I know plenty of people at MS. Several months ago, they announced the end of SDT (QA) as a thing. About half the SDT guys found internal transfers to the development teams. The other half were clearly looking for seats before the music stopped. Well, the music stopped.

That's the thing about software - whatever your technical skills, they have a half-life. You have to keep on top of that, or you'll find that what you know how to do simply isn't valuable any more. SDT was supposed to be a "developer, but writing test code" job all along. Now that MS is following the herd in making all test automation part of dev's job, those who had the talent and inclination to become normal devs had plenty of time to make that transfer. And about half of them did.

Your employer's duty is to give you money, not hold your hand and guide you through life.

Microsoft had a very generous severance package for engineers. They're on the payroll for 2 months after "being layed off", they get 2 weeks pay per 6 months tenure up to some high cap, from what I've heard.

When I got layed off in the dot-bust, my employer gave me a check and a shove out the door, but not having to work for 6 months gave me plenty of time brush up my skill set and to place myself with another company.

A free man doesn't expect his employer to be his mommy too - that's how a serf thinks. A company who wants to hire professionals ever again, after laying some of them off, will make sure to have a decent severance package - and MS did that. Most big companies that aren't in a death spiral do.

Ahh, liberals, forever convinced economics is a zero-sum game.

It's all the same trend. HFT isn't some cliff we fell off - trade frequency and market maker participation has been increasing steadily for 20 years as technological advance made it more and more practical. Spreads fell steadily during this time as a result.

"How do we race towards middle class standards for all by cutting middle class jobs for white people, simultaneously concentrating white people wealth in fewer hands"

By creating many more jobs for other people, which clearly you don't even see as people in your moral equation.

Microsoft layed off a bunch of v\factory workers and QA guys while complaining how hard I is to hire developers. Seems legit to me.

But is so much more fun to shout "big companies are evil!" "rich guys are evil!". than to think about issues. Here's a thought for you: if you think rich is bad, you won't get rich.

Well, maybe I don't know what you mean by "shop around". There may be multiple exchanges selling the same thing (though not for stocks), and you usually aren't even aware if which one your broker deals with, as arbitrage keeps prices the same on all of them at faster than human scale these days - another example of making markets efficient.

The market makers simply trade on the exchange, filling orders at better prices than the bid/ask would be without them there. Because they trade so frequently, they can make good money off of quite a small price difference between what they buy and sell at.

You seem worried about these "losses for everyone else", but the market makers aren't siphoning off a % of each trade or anything like that. The only ones hurt are real parasites on the system: those who would profit from inattentive traders, by taking advantage of a thin market for price gouging.

It really seems like you're trying to argue "they add no value, because they must be taking money form someone, because they add no value."

Me too, but sorry, that's not an option. Stable climate isn't really a thing, and merely removing human influence won't get you a stable climate. Maybe with a century of research we might attempt "climate engineering" to deliberately mess with the system to achieve a desired result, but that's SciFi today.

Well, these are exchanges, so "shop around for a better price" isn't really a thing. What you can't do is profit from someone not paying much attention - profit from the inefficiency of the market. And that's a good thing: there should be no game to play, no skill at haggling required, nor deep understanding of market mechanics, simply to execute a trade. Deciding what price you're willing to buy or sell at is where the smarts belong, but if you buy something by mistake, and turn around and sell it 2 minutes later, that should cost you as little as possible.

Never forget Poe's Law. Not only is there no statement so absurd that it can't be taken seriously by someone, it will be. Even TimeCube.

Did you have a problem with those specific companies or something? I'm not sure why you called those out.

Narrow or broad, I can't fault the reasoning here. The government can't ask someone to (directly) act against their religious beliefs without clearing the bars of compelling state interest and least-burdensome (most narrow) approach. When you hand out waivers left and right, you don't have much ground to stand on there.

I don't see it at all. It's not a race to the bottom: it's a race towards first-world middle-class standards for all. It's not like reducing labor costs goes into the pockets of some rich guy somewhere - it's spilt between lower costs for everything, and better returns for all shareholders (and more than half of Americans own stock now).

Long term, the effects on demand from e.g. India emerging as an economic world power would be hugely positive for everyone. It the whole world were consuming at middle-class levels, there'd be no shortage of good jobs for all, even with most manufacturing done by robots.

Well, I guess they do have a magnetic moment, fair point. But I was talking specifically about the simple way matter interacts that we see through galactic rotation rates and the CMBR: dark matter doesn't interact with light the way electrons do, nor get dragged along with the electrons the way protons do, and it doesn't seem like dark matter clumps the way normal matter does thanks to friction. Neutrons would fit the bill for all of that, were in not for the short life of a free neutron.

It would be fascinating to learn what dark matter really is. Does it interact with the weak force? Could it be baryonic somehow? (That would be a shocker) Is it even some sort of hadrons, or something really new? (I almost said "exotic", but we're made of the exotic stuff.)

The amount that an $80000 job affects the lives of people in America is much smaller than the amount that the $30000 job helps the lives of people in India. You have to compare purchasing power, not "dollars".

One developer job in America means one guy lifted out of the social safety net or retail job in America (if you think anyone in America is poor, look around the world more). One developer job in India means 10+ people lifted out of abject poverty.

Believe me my job is on the line - I compete for jobs directly on the world market, working for companies large and small that can easily hire developers in India or China and in most of the places I've worked in fact have the majority of their staff there. And those people deserve a job every bit as much as I do.

What Microsoft sadly lacks is vision. They have great R&D teams, pointed at nothing, or at each other, or at random. If they had any kind of clue about what new technologies would be popular in the future, they could do great. They can afford to say "it may be X, or maybe Y, or maybe Z - so lets make all 3!".

But they don't they make second-rate (or acquire) products in markets other people have invented, then try to make those products the best-in-class over time. That's fine and all, but it's the opposite of leadership!

No, what happens is: instead of the prices being set buy the professionals who are perfect at gaming the system (buy a new car, then sell it the next day, see how that goes), the little guy gets a fair price, as the middle man screws the big guy (well, the middle man is likely the biggest guy, but still).