Hey guys, it's the last month of the

year and our last video of 2025. It's

been one hell of a year and for tech

some things were exciting, some maybe

not so much, but what a time to be

alive. So, in our last video of this

year, I want to look ahead and see

what's around the corner. So, have a

seat, grab a cup of tea. We'll be

talking about all things global. Global

job market, geopolitical influence on

the tech industry, the new buzzwords of

the next year, and the AI theme of 2026.

Before we dive in, a quick announcement.

Our channel is turning one in a few

days, and we will be releasing our

Christmas special about what's going on

behind the scenes. If you're curious to

know what it takes to run a YouTube

channel while having a full-time job,

how much it costs, what the production

process looks like, and how my life has

changed over the past year, feel free to

subscribe and get a reminder so that you

don't miss it. And now, for the last

time this year, let's dive in.

So what's happening with the job market

after 3 years of unbelievable turbulence

globally? We are not trending towards

prepandemic. We are nowhere near back to

2021. The layoffs are still very much

elevated. The demand is concentrated in

pockets and if there are any rebounds,

they're happening in sector specific and

skillspecific industries. I remember how

in late 2024, early 25, there were a lot

of talks from very reputable media

resources that I have been following for

many years and they were saying that a

new wave of opportunities is just around

the corner. That the market is picking

up and that we'll be seeing an ocean of

opportunities. They're coming any day

now. But now going back, I'm realizing

that a lot of it was coming from career

coaches and people who sell the idea of

getting a job in any market and in any

economy. I remember being skeptical even

back then because on the ground it did

not feel like anything was picking up.

It definitely wasn't disastrous, but I

cannot say that I noticed any

significant changes or improvements. The

only thing that was kind of noticeable

is that the mass layoffs were not as

common. So now it's a good time to kind

of look back and think about it in

retrospect and see whether those

predictions actually came true. So I

looked up some data. Tech layoffs in

2025 matched or even slightly exceeded

2024 levels. The reason I'm saying they

matched or exceeded is because there is

a slight variation in terms of data

depending on which source you're looking

at. But what I can say with certainty is

that they're definitely not lower. On

the positive side, there are definitely

better than the 2023 peak. So, let's go

region by region and study the trends

across the world. Starting with the

United States, the theme of the 2026 job

market in the US is the hollow middle.

The biggest trend of 2025 that will

continue into the next year is replacing

highcost local headcount with nearshore

labor. And for obvious reasons for the

United States, the nearshoring happens

in Latin America. What US is seeing is

the barbell effect. They're cutting a

lot of middle management based in the

US. But on the other hand, the money

being offered for principal architects,

staff engineers, group PMs, or any kind

of principal role is sometimes beyond

reasonable. And I'm saying this as a PM.

And then the entry-level market is often

just outsourced to Mexico or Brazil. So,

actually, let me take it back. Maybe

it's not a barbell after all. It's more

of a kettle bell so to say. What we're

seeing is that even for product

engineering or R&D talent, the senior

roles that tend to stay inhouse are the

ones that are tied to strategy and

business. Something that would be really

difficult to outsource because there is

a lot of business and market context

that you understand when you live in

that market as well as the cultural

nuance that you just can't teach over

Zoom. The point I'm trying to make is

that for a senior level engineer, for

example, coding is not enough. Unless

you're tied to business and strategic

decisions, you can very much be replaced

by an engineer in Colombia with the same

skill level in the same time zone.

Moving on to Canada.

No matter what you do for a living, be

it coding, product, marketing, or HR, at

some point you get to experience the

beautiful world of documentation. And as

a PM, I have to write feature specs

every single month. The problem is

people don't like reading feature specs

and the work of the whole team sometimes

goes unseen because it's a lot easier to

see what was built, not read three pages

of text. So I thought, why don't I build

an app that will turn my feature specs

into beautiful landing pages, so neither

myself nor my customers have to suffer

and people will actually be excited

about what my team has built. Let's do

it together right now. Watch me do it in

a minute. I'm opening UWare and just

describing what I want. Build a feature

spec visualizer for product managers to

convert feature specs into a landing

page for a new product feature. Adding

some details here around the specs

around the wireframe and how I want this

to look like. And finishing it off with

a CTA. Let's call it, I don't know, for

example, visualize. And create the page.

And my laptop dies now because it needs

a Christmas break. Not a problem. I'm

going to move to my phone and continue

from there. All right, let's test it.

