Pascal's Wager if you read the entire book is more intricate than choosing to believe. He also argues that by practicing as if you believed, you may feel as if the choice is true and find God that way.
Yeah but then that sort of invalidates the wager right?
The premise is that it's trivial cost to believe with very high potential reward and no downside if you're wrong. That's simply not true; if it turns out that there isn't a God, and if it turns out that there is no heaven or hell, and that this is the only life we get, then you have wasted everything for a false premise.
People always leave off the second half of Pascal's Wager. Pascal's Wager is not simply that you can map out the odds vs risk and decide being a theist is more practical. But rather that if you take the odds, decide to be a theist, then start acting like one (participating in rituals, living like one, practicing what is preached, etc) then you may find God through those actions.
60k workers, 1/4 of the workers. This is a big deal. It also really puts you into a bind if you receive the offer. Do you accept, take the money, and hope you can find a job (Now competing with many other Msft employees that are looking). Do you decline and hope you don't get hit with the layoff which hits if not enough people accept?
My dad was a newspaper reporter in the early 2000s, so there were several dinner table conversations about this dilemma.
The buyouts were taken by superstars and low performers. The superstars moved on to other things, like working in other forms of media.
Dad didn't take several rounds of buyouts and was fine.
After suffering a stroke, he was "put out to pasture", which for a journalist means he was sent to cover city hall meetings in some suburb. Eventually, he retired with some much smaller payout than what the last buyout would have given him. The sense in the family was that the collapse of the industry denied him a dignified last decade of work. (When the industry was flush with cash, older journalists were sort of like "elder statesmen" in the newsroom. Post-internet, no longer.)
After suffering a stroke, he was "put out to pasture", which for a journalist means he was sent to cover city hall meetings in some suburb. Eventually, he retired with some much smaller payout than what the last buyout would have given him. The sense in the family was that the collapse of the industry denied him a dignified last decade of work.
I think your dad did the right thing.
No, he didn't get the big dollar signs. But he did get a decade worth of health insurance, employment, and more security for his family than he would have had going out looking for a job on his own.
There are no good choices in that situation. But I don't think he made a wrong one.
With all due respect, it's just a job, and we would do well to remember that. Chasing status and respect through work will lead to sadness (reality - expectations = happiness).
I think we should buy people out with reasonable comp and let them live the rest of their life doing something that brings them joy and happiness, even if that's volunteering in what they used to get paid for. But I'm not a policymaker.
A whole lot more of us are going to get involuntarily put out to pasture through no fault of our own eventually.
I was a journalist in the old days. With all due respect it was mote than just a job. It was a community, a calling. It felt important. I went out to dinner with my first ever boss and some original colleagues a couple of months ago and had a great time.
I wonder if it's just me, but before the 2000s, a lot of jobs felt important, society felt important, institutions felt important.. it's evaporating now.
There was a lot more pride in professional work yeah. People cared about doing a good job. I'm not quite sure what caused the decline over 3+ decades but you could probably throw a dart at "the internet" and probably hit something partially related.
I think theres just MUCH more depression over the much more visible reality that your upper managers don't care about you or the work you put out. Especially now with AI companies pitching them a salivating dream of doing the work of 100 with 10.
> I'm not quite sure what caused the decline over 3+ decades
Finance. Everything is a number to be optimized that must constantly grow. The US abandoned antitrust, worker protections, social safety nets, and more in the name of greed.
For workers to care you need to treat them as humans. People care about a team and a family that care about them back.
The mythical story of the person who started in the mailroom and worked their way up is gone. The mailroom, secretary, custodian, and as many roles as possible have been replaced with contractors without benefits or any future in the building they currently work in who will facelessly cycle out in a few months for another contractor.
Employees have been abused too much to believe the lies. If I work twice as hard, my reward is a sub-inflation raise and no realistic hope of promotion. Feedback employees give is ignored, so there's no motivation to push to improve things. The management class has a desperate dream of all people being fungible so they can throw them out and get cheaper ones, and fungible is what you get - if you want a generic interchangeable cog, that's what you get, but don't complain about how the cog doesn't "care enough".
No the decline is because people woke up to the fact that it doesn't matter if you take great pride in your work and work unpaid overtime and always produce quality output: you will still get laid off when the economy explodes or when some VP decides to cancel your whole product division. It doesn't matter. You are a sucker if you go over and above every day to the benefit of the company.
That's the end tail of capitalism. All that matters is the group / shareholder benefits and growth. It was useful to amplify trade skills and efficiency long ago but people pay the price in a different way.
I was strangely ahead of my time in a negative way. Spending way too much time alone with computers, didn't care about society, jobs were just jobs, life was meaningless. I recovered and feel much better and much more stable although I was never properly socialized so I still think society is "meh" and jobs are just jobs but some part of me wonders if all of you normal guys are starting to get depressed or something. Many things people say remind me of my 15yo self.
I had multiple phases in my life. Simple min wage jobs, long isolation, IT jobs.
Even in bakery, coffee shop, repair, deliveries.. you feel happy about your simple skills, happy to serve people that need a little bit of what you do, even serving coffee quick and clean.. in a team of people who know how to organize themselves. It can be exhausting, limited.. but it felt better than digital gray fog we're going in (graeber would say bullshit jobs).
And previous generation had even a different culture, my mother keeps telling me how warm and fun it was to work in the 70s. No easy job, 1000~ customer restaurants, but the way people approached jobs, belonging, connection.. was different. I witnessed the cold privatization of her building around 2000s, it became more a factory than a place to drink coffee and eat, everything was stiffer and came from high above management who didn't work with employees.
Without getting too political, these were the days when the press controlled information and appointed themselves arbiters and gatekeepes of information.
The internet and free information showed them up for what they really were: biased cavemen like everyone else, and the aura vanished.
No, it’s more like: who is lying, Jared Kushner or Vanity Fair? The stakes are large for both, but we’re better off compared to how the regime prefers to suppress that.
>A whole lot more of us are going to get involuntarily put out to pasture through no fault of our own eventually.
