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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   28225 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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So, is AI coming for the programmer jobs? There's a news story in my country about Microsoft seeking redundancies globally which probably means chopping jobs here as well, and one paragraph mentions AI:

Microsoft employs around 4,000 people in Ireland, with a further 2,000 people employed at its subsidiary, Linkedin, which has a base in Dublin.

The cuts are to be implemented across several divisions and geographical offices, according to the Seattle Times, reporting from Microsoft’s global headquarters.

The tech giant has said that the layoffs are part of a restructuring effort.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently disclosed that up to a third of programming at the tech company is now done by AI, with a higher percentage likely.

However, the current cuts are thought to be aimed across several job categories, including sales and middle-management.

...The company has previously said that cuts would involve "streamlining the organisation, eliminating management layers”, with no further detail on the sectors to be targeted, other than that it intended to shrink expenses in “R&D, marketing, general and administrative” divisions.

Granted, that seems to be trimming jobs across management and admin rather than software engineers, but the little nugget about "up to a third of programming is now done by AI" does seem to be a straw in the wind. Yes? No? Just means they're not hiring new junior staff?

Almost all of these employees laid off employees will be replaced by H1-Bs (Microsoft put in for over 6000 the first two quarters this year) as well as previously announced hiring in India.

I’m not sure where AI comes in but they certainly aren’t replacing their laid-off workers with AI unless AI stands for “another Indian”.

Doing a similar standard of job for 30% of the price, or even doing the same job to an 80% standard for 30% of the price for almost all jobs is a very valid component to the merits of an individual for a job. Microsoft choosing to recognise and reward this doesn't reflect badly on either them or the person doing the job for cheap, the only person to boo here is the person who wants to extract economic rents by artificially restricting competition.

Given that the 30% wages essentially work due to relative purchasing power and / or arbitrage between a Third World childhood and a First World adulthood, isn’t this global laissez faire approach basically poison for long-term economic growth?

If it becomes widely accepted that economic growth means an increased quality of life here and now, but that the window of opportunity only lasts maybe 1.5 generations before your (grand)children are priced out of the global market, that seems to make growth and laissez faire economics a much tougher sell.

I’m not convinced that most people make decisions on that timescale.

It’s the kind of sentiment that convinced communists the world revolution was coming any…minute…now.

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