A contractor is an MS employee without benefits, managed by MS. Outsourcing is hiring a contracting firm, like Tata, to manage the employees at a much higher cost. Everyone uses contractors. None of the serious players use outsourcing firms for core work.

MS is using H1Bs to keep development at their main sites, like Seattle. The commenter stated that they could just contract it through an outsourcing firm, like Tata.

Ironically the H1Bs are helping the locals more than hurting as it makes you valuable to be in the area. When you force a company to go distributed, you reduce the incentive for them to not hire from wherever they want, especially outside the USA. I've seen it happen many times.

As someone already stated, Europe is huge. Not everything is London or Zurich. They have backwater villages and cousin-fucker countries, like most regions. Many companies open offices in Eastern Europe to tap into the talent pool. Also a highly skilled Polish engineer is cheaper than a shitty one from anywhere else in the word, no matter their wage. The cost of an engineer is a factor of productivity and salary, not just salary. Everyone who outsourced to India discovered this. Anyone in India with any talent was getting Western wages to work for MS and others...all that remained for the outsourcing companies, like Tata, were the ones they were turned down or never should have been engineers and it took them 10x as long to get anything done.

If you're using their product, it's done in-house. The only software firms that outsource core development probably shouldn't be called software firms. You know I meant good in the sense of engineering, not virtues. Cool quip, though.

OK, you don't work in software. Good tech companies don't outsource core development. They hire in house. They also have a huge presence in every country they'd hire from. Microsoft can just as easily open an office in India, Poland, or anywhere else. All the major players are the same. They outsource things like cleaning the office, sometimes some shitty work they don't want to do, like content moderation, they might outsource printer maintenance or helpdesk operations. However, the H1Bs are usually for valuable work and they keep that in house.

If Microsoft wants cheap, shitty labor, they can open an office anywhere it's cheap. They already have offices all throughout Asia and Europe to tap into cheap labor. If they're hiring H1Bs to work in Seattle, they typically want them for good work and are willing to pay a premium for them. MS won't outsource core Azure, XBox, Office, or Windows development. Non-tech companies may outsource core functions, but software companies never do (at least any I've seen...certainly not all major players).

Look, if your concern is American tech workers, the answer is simple, make H1Bs more expensive. The intent is to snag the best and brightest from around the world, so ensure the company has to pay them above the 75th percentile of wages for that job plus an additional sliding scale fee. If you're MS, pay $40,000 per VISA, for example. If you're a hospital needing to hire a pediatric surgeon in an underserved rural community? Make the fee $0.

H1Bs do more good for American tech workers than harm. Your employer can pay for H1Bs to bring all the labor to headquarters...and thus you have value by being local and a huge advantage. If they can't find the talent they need...and there's a HUGE shortage of talented engineers, even today, but especially 4 years ago....then they have no choice but to adopt a distributed model and then you're screwed. They need the talent and will hire someone overseas to do it if they can't bring them locally. If an MS employee in India is willing to do the job for half the wages on an American schedule, what hope does a Seattle-based employee have? Ironically H1Bs are quite often keeping your job from going away completely if you live in the developed world. If MS is used to distributed development, then you're competing with THE BEST IN THE WORLD that are willing to work for MS in their hometown....not just the best in Seattle. Trust me. I've worked in distributed teams for decades. It is a lot more competitive in terms what they expect from you and what they can get by with paying you.

They're just different. That's the way it should be. If my kids were begging me to play Nine Inch Nails in the car, I'd be disappointed in them :) Frankly, I like the music the kids are into lately...for some reason, there's a whole batch of young people who listened to all the good stuff from the past and did their best to learn from it and improve...certainly on the techno scene. I like new stuff from young artists more than my favorite tunes from my youth. But....regardless....Roblox isn't Alice Cooper...Alice Cooper was not Beatles...who were no Elvis...and the cycle goes on and on

What you mean to say is "I'm old and I don't like Roblox because it's not what I am used to." Roblox has 80 million active daily users and 5 billion in revenue annually. Not only that, if you talk to anyone under 18, the IS THE BIGGEST GAME by a long shot. It's bigger than minecraft and fortnite combined. It's bigger than any mobile game. Trust me, the kids feel the same way about the games I love to play, INCLUDING Fortnite. It is a cultural phenomena bigger than any boy band, Pokemon, even most consoles. My kids' friends? They don't want a PS5 filled with AAA hits. They just want to play Roblox with their friends.

You understand you're the villain in this story right? You're the preacher in footloose. You're Tipper Gore banning 2 Live Crew. You're those frigid church ladies saying Heavy Metal and Dungeons and Dragons will turn your children into satanists, while their husbands sneak off from their suburban homes, pretending to work late, but actually fucking their sidepieces. You're that old man complaining about whatever you listened to in High School saying "that's not REAL music." You're that dick who was telling teenage me Rage Against the Machine was garbage because it wasn't Led Zepplin and how my music isn't "cool" like your classic rock.

I don't get Roblox either. A few of the games are actually fun, like 99 Nights in the Forest. My kids and I have parties where we all play that. Most are weird and pointless to me, but I'm fucking old with grey chest hairs. I'm not supposed to get what the kids are into. It would be weird if my dad was begging to go to a Nine Inch Nails concert with me when I was in high school. This is their Sex Pistols, Alice Cooper, rap-music, hair-metal, New Kids on the Block, N'Sync, Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, or whatever confused, scared, or annoyed your parents.

My kids and all their friends have distinct taste in Roblox games. It's a MASSIVE phenomena among all their classmates. There are endless youtubers making content about it. Again...boring to me...but I have no hair, am on blood pressure medicine and have a solid retirement plan. I'm OLD. And clearly you are too if you're confident about making a statement that out of touch.

There are many ways AI is guiding rapid advances in technology.

The Rapid Trajectory Of Artificial Intelligence

AI revolutionizing industries worldwide: A comprehensive overview of its diverse applications

Quote: "IBM and Red Hat say their AI-powered Lightwell initiative has identified and helped remediate more than 400 previously unknown vulnerabilities across widely used Java libraries."

AI is helping us improve our lives! Technology is moving forward rapidly.

The difference is that if you pay people to monkey around with things, you get a non-revocable perpetual license to the result. With license rental, you get a perpetual bill. It's the same rent trap as individuals get stuck in but with less excuses.

Yes, and the reason is that they stupidly painted themselves into a corner and never thought about an exit strategy. Had they been thinking about the possibility that they might one day need to migrate from the beginning, it would be much cheaper to do so now.

That's the thing about painting yourself into a corner, a little better planning at the start can always avoid it with little to no additional effort.

...whoever wins, we lose! (from the movie poster)

You sound like a badass...are you proud of yourself? That was really macho, bro, yet dumber than shit. It's always been a stupid comment made by people who live in comfort and security. Without life, there is no freedom. If someone is trying to murder you, then your liberty is not a concern. You can talk about "deserving" until you're blue in the face. When I had a gun pointed at me, I wasn't too concerned about civil liberties. You're living in the burbs or a small town if you can utter such stupid things with a straight face. It's like the situation in Gaza or Ukraine, I can comfortably opine all I want from the safety of the USA. To the people facing constant threat of death, they don't really care about your opinions of what they deserve.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again for those who arrived lete: If you give an AI agency of any kind, imagine everything you ask of it to be appended with "by any means necessary", because that' how it will interpret it. Slander, doxxing, and murder will definitely NOT be off the table even if you explicitly forbid them. That's the problem.