Elevate To The Unknown

Health care and education added 45,000 jobs last month.

The whole private economy added 38,000.

Read that twice. Two parts of the economy added more jobs than the entire economy did. Which means everything else, added together, went backwards.

Manufacturing lost 17,000. Professional services lost 16,000.

So if you have been sending applications out and hearing nothing, and you have been sitting there wondering what is wrong with you, look at that split again.

Nothing is wrong with you. You are pointed at the part of the economy that went backwards last month.

Here is the other number nobody reported. American employers announced 12,325 new hires in August. In that same month they announced 52,881 cuts. That is more than four jobs going out for every one job coming in.

And this is the part that will surprise you. Both of those numbers got better this year. Cuts are down 41 percent. Hiring plans are up 37 percent.

Everything improved on paper. And it still feels like this.

That is because this is not a layoff wave. It is a hiring freeze. Nobody is pushing you off the boat. Nobody is pulling you back on either. Those are two completely different problems and they need two completely different plans.

I broke the whole thing down this morning, including two real job postings with the pay printed on them and the exact words to type into the search bar. 👇

See you at the top.

Jon McCarty is in his early sixties and he lives in Virginia. He lost a software engineering job in 2022 and spent eighteen months trying to get another one.

He would pass the phone screen. He would pass the technical interview. Then he would do the video interview and get rejected. After enough of those, he started to think it was his age, and he is honest about not being sure. His words: "Is this just a perception I've created to make myself feel better about not getting a job? I'm not sure."

So he stopped. He does handyman work now, and he is a part-time cashier at Home Depot.

And here is the sentence he gave Business Insider this morning: "I started coming to grips with the idea that I will probably never get another software job."

Now hold that, because Michael Shmarak also works in a retail store.

Michael is 56, in Northbrook, Illinois, and he ran global communications for an ad tech company until a 2023 layoff. He got six interviews deep on one job, the recruiter, the CMO and four more executives, and then they stopped answering. He has not held a full time job since 2024.

Same shift. Same name tag. Same white collar career behind him.

One of them says that register is where his career ended.

The other one has had four job interviews come out of that exact job, because he talks to people while he is doing it.

Same job. Opposite outcome.

Now I am not going to tell you Michael won and Jon lost, because that is not true and it is not fair. Michael does not have a full time job either. He is working three things to make one income, and some months that is exhausting in a way a paycheck is not. And Jon spent eighteen months doing everything right and got worn down, and anybody who says they would not get worn down has not done it.

Here is the only real difference I can find.

Jon is at that register waiting for the career to be over. Michael is at that register talking to people.

And there is a reason so many people are landing where Jon landed. More than a million Americans have now been out of work for at least six months. Normally, when that many people are stuck that long, unemployment is high and everybody knows why. This time the rate is low and there is no recession to point at.

Ofer Sharone, a sociologist at UMass Amherst, told Business Insider what happens then: when people cannot point at an outside reason, they start looking inside themselves for one. He said it better than I can. "A recession is ironic in that it is a time when finding work is hardest, but also, it is when the stigma of being unemployed is lessened."

So let me give you the outside reason, with the number on it.

Last month American employers announced 52,881 job cuts. Artificial intelligence was the reason they gave for 3,462 of them, down from 10,970 in July, and it fell from the number one reason all the way to number four.

The number one reason was restructuring. 16,173. About one out of every three.

Restructuring means the money is fine and the customers are fine, and somebody looked at the org chart and decided there were too many boxes on it. When they redraw that chart they are not hunting for bad workers. They are hunting for levels.

So the question was never whether you are good at your job.

It was whether the level you sit on has to exist.

Those are two different questions, and a lot of people have spent six months answering the wrong one, and blaming themselves for the answer.

Let me ask you the one I asked the room this morning, and be honest, because nobody is grading you.

In the last thirty days, has one person who could actually hire you heard your name from a human being?

Not a form. Not a portal. A person.

If the answer is no, that is not a resume problem.

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She had fifteen years in tech. She applied to be a cashier at Target. They told her she did not have retail experience.

