Why the companies cutting junior headcount are making a decade-long mistake

In The Loop · May 14, 2026 · 16m · transcript

In 1971, Boeing laid off 44,000 engineers in 18 months. The aerospace industry is still paying for it — they're projecting a shortage of over a million engineers by 2030, and the cohort that would now be the senior bench was simply never hired.

Last year, S&P 500 companies cut 400,000 jobs — the first net decline since 2016 — and the specific pattern of who's being cut, and why, looks uncomfortably familiar. At firms that adopted AI, junior employment fell 7 to 10% within six quarters. Senior employment kept rising. The pipeline isn't slowing. It's stopping.

In this episode of In The Loop…