Software industry is a giant bubble 90% of the time, so it's usually the first one to go. But no most industries seem to be hiring averagely to better then average at least as per the JOLTs report.
Software companies are pretty uniquely positioned such that they have far more employees than are operationally necessary.
Not to say that those employees don't provide value, but the spread between operationally stable employment levels and current headcount is far wider than other industries.
During COVID, software companies massively overhired, because the executives in charge went all "hurr durr, digital is the future boys! Nobody is going outside anymore!". Not to mention the government was handing out money like candy through various schemes complete with low interest rates. I believe Facebook (as example) alone went from a headcount from 40k to over 80k employees in just 2 years of COVID.
2022+ was the "return to normal" with online trends quickly reverting back to pre-COVID levels. This resulted in a sudden drop in online economics (such as ad spend) that could justify the bloated workforces.
Drastically increased interest rates to fight inflation also cut off the cheap money flow to companies that would previously burn it like crazy on "R&D" and the like.
It's the end of the internet service software business cycle. This plus a ton of unprofitable VC funded companies unable to get the funding they were hoping to get with interest rates up lead to a massive pullback.
Will things change next year? Maybe if some IPOs hit and the VC pump and dump pipeline gets back up and running.
A lot of these companies have people doing no real work, even afterwards of layoffs, they're bloated. You can't layoff essential people otherwise you die.
You can look at companies like Spotify and Twitter, they ship like one feature a year if you average.
Only to a small extend. Mostly it happens in software. And no it's not just "overhiring" (that doesn't happen across so many industries). That's only part of it. We all know with AI we won't need white collar jobs anymore. If I had children I wouldn't allow them to study CS. Not anymore.
What would you have them study instead? If you're optimizing for what AI is least likely to be able to accomplish, some forms of blue collar labor would probably rank highest on the list.
I feel like you're overestimating the impact of AI on the current wave of dismissals. It's hard to say without any actual data, but there seems to be a lot of FUD regarding AI replacing white-collar and CS jobs.
I don't have better data than you, but I'd be very much surprised if AI would replace computer scientists rather than being a tool which will change what we'll have to be good at as computer scientists.
There is a lot of digitalisation to be done and AI might change the price of doing that, but it won't make a whole academic discipline obsolete.