> 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.

Because the article is about censorship?

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...

>not [seeking] an argument

Oh! Oh! I'm sorry! This is slashdot, in Room 12. This is Abuse!
For arguments, you want 12A, next door!

>people don't hire on merit
>Which candidate would you feel most comfortable working with for 40+ hours a week?

Why do you think "merit" and "works well with the employees I already have" are unrelated?

>Of course the candidate with a similar socioeconomic profile as your own would be preferred:

I suspect that's often true, but certainly not universal.

For example, allegedly, some people want slaves and want to lord themselves over their slaves. So they would never hire people like themselves, SES wise; they would only hire people where it was clear (in their own minds) that there was SES or other status daylight between themselves and their "underlings" So I'm not sure there's a universal law of hiring. I agree that "hiring someone like me" is a common -- but not universal -- pattern.

(Oddly enough, in the USA in 2026, I think you'll find that white males are the _least likely_ to use the "someone like me" hiring strategy - if for no other reason than decades of targeted enforcement against that that group for appearing to employ that strategy. Eg the Indian preference for hiring Indians, or the female preference for hiring females, is stronger than the white-male preference for hiring white-males. Maybe not in terms of hidden preferences, but in terms of actual hiring outcomes, yes, that's what the data will show)

Back to the non-universality of hiring strategies: A friend of mine with a tech business intentionally tries to hire mid-field performers. He doesn't want a rapid climber, because he cannot afford to keep them on staff once they understand what they are worth. He wants mid-field performers who are going to do solid, reliable work, and be content to work for him for a long time. So he doesn't hire on "merit" - he hires for "good enough, low turnover"

Other businesses have other strategies.

> but "not understanding cost" is a dangerous assumption to make.

One of the best, most succinct phrases in this discussion. Thank you.

We don't have to wait for AGIs to develop their own agency and build terminator robots. Industrial robots with no agency and with auditable and deterministic programming already kill humans. The industrial robot doesn't understand there's a human in the safety cage with it. It doesn't understand that moving through space occupied by a human has a cost. It doesn't know there's a human there and it doesn't know what a human is.

Designing automation that can never kill a person is already an unsolved problem with standard, non-intelligent technology.

I don't know if AI makes it harder or easier. On one hand, AI behaves, in effect, non-deterministically (even though at some level it is deterministic, it's not observably so).

OTOH, in organic intelligences, adding sensors, adding alignment, giving feedback - tend to produce humans who accidentally kill less frequently. So maybe something like the 3 laws will conceptually be part of the System Prompt of future AIs, and they'll figure out how to avoid HAL 9000 problems.

Thanks for the interesting response.

The strongest man today; the hardest workers today... are not 10x or even 2x as strong or as physically productive as the best in human history. Depending on what you think about ancient man, we are possibly weaker and dumber than some of our ancestors.

The transmission of new ideas across memory, time, and place is the extra term in the equation of human achievement, civilization, and prosperity. It's not that labor doesn't matter. It's that ideas are like compound interest. Labor adds principal to our civilizational account balance. But Ideas compound it.

In the long term, ideas are all that matter.

I have the same reservations you do - powerful people will continue to want to corner and concentrate their power.

It's unclear how well they will be able to do that, however. The capability lag time between a paid frontier model and a self-hostable open-weights model is months.

The ability to train a good-enough model will also be commoditized. In my youth, we had distributed crypto challenges.... to get super-computing work done on mass democratized hardware of like-minded individuals. So in the future, we can fall back on analagous distributed model training efforts if some better alternative doesn't exist.

I am skeptical about a post-scarcity society and I am skeptical about man's "labor" ever going to zero. Of the infamous twelve possible AI outcomes, I am somewhere in middle. For biblical reasons, I believe the extinction of man is not going to happen, and I believe the utopia of man is also not going to happen.

Control of other people's speech is always about asserting power.

It's never actually about "reducing harm"; it's about asserting power.

