September 2026: the planet right this moment, as seen by one Polish man

An economic landscape that wants fewer of us

The IT eldorado is over, and the individuals who constructed their lives on it are discovering out what it rested on. The official statistics are sluggish to point out it. The folks dwelling via it will not be.

About 120,000 tech jobs have been minimize worldwide within the first half of this 12 months, and the primary quarter alone noticed greater than twice as many as a 12 months earlier. May was the worst month for US tech job cuts in virtually two years. Amazon has shed 30,000 company roles in two rounds, Meta a tenth of its employees, Block almost half. These are firms reporting document earnings, and Amazon’s chief government has stated in plain phrases that AI brokers imply the agency will want fewer folks for a number of the jobs completed right this moment. Some analysts assume AI is partly the excuse, and that the financial savings pay for knowledge centres. For the individual laid off, the distinction is educational.

In Poland the social gathering resulted in 2023, when IT job postings fell by a 3rd in a 12 months. The market that has come again since is a distinct one. Postings are up sharply in 2026, however greater than 90 p.c of them are for mid-level and senior folks. Juniors get about 5 p.c, and an entry-level itemizing attracts 47 purposes on common, 146 for a junior frontend position. In Kraków, the place almost half of all company jobs are in industry companies, group layoffs have run into the 1000’s two years in a row. HSBC is reducing about 400 jobs there and shifting the work to India, and Shell has let 300 folks go.

I’ve to be sincere about what the headline numbers say, as a result of they are saying one thing completely different. Kraków’s unemployment fee was 2.8 p.c in August, up from about 2 p.c on the finish of 2024. In America current graduates confronted 5.6 p.c unemployment in opposition to 4.2 p.c total, a Stanford examine places employment of staff aged 22 to 25 in probably the most AI-exposed occupations about 19 p.c beneath the place it might in any other case be, and economists nonetheless argue about whether or not AI is the trigger. Mass white-collar unemployment shouldn’t be within the knowledge. What is within the knowledge is a ladder with its backside rungs sawn off, and a center class that has stopped feeling protected.

Remote work is the place it bites hardest. Those who’ve a distant job largely nonetheless have it, however new ones have dried up. Postings providing distant or hybrid work peaked at greater than 10 p.c of American job advertisements in 2022, and right this moment solely about 4 p.c of recent postings are totally distant, every drawing greater than two and a half instances the purposes of an workplace job. On one among Poland’s largest IT job boards, hybrid overtook distant this 12 months for the primary time in years.

So image the engineer who spent the nice years constructing a home two hours from any metropolis, on a wage the native economic landscape may by no means pay. While the job lasts, nothing has modified. On the day it ends there may be nothing inside driving distance, and the distant market that when competed for them now attracts a crowd for each opening. They have been wealthy, and on paper they nonetheless are.

And driving distance has shrunk. Petrol in Poland rose by greater than a zloty a litre within the first days of September, when the decreased VAT on gasoline expired simply as Hormuz tightened once more, and diesel reached a document 8.89 zloty in mid-September and has since handed 9 in some areas. Take the traditional commute between Katowice and Kraków, about 160 kilometres a day. At right this moment’s costs that’s roughly 90 zloty of petrol for day by day on the workplace, near 1,900 zloty a month, and a few 330 zloty greater than in August. The job within the subsequent metropolis, which was once the fallback, pays much less each time the value board adjustments.