Job growth was steady last month — in more sectors than just healthcare. But the tech industry continued to lose jobs, despite driving stock gains to new highs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that employment in “information,” a rough proxy for the tech sector, has declined 11% from a peak in 2022. There’s been a steady drumbeat of layoff announcements, often explicitly tied to AI. Could the losses be a warning sign for the broader labor market?Cloudflare, Coinbase and PayPal announced job cuts this week, following mass layoffs at Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon earlier this year.But the tea leaves of tech jobs are hard to read, said Guy Berger, senior fellow at The Burning Glass Institute.“If you were going to talk about pandemic overhiring, this would be the epicenter,” Berger said. “And I think that is confounding a lot of things that people are also trying to figure out.”The trend has raised questions about whether workers should be concerned about AI coming for their jobs, but Berger said many of the companies culling their workforces now could still be rightsizing from pandemic expansion.“I don't think we fully know whether these layoffs, to what degree they are driven by AI versus AI being convenient boogeyman,” he said.That’s because AI is not a boogeyman to Wall Street investors, said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon.“Any type of layoff announcement is typically seen by markets as being a sign of weaker demand,” Daco said. “But when you announce layoffs because of your greater efficiency that is seen actually as a good sign.”That means companies have an incentive to attribute any downsizing to AI.Still, Daco said, automation is likely a factor.“Artificial intelligence is very good at writing code,” he said. “So, there is certainly some replacement happening.”But reports of the death of coding have been greatly exaggerated, according to Cory Stahle. He’s a senior economist at Indeed Hiring Lab, which has seen postings for software developers and other tech roles pick up in recent months despite ongoing layoffs.“So I think what we're seeing in IT and in tech right now really is a restructuring,” Stahle said. “These layoffs are about, you know, cutting over here so we can spend the money on AI over there.”Though many of the hundreds of billions of dollars are going toward steel and silicon rather than staffing.