Talking about it in "harm" terms is a clever hack: ... because most humans are sensitive to harm/harm reduction along their moral reasoning (see: Jonathan Haidt)

But "Never hurt my feelings" is an impossible bar, and it doesn't scale across a civilization. It cannot be a basis for law.

The attempt to abuse the "harm receptors" of political enemies is contributing to the mutual dehumanization across faction lines.

We use Hubspot. Here's what we use it for:

- the "live chat with support person" bubble on our web application
- single funnel for incoming/outgoing support tickets & support communications with our customers

Adopting it was an old decision.

We would love to not use hubspot; the service delivered vs. the ongoing costs seem like a bad deal now.

At some point, we'll get around to migrating to something else.

That nightmare scenario actually did play out not long ago near me. A woman from out of state was falsely ID'd by an AI camera of some kind and was detained for months and it wrecked her life.

My sentiment is that the process was wrong and that the officers and other parties involved in this should all be fired, and the woman compensated.

None of that is what normally happens; that is not happening "millions of times". That's why it was newsworthy when it _did_ happen.

The original comment was philosophically open ended.

I made the example in my response very specific because arguing about hypothetical generalities is usually not productive.

The difference is this: it's difficult to ascertain if someone is guilty or innocent without arresting them. YOu don't arrest people via a random statistical sampling; you arrest via a biased selector: You arrest people you have high odds of beleiving are likely to be guilty. And you arrest them because you cannot ascertain their guilt via non-destructive observation. Without arresting them, they are allowed to simply walk away while you are trying to ascertain their status.

An arrest rate of 10% of all humans would be ridiculous.

A false positive rate of 10% _among the population of people you arrest_ is acceptable.

So the applicable comparison isn't "your cell phone doesn't work 10% of the time", the applicable comparison is "when your cell phone wasn't working, the tech support team guessed correctly as to the root cause 90% of the time, but guessed incorrectly 10% of the time"

IOW, 90% success rate with a 10% FP rate amongst a problematic cohort.

>No I maintain it would be pathetic performance by LEO if they were willy nilly arresting people hoping to bag the perp.

Nobody is advocating for that.

The cops should only be arresting people they have a plausible reason to arrest. If it turns out that 10% of the time their guess was incorrect, that's acceptable. They are not performing random arrests and getting a lot hit rate. They are doing targeted arrests and getting an ultra high hit rate.

>AI is being forced inappropriately into peoples lives with no opt out *everywhere*

I agree with you, and I also don't like that, and I think stopping that via market choices and legislation, as appropriate, is the right thing to do.

In my mind that's totally separate from what I am talking about and commenting on.

That said, you can make legislation so that you're not forced to use it (or be spied on by it), but you cannot make a law that stops AI development. If nothing else, the law won't reach beyond our borders. And eventually a nation hostile to you will develop ASI and then they will impose it on you (and worse)

I've been a professional software engineer for 30 years.

AI has changed everything for software engineers.

I wrote a line of code by hand saturday (client blocks AI) and it was weird. I hadn't done it in months.

I don't have a crystal ball. I cannot say for sure whats coming.

But I would say this: if the scope of your ambition is small, e.g. the possible amount of value you can add as a business (or as an employee) is fundamentally constrained by something, then having a machine do that thing way more efficiently than you is a problem.

Machines will take an increasing share of your fixed pie.

Lots of software isn't that.

Lots of software is trying to make the pie bigger.

We're doing things now that we never would have tried. The incremental cost of writing code goes to zero. Software engineering changes. What assumptions about what you do and how you spend your time and what value you provide change when the cost of writing code goes down 10x or 100x?

For all of human history, the speed of acheiving every goal has been limited by available high-IQ-hours. At every moment in human history, there was unimaginable value not being created because it didn't make the cut compared to everything else that also needed doing - the brains capable of doing it didn't have the remaining hours to do it.

Artificial intelligence is changing the math on that. Unbounded level of available hours at what appears to unbounded level of IQ.

You are trapped in a prison made of your own lack of imagination.

(I'm not saying I'm not, by the way)