I was speaking in the general case, where a company is cutting and outsourcing at the bottom end and paying top dollar and providing bonuses for executives. In this case, no matter how much dislike I have for Microsoft, I'm guessing the move is just plain old cutting of dead weight. Satya Nadella can't think of anything useful to do with this particular set of 18,000 employees, so they're being let go - but he has no plans to replace them with cheaper alternatives. Departments and projects they've decided are not part of Microsoft's future are being shut down.

I'm glad an Indian guy made CEO in the US. I think that's great.

If I understand the situation correctly - and it may be that I don't - this is what projects like Docker and chroot jails (?) were created to handle. You get most of the benefits of virtualization without most of the overhead. In a lot of cases you don't need the features that full virtualization provides over them.

I don't have a problem with some man (or woman, whatever) in India getting a good job from a US company. That's fine.

What I dislike is that a US corporation will cut twenty million dollars off their annual payroll, replace it with eight million dollars in foreign workers - some outsourced and some cheaper H1Bs, and then the company divides the other twelve million per year between executives and shareholders. Clearly spending more money to hire, attract, train, and retain good talent is the height of stupidity. Unless of course you're dealing with corporate executives, in which case giving them little bonuses worth more than fifty regular employees earn in a year is the only reasonable way to do business. Long live the oligarchy!

Good point, and good song. But I think Al left out "perfect storm", and even though I'm not hearing that phrase quite as often this year as I was three or four years ago it still deserves a top spot among the worst corporate buzzwords.

I have nothing against people from India, China, Africa, South America, etc... but you will notice that this ruthless drive to keep productivity up while lowering expenses does not extend to top executives. So you and me and the guy down the street and the woman across town take a pay cut or lose our jobs so someone in Indonesia can have a better life, while the person that decided to axe our positions and everyone on the board of directors get a bigger mansion.

I am happy when anyone anywhere gets a better economic opportunity. That's a good thing. But the more important point is that we're heading towards oligarchy - the middle class in the US is seeing their standard of living move more in line with the rest of the world, the average person in the rest of the world is seeing their standard of living inch towards the American middle class, but the great majority of the financial benefit to cutting middle class wages and outsourcing jobs goes to the 1%.

There is a class war, we're in the middle of it, and we're getting beaten badly.

bangular, IBM does almost $100 billion in annual business per year, a solid $20 billion more than Microsoft. Though to be fair their profits are slightly lower. IBM is more than just surviving.

A person negotiates for compensation once every few years, at best. The people handling hiring at companies negotiate compensation every day. Companies almost universally make it company policy to forbid employees from discussing compensation with each other.

So when you and your employer are trying to agree on what you're paid, they've got more experience at the negotiation and access to much more information than you have. That makes the game field completely uneven.

Or in other words - no, you're not worth only what you can negotiate out of your employer, regardless of what field you work in.

I prefer GPL to BSD. But any FSF-approved open source license trumps proprietary, so I'll happily use OpenSSL, OpenSSH, LLVM, etc... I make my arguments in favor of GPL, but if the people giving their free time to open source don't agree, it's no skin off my back. I'll take a full top to bottom OpenBSD stack over a walled garden from Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or anyone else any day of the week.

Agreed.

I'm familiar with Larry Wall and his virtue of Lazines. That kind of laziness I admire. I'm speaking of the less intelligent form of laziness: doing a half-hearted job because you don't care if it will need to be rewritten later.

I am of course only speaking anecdotally, and I have no sense for the correct threshold.

Inventing a quicksort requires a lot of luck and a high intelligence. Learning to apply a quicksort instead of a linear insertion sort is within reach of someone of average intelligence. Inventing a build automation tool, continuous integration servers, a unit testing framework, etc... all requires a great deal of intelligence. Learning how to use them is just patience. I probably wouldn't invite someone with average intelligence to a Google design meeting while you discussed some radical new way of manipulating large data sets. Or I would invite them, but not expect them to provide much input. But for implementation? Why not?

I wouldn't expect an average guy to write a new scheduler for the Linux kernel and get it accepted. But modify some network driver to work with a new piece of hardware very similar to something that already exists? Why not?

I think anti-intellectualism is a problem, but I think the bigger problem is teaching people persistence in the face of discomfort and frustration when learning.

I lucked out into the perfect learning environment through my own incompetence and laziness. Early in my career I was laid off, and I wasn't skilled enough to land a good job. I took the best job available as the lone developer at a company too poor to hire anyone better. In that environment, when problems appeared and features needed to built if I couldn't figure out the work it did not get done. In school and in previous jobs I would give up after an hour without progress and hand the problem to someone else. That wasn't an option, I had to keep trying different approaches until I got it right or quit and lose my income. Sometimes it took weeks for me to puzzle out features that required a five line code change. It was the most frustrating and stressful three or four years of my career - and I emerged from the other side somewhere near competent or at least three times more skilled than when I started. Now I seek out that kind of challenge, because every bit of mental anguish is just a small sign I'm broadening my horizons.

It's clear most people in this field - most people in general - don't share this attitude. But I'm at a loss as to how to foster it.

Rudy didn't make it to the New York Giants, did he?

I say the professional athlete is luckier than you are. There are hundreds of thousands of kids every year working as hard as they can to become professional athletes, and that hard work combines with two big patches of luck - good genetics and the fortune to avoid a career-ending injury - to make success. The ones who get hurt can't do it, no amount of hard work offsets poor genetics, and the pool of available paid athlete positions is relatively small.

In our field, average talent or at most slightly above average talent and a lot of hard work is all you need to succeed. You don't need to be born a genius, average intelligence and a willingness to learn is sufficient. And there are a huge pool of open positions plus the possibility of creating your own niche. The only thing "elite" about most of us is that we learned not to be lazy and in the modern world that appears to less common than it was a century earlier.

I think they're right about the problem, but wrong about the solution. They think the solution is to make it easier, but that's just not practical. Most people can drive, few can design engines. Most people can learn to use a blood pressure cuff, few create them. Most people can learn to use a spreadsheet, few know how to create one. Learning how to write software that's more than just user interface tweaks on something that somebody else built is inherently difficult.

But the real problem is this impression that you have to be born 80% as smart as Einstein to get into this field, and that the learning curve is impossible for regular people. That's totally wrong. Average intelligence plus persistence is all you need. You won't be Linus Torvalds tomorrow, you won't be Steve Wozniak next month. But put your time in, try things out, get used to being frustrated as you learn and keep learning anyway, and in a few years you'll understand what's going on and be able to do anything this side of the most advanced work as well as anyone.

That's the lesson we the progressives should be teaching people. And to be clear, it fits all of my original examples too. Few people walk into an automotive engineering program and instantly grasp all of the concepts involved - years of persistence matter more than raw talent if you want to design engines. Few people start building medical equipment and have an instant knack for getting it right - years of persistence matter more than raw talent again. If you were born with an 80 IQ, sorry there's only so far you can go. But the difference between a person with 110 IQ that contributes code to the Linux kernel and one that works at a gas station is their persistence, not raw intellect.