Columns and field notes from the people who have shipped the things they are writing about.
New tariffs, digital services taxes, and a strong dollar are driving up cross-border tech costs, with two million fewer Canadian border crossings signaling a wider trade policy reckoning.
Companies like Oracle and Southwest Airlines now use the WARN Act's 60-day notice requirement to structure severance packages and delay mass layoff warnings, shifting costs to workers.
The Q1 2026 earnings reports revealed a stark split: investors now separate hyperscalers by AI revenue delivery, fracturing a capex cycle that once rewarded all spenders into clear winners and losers.
As M&A deal volumes climb, antitrust regulators from FERC to the DOJ are rewriting clearance rules in real time, leaving deal pipelines vulnerable to political and legal shifts.
Nearly 73,200 U.S. workers appeared in state WARN databases in Q1 2026, and the severance formulas attached to those filings reveal how companies really value their departing workers, more than any earnings call could.
Record Q1 2026 AI infrastructure spending from Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta has pushed the market to separate leaders who show revenue returns from those still asking for patience.
Four hyperscalers reported strong earnings but tempered forward guidance as combined AI capex commitments topped Switzerland's GDP.
Landmark NLRB joint-employer rulings against Google and Amazon, amid the tech sector's longest sustained layoffs, are reshaping the bargaining landscape for engineers and forcing the industry to confront not whether workers organize, but what the org chart looks like when they do.
The NLRB oversaw 30 percent fewer elections in 2025, but tech workers are bypassing the ballot box altogether, turning to contract campaigns, walkouts, and a quiet redefinition of collective bargaining.
L5+ hiring was supposed to be the safe tier but has become the unplanned bottleneck, caught between AI tooling flattening the productivity curve and compensation bands that haven't reset fast enough.
From automated résumé tailoring to real-time answer generation, AI tools like Teal and JobCopilot force engineering organizations to confront a metric breakdown: interview funnels now inflate false positives while hiding true talent.
Amazon's free cash flow collapsed to $1.2 billion yet Alphabet surged while Microsoft and Meta fell, drawing the first clear line between AI capital spending and realized returns in Q1 2026.
With 52,050 layoffs and 92.6% AI coding tool adoption among engineers, companies are flattening the senior engineering leveling diamond, thinning L5 roles while raising the bar to old L6 standards without moving compensation.
The headline of Q1 — "$300B raised, 80% AI" — is the press-release version. The line-item version, reconciling the deal-by-deal disclosures, is more concentrated than even the press release suggests.
Three of the eight largest software-platform employers reopened L5+ engineering requisitions in March. The new postings are 30% fewer than the 2023 baseline, and the leveling rubric has changed in a way nobody is announcing.
Five stories. Four minutes. Zero hot takes. Sent at 7:00 a.m. local time, every weekday.