And that is going to have predictable consequences like increases in suicides, substance abuse, etc.
A job might "just be a job" but I'm growing tired of this trend online of treating work like it isn't important for most people's sense of worth, place in society, and overall mental health.
This is correct, but the entire structure of modern industrial society is not based on what should be now that more and more people realize its flaws.
"Your sense of worth should not be tied up in your job" only does so much when the average person's reality is that his or her job is the means by which they survive/thrive economically, a primary factor in whether or not they attract a partner and reproduce, etc.
It’s just an excerpt and not applicable to some but Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet has a good if longer bit:
“Are not all careers the same? Filled with demands and people filled with animosity towards the individual. At the same time absorbing the hatred of those who have silently and sullenly adapted to dull duty.”
It's not like it's what you spend most of your life's hours doing or anything like that.
What I would say, and perhaps what you actually mean, or if not then at least what you might now consider, is you shouldn't give anyone else the right to declare your sense of worth, including an employer.
It might just be a job but someone living happy in good conditions that feels like the rug might get pulled under them for something they cannot control for is a lot more unerving even if your material conditions work out just fine in the end.
Also I think your being a little atomizing in the impact here. 1 Person losing a job is their problem, I agree. 60 thousand people losing there job is a problem for the government and society. 60K people is a lot and it has a ton of consquences. This is also leading into the prospects of we have these massively profitable corportations who are on the cusp of firing large % of high income people. Whats the tax implication of losing 60K engineering staff level saleries. Its atleast in the billions which is small in the total Federal revenue but if this is a sign of whats to come we have problems. Maybe those people go to different employment but change will effect a lot of local economies.
Granted I know you are really talking about the local emotional effect but the granular net effect is worth the conversation too.
I like your comment but I think you're generalizing too a bit in a different way. It's 60k people spread in different countries, at least four. It is still a big problem, but it's not "the tax implication of losing 60k salaries" for a single government
I do agree maybe its a over generalization but I am trying reading the waves
If Microsoft is 40% based in the US the US probably would see 20K people in high salery positions get cut if its somewhat evenly leveled. They are still okay with reducing 1/4 people (they are offering a buyout so I am holding off on the F bomb).
The invest into AI is something like $6T if it hasn't produced $6T in value it better produce it in cuts. If you expect its just going to Microsoft laying off great the government is fine but if other companies in the next months cut high paid position it hits the country in non trivial ways. But You are correct its not just going to effect the US it and that dampens the magntitude but its still a massive reduction of force for a major company
> This is also leading into the prospects of we have these massively profitable corportations who are on the cusp of firing large % of high income people. Whats the tax implication of losing 60K engineering staff level saleries
Muh job creators! You can't tax your way to growth!
Well actually, they are now job destroyers. Tax the fuckers.
In the US, currently, ~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means ~13k-14k workers leave the labor force every day in the US, ~400k/month, ~4.8M/year. 60k workers leaving Microsoft is a drop in the bucket, relatively speaking. But of course, they should still get as much support as possible via the packages they accept, and getting to retirement (Social Security and Medicare benefits) as pain free and least uncertainty as possible.
> Granted I know you are really talking about the local emotional effect but the granular net effect is worth the conversation too.
I vote for and support Democratic Socialist candidates, who would implement and maintain more humane and pro worker economic systems, I'm doing my part at system levels. But systems will take decades to change. It took decades to get here from Ronald Reagan and his policies. Certainly, people should never be in economic peril, but they also shouldn't tie their identity to their job, or think their job matters. The evidence is robust that the job does not matter.
(and if you think there is a problem with corporate earnings vs what workers take home, again, that is a political and labor organizing problem to solve for)
Listen I am not even 30 yet its a big deal when an industry leader reduces work force by 1/4. It absolutely number yeah no company ever really matters but in agrogate the little loses can be devistating for the people and the boarder economy. 4M Boomers retire is a problem if we cannot replace them and want the same set of services as before. Not nearly as many people are entering as leaving right now which makes wage pressure up but if there isn't people the business moves.
I don't really think DSA had much that would help the economy beside the basic mainstream democrat tastes. Democrats generally speaking want less monopolies, better healthcare insurance (mostly a public option) and reasonable taxation but the DSA takes things to 11 with just politically unviable rhetoric in my opinion. But most of all, I think the ideas from the DSA that work doesn't matter as long as people are taken care is likely to cost a lot people.
The Mechanic takes pride that he can fix stuff. The engineer takes pride that they can design a system. Doctors take pride that they are the reason people don't die. If you take away pride you harm a lot of people this is arguable what got the democrats (republicans voted for this too) where they are today in that they embraced Free Trade regardless of the cost. It created a rust belt that is brain washed into blaming Democrats for 100% of the harm. Fox news helps in accomplishing that that too but I think a lot of the DSA is steeped in that MAGA like style of never engage in what harms the ideology thinking and that spooks me away from that group agressively.
Enron saw 20k workers let go in 2001, Arthur Andersen saw 85k jobs evaporate when they collapsed in 2002. Yellow Corporation caused 30k union freight jobs to be lost when they failed in 2023. 33k Toys "R" Us workers lost their jobs when the company liquidated in 2017. These events happen, and the economy will carry on. Notably (and for comparison and counterexample purposes), the US.
government bailout of General Motors (GM) in 2008 and 2009 saved an estimated 1.2M jobs (with up to 2.6M total jobs preserved across the broader auto industry and supplier network in 2009 alone), according to studies by the Center for Automotive Research. When we want to save a lot of jobs, we can when there is political will.
There are labor shortages throughout the developed world, due to structural demographics. This will not change in our lifetime due to global demographic trajectories. This will push wages up. This is good. Wages paid are shareholder returns not paid.
We agree to disagree on DSA policies. I want the Scandinavian model to protect people. IDGAF about profits, people first, full stop. Their support is very high amongst the under 35, and 2M 55+ voters age out every year. Progress is a function of time and electorate turnover. Old people with old ideas die out, and are replaced by young people with different ideas.