The feature that I'm launching is

advanced search filters. The users can

now filter search results by date range,

category, and custom tags. All of this

makes finding specific content 10 times

faster.

Okay, that's actually sick. It just

turned my feature spec into a landing

page for my feature. Let's try another

one. I am launching a dark mode toggle.

Users can now switch between light and

dark themes in settings. It is located

under preferences and then appearance.

And it reduces the ice strain and saves

battery on mobile devices.

And now instead of making my customers

read pages and pages of text, they can

actually see what's new and what was

built. And I can publish and share this

instantly. I don't need to worry about

hosting, deployment, or setup. And the

best part is that all of it was built in

minutes. Try UWare yourself. Link is in

the description. Turn your ideas into

apps without writing a single line of

code. Huge thanks to UWare for

sponsoring this section.

The theme of the 2026 job market in

Canada is going to be nearshoring plus

selective hiring. In Canada, the number

of people currently with jobs is

actually flat or slightly up. What this

means is that the crisis is entirely on

the hiring side. If you have a job,

you're most likely safe. Not guaranteed,

but most likely. But if you're looking,

it's pretty tough out there. postings

for senior roles are slightly up and the

junior roles are down 25%. And this

tracks with the trend around expertton

market. So back to those predictions

from earlier this year. Yes, there are

opportunities and hiring is happening

but the hiring is happening for highly

critical and very senior positions.

Canada just like the US is also

experiencing nearshoring and offshoring

trend for a huge number of roles. Even

among the people that I personally know,

I can count quite a few who got laid off

because their entire departments were

moved to a cheaper location. From what

the data is telling and from my personal

experience, the roles that are being

kept inhouse are tightly coupled to

decision making and core architecture

rules whereas execution is often pushed

offshore. Moving on to Europe. Europe is

going through a very interesting time

because they are essentially at risk of

losing their manufacturing base. In

general, the European Union is deeply

concerned about deindustrialization

going into the next year. Germany has

lost a quarter million industrial jobs

in the past few years and this bleeding

will accelerate in 2026. The automotive

sector which is the spine of the German

economy is first of all not doing well

and secondly under a threefront assault.

The Chinese are undercutting on price.

The full shift to electric is much more

expensive and difficult to execute than

it seemed and is currently unaffordable

to be honest. Plus don't forget about

the energy crisis and Sweden's bet on

being the country of green tech was a

pretty bad miscalculation as well.

They're now reversing course after

colossal bankruptcies of the green tech

giants and mass layoffs in the

industrial sector. On the flip side,

even though general software hiring is

stagnant because of the manufacturing

recession, there is a massive demand for

roles around AI sovereignty and

regulation. I will speak about this in

detail in a few minutes, but the demand

for cloud architects with EU specific

compliance certifications and data

guardians has spiked almost 50% as

Europe is gearing up for something

called the Euro stack. Again, more on

Euro stack in a couple minutes. And now

the Gulf and specifically the UAE and

Saudi Arabia. The Gulf states are

actively promoting the nationalization

pivot and they're pushing for Saudis and

emiratization in their attack rules.

Unlike in mid to late 2010s, you can't

just move to the UEE or Saudi Arabia as

a mid-level PM or an engineer without a

specific domain knowledge because they

have enough foreign talent already. The

roles are there, but they now require

specialized local knowledge or Arabic

fluency, which by the way, in my humble

opinion, I do think that local languages

should be prioritized. No matter how

international the market is, no matter

how many expats they have, I am of the

opinion that the countries should be

prioritizing local languages over

English. So in my view, it's expected,

not surprised. I understand why they do

it. The Gulf is going through the same

situation as the US and Canada where

cuts disproportionately hit the middle

layer, middle management, operations,

and execution rules while AI, cloud,

cyber security remain fairly protected.

At the beginning of the year, I made a

video about 2025 tech trends. And one of

the biggest ones that I highlighted was

the rise of individual contributors. And

now that we're approaching the end of

the year, I stand by what I said. The

biggest leverage in today's job market

are hard skills and domain expertise,

which makes one an elite level

individual contributor. Now, if you're

curious why I'm not covering China or

Asia as much, it is only because I have

never lived or worked in those regions.

