US Tech Workers' Confidence Drops Again in February Amid AI and Layoffs

According to Glassdoor's latest Employee Confidence Index, the confidence of US tech workers dropped again in February. Only 47.8% of IT professionals were optimistic about the future that month, down 1.6 percentage points from January and 7.1 percentage points from the same period last year (55% then). Among all US employees, the proportion optimistic about their company's prospects in the next six months also fell from 45.9% in January to 44.3%.

Glassdoor noted that despite rapid growth in AI and data center investments, tech workers remain cautious after years of cost cuts and layoffs. Recent large-scale layoffs by Block and Amazon have increased anxiety. The impact of over-hiring during the pandemic is still being felt, and AI tools automating some programming tasks have also hit software engineers' job expectations, suggesting the industry's "winter" may continue.