Can you stop big companies from making these cuts? No, at least not without unions and laws to make it harder. So, in the short term, help these people land softly and in the long term, build better systems so that people who want to contribute have some place to from a place of economic security. That’s it’s. Feelings are irrelevant, only outcomes matter (imho).
> In the US, currently, ~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means...
Sure, from a raw numbers perspective it's a drop in the bucket. But not all numbers are created equal. How does the pay of these employees from Microsoft compare? You mention those of the baby boomer generation, but are all employees who may be leaving Microsoft of the same age range? What about their skillsets and the investments they and we as society of spent in their education? Those other factors matter quite a bit, so you can't just do a simple 1-1 analysis of "people".
> Certainly, people should never be in economic peril, but they also shouldn't tie their identity to their job, or think their job matters. The evidence is robust that the job does not matter.
Why? Which evidence? I think more people could have more meaning if they were self-employed, were craftsmen or artisans, and such, but this nihilistic viewpoint (which is a hallmark of anti-social/authoritarian ideologies like DSA and others) not only doesn't reflect reality but seeks to belittle those who do in fact find meaning and joy in their work. I for one like my job and have liked most of the jobs I've had. Just because an organization no longer needs you, or you no longer need it, doesn't mean that the job all of a sudden "doesn't matter".
If people don't tie their identity to the thing they spend the most time doing what will they tie it to? Should a police officer or teacher not think of themselves through the lens of their chosen profession? When you ask a professor at your university do you want to work with one who doesn't tie themselves to their work or their research? Would you want to buy produce from a farmer who sort of doesn't care about the quality of the food they grow? Do you want to fly on an airplane built by people who think their job doesn't matter?
If the org can operate without you in the role, or without the role itself, the job does not matter. The human always matters, the job does not.
> If people don't tie their identity to the thing they spend the most time doing what will they tie it to? Should a police officer or teacher not think of themselves through the lens of their chosen profession? When you ask a professor at your university do you want to work with one who doesn't tie themselves to their work or their research? Would you want to buy produce from a farmer who sort of doesn't care about the quality of the food they grow? Do you want to fly on an airplane built by people who think their job doesn't matter?
Finding meaning in the human condition and experience I suppose. Is that in your job? I argue no, but everyone will find meaning in their own way, if they find it before death. If it is your job, and you are involuntarily retired, my condolences. I fly on Boeing equipment occasionally (not my choice), so I definitely fly on airplanes built by companies who think building good aircraft doesn't matter. I'm sure some people at Boeing care, but not enough to overcome institutional inertia of "bean counter idgaf".
Society, broadly speaking, runs on everyone doing just good enough in the aggregate to keep the system running. Some systems are better than others (Japan institutionalizing perfectionism, for example).
Look, I'm all in favor of fully automated (gay, space) luxury communism, but as long as work remains a major component of civil society, one of the few truly social institutions left, people will identify with it. Which makes it a problem that while a vocation needs to be lifelong to justify the time-investment of cultivating skill and experience, employment has become a rather short-term, feast-or-famine phenomenon.
> If the org can operate without you in the role, or without the role itself, the job does not matter. The human always matters, the job does not.
Blueberries grow in the wild, ergo farmers don't matter.
> Finding meaning in the human condition and experience I suppose. Is that in your job? I argue no, but everyone will find meaning in their own way, if they find it before death.
So why are you prematurely defining what meaning should be for everyone? That's one of the problems with these authoritarian ideologies.
> I fly on Boeing equipment occasionally (not my choice), so I definitely fly on airplanes built by companies who think building good aircraft doesn't matter. I'm sure some people at Boeing care, but not enough to overcome institutional inertia of "bean counter idgaf".
I don't understand this at all. Clearly they care a lot or else these planes would be crashing and stuff. If you think they don't care and you're saying flying on the aircraft sucks because they don't care, then maybe they should care more about their jobs and then it would be a better experience, which sort of runs counter to your thesis here.
Local journalism _feels_ like more than a job. Before my CS career, I was a photojournalist for a few different daily papers. It felt like important work. We were history keepers and story tellers for a community.
It is important work, but we have yet to find an economic model to effectively support it and the people doing the work.
(i donate to journalism orgs across the US [ProPublica, Associated Press, Tampa Bay Times, Salt Lake Tribune, Marion County Record, Muckrock], but far more and consistent financial support is needed than these orgs are receiving today)
Go find a newspaper from 2000 or earlier. It will have whole sections (20 pages or so each) of advertising for jobs, real-estate and other classifieds. In some places every government job had to be advertised in the newspaper.
All that paid for the newspaper. Usually before it was even printed.
I remember this well into the 2000s. My parents have never stopped subscribing to their local paper and your comment made me realize how much advertising is gone from it actually. I remember enjoying reading the Best Buy, Target and Circuit City ads each week, especially the Sunday circulars. That was only a fraction of all the paid ads in the paper back then, too.
If anything, the demise of the journalism industry is a harbinger for what's to come for many white-collar jobs (even respected and highly-paid ones, like law) if AI progress continues unabated
The issue is that several career tracks have some form of low pay, filtering, or outright hazing when you start out, with the promise that if you stick with the program, you will end your career at the top. Medicine, law, etc. If that promise is taken away, a lot of people on the job and in the education pipeline would be questioning whether it was worth the pain points (and not thinking about reforming and improving the entry level experience, lol). In the US this is one of the fears around socialized medicine.
Another problem is those career arcs are so long, where in something like tech or consulting, if you stick with it for 5-8 years you historically have a lot of seniority over new hires.
I agree that it's a job, but.. for most of humanity, people lived and worked in the same spaces with the same humans. The home was a unit of (pre) industrial production. Your neighbours were your partners, or at least involved in general economic activities with you.
Our human brains unsurprisingly still default to that, and it is quite understandable imo.
