Elevate To The Unknown

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.

A building went up in Nashville that did not exist in June.

When it opens in October it will employ about 70 people full time. About half of them used to drive for Lyft. Their job is to clean, charge and inspect the Waymo robotaxis — the same technology that took the driving work.

Here is the part that got me. There is no line on any government report for "robotaxi fleet operations associate." That job will not show up in Friday's numbers. It will not show up next month. And 70 people are going to work in it.

Meanwhile, 2,500 people in Joslin, Illinois worked their last shift at the Tyson beef plant. They were given one day's notice. Essobou Ouro Gmao gave that plant 21 years, and he stood up at a rally in the rain and said out loud that the way it happened was not fair.

Two-thirds of employers say they are increasing hiring this year. Almost nobody watching feels it.

That gap is not in your head. It is in the count.

Live this morning at 7:30 AM Central. We are also covering the federal program that pays for your retraining that almost nobody talks about, and the finding that 20,973 job-seeker complaints blamed AI only 4.2% of the time — the most common phrase in the whole pile was "background check."

Keep climbing. 👇