You're right, but higher energy costs has a larger impact on manufacturing and a relatively low impact on services where energy costs make up a smaller percentage of total costs.
The reason tech is struggling right now (imo) is that Covid dragged forward a ton of demand in tech hiring and in late 2022 this pull forward started to reverse as companies faced facing reopening (less digital demand), higher interest rates and inflationary cost increases. Many companies either had plenty of tech talent so paused hiring, others had too much and needed to cost cut so did layoffs. The result is a market full of talented engineers but no one looking to hire.
I think it may also be partly that the AI hype has pulled capital from labour to compute. The largest expense an AI startup has is compute, not tech talent. Previously a newly funded startup would hire a large team of engineers, now they'll use that funding to bring in a few AI researchers and spend the rest on compute.