I tend to agree with the idea that one shouldn't define oneself by a job, especially since one's career is generally dependent on some combination of market forces, institutional gatekeepers, and other factors that are beyond one's control to varying degrees. However, people do tend to put that kind of personal investment into things they spend most of their time on, and especially things they had to spend a long time training for. In order to realize a world where people aren't defined by their career, we would need to first realize a world in which people weren't equal parts encouraged and forced to put most of their time and effort into one, which would require somewhat different economic arrangements than presently exist
Some things are more than just jobs - they are callings. Journalism and teaching are two. People wouldn't do them if they were just jobs, because they don't pay enough to cover the headaches.
> I think we should buy people out with reasonable comp and let them live the rest of their life doing something that brings them joy and happiness, even if that's volunteering in what they used to get paid for. But I'm not a policymaker.
Respect is how you feel, a good position in life is a function of your retirement benefits and financial comfort. If the market has no place for these folks anymore, and we're not offering a permanent jobs bank to keep people working who want to work (which I absolutely think we should do), "it is what it is." Sorry if they feel bad about market changes and demand for certain skills and labor.
We show respect by packaging folks out to live comfortable remainders of their life. "Thank you for your contribution and service." Lack of respect is leaving them hanging in the wind financially, not words. If you need a job to feel needed and respected after entering retirement and with sufficient financial and retiree benefits support, we'll throw a standing appointment with a therapist into the package and/or a volunteer opportunity online board/bank.
If you're looking for validation from your job or your work as a component of your identity, you're going to end up sad. That's a choice. Make better choices if you don't want to be sad.
The dream, when possible: to continue to perform work one enjoys without an economic requirement or component. It would be great if we could do this for more people, whenever possible, via systems.
Is that due respect? That may be your perception of work now, but how many people have much of their self esteem bound up in the work they do at their current place? I want employees and coworkers like that. But what you’re talking about is both life under Late Stage Capitalism and also a bit of blindness as though someone being squeezed by the death of newspapers could just find a different newspaper job.
Just 300? I’m at about 2000-3000. Just got my latest rejection after 5 rounds and 3 weeks.
At this point I can’t afford to apply to tech jobs anymore. They require you to be available for an hour randomly across multiple days and have shit like the ceo “needing” to meet you and then rescheduling last second because something more important than you came up.
All the jobs available to someone changing career right now give you maybe a days head up on your schedule and a 30 minute lunch if your lucky.
The interview process for tech has become a class barrier in of itself
I've a neighbour who declined, and then got hit by layoffs. It was quite a gamble, and they lost out big time.
Honestly, if work was to come at me with a buy-out offer, and I was in a position to be able to afford to not work for a few years, I'd probably accept. Maybe go find some non-tech work for a little bit to stretch the dollars and ensure I have health insurance.
We're in such a bubble at the moment, things are going to get really rough.
That job exist does not equate that good jobs exist. Some jobs are far away requiring you to commute for two hours (you can’t because you have a family) or move (you can‘t because you can‘t afford the move), most are low paying to the extent that they are simply not even worth your time. Many are stressful (to the extent you physically can‘t do them), etc. etc.
Anyway, this has been explained a lot in the literature, unemployment rates are a poor measure of the difficulty of finding a job.
I've spent most of my career non-FAANG. Health insurance has been fine previously, and mostly I know folks outside of the tech industry having similar coverage. FAANG health insurance isn't that great a thing these days. It has been nickled and dimed about as much as anything else.
I’ve been in the industry a long time and benefits at FAANG are not great. Deductibles are high, subsidy pretty average, overall package weak. Earlier in my career I paid nothing for insurance, had a lot of fringe benefits, and I was genuinely grateful for the perks. I’ve looked at ACA alternatives compared to my FAANG benefits and it wasn’t a huge difference frankly - better on the margin but nothing to write home about, at least in my local market.
The fact people have to find a job not for money but for health insurance is about as dystopian as I can imagine. Toil just to not get sick and go broke, not because you need the money. What a sad world we built for ourselves.
Sad country, just US. Rest of the western world works much better. But this is what US population wants, more direct money at all costs and praying all the time no nasty health surprise is around the corner. Otherwise you are a commie or worse. Higher education is exactly the same.
Given overall health of US population thats not a good bet and it only gets worse with age.
I think no one wants this personally, but there is so much money - and employment - behind the private pay system that it’s virtually impossible to reform it. There is also a real aspect that the system was designed by those in power to further a necessity to work, an overriding fear that people might idle or not work with maximum productivity. Once the system was laid down. With dozens of huge insurance companies and even more smaller ones, with billing departments, coding clerks, adjusters, claim processors, duplicated at every clinic, hospital, insurance company, and the constellation of other roles, partners, providers, it’s now employing millions of people just to operate this hideous machine of national suffering. Talk of reforming it into a single payer system or a socialized system is wildly unpopular with everyone who depends on the current system - millions upon millions of people, and deep spending companies supporting candidates. In a country where either politicians either win by a landslide due to partisan politics, in which case it doesn’t matter what constituents think, or the margins of victory are so narrow that you can’t afford to screw over millions and millions of people through direct action like legislation, the system is metastasizing. There are solutions to the health care problem from a consumer point of view, but the churn it would cause on the employment side would be profound and structural. My view is probably the best strategy is make money young here and emigrate to a place worth living, which is painful to say.
There’s very little I can see truly breaking American society but I think the stark stupidity of health care here is up on the top.
These systems seem unbeatable but thats just an illusion. Either market forces will make it so unattainable that people will simply revolt due to frequently dying from stuff thats curable in Haiti, some saner politician in style of Kennedy will come and make change (with very high risk of getting killed but that risk is there in all cases, see mr trump) or some other massive shock will happen. System in US is so twisted and unfair where 99% lose, sometimes in very life-destroying manners.
Shocks do come, nothing is static. One may end up bankrupt earlier than correction happens though. Vote with your feet if you want change earlier than it coming from the top.
I haven't had any coverage in 3 years. It's not the end of the world. People who lose their shit over weird tail risks are missing out on the competitive advantage. You can compensate for the expensive doctors and prescription meds with more exercise and cleaner diets.
