Sub-200K Claims for a Month, Software's Senior-Only Rebound, and Eight Firms Cut From the Green-Card Queue: October 12 Briefing

The week of October 5 to 11, 2026 produced no new federal reading on hiring. The Bureau of Labor Statistics had nothing scheduled between the September employment report on October 2 and September inflation on October 14. The one official number that landed was the Labor Department's weekly count of unemployment claims, and it repeated what the market has been saying for a month: almost nobody is being laid off.

The week's other news was about who gets hired. Amazon trimmed its retail arm during its own fall sale. HubSpot cut 7% of its staff. Eight large employers were barred from sponsoring green cards. Software-development postings are growing again, and the bottom of that field keeps shrinking.

Ahead: September inflation and real earnings on October 14, producer prices on October 15, state employment on October 20, metro employment on October 28, the September job-openings report on November 3, and the October jobs report on November 6.

Initial claims for unemployment benefits fell 2,000 to 197,000 for the week ended October 3, the Labor Department reported on October 8. The four-week average dropped 2,500 to 198,000, its first reading under 200,000 since early August. (Source: The Associated Press)

All rows: (Source: The Associated Press)

Claims have now come in below 200,000 for four weeks running, the longest such stretch since 1969. (Source: Marketplace)

"The number of people seeking unemployment benefits has fallen below 200,000 for four straight weeks now, an incredibly low level of layoffs for a sustained period of time that hasn't been seen since the 1960s," said Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union. Long also noted the other side of the ledger: the number of people unemployed for more than six months is at a five-year high. (Source: The Associated Press)

That pair of numbers is the market job seekers are working in. Claims measure how many people are being pushed out of work, and that figure is the lowest sustained level since the 1960s. The people already out of work are the ones carrying the strain: 27.1% of unemployed Americans have been searching for six months or longer. (Source: Marketplace)

The Federal Reserve's September meeting minutes, released October 7, described a labor market "close to maximum employment." Inflation has run above the Fed's 2% target for more than five years, and most participants expected another rate increase before the end of the year. The Fed next meets on October 28 and December 9. (Source: CNBC)

Workers read their own prospects a little better last month. The New York Fed's September survey of consumer expectations, published October 7, found households expecting less chance of losing a job in the year ahead and more chance of finding one if they do. Their inflation expectations rose sharply over the same month, to 3.9%. (Source: Marketplace)

The Labor Department announced on October 8 that it would stop accepting or processing Permanent Labor Certification applications involving Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Capgemini, Tata, Wipro and HCL. Microsoft and Adobe were cited for "multiple active federal investigations." (Source: CNBC)

Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling gave the administration's arithmetic. Since 2009, he said, those companies alone requested almost 3 million foreign workers and received more than 230,000 H-1B approvals and more than 100,000 permanent labor certifications. Permanent Labor Certification is the employer-sponsored step that precedes most employment-based green cards. (Source: CNBC)

Microsoft said the vast majority of its U.S. employees are Americans, and that about 6,000 H-1B applications it filed last fiscal year were 80% for existing employees extending or changing status. Vice President JD Vance pointed to the company's 6,000 layoffs in 2025, and said the suspension would hold until Microsoft "shows that they are going to get serious about putting American workers first." (Source: CNBC)

For anyone whose search depends on sponsorship, the useful detail is who files the most petitions. Amazon led 2026 with 35,426, followed by Cognizant and EY. Microsoft was fourth at 21,706 petitions, with a median base salary of $180,710. (Source: CNBC)

With mid-October here, the biggest U.S. retailers had still not committed to holiday hiring targets. Amazon, which hired 250,000 seasonal workers in each of the past three years and usually announces by mid-October, has said nothing. (Source: Business Insider)

Walmart said it would repeat last year's approach, which set no goal and gave extra hours to existing staff instead. Target said it would again lean on its on-demand team of about 43,000 and leave further hiring to store managers. (Source: Business Insider)

Challenger, Gray & Christmas projects about 450,000 seasonal retail jobs this quarter, the lowest gain in nearly 20 years and below last year's 461,000. Spirit Halloween has said it will hire 52,000 people and Michaels 10,000. Trent Cotton, who leads talent-acquisition insights at the recruiting-software company iCIMS, said retailers have been pulling the hiring earlier so that stores are fully staffed by October. (Source: Business Insider)

Glassdoor published a list of 20 open roles across four industries on October 7. Read as a map of where the requisitions sit, it puts the volume in sales, care work, warehousing and store management.