That is a real person, on camera, this week.

She is one of four people Business Insider filmed, all laid off out of Google, Meta, Intel and Microsoft. One of them spent twenty three years at the same company. Another says it plainly: "I'm 57 and it is a crowded market."

And one of them asks the question I have been getting in my inbox for six months straight:

"Is it me? Is it them? What's happening?"

I want to answer that honestly, so here is the number.

Out of every hundred jobs in the United States, three changed hands last month. Three. Ninety seven did not move at all. Same person, same chair, same badge.

So if you have sent fifty applications and heard nothing back, you were not rejected fifty times. You knocked on doors that were never going to open for anybody.

It is not you.

And if you are over fifty and you think the age thing is in your head, it is not. AARP surveyed 1,656 workers over fifty. Sixty four percent said they have seen or experienced age discrimination at work. Of the people who saw it, ninety one percent say it is common. That has been against federal law since 1967. Fifty nine years.

Now let me give you the man who found a way through, because I am not going to leave you sitting in that.

His name is Benjamin Reneau.

He served in the US Army. When he got out, he became an automotive detailer. Almost five years of window tint, paint protection film and vinyl wraps, and he ran his own side business doing it.

Then he got laid off.

So he did the right thing. He enrolled at a technical college in Tacoma, Washington, and he went for the obvious one. Electrician. Good trade, real money, and everybody in his life would have told him to do exactly that.

The electrician program was full.

No seat. He did not fail anything and he did not test badly. There was just no room.

A guidance counselor gave him two options. Wait for a seat to open. Or take the one program that had room: clinical engineering, which is the people who keep hospital equipment working. Ventilators, beds, monitors, infusion pumps.

He had never heard of it. In his words, "I had never even heard of it until I enrolled in school."

He did not wait.

He graduated with a 4.0. Honors society. He tutored the other students. He won the President's Award every single quarter he was there. Three manufacturer certifications on hospital equipment.

Today he is a biomedical equipment technician at Tampa General Hospital.

The man putting window tint on cars is now the reason a monitor works in a hospital room.

And here is the honest pay, both halves, because I am not selling anybody a lottery ticket. The median for that job is $61,660. That is not a six-figure job on day one and I am not going to tell you it is. The top ten percent clear $98,280, and the government projects that work grows thirteen percent over ten years against three percent for everything else. Typical education is an associate degree.

Now put those two people next to each other.

Both of them got a door closed for a reason that had nothing to do with how good they are. Fifteen years in tech and Target says you do not have retail experience. That is not a skill problem, that is a door. The class was full. That is not a skill problem either.

And I want to give her credit, because she is not sitting still. Later in that same video she says she is leaving Washington D.C. for Charlotte, North Carolina, because the rent where she is is too much.

Washington D.C. lost 83,500 jobs over the last year.

Nobody told her to check that. She looked at her city and made a decision about it.

So which one have you been doing for the last six months? Standing at the same door, or looking at a different one?

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She was a product manager nobody would hire. So she went and got her own product. The first six were useless.

Her name is Maria Harsh*tha. Amazon laid her off in March. She has two kids.

She wrote this out herself, on LinkedIn, and here is what she thought was going to happen:

"I actually thought I can jump onto another company quite easily. But that didn't happen at all."

Rejection after rejection. Five months of it.

So here is where she was in July. A product manager, with a résumé full of other people's products, and nobody would hire her to manage one.

Then this:

"And one random day we built a chicken coop. Got 6 chicks, took care of them while I kept applying everywhere."

Six chicks.

Every single one of them turned out to be a rooster.

Roosters do not lay eggs. Her first attempt at a product produced nothing. Zero.

And I am not skipping past that, because that is the part everybody leaves out when they tell you to go start something. She got it wrong the first time and she went and got hens.

Here is what she says now:

"I have my Product, the eggs, and I'm selling them."

Let me be careful with you, because I do not want anybody quitting anything off this story. She has never published a dollar figure and I am not going to make one up. What I know is she has customers. She did not have those in July. And she is still applying for product management jobs.