I always looked at employer sponsored health care as a sort of trap. I never got involved in it. Every insurance premium I would have paid has gone to a retirement, investment or savings account instead. One big open runway is a lot more useful than a bunch of smaller ones with weird constraints. The idea of a health savings account amuses me.
Not to start an argument, but do you really think you could easily find non-tech work that also provides health insurance? I get a little triggered at this line of thinking. People often day dream about working as a Costco receipt checker without realizing you literally have to work your way up from seasonal to part-time to full-time over years. And that's assuming you can even get hired as a seasonal worker with a 5+ year unemployment gap on your Resume (your SWE career).
I'm realizing I'm a little bit too passionate about this lol but I would love to hear if you have a specific plan or goal in mind so I can copy it. For me BaristaFIRE would be ideal, but with so many friends going through the layoff/unemployment cycle and hearing their experiences I've concluded it's much more pragmatic to stay in tech.
This is all a bit out there, but I moved to New Zealand on a working holiday visa, and within two weeks of settling down in a particular spot (after a two month road trip), I had two job offers, one very relaxed retail, and one tech-adjacent for a small civil engineering firm. I'm making about a quarter the take home I did in the US, but I've cut my expenses a lot (bought my car in cash, carpool to work to save gas money, rent a room in a house instead of a whole apartment, no food delivery), and I'm using this time to reevaluate my values and work on building a lifestyle that does not rely on earning a six figure salary.
My plan when I return is to get my EMT and moonlight as an ER tech while doing prerequisites for PA school or maybe medical physics.
I heard a lot of doom and gloom about the economy before I came here, but finding a job proved to be straightforward. The pay leaves a lot to be desired, and I'm not intending to extend my visa because of that.
Caveat: I'm not living in a typical region of the country, I'm in Wānaka, which is easier to find a job in but also more expensive than most of the country.
Just any relaxed job in NZ will not let you extend the stay beyond 3 months, no? The employers who are employment visa approved are milk-cow-bank-insurance companies very difficult to get into, not to mention the overall crisis right now.
Ah... it's working holiday visa, I never qualify for these...
> with so many friends going through the layoff/unemployment cycle and hearing their experiences I've concluded it's much more pragmatic to stay in tech.
If so many of your friends are becoming unemployed, isn't this a sign of things to come? If people keep getting laid off in tech, what is the motivation to stay there if you might be next?
Like you, I'm confused by the dreams people post about working low-paid jobs if they're laid off. If the job market is flooded with tech workers, all these jobs will become even more competitive than before, and wages will fall. If you think your own career in tech is actually in danger (as in, you don't think you have any skills that couldn't be fully automated in the near future), I think the best option is getting some different education to put some barrier of certification between yourself and the rest of the desperate job market. But it should be something that's highly employable and difficult to automate, which is a scope that keeps narrowing.
87% of full-time private sector workers have access to employer-subsidized healthcare. On average employers pay 82% of the cost for an individual and 73% of the cost of a family. To use BestBuy as an example: Reddit threads suggest costs range from $100/month (as of 2021) to $250/month (as of 2025).
Often, buyouts terms are more generous than layoff terms. Even if the company has a history of generous layoff terms, the next one may be less generous.
The other thing to consider is if you'll want to keep working at the company after so many people have left due to the buyout and the layoff. If not, taking the buyout and looking for a new job is likely to be better for you than not taking the buyout, not getting laid off, and looking for a new job once you conclude you don't like the new environment. For one thing, you'll probably have buyout compensation and new job compensation at the same time; for another, it may be easier to find a new job if you're in the market before the layoffs increase the hiring pool.
Yeah, I survived several layoff rounds at a company and my workload increased significantly. At first it was fine, even better in some ways to have more responsibility. Then the subsequent layoffs added too much, and we lost a lot of people with institutional knowledge, so I was being handed work with no one to talk to when I had questions.
tl:dr One round of layoffs isn't bad if you're staying, but subsequent rounds can make you miserable.
buyouts usually imply a far more generous offer than just termination and severance.
also means they can dodge any NDA / wrongful termination / bad behavior issues on the way out. sign the doc and play nice and get $$$.
keep in mind the US doesn't have great protections in that regard, so "severance" may be them allowing you to collect the last of your crap on the way out and paying you through the end of the week.
Ex-softee here, laid off last year after 32 yrs. The current buyout is the same package I got. The recent voluntary package to old-timers a few months ago was also the same with one important distinction - 5 years of COBRA, which would take a 60 yr old to Medicare age.
I know its very similar to the equivalent amount of cash but it feels a lot different. I feel like half my desire to work is connected to healthcare for the family.
Layoff severance isn't great and it's very common for companies to use the performance system to get rid of people. Suddenly someone stops meeting expectations and are gone within weeks.
When they offer a package YOU ALWAYS TAKE IT. It means that layoffs are coming.
My friend's company offered a voluntary severance package to a bunch of employees. She was talking to one of her employees and she knew that he was going to get laid off if he didn't take the package but was unable to advise him. I think the voluntary severance was 2 years medical, 2 years of vesting, many months of pay, etc. But he decided not to take the offer and was laid off for a much worse package a few months later.
It really depends on who it's being offered to - if it is literally EVERYONE you need to evaluate it on a case-to-case, but if it's a small targeted group, you probably should take it.
Also if you're a manager you should be able to make it pretty clear.
The interests might be aligned albeit for different reasons. A corporation laying off a huge number of employees is facing reputational damage or regulatory consequences. That doesn’t mean you gain any benefit from their pain. Maybe you could sue for wrongful termination and keep your job?
It obviously depends on the specific amounts of the package as well as the timeline and personal impact of the upcoming layoffs (the latter of which you can’t know).
The company doesn’t necessarily want everyone to take the package, and they’re inevitably going to price the separation benefits such that some employees would end up better off taking it and others would end up better off not taking it.
They'd just rescind it. They aren't usually set up as binding contracts where the employee signs on the dotted line and it's immediately binding. It's more like an expression of interests which then leads to an exit contract if the company wants.
If you take it you're not eligible to unemployment. I think in this market, given the undefined length of employment searching at the moment, that's a major consideration.