All rows: (Source: Glassdoor)

Manufacturing shows the same pattern from the other direction. In the August job-openings data, manufacturers had 522,000 openings, down 54,000 from July, while their hiring rate rose to 2.6% from 2.3% and quits rose by 23,000. Fewer doors standing open, more people moving through the ones that are. (Source: National Association of Manufacturers)

Amazon laid off hundreds of employees this week in its Stores division, which runs the main e-commerce site. Customer service, selling partner support and retail engineering were among the teams affected, across the United States, India and the United Kingdom. Reuters and Business Insider both reported that fewer than 1,000 people were involved. (Source: GeekWire)

The timing is the notable part. The cuts ran during Prime Big Deal Days, the fall shopping event that is one of the retail team's biggest dates of the year. Amazon has not yet filed a notice with Washington's Employment Security Department, which the state requires for layoffs of 50 or more workers. (Source: GeekWire)

"We've adjusted parts of our Stores business because we believe this structure will better enable us to deliver on our priorities," an Amazon spokesperson said, adding that the company "made the difficult decision to eliminate a small number of roles." (Source: GeekWire)

This is the third consecutive year of Amazon trimming, and the scale keeps changing. The company removed about 30,000 corporate jobs across October 2025 and January 2026, the largest reduction in its history, then made smaller cuts in its robotics and artificial general intelligence groups. (Source: GeekWire)

HubSpot's board authorised its plan on October 1, and the company expects charges of $65 million to $75 million, most of it landing in the fourth quarter. The reductions should be finished by the end of the first quarter of 2027. Chief executive Yamini Rangan told employees the goal is a flatter organisation with fewer management layers, and framed the restructuring as a change in how the company operates. The package includes a minimum of 20 weeks of base pay, and HubSpot shares have fallen about 45% this year. (Source: Quartz)

Caribou Biosciences announced its 87 cuts while halting its pipeline, with the reductions taking effect December 7; local reporting puts that at about 90% of its staff. Uber's 390 Bay Area roles are part of the 3,300, or 10% of its workforce, that it announced on September 2. Workday's Bay Area cuts belong to a plan to reduce its global workforce by 2.5%. TikTok's Nashville office, home to part of its content moderation team, closed on October 5 under a notice filed in August. (Source: BioSpace)

The larger multi-week stories continued without new numbers. Oracle, which cut about 21,000 roles over its last fiscal year, has been working through another round since mid-September, with the headcount undisclosed. Microsoft's Xbox division, which eliminated 268 roles on September 22, says its reset is about three-quarters complete against the 3,200 roles announced in July. Nike said on October 1 that further layoffs would begin in calendar 2027, and still has not said how many. (Source: Yahoo Finance)

Software development was supposed to be one of the first casualties of AI. It is posting again instead, and the recovery is narrower than the headline suggests.

U.S. software-development job postings have risen nearly 15% since late February 2025, the month Anthropic released its Claude Code tool. Overall U.S. job postings fell 7% over the same stretch, according to Indeed Hiring Lab. Even after the rebound, software-development postings sit about 27.5% below their pre-pandemic level. (Source: CNBC)

Two figures inside that increase are what a job seeker should carry away. Senior roles accounted for 71% of the growth in software-development postings between May 2025 and May 2026. Postings whose titles mention AI accounted for 37%. (Source: CNBC)