That last part matters. She did not burn the boat. She built something on the side of the search.

Now let me give you the other person, because he is the reason this is not a quit-your-job story.

Abhinav Bohra is a senior applied scientist at Amazon. He is in his thirties, he lives in Seattle, and he did not get laid off. He still works there.

His biggest career regret is this: "For most of my career, everything I built lived and died inside Amazon."

Then five words that should stop anybody over forty five:

"Internal reputation doesn't travel."

Watch his seven years. 2019, he joins. For two years, nothing with his name on it exists anywhere outside that building. 2021, he starts sharing his work. 2022, first research paper. 2024, senior applied scientist. 2026, this year, he is a challenge co-chair of an international research conference and he mentors early stage companies through Johns Hopkins.

Two years of building nothing anybody outside could see. Then five years from his first post to running part of a conference.

Here is what he says those first two years cost him: "I'd be a few years further along if I'd realized this sooner."

And this, for anybody who thinks they have time:

"You don't want to spend years developing tools, solutions, and expertise, leave a company, and feel like you're starting from scratch because everything you built was proprietary and you can't share it."

So put those two people next to each other.

Maria lost the job first, and then had to go make something.

Abhinav still has the job, and he is making something anyway.

Now think about this one in your own career. Right now, this morning, before anything happens to your job.

If you walked out of that building on Friday, what could you take with you?

Not your experience. I know you have experience. I mean what could somebody outside your company actually see?

Because if the honest answer is nothing, you are Abhinav five years ago. And he is the one telling you that costs you years.

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He had fifteen years of experience. Nobody would hire him. So he took a job paying fifteen dollars an hour and did not tell his wife.

His name is Mo Zohourian. Fifteen years in entrepreneurship and sales management. He moved to Canada in 2023 and started looking for work.

Ten months. Back-to-back interviews. Not one offer.

Then he saw an ad on LinkedIn. Fifteen dollars an hour to train AI. No experience needed.

Here is what he says about taking it:

"Because I didn't have a job, I said, okay, I'll give it a shot, but I was skeptical. I didn't even tell my wife that I started doing it until I received the first payment."

He did not tell his wife.

Fifteen years in sales management, and he was too embarrassed to say out loud that he was making fifteen dollars an hour.

Now watch what happened next.

Fifteen an hour to start, and the work was inconsistent. Three months in, a project at thirty. The company had assessments you could pass to unlock bigger work, so he passed English, reasoning and math, and went to thirty five. Then forty five on some projects, seventy on others.

Then the companies started looking for sales experts.

He had fifteen years of that. He has been at a hundred dollars an hour for the past ten months, and he has since started two businesses on top of it.

Now the honest part, because he says all of it himself and I am not going to leave it out. He is a contractor, not an employee. There is no salary and no floor, and some projects pay less than the one before. In his words: "As a freelancer, you don't have the same leverage. It is what it is. You can take it or leave it." He also had savings when he started, and that is what let him ride out the slow months.

So this is not a magic trick. It is a ladder, and he climbed it while the bottom rung paid fifteen dollars.

Here is the line I cannot put down. It is the last thing he says.

"After working in sales for fifteen years, I was attached to it. You think you can develop faster in an industry that you built a foundation on. But for me, I could never find the quick advancement that I found in AI training."

I was attached to it.

His fifteen years did not get him hired anywhere for ten months. The minute he was standing in a new lane, those same fifteen years took him from thirty five dollars an hour to a hundred.

Same man. Same experience. Worth nothing under the old title. Worth a hundred an hour under the new one.

And I put him next to a man who wrote out his own story on Reddit. Laid off the year he turned fifty five, senior vice president in marketing, more than ten years in the job. He spent forty two months looking for the title he used to have. He landed this year, as consulting that converted to full time, at roughly half of what he used to make.

He got there. I want to be clear about that. It just cost him three and a half years and half his income.

So think about the exact words you type into that search box.

Are you searching for what you can do?

Or are you searching for what you used to be called?

