Give raises to teams and not individuals. The smallest group of people that has an objectively measurable output value should all get the same raise, and the amount of that raise should be tied to how much value they provided.

This is how startups operate. Workers are offered a lot of potential reward, but that reward is tied to the success of their team (which in a startup is the whole company). In a large company, you have minimal motivation for doing a great job. As you described, there's this overly convoluted process. That process is standing between your contributions and the rewards you're supposed to get. Moreover, since managers are the ones doing the measuring, it encourages people to do things that the manager find beneficial to themselves, not the invisible work that contributes to the overall success of the company.

Why do managers have to "defend" their reports? If the team is performing, then everyone on the team should get better ratings. The only exception should be if most team members agree someone is not pulling their weight.

Aside from being a ton of unnecessary work and unfairly punishing people for having been hired by less experienced managers, it's not even possible to evaluate each person's work in a vacuum. The guy who's helping everyone else with their problems is the one who gets dinged at eval time because they have nothing to show for themselves, even if every time they give help, they're saving several hours or days of work for someone else.

The job market is always hard on the experienced side. Someone may have 5 years experience, but they don't have it in your specific tech stack. Your options are to accept someone who can learn on the job (and hope their experience carries over), hire less experienced people, or try to poach the perfect one with a high salary.

People who are good will most likely be happily employed. So the best time to hire is when other businesses are laying off people.

They should just auction H1Bs. Whoever pays the highest salaries gets the slots.

Surface-level issues with LLMs, such as hallucinations, can be solved by programmatically providing the correct context. Deeper issues, such as the inability to perform deductive reasoning or analysis, will require completely new solutions. Until those solutions materialize, we will need people. I imagine the future junior dev will simply start out by learning how to do today's mid-level devs' work, while the very low level stuff will be relegated to LLMs.

That means feature design, optimization, debugging, interface design and so on rather than tree traversals and hash functions. It actually makes the job harder. You can't debug without understanding how to code. You can't design an interface without being able to conceptualize its usage, including evolving future requirements. You can't optimize without understanding how the CPU, memory, disk, network and the OS all interact.

For senior devs, it will always be just another tool in the toolbox. Just because chainsaws exist, doesn't mean people stopped hiring loggers, it's just that loggers no longer spend 90% of their time pushing a jagged piece of metal back and forth.

This is an incredibly important point that management do not understand. The best ideas are rarely uncovered in verbal conversations. Chat or email are far better because they give you time to think. You can go look up documents or APIs, maybe even prototype something. You can have 2 or 3 ideas and pick the best one.

No, not yet.

Innovation still largely happens in the West. China and others are rapidly catching up, but they're not there quite yet. And their disadvantage of cheap labour is slowly diminishing as well as the Chinese people demand that they benefit from the whole thing as well.

That is all smoke & mirrors. How many companies from Europe do you see outsourcing to the USA because of the lower minimum wage and the weaker unions? None. Because those are just bullshit arguments they've been peddling for decades because they work. Sadly, our politicians these days are (in general, a few exceptions nonwithstanding) both incompetent and corrupt, so it's working even better now.

I've been involved in a few location decisions on the company level. Pay is a factor. But language is a huge one (what good is cheap work if they don't understand what you want them to do?), logistics is another (how far is it from our current location, and how easy to get to?), surrounding infrastructure, availability of qualified people nearby, options for additional space to expand, heck I've seen a company move HQ because the new location was closer to the CEOs home.

Yupp, the Silicon Valley style of solving everything. Companies buying into that soon learn that manufacturing is a lot more than a couple people/robots doing stuff.

That's what I said. Assume for your example that you need not just a few techs, but also at least one or two people who actually understand how manufacturing works. Where do you get these people when there are no more manufacturing jobs?

Let's force all the decision makers (politicians and CEOs) to make a month-long "vacation" in Detroit. Drop them off with nothing but their clothes in the city center. They all got where they are because they're so smart and successful, so shouldn't be a problem, right?

Solar will be dominant just because it's nearly impossible to prevent people from installing it. Just try putting up a coal plant in a blue state. Investors won't even touch you with a 10-foot pole.

There was a change in management and the former management wanted to build fabs and the current management wants to cut back.

Federal government paid Intel to build fabs. As they're not doing that, taking the money back is reasonable.

Intel is complaining about the money being taken in stock. Alternatively it could have been taken in cash which intel would have had to put as debt on its books. I think the stock is easier for them. US is also trying to build a sovereign wealth fund. 11 billion of intel stock is a reasonable addition to that.

Is that after the 60% tariffs? If so that seems reasonable.

Only because of tariffs. Solar module prices outside the US continues to fall.

Sounds like you prefer the death panels run by insurance companies?

Provided they know at least some basics about the thing in question.

As with pretty much all tools: They are most effective in the hands of a professional, and might be dangerous in the hands of a novice.

AI can replace a lot of intro-level workers. Honestly, most of the stuff I get out of AI is intern-level, be it code or text.

BUT - how then, do people move up from intro-level ?

And that's the kicker. For a couple decades now, companies have essentially gone "nah, we don't train people, we hired them once someone else has trained them". Well, good luck with that when the last few places where people can gain experience fall away.

The focus on quarterly results will be the downfall of western civilization. We will be eclipsed by countries like China who have decades-long plans, even when much of the rest of their system is shit. Nobody wants to live in a dictatorship. But even fewer people want to live in a completely ruined economy.

Well look at it this way, your taxes mostly go towards keeping someone else from taking the rest of what you've earned. Whether the potential taker could be some other country or another American who feels like they drew the short straw in life.

That's what the Sicilian gentlemen with the double-breasted suits and no necks said, but they were taking a somewhat smaller cut.