For most Microsoft employees, the maximum unemployment benefits in most states are a rounding error vs the buyout offer. Here in Missouri it's $320, maxed to 20 weeks. So for most local employees that might get this letter, It's less than a month of salary, and that without accounting for months of health benefits, which I bet the buyout includes.
Unemployment in WA where Microsoft is headquartered has quite generous unemployment. Max of $1208 a week up to 26 weeks and based on your previous salary so most certainly ex-Microsoft will be maxing this out.
Yeah, it’s really not for us, it’s more about tiding over a laid-off retail worker so they don’t get evicted. Not allowing someone with a mortgage in Cupertino or Redmond and little savings to keep their lifestyle mostly intact with just a little belt-tightening.
And I’m not saying that in a grumpy way. Yes we do have much higher salaries, and because of that it’s reasonable that it’s on us to save up for this type of rainy day, in accordance with our own personal risk assessment.
It’s honestly something I spent 15 years rarely thinking about, because while I’ve seen many RIFs, I was never worried since getting a new job was as easy as just responding to a few of the messages that constantly came in via LinkedIn or email. No longer.
States like Florida cap out at $275/week with a maximum of $3,300 (over just 12 weeks). McDonalds pays around $16/hr according to indeed. Unemployment almost might as well not exist.
I would assume a lot of the types of people you're talking about are in fact not Microsoft employees, it's way more common these days to hire people like on-site cooks through agencies that effectively make them contractors for Microsoft. This notice is definitely about "corporate" employees, and I believe another comment noted that in a different source it's stated that sales and marketing are not even being offered this deal.
Always? What I’ve seen is sometimes the buy out is no better than the current severance package. Might as well ride it out. The severance could in theory get worse over time but that doesn’t seem like a worthwhile reason to throw away your job. You’re also throwing away unemployment.
Sometimes--very rarely--one's ethics may dictate not taking it, as with the "fork" email to U.S. Federal Government employees. Or when an early-stage company layoff is being done in tandem with a buyback/tender to reduce employee ownership before the board does something crazy.
Eh, the voluntary severance offered at Google in various European countries recently was less than the negotiated payout for mandatory layoffs. And most of the headcount from people who took it was backfilled, too.
Having been in a company for many years, that every so often had these packages, I disagree.
Yes, of course it means layoffs are coming. This isn't a conspiracy. The whole point of these packages is "We want people to leave. The more people who take the package, the fewer the number that is laid off."
If the package is going to only a small percentage of the company, then yes, it's a sign they'll get rid of you. When it's offered to such a large number, then it's just a lottery to see who'll lose their jobs. Like all lotteries, the chances of you being impacted are low (e.g. 10% was the max in my case).
Well, it’s often a big payout though, and taking it can be a nice bit of cash if you can line up a new job quickly. But I’d be the first to admit that likelihood seems to have plummeted for everyone (except for the geniuses who develop the AI models themselves, who are in a ton of demand.)
Can't be software engineers, from what I learned they were never really paid commensurate to value they delivered. So it must be quite economical to keep them around.
Someone on Twitter said that they're getting rid of the whole co-pilot thing. Pretty much all their AI effort. Not sure if I believe that, but who knows.
A couple of times in my career, I was one of those who were not given out a buyout. I was chosen to keep the lights on while the number of employees shrank every month. It sucked. I was given responsibility for systems with no documentation or than a username/password. I was called by all sorts of people I had never spoken to who had their hair on fire because the system was breaking left and right. I wished I was given the buyout; instead I was told I should be grateful I had a paycheck. No thanks.
Yep I was at place where the skeleton crew couldn’t keep systems up. Weeks long outages of critical systems. It was hell for the ones who remained, i pitied them.
Just because the offer is made to 25% of the workforce doesn’t mean they will all accept. These are generally very well paid jobs and the prospect of entering the job market right now isn’t going to appeal to everyone. Especially not when you have upcoming RSU vests after a recent 50% stock rally. If say a third of the employees accept then it’ll be an ~8% reduction, which is in line with a regular company-wide layoff.
There is a difference this time though. There has never been a time in last 40 years where being laid off seemed terrifying for knowledge workers in tech. It's speculative what's ahead, but man, does it LOOK bleak. Many would still come out OK, but it's not a given.
Things during dotcom crash looked at least this bleak. Easily. It felt like every company on earth (at least in tech) was crashing and firing people. Even high-flyers like Google absolutely stopped hiring.
If you were lucky, you got laid off with a severance. If you weren't, you showed up to work one day and the doors were locked with no notice.
> There has never been a time in last 40 years where being laid off seemed terrifying for knowledge workers in tech.
How about the last several times all of big tech was laying off tons of people at the same time?
I'm not going to disagree with "this time it's different", but I've seen this fear several times before. This time it's AI that's going to take our jobs, and maybe that will happen, but it's not the first threat.
It's incomparable the difference now compared with say layoffs in 2022
Back then, you might think the market was a bit cooler, but talented engineers were still in massive demand. Growth in tech was stalling but a massive reduction in demand was very unlikely
This time there's a real chance that in 10 years we have 50% or less the number of software engineers today, if the job title still even exists as we know it
Of course if you only go back as far as 2022 it’s massive right now. Consider dotcom bubble burst or 2008 and it’s actually still not as bad (although I believe it will soon become so).
As indicated, they don't expect a very big portion of the 25% to accept at this time. Probably about one third, as it was before.
Considering that the offer seems to be familiar and not more lucrative than ordinary separation, I would estimate the target is a 20000 headcount rapid reduction by December. If that's not accomplished this time then I would expect further action until that short-term target is met as early in 2027 as possible. Probably by offering to many who were not included this time.
This is actually pretty drastic, enough to be considered overkill adequate enough to weather economic downturns extending for quite some time, it would be much more foolish to err on the side of inadequate.
After 20000 is hit, I would expect no further cutbacks for well more than a year unless things turn miserably worse faster and steeper than their top people could imagine based on what they know now.
