The AI Hiring Pause Is Officially Here

When Microsoft Corp. cut roughly 6,000 jobs this week, it exposed a telling contradiction: While heading into a major boom in the software market, one of the world’s biggest tech companies is laying off people in product management and software engineering.

Microsoft hasn’t announced a hiring freeze, but the cuts highlight the risk that artificial intelligence poses to coding jobs writ large. They’re also emblematic of the strange moment the entire corporate world finds itself trying to navigate: an AI-driven tech boom with a backdrop of massive economic and policy uncertainty.

“Microsoft’s layoffs in software engineering and AI roles are a bellwether ...