I simply don't have the same cultural

context and contextual knowledge of the

Asian market, which is why I prefer to

stay in my lane for now at least. So, a

quick verdict. Was 2025 better than 24

across the globe in the context of tech

employment? No. For an average worker,

it was arguably worse. The whole job

hopping every 2 years is a thing of the

past. Quit rates have plummeted and the

market is quite frozen unless you are in

a highly specialized role. As of today

and as we're moving into 2026, being a

highly skilled individual contributor

pays off more than being a middle

manager. The trend of 2026 is to accept

the reality of distributed teams. I

personally think that we're going to

stop using the word offshoring or

nearshoring in the near future. The

satellite offices become the norm. The

market will not recover to 2021 levels.

Do not expect that. It's not going to

happen in the near future. We are

entering a multi-year period of job

market compression, which means fewer

jobs, much higher barrier to entry and a

focus on ROI. And if you are an average

worker without specific hard skills or

industry expertise, my recommendation

would be to specialize as soon as you

possibly can. Remember, these days

narrow is the moat, whether you're

building a business or a career. Moving

on to my favorite topic, tech and

geopolitics.

While the US and China fight over chip

supremacy, the rest of the world is

fighting to own the infrastructure so

they don't become digital colonies of

either US or China. Why is

infrastructure and data sovereignty so

important? Let me give you an example.

Imagine there is an AI company in

Singapore that is building a very

powerful AI model and it works great

until they try and sell it to a

different country. It gets blocked by

Singapore's data residency law because

the model was trained on servers in

Virginia. It gets shut down in the EU

because it doesn't comply with the

European AI act and it can't operate in

China because well, China. So the

startup realizes we can't go global. And

this is why the Saudis building those

data centers and NEOM aren't doing it

just to run GBT faster. They're building

it to say, "You want to sell AI to my

people? You come to my server, you come

to my law with my rules, and you pay

me." This framing defines the next era

of geopolitics in tech and the rise of

the third AI power center. The swing

states of tech, bricks, UAE, Saudi

Arabia are refusing to be just users of

US and Chinese tech. They're building

their own third stack to protect

themselves from a situation where the US

says, "I'm putting a 100,000 sanctions

on you. And unless you do as I say,

we'll cut you off from the rest of the

world." China doesn't have this problem.

China is a superpower and they invest

heavily in building domestic AI with

their own chips and their own cloud. So,

we got the US, we got China, we got

Europe. So, what are we left with? Well,

just about the entire half of the

planet, the global south, give or take.

But treating the countries that are in

the global south as one unified entity

is a big mistake. They're very

different. India produces about 20% of

the world's data, but only holds 3% of

global data center capacity. India is

datarich, but infrastructure poor. Latin

America is in a very similar situation,

but Saudi Arabia and the UAE are

actively recovering from the Dutch

disease. So instead of buying chips,

renting models, and simply relying on

US, China or Europe, they're signing

contracts with all three to build the

relationship. And they're building the

entire supply chain on their own ground.

The way I see it is that the global

south is splitting into two camps. Camp

one being the Gulf and specifically the

UEE and Saudi Arabia. These are the only

non-western powers that have the capital

to buy their way out of dependency. The

UAE and Saudi are capital rich

infrastructure hungry. They can't match

India or Latin American population, but

they can build gigantic physical data

centers. They're the only ones who can

write a hundred billion dollar check to

OpenAI or Nvidia and force the transfer

of technology to the region. And camp

number two, the data colonies, India,

Brazil, and Indonesia. These nations are

very rich in data but poor in

infrastructure. Like I said, India

generates about 20% of the entire

world's data, but they only have 3% of

global data center capacity. India

exports data, its most valuable asset to

the US servers. There it gets refined

into intelligence or models and sold

back to India as a subscription service.

This is a tech equivalent of the cotton

trade. Sell cotton cheap and buy

expensive shirts. Brazil and Indonesia

are facing a very similar story. Massive

user bases, massive population, good

talent, but their tech infrastructure

runs on Amazon and Microsoft clouds. If

the US turns off the tap, the tech

economy goes dark. So this was the

global south. And finally, Europe.

Europe's problem is that on top of

losing ground in the manufacturing

realm, they got to do something about

data, and they better do it sooner

rather than later. Europe owns only 4%

of global cloud capacity. Every bite of

European data, every AI model trained on

it, every service delivered to a

European, all of it runs on US servers.

So the European government was thinking

and was like, "Okay, let's fight back."