I've never been involved in such a situation, but I assume part of individual's calculation is: If I indicate interest, but the company doesn't accept it or go through with it and keeps me... am I now viewed as a disloyal, detached worker?
I've been given such an offer. The company gave eligible employees X days to opt in and then it gave itself Y days to decide which volunteers would get buyouts. This matter of loyalty perception was certainly a live question for the employees. But also the company did iterative buyouts so in later rounds there was some evidence available to the current prospects about how employees were treated earlier. Not so much in what opportunities were withheld from the "disloyal" but in the take rate of volunteers and in the probability of being "laid off" given the receipt of an earlier buyout offer.
Ahhh, I retract my previous statement. I assumed it was "do you want to accept the offer". If it is "do you want to be considered for the offer" that's a little more complicated...
very much this. I was denied 2 rounds in 2008. I knew too many of the systems to risk losing me. Was sort of ok with it in at the time, and the length of the recession made me really happy in retrospect. Today I recognize offering to be let go as risky, since upper management may see you as a flight risk, which changes future layoffs and makes you slightly more likely to be included.
In the fastest shrinking industry at the time? I think the phrase has something to do with blood and a turnip…
I was actually thrilled with my cola that year along with the required vacation time.
Honestly it was a very weird time. Less than a year prior I had worked in a real estate office, and there was a lot of scary stuff already starting to happen.
At Google it was really rare to be denied, and if they did then it was kinda a negotiating chip for you - if you're so important to the company they won't let you leave, then are they going to pay you accordingly?
Not a problem. While it is reasonable to consider the signaling impact of all your comms at work, if you take this, they'll smile at getting closer to quota and wish you well.
Reasons to accept. Reasons to decline, but that isn't one of them.
I don't know what other people's experience is. But as a nearly 50-year-old software engineer with 25 years of experience, I find that there's little to nothing out there right now.
I don't know if it has to do with my particular tech background, the fact that I live in Austin and everyone and all the remote jobs are gone, but it used to be pretty good out there, and in the last year it seems like there's almost nothing at all.
If they're doing similar to what was mentioned back in April there is some calculation about current age + years of service that could be tempting to people on the "bubble" of retirement.
The worst case scenario is not taking the offer then getting let go for performance, which means zero severance, health insurance terminated same day. This has been happening at Microsoft for the last few years, sometimes in large waves. Many of these people were not egregious non-performers, just people who had been marked as not quite meeting expectations, and thought they had another chance.
The worst case scenario is not taking the offer then getting let go for performance, which means zero severance, health insurance terminated same day.
That's generally not legal in the U.S. or most of the EU. The company would have to establish a very significant paper trail to establish that these individual "performance-based" layoffs were not part of a layoff subject to WARN regulations (or their European equivalents which are even stricter). The hurdle is so large that no company has successfully pulled off such a feat, and many of the companies that tried ended up paying significantly more in penalties to their local Depts of Labor than they would have saved with this stunt.
I don't really know the legality of it, but I can tell you that last year around April there was quite a big wave of sudden performance terminations within Microsoft and these people did not get severance. I know because I was a manager of one of these people and had to deliver the news. I know that many of these people had had a below 100 rating on their previous performance review, but we were unaware at the time that this meant a death sentence for these employees several months later when we got the email a few days in advance of the termination. It was hundreds, if not thousands of affected people.
What's legal and what's enforceable are two different things. Also the US is extremely muddy in these legal waters because, sure, Federal laws and the Department of Labor are supposed to enforce such actions. But most US states are "At-Will Employment" states which means that companies do not even have to provide a reason for a termination, which means there's no paperwork that really gets sent to the Department of Labor to enforce anything at all.
(Not to mention that companies have spent decades perfecting the "layoffs are coming in a quarter or two, send out performance reviews now and encourage managers to be extra 'honest' and nitpick everything so that we have a written record just in case we need to fire people for performance to make the layoff seem smaller" dance, including Stack Ranking being built to be that smoke 100% of the year, every year. Still technically illegal, but if the quiet parts aren't said out loud who are you going to believe, the months ahead of time paperwork in performance reviews or that executives decided they needed harsh performance reviews months in advance on a golf course somewhere? It's not a conspiracy when it's so easy to pull off.)
Mass terminations without timely notice, or pay in lieu of notice, are not. Disguising a mass termination as a collection of "performance" based individual terminations is a method that many companies have tried and failed, because...get this...WARN regulations in the US and EU don't care about the reasons for termination unless it's a "for cause" termination and you absolutely need to document the cause for those.
Big companies are notoriously overweight and need to trim down continuously. Microsoft is already a big bureaucracy and nothing like the start-up mentality it had throughout the 80's and 90's.
It's fine for them to get rid of excess weight. My guess is they could probably cut a lot more if they wanted.
Microsoft made $134B in net income in the last 4 quarters. It used to be if you worked for a company that was printing boat loads of money that you had job security.
Now, even if the company is crushing it, they'll still see employees more as a cost center instead of a revenue generator.
No, this has never been the case. Companies are and always have been very conscious of wage and salary expenses, as it's one of the most controllable categories on the P&L.
They are making $600k in net income per employee. 10+ years ago, I'd never seen a mass layoff at any company making that kind of money per employee.
Their net income is up more than 2x in just the last 5 years. 10 years ago, Microsoft only had $85B in revenue, now they are up to $134B in net income, and they need to let 25% of the company leave?
I'll also note that the 25% didn't include anyone VP or higher. So, the most expensive employees aren't being shown the exit, just the people doing the actual work.
It includes up to (and including) VPs, but not higher. If you read the comments (from former employees) on HN in the last couple of days, morale wasn't high/people weren't busy.
If I have a team of 20, making a lot of money, but I think I can do the exact same job with 15 because of AI productivity gains, should I keep the other 5 employed for the vibes?
The total net income doesn't matter: The move is management saying they are overstaffed for the work they think they need.
Assume Microsoft is expecting just a third of people to take the offer. It's just too many people to want to move to a different division that needs more labor: It's basically entire divisions that they'd have to create from whole cloth.
