alt Hacker NewsTinfoil hat thoroughly fixed upon my head, but a part of me kind of thinks that this might have been a long-game from big tech in the same vein as Grapes of Wrath.
Software engineers make a lot of money, at least historically because of supply/demand mechanics. By suddenly and continuously flooding the market with lots and lots of software engineers, you effectively can bring down wages, since if people are unemployed long enough they're likely to take a lower salary.
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They (the industry) have always wanted to find a way to do this. Tools like Rational Rose and Visual Basic were touted as being able to do this. Sending work overseas is another way. AI is just the next in line.
I don't know what the overall answer is, but I would say that if you have high demand skills, you can still earn a living.
Only works if employees can't found something new. Which might be the case right now.
Really, it feels like we're in a quiet depression.
>Software engineers
This Microsoft deal for the large part is not being offered to software engineering orgs.
If they actually had a need for those software engineers right now, they wouldn't play that game. (Or rather, if they could make more money by having them create something than they could save on wages from playing the game.)
But at that point, they almost should be laying off engineers, even without playing any such game.
To me it does not seem like any bigger conspiracy than people always wanted to pay less and earn more at the same time.
The FAGMAN companies got caught colluding to depress wages by avoiding hiring people already employed by the others, so they learned to accomplish the same thing without writing it down by having these periodic huge layoffs across the entire industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...