The great prosperity bomb that exploded over the region, raining jobs and wealth while fueling prices that blasted working people right out of town, is sputtering.
“Region loses 12,900 jobs in 2025,” said economists this week at the Puget Sound Regional Council.
If you exclude the anomaly of the pandemic, “this is the first time the region has experienced an annual decrease of jobs since 2009,” the council said.
It's really the past three years that have been tepid across the four-county area, which includes King, Pierce, Snohomish and Kitsap counties. This powerhouse zone has added just 4,100 net jobs on average per year. During peak Amazon in the 2010s, it was eleven times that much, with an annual average of plus 46,750 jobs.
This year is off to a rough start as well, with Amazon and Expedia announcing layoffs this past week. The last time Amazon did this, with 14,000 job cuts announced in October, it turned out fewer than 2,000 of them were located in Seattle. Still it’s a far cry from the local economy’s rocket ship days.
“I am very nervous about what’s happening,” the Seattle Chamber of Commerce’s new president, Joe Nguyen, told KIRO 7. He alone embodies the shift, as earlier in Nguyen's career, he was a feisty state senator clamoring to tax this same tech boom (even dropping f-bombs in The Stranger for it).
“We’ve just become accustomed to growing at a lightning pace,” was how a UW business professor, Jeff Shulman, put it.
On the flip side, you can feel some of Seattle’s most intense pressure points easing off a bit. Rents are actually down, a rare headline in these parts. It wasn't a big drop — only $20 a month less on a one-bedroom, or down 1% year to year, according to rental platform Zumper. Still that puts Seattle outside the Top 10 priciest cities for rent. (We’re now No. 17.)
Office lease costs are also dropping, down 4.9% last month, fifth-largest drop in the nation.
It’s the awkward thing about the affordability debate. Nothing makes a city cheaper faster than an economic bust.
Conservatives are howling that this is all self-inflicted, caused by Seattle’s high taxes and general progressive lunacy. That could be contributing for sure, but like I said above, the lost jobs aren’t necessarily focused in the city. Meta (Facebook) just announced 331 layoffs, with only 40 in Seattle proper. The rest are in Bellevue and Redmond.
Only about 15% of Amazon’s 14,000 October layoffs were even in the state of Washington.
Amazon and Microsoft have become like global nation-states. You can’t assume when they announce job cuts that they are turning out the lights in South Lake Union or Redmond.
The companies themselves have issued a bunch of gobbledygook about “reducing layers and increasing ownership.” But the workers say these might be the first signs that Big Tech is starting to cannibalize itself.
A laid-off Amazon software engineer described to The Seattle Times “a creeping feeling that she and her colleagues are training a technology that will eventually replace them.”
Microsoft has researchers looking at how these first waves of artificial intelligence will affect work. Their latest indicates it's first hitting the bottom rungs of the white-collar ladder — and may exacerbate income inequality even more.
“Payroll data suggests employment for workers aged 22–25 in highly AI-exposed jobs fell by about 13% compared to less exposed roles,” the company describes in its latest New Future of Work Report.” (Microsoft had been studying the changes caused by remote work, but switched to focusing on this far bigger societal disrupter. So even they are getting whiplash trying to keep up.)
What is an “AI-exposed job"? Microsoft researchers examined 200,000 real-world conversations people had with one of its own AI tools, Microsoft Copilot. After anonymizing the threads, the researchers reverse-engineered what types of work people were doing, to get a sense of the inroads AI is making.
The goal was to see “whether AI is being used for the work activities of an occupation and whether that usage tends to be successful.” The study resulted in highly specific lists of what jobs may be most vulnerable to being displaced by the very smart tools workers have begun using.
Sorry, “interpreters and translators.” You’re No. 1 for most endangered species.
Also on this AI-victims watchlist: customer service reps, telemarketers, technical writers, web developers, computer support specialists and, gulp, “news analysts and journalists.”
A different study in the Microsoft report issued similar "AI is coming for you" warnings to the ramen-eating post-grads who toil away at research over at the University of Washington.
“When automation substitutes for human labor, laborers' share of output shrinks and inequality widens,” the report noted. “For universities, this implies a sharp contraction in postdocs, RAs, and computational research staff as labs replace ‘routine’ research work with cheap, scalable AI cognition.
“Without intervention, universities may become AI-driven knowledge factories, where human involvement persists only in tasks with high regulatory, physical, or relational constraints.”
So the president and the janitors will still be people.
This is like the movie "No Other Choice," where at the end, the last manager wanders around a pitch-dark yet humming factory. There's no need for lights when all the work is done by robots.
The Microsoft study on AI-exposed jobs also contains a counter list, of the most AI-resistant jobs. It happens to be America’s forgotten laborers: the roofers, piledrivers, oil “roustabouts,” housecleaners and, the last job standing when AI gets finished with us, the dredge operators.
So dirty work may get a last laugh, after decades of being eclipsed by the revolution of the nerds.
If Seattle’s era-defining prosperity bomb really is fizzling, shouldn’t there be more official attention paid? Whoever makes and owns AI tools will probably get astronomically wealthier — of course. While millions of desk jobs clustered in the tech-dominated middle appear to be at risk of being at least partially taken out by AI “efficiencies.”
Shouldn’t Congress be talking about this, rather than fighting about the terrorizing and largely pointless immigration enforcement "surges? Shouldn’t state politicians start discussing some economic development, rather than solely how much more to expand the size and reach of government?
Just typing the phrase “economic development” feels strange. One of the foolish luxuries of living in the blast zone of a prosperity bomb was nobody was ever worrying too much about that.
This is really me typing, by the way. For now.
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