It’s Thursday, 2nd April 2026. Welcome back to Bold Efforts.
Last week I wrote about trust in the age of AI. This week I want to stay close to the same fault line, but look at a different part of it.
For a while, the dominant story was simple. AI would crush white-collar hiring. Entry-level roles would vanish. Companies would keep cutting. People would be asked to do more with less, and then more again.
That story now looks too neat.
Some parts of the market are clearly improving. Lenny Rachitsky’s latest review of tech hiring data shows more than 7,300 open product roles globally, up sharply from the 2023 low and up again since the start of this year. Engineering openings are above 67,000. AI roles are growing even faster. If you only look at that slice of the market, you could come away feeling that the fear was overstated.
But that is not how the market feels to most people.
And I think the reason is simple. This is not a broad-based return. It is an uneven one.
Demand is coming back, but in a more selective way. Companies seem more willing to hire people who can create value quickly, work fluently with AI tools, and operate with less support. That does not mean there are no jobs. It means the path into good jobs is becoming narrower. So while Oracle is firing 67,000 people it is also simultaneously actively hiring for the right roles.
At the same time, the wider mood remains tense. In the U.S., hiring fell to 4.85 million in February, which helps explain why the market still feels cautious even when some tech hiring metrics improve.
But the deeper story is more human than statistical. In many parts of the world, especially in West Asia, this does not feel like a weak economy. It feels like a waiting economy.
The GCC still has ambition, capital, and projects moving. But once a region enters a period of geopolitical stress, the texture of business changes quickly. Employers become slower to commit. Candidates become slower to move. Travel feels less casual. Boards ask harder questions. A role that might have been approved in a week now takes a month. A hire that looked obvious starts getting postponed until things feel clearer.
That kind of limbo is difficult to capture in a headline. It does not look like a collapse. It looks like delayed approvals, longer hiring cycles, quieter inboxes, and companies trying to protect momentum without pretending they have certainty.
That is why the market feels so strange right now.
The topline story says activity is returning. The lived experience is that many people and businesses are still bracing.
Both can be true at the same time.
A market can have more openings and still feel less open. Because the real question is no longer just whether jobs exist. The real question is where they exist, who can access them, and what kind of life they demand in return.
That is where the more interesting story begins.
AI is not only changing the quantity of work. It is changing the shape of opportunity. The new demand is clustering around specific skills, specific companies, and specific places. In the same dataset, more than 23% of open product roles are now in the Bay Area. Only about 26% of product roles still offer a remote option. So the market is not just recovering. It is concentrating.
That matters more than it first appears.
A healthy job market is not one where a small number of exceptional candidates do well. It is one where ordinary capable people still have room to make decent choices. They can switch jobs without moving their whole life. They can recover from a bad fit. They can live in one city and work for a company in another. They can build a career without passing through a tiny number of gates.
That kind of freedom is easy to underestimate when you already have it. But you really notice it when it starts to shrink.
This is also why remote work still matters even when the conversation has moved to AI. Remote work was never just a comfort perk. It widened the map. It distributed access. It gave companies a much larger talent pool and gave workers a way to reach better opportunities without tearing up the rest of their lives.
When remote work declines while AI raises the bar for who gets hired, the result is not just a tougher market. It is a more concentrated one. Some people will do extremely well in that world. But many others will feel the squeeze even if the headline numbers improve.
That squeeze will not only show up in careers. It will show up in life decisions. Where people choose to live. Whether they can stay close to family. Whether they can afford to wait for a better role. Whether a temporary slowdown becomes a permanent setback.
That is why I find the current mini-optimism incomplete. And this is why I do not understand the sporadic recovery in markets on random days.
Yes, AI has not produced the simple collapse in knowledge work that many people feared. Yes, there is real demand returning in parts of the market. But access is tightening at the same time. And access is usually where the deeper story sits.
The future of work will not be decided only by how many jobs exist. It will also be decided by how widely opportunity is distributed. A market can look healthier on paper and still feel harder to move through in real life.
So this is the thought I keep returning to.
The divide ahead may not be employed versus unemployed. It may be between people who can reach opportunity easily and people who have to rearrange their whole lives just to get near it.
Some parts of the job market are improving. That is real. But until good work is accessible to more people, across more places and under more reasonable terms, the market will keep looking stronger than it feels. Thank you for reading.
Best,
Kartik
I write Bold Efforts every week to think clearly about where work and life are actually headed, not where headlines say they are. If you want these essays in your inbox, you can subscribe here.