So they're launching a moonshot project

called Euro Stack, which is a European

cloud built on European servers and

under the European law. Euroack is not a

single company. It's a policy. And the

plan is to glue together European tech

assets into one usable stack. It

includes European chips, European

operating system, European AI models

like Mistral and a jurisdictional gate

to protect Europe from foreign laws like

the US cloud act. Europe's biggest

problem right now is fragmentation. If

you think about the US, they have three

centralized giants, AWS, Azure, and

Google. Europe at the same time has 27

different strategies, a dozen startups,

fantastic startups especially in Sweden

and a European committee. So for Europe,

2026 is about bringing all of this

together and making it the year of Euro

stack so they can become defensible.

Moving on to business trends of 2026,

the rise of NeoClouds and regional

stacks. So we spoke about the country

level. Now, let's zoom into the market

level. Imagine you're moving from

building A to building B. Both buildings

are on the same street. You get a

U-Haul, and U-Haul gives you a massive

truck, a massive 26- ft truck with

hydraulic lift, climate control, and

GPS. But you're moving a one-bedroom

condo on the same street, but you're

paying for the whole truck. But U-Haul

is the only game in town, so you don't

have a choice. In 2025, AWS and Google

became that U-Haul truck. A startup

training an AI model pays for compute

plus storage plus database licensing

plus data transfer plus billing

complexity that they simply do not need

at that scale. And then Coreweave and

Nebus the Neoclouds step in and they say

we're not U-Haul. We will sell you just

as much as you need and for 30% less.

And what the Neocloud business is doing

is that it makes compute costs cheaper.

And when compute costs become cheap, the

entire structure of tech inverts because

suddenly a startup with a $2 million

funding can train a world-class model

and the barrier to entry falls.

Neoclouds are in the newest form of tech

business with an extremely high leverage

that keeps rising across Europe, the

Gulf, and Latin America, which means

that we're heading towards a trend of

decentralization.

Where does this leave us as we enter

2026? The geopolitical situation of the

past 5 years as well as the pandemic

deeply affected the tech industry. And

if this isn't giving you the cold war

vibes, I don't know how else to call it

because we see this race unfolding right

in front of us. And the race is for the

AI infrastructure and data sovereignty.

China showed an example of how one can

survive and thrive even when you're cut

off from the rest of the world. American

hyperscalers are actively investing in

metal in chips because neocloud model is

undermining their business model and

their ability to control. The south is

looking up and goes you guys have fun

over there but we got the population and

we got the land. So if you want our data

and our users you come to us you open

your offices here and you pay us. And

last but not least let's move to the AI

theme of 2026.

2023 was about knowledge and chats. 25

was about action and agents that could

do something with that knowledge and in

those chats. 26 is going to be about

physics. The theme of 2026 will be

physical AI. I've spoken about this at

length and if you're interested, I

recommend that you explore reputable

research papers because it becomes

pretty obvious that the LLM project has

reached the plateau of productivity. We

have hit the physical limits that

prevent us from achieving further

massive leaps. So instead of building

the next LLM, we're finally entering the

era of execution and putting existing AI

to use. In 2026, AI will start becoming

ubiquitous. We will be seeing it

everywhere in kitchen appliances built

into new devices. It will be in the

cameras at factories and plants. Your

power grid is about to get intelligent

or smart. Your government IDs will

likely be linked to AI agents that file

your taxes. All in all, we're about to

enter the first year of hardware AI.

This means that if you work in

manufacturing, logistics, energy,

healthcare, appliance production,

mining, the most labor intensive

industries on Earth, this is your year.

You will be seeing a lot of pilot

programs, new buzzwords such as spatial

computing, and large world models. In a

nutshell, in 2026, artificial

intelligence leaves the browser and

enters the physical world. Conclusion,

there is no going back to 2021. Not for

jobs, not for tech, not for geopolitics.

We're building new walls. We're building

new clouds. Nations are trying to

protect themselves from a big power

turning off the switch. But despite the

setbacks that this creates, I am low-key

glad because I think that we will be

seeing a much stronger diversification

across tech and tech hubs around the

planet where each region has something

unique to offer. So once again, it's a

fascinating time to be alive and let's

see how the next year will unfold. We

would like to thank those of you who

stayed with us this year, those who

believed in us and gave us your time. We

cannot imagine getting to where we got

in just one year. So from both of us,

myself and Maria, thank you and we will

see you in our anniversary episode.