> unless said workers have the same skills and experience.

At Microsoft, its usually the hypocritical scenario.

There were very few specialized dev roles at Microsoft. Either you're thought to be smart enough and adaptable enough to work on whatever you're told to do, or, you aren't hired.

Exceptions would be "face characters" - unique individuals with unique contributions; people slashdot might have heard of. But those are far less than 1% of the company.

When you are cutting staff by thousands and hiring staff by thousands, none of them are special, none of them are differentiated. Its just bodies.

The layoff policy at Microsoft when I was observing it was pretty brutal. Each round was slightly different, but the mechanisms were usually similar: Each layer of management hierarchy, starting at the top, would get an "NTE" number, "Not to Exceed". As in, "your headcount is NTE 514" or whatever the number was for that manager. And whatever number you got, you subdivided it amongst the mangers beneath you, they subdivided to their child managers, and on downards, so most people in certain org-trees had some quota of people they were responsible for cutting.

Often, the layoffs were not based on the skills the person had, or how good or bad they were at their job, or anything like that. Usually entire teams would be eliminated, even if they had great people the company should have wanted to keep.

Yes, you did sometimes have awful situations where you lost really outstanding people just because they were on the wrong team when it came time to conduct random firings/layoffs.

The company seemed to have the idea that if they were good, they would reapply and find their way back in at some point.

The mechanism had a certain sort of "trapped by corporate America stupidity" feel to it. "We need to cut xx people and we can't be very intelligent or selective about it.. we cant make it about the specific person [because that invites lawsuits], so we make it about 'reducing investment in product [xyz]"

I am aware of possibly 2-3 RIF ("reduction in force") actions where the performance of the affected individuals was a factor in them getting chosen. More often it was whole-team cuts.

I was a dev lead at Microsoft. I believe I was asked to support immigration fraud.

I had an employee on a VISA. He was in a junior level role.

The immigration attorney asked me to verify that the job requirements for his job were:

- masters degree
- expertise in python
- (a few other things)

He had a masters degree. He had the other things on the list.

Problem was, the job he actually had was an entry level dev job. It was the exact job I got hired in at at the beginning of my career. For the level/job he was at, a 4 year degree is normal. Python (or any other specific language) is not needed.

So i said "no, that's not right. You don't need this, or this, or that"

And the immigration attorney was like "OH! My mistake! It sounds like this is more of an entry level position! Well, I guess based on what you've told me, we cannot sponsor the Greencard process for this employee at this time"

I had no idea that's what was going on or what was at stake when I answered the question. My employee wasnt mad at me - he quit MS and transferred to Google - who promised to push through his Greencard process. He said once he got done at Google he looked forward to working for me again at Microsoft some day.

So you tell me what you think was going on.

I think I was supposed to rubberstamp Microsoft immigration fraud, and I accidentally didn't, because I tried to accurately answer the question I was actually asked.

But look at how the lawyer responded. "Oh, shoot, what a silly mistake - nevermind!".

So no matter how I responded, he has plausible deniability. And if I had said, "yes, these are the required skills", nobody would have known otherwise.

I was gutted that I had ruined things for my employee without realizing it. The fact that he wasn't furious with me surprised me. To him, it was all a transaction. He wanted a Greencard; so he was going to go where he could get it - no hard feelings.

It's all transactional.

>OK, you don't work in software. Good tech companies don't outsource core development. They hire in house.

I was a software engineer at Microsoft for 22 years.

For all 22 of those years, Microsoft had core developers on every product who were not Microsoft employees.

You may want to look up the "permatemps" lawsuit from the early 00s. Microsoft had so many permanant contractor "non employees" that they were succesfully sued for the practice.

Microsoft has all kinds of legal sub-structures and "at a distance" legal entities for various employment arbitrage reasons. The technical talent of the people is not a determining factor in whether someone is a contractor, vendor, or full time employee.... Or if they are employed at an overseas subsidiary or domestically here in the USA.

And Microsoft plays a LOT of games with hiring/employment laws.

For instance, Microsoft had (has?) a large Vancouver development shop because, as I understand it:
1) its faster to get Chinese/Indian nationals into Canada than it is to get them into the USA
2) Vancouver is just up the road from Redmond, so easy to come down to Redmond for in-person meetings once in a while
3) It's very fast, legally to get people from Canada to the USA

So It was an open secret that MS would hire foreigners into the Vancouver office and park them there for, IIRC, 1 year, before moving them into the US.

True, but Australia has a handful of cities separated by massive destroyed wastelands populated only by roving gangs, so each city can do its own thing in the north and south.

You know what a shed is? Same thing, except you keep a bike in it...

Founds the commie insurgent.

When you get around to answering my question let me know.

Because the article is about censorship?

I just looked at the paper and you are right. Thanks for looking.

The male and the female one are basically suggesting visually that the man is competent and the woman is not. I mean even only the cloth pattern of the skirt that "she" is wearing is atrocious. It is like they made the "woman" intentionally unattractive while they made the "man" average. ("She" is also blonde, of course, while "he" has dark hair.) I have no idea whether this was actually done intentionally, but if I were to design a study to find this type of bias, that is what I would use. I wonder whether they did something similar in the text interfaces.

I also noticed that their names are Johanna and Johan, i.e. a proper male name for "him" and a feminized male name for "her".

So, after all, my first take of "likely methodical error" was correct.

The study is flawed in another way as well because "everybody knows" that women earn less than men. (Usually that is "proven" with the unadjusted wage gap, which is completely bogus and essentially a lie.) Hence the study participants just conformed to what they thought were the facts of the matter. Makes the results completely meaningless.

And the other thing is that "everybody knows" there is a gender pay gap. This is only true for the unadjusted gap, but most people do not know what that means. Once you adjust for factors like experience and field-of-work the difference is below the margin of error, i.e. small and we do not even know whether it is real. We essentially have same wages for the same work and qualification and had it for a while. That some parts of some gender groups decide to not do the same work or invest less or more time into getting experience is a separate problem and not a problem of payment.

Hence the people in this "experiment" were just conforming to what they thought was expected of them. That makes the whole thing bogus. Obviously wages in the real world are determined by a different procedure and harping on about women and men not behaving exactly the same (as a group) is just one thing: counterproductive.

Why haven't you stopped watching _all_ corporate content - broadcast TV, cable TV, whatever the DSS dish companies are doing, Amazon, Netflix, blah blah blah

I hope you're not _paying_ for any of it...
And I hope you're not consuming very much of it...

It's bad for you. The people who make it are idiots, but they are crafty idiots. They know how to hurt you even if they don't know much else.

The idea that we have to watch their content is just baked into the cake, and nobody can escape it.

I was talking to a mechanic once. We were complaining about the news, and how it was all fake, they were all liars, etc.

I asked, "why not stop watching it?"

He responded: "but then I wouldn't know what's going on"

I replied, "you just said they are lying to you. So how does watching them tell you whats going on?"

(then everyone clapped)

He didn't answer. But I don't think he changed his habits.

Next, lets talk about Americas insane addiction to a Sportsball industry that regularly abuses us...

Well, what can an LLM do? It has no understanding or insight, so it cannot see whether something is a good solution or not. Obviously, a smart human would not even have looked for a "solution" like that, because it is obvious crap.

Are you serious? Because that is the dumbest shit I have read in a long, long time.

Since you do not even seem to know the very basics, here is a starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...