The FAGMAN companies got caught colluding to depress wages by avoiding hiring people already employed by the others, so they learned to accomplish the same thing without writing it down by having these periodic huge layoffs across the entire industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

They (the industry) have always wanted to find a way to do this. Tools like Rational Rose and Visual Basic were touted as being able to do this. Sending work overseas is another way. AI is just the next in line.

I don't know what the overall answer is, but I would say that if you have high demand skills, you can still earn a living.

>Software engineers

This Microsoft deal for the large part is not being offered to software engineering orgs.

Only works if employees can't found something new. Which might be the case right now.

Really, it feels like we're in a quiet depression.

If they actually had a need for those software engineers right now, they wouldn't play that game. (Or rather, if they could make more money by having them create something than they could save on wages from playing the game.)

But at that point, they almost should be laying off engineers, even without playing any such game.

To me it does not seem like any bigger conspiracy than people always wanted to pay less and earn more at the same time.

Seems like a good way to avoid the bad PR. This offer will be disproportionately taken by citizens and avoided by visa workers.

Can’t claim MS is firing citizens and replacing them with H1Bs, if they are leaving voluntarily.

I highly doubt it’s a factor. If we learned anything in the last 10 years, is that you can’t unflood the zone with facts. The administration is going to say what they are going to say and signal to their target audience. Corporations are going to do what they need to do. Their target audiences barely overlap.

I'm not aware of this. But if I were to speculate, maybe they feel some freedom because they thing the midterms will be a change.