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James Strawn is 56 years old. Twenty five years at Adobe — eight in San Jose, then more than twenty on the Premiere team from his house in Colorado. He was aiming to retire at 59 and a half. He says he had already pictured what he would say at his retirement event.

One day last year a calendar invite showed up. He joined, and somebody started reading the layoff script.

Then he did everything you are supposed to do. He hired a coach. He took seminars. He rewrote his resume and customized it every single time. He started at jobs paying a hundred thousand, down from over a hundred and fifty at Adobe, and kept lowering the number as the months went by.

What kept happening was this: "I either heard nothing back or I'd hear, This is great, we'll get you an interview. It would feel really promising — and then crickets."

And then he said the thing I cannot put down.

"I felt like a failure because, according to LinkedIn, it seemed like every other person I knew who'd been laid off had some fantastic job already, a few months later. I was like, What's wrong with me? I still don't know why."

Nothing was wrong with him.

He was job hunting in the exact twelve months the government now says it counted wrong. Last year's preliminary correction to the national job count was 911,000 — the largest ever recorded — and it turned a hiring pace of about 146,500 a month into about 70,600. Half as many new jobs opening up as anybody was told. Same number of people looking.

His unemployment ran out this spring. He said, "I'm not looking for tech jobs. This is going nowhere and just sucking my soul away." He went to Costco and asked if they were hiring. He tried a gym. Crickets.

He drives a school bus now. Two months of training, a commercial license, a big pay cut, and children's lives in his hands instead of software bugs. And here is the part the headline does not tell you — he likes it. He sees the sunrise and the mountains every morning. The kids' names and the route are muscle memory. He says he has no regrets.

Now here is why he is not a sad story

Nvidia reported Wednesday night. Ninety six billion dollars in ninety days, and eighty nine billion of it came from data centers.

Everybody ran that number this morning. Almost nobody asked the next question, which is the only one that matters if you are the one looking for work.

Where did it land, and is anybody standing there.

Indeed's research arm went through job postings from January through June and did something simple. They took the same job title and asked what it pays inside a data center versus everywhere else.

Read the answers in order and the list runs upside down.

Facilities manager, 64 percent more. Network technician, 42. Construction manager, 29. Superintendent, 26. Network engineer, 23. Project manager, 12. Electrical engineer, 10.

The more schooling the job takes, the smaller the raise.

And here is the line I had to read twice. Inside that building, the facilities manager makes a hundred and thirty four thousand dollars. The electrical engineer makes a hundred and twenty five. The man running the building out-earns the engineer in it.

Now let me be fair, because there is a reason. The engineer already got paid well everywhere else — a hundred and fourteen thousand before he walked in the door. His pay was set by a national market and there is not much room to move him. The facilities manager was getting paid whatever his town paid. Seventy one percent of these postings come from the biggest tech companies in the country, so what is really happening is a Big Tech payroll landing in a building in your county. When that payroll shows up, the person whose pay was set locally is the one whose number jumps.

Everybody has been arguing about whether AI takes your job.

A study published Friday says something almost nobody is talking about. At most companies, the AI is not even working yet.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found that about nine out of ten executives say it has not made their company more productive. And a professor at the University of Pittsburgh went and looked at why.

His team read millions of employee reviews against five years of company announcements. Here is what they found. When a company says it is cutting jobs because of AI, the mood inside that company falls off a cliff, and the people who are still there quietly stop using the AI.

Think about why for a second. Your boss hands you a tool and tells you to get good at it. That same week, the company says it is cutting people because of that tool.

Nobody is going to help that tool get better.

Somebody in our own community said it plainer than the study did. He works in a tire and diesel shop, and he said it on our call Saturday: you are always going to need a person to oversee AI, because it is never going to be perfect. Look at the calculator. Look how far that has come. And we still find ourselves using a calculator.

The calculator did not fire the accountant. It changed what the accountant does all day.

Also today: Bill Gates published an essay at four this morning saying robots start competing for construction and hospitality work by the end of the decade. And a marketing boss explained how he went from 130 people to 20, and named the exact layer that disappeared.