The tools are doing more of the writing. GitHub reported in October that one in three pull requests now involves an AI agent, up from fewer than one in ten a year earlier. A pull request is how a developer proposes a code change for review. Eric Kutcher, North America chair at McKinsey, told CNBC the result surprised him: "We're seeing much more growth in the places we thought we were gonna see the biggest displacement." (Source: CNBC)

People entering the field are having the opposite experience. Stanford University's 2026 AI Index found employment in AI-exposed occupations for workers aged 22 to 25 down 16% since generative AI took hold. Early-career software developers did worse, down about 20%, while older developer roles expanded. (Source: CNBC)

The official outlook still points up. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment of software developers, quality assurance analysts and testers to grow 10% between 2025 and 2035, much faster than average, adding about 185,400 jobs to a group of roughly 1.9 million. (Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook)

Both things are true in the same occupation at once: more postings than a year ago, and fewer openings for the people who used to take the bottom rung. The growth sits in experienced hires and in roles built around the AI tools themselves, and that is where search effort belongs.

The software roles employers are posting ask for different skills than a year ago, and those skills sit one layer up from writing code.

Sneha Puri, an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab, described the work that remains. Companies need people who can evaluate what AI tools generate, refine the products around that output, and help clients work the technology into daily operations. She named communication, interpersonal skills and leadership as the qualities that hold up alongside the technical work. She also warned that employers who stop hiring at the entry level will have no senior talent a decade from now. (Source: CNBC)

The pay anchor for the field is public. Software developers, quality assurance analysts and testers earned a median $134,040 a year in 2025, and software developers alone earned $135,980. The BLS projects about 106,100 openings a year for the group through 2035, and most of those will replace people who move to other occupations or retire. (Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook)

There is a second lane next to it, with data on where people actually land. Revelio Labs tracked call-center employment across 12 middle-income countries and found the global headcount down 5.3% from its December 2023 peak, falling year over year for eight straight quarters. Hiring slowed while separations held steady: the entry rate into call-center work fell from 25.1 to 17.2 per 100 workers since November 2022, and the exit rate fell from 22.3 to 18.5. (Source: Revelio Labs)

The roles that kept growing in those same countries were the better-paid, less scripted ones next to the shrinking job.

All rows cover 12 middle-income countries: (Source: Revelio Labs)

Moving into those roles pays for the people who manage it. Workers who changed jobs within the same country at unchanged seniority saw median pay rise 12.7% moving into software and data, 11.4% into technical support and 7.1% into customer success. The catch is that few make the move. Only 10.8% of the people who left call-center work reached one of those better-paid categories, while about half moved sideways into another customer-service, sales or office job. (Source: Revelio Labs)

Two figures from this week's software data belong in a search bar before anything else.

Between May 2025 and May 2026, senior roles produced 71% of the increase in U.S. software-development postings, and postings with AI in the title produced 37%. That describes where openings were added, and it changes which query is worth running. A search on the occupation name returns the whole field, most of it old. A search built from those two qualifiers — the seniority words and the AI words that appear in the titles — returns closer to the slice that grew. (Source: CNBC)

Then read the posting for which half of the work it contains. Postings whose duties centre on reviewing, testing and integrating what the tools produce are aimed at the demand Indeed's researchers describe. Postings whose duties are still mostly first-draft production compete with far more applicants per seat.

If you are early in your career, read the 15% as a fact about the field. Employment for software developers aged 22 to 25 fell about 20% from 2024, and the roles that kept growing and paying more sat one step up from the entry job. Naming one of those targets — technical support, customer success, software and data — gives an application somewhere to land. Only about one in ten people who left the shrinking entry-level work reached them; the other nine moved sideways. That gap is the difference between applying to an occupation and applying to a role.

Announced cuts are at a four-year low, claims have not been this steady since 1969, and the openings that exist are concentrated in a few named places: care work, sales, warehousing and store management, manufacturing floors that are hiring more people through fewer doors, and the senior and AI-adjacent software roles where the rebound is real. The next hard reading arrives October 14, when September inflation and real earnings land together.