> If I have a team of 20, making a lot of money, but I think I can do the exact same job with 15 because of AI productivity gains, should I keep the other 5 employed for the vibes?
yes, because, (a) you would be an amoral company otherwise and (b) the productivity and work quality of those remaining 15 will plummet if you don't and AI won't save you in the end: you'll build faster and cheaper, but the quality of your products will enter a downward spiral it will be hard or impossible to exit from.
Companies should also be legally barred from hiring for three years if they engage in layoffs. Mergers should also be off the table for the same period.
It's deleterious to the economy. As the recent Microsoft game studio apocalypse shows, mergers are also extremely deleterious. It would be better to have a dozen game studios employing people and competing rather than one shit company cutting expenses and reducing products going to market.
> Companies should also be legally barred from hiring for three years if they engage in layoffs.
I like this. I was trying to think of some way to allow layoffs for struggling companies but not reward layoffs for companies that are making a profit, who just want to make more. My idea was more around the executive team being unable to take a salary or having to fire the CEO or something, nothing which as I worked through in my head seemed workable.
Why amoral? If a an employee costs the company more than they make, it means the owner of the company is essentially donating his money to the employee. Is it amoral to not do that? What if the owner wants to donate the money to cancer research instead?
To expand on this, a company’s purpose should go beyond simply generating profit for its owners, imho; among other things, it should also include a duty of care toward its employees. Society instills a strong work ethic in us from childhood, teaching us that contributing to the greater good is our individual duty. Before the plague of neoliberalism, there was an expectation that companies would have a positive impact on society, too. Nothing, except greed, forbids to return to those values.
Why risk a sure thing? You might have others quit or get rid of someone more important than you thought. The morale hit might affect work quality. Any number of things can go wrong and its simply not worth it when you make $600k in profit per person.
> If I have a team of 20, making a lot of money, but I think I can do the exact same job with 15 because of AI productivity gains, should I keep the other 5 employed for the vibes?
What should actually happen is everyone should be paid the same amount while doing 75% of the work they were doing before, but unfortunately there are no serious power structures like unions which could ensure that technological gains actually improve people's lives in that way.
> If I have a team of 20, making a lot of money, but I think I can do the exact same job with 15 because of AI productivity gains, should I keep the other 5 employed for the vibes?
Well no, you should keep the other five to increase your output even more and make even more money.
But like if your company is making money hand over foot you didn't typically cut staff by 25%. You could just as easily do a hiring freeze and get out ahead of it. I mean if your profit metric is showing all green and growing you have to be really cold to say we need to fire 1/4 people now why? (to maximize shareholders short term value of course)
> I mean if your profit metric is showing all green and growing you have to be really cold to say we need to fire 1/4 people now why? (to maximize shareholders short term value of course)
Yes, it's cold, but in the grand scheme of things, it's good for the society if companies are efficient and the economy is efficient. An efficient economy means that we can produce and consume more per hour worked.
Such behavior by companies may not be in my self-interest but that's another matter.
They aren't cutting staff because they made a ton of money. They are cutting staff because they see trouble on the horizon and are positioning themselves for that. Layoffs are rarely lagging indicators. They are more often predictors of trouble coming. This bubble will explode, MSFT wants to survive it. Thats all there is to it.
This may be so but what others in this thread are trying to point out is that this is a relative novelty. Decades ago, layoffs were something that hapened at struggling companies trying to stave off bankruptcy (or already in it). It is a major cultural change to treat employees so casually as fat to be trimmed.
AI adoption is a huge shift from labor to capital. Its history repeating, now instead of muscle power being replaced its brain power.
The amount of capex flying around requires raising funds, there have been dozens of stories recently about investors demanding higher rates for AI bonds. MSFT et al need to get their balance sheets in order to get good rates. Also, everyone is waiting for the bubble to burst, getting the house in order ahead of it is very prudent.
I have been through a similar situation at a former employer, during the aftermath of 2008 crisis, and is complicated.
Exactly as you place it, the way they found out to push for buyouts was to terminate existing positions.
Everyone was forced to decide between taking the buyout, or apply to internal positions instead, naturally the later was much more complicated than just taking the money.
With these kinds of offers, they don't expect to get rid of 60,000. They expect to get rid of Y,000.
They make the offer to 60,000 (typically, an entire department gets this offer, including people they want to keep). Some X,000 will take the offer. If Y,000 > X,000, they they lay off the difference.
This is what I was wondering, if they have some internal math that says "15% will probably take this offer" targeting a lower number like 10k. And if they overshoot, it's not like they'll have trouble refilling positions in this economy...
You say that but the economy seems pretty strong to me, we have lower than average unemployment with above average job listings. It's harder if you're on visa otherwise it's pretty competitive
You can tell what proportion they want to take the offer by how generous the offer is. And indeed:
> The Redmond, Washington-based company is expecting a lower proportion to accept the voluntary exit offer because the employees included in the offer are younger and no additional incentive is given beyond standard severance for their length of service, the person familiar said. Typical take-up levels for buyouts in tech are between 3 per cent and 5 per cent, they added.
Including people they want to keep? What if all the people they wanted to keep accepted while those they didn't want to keep stayed? Certainly makes no sense.
I imagine they don't extend the offer to specific people they want to keep.
I'm still not sure what the advantage to the company of an offer like this is versus layoffs where management gets to choose who leaves, unless they feel the "loyalty test" of deciding to stay is worth more than their own evaluation of employee performance.
1. Some C-suite asshole wants headcount in your division reduced by, say, 5% next year. He has zero visibility into anyone's performance, or any of the projects anyone is actually working on.
2. His subordinate directors could do random, or targeted layoffs to hit that 5%, but this ruins morale for everyone who survives, and is rather awful for those that don't.
3. ...Or, they could make this offer, let people leave on their own, try to convince any stars who want to take it to stay, don't do any backfill. Then, hopefully, between the voluntary layoffs and no backfill, you might hit that 5% reduction, and not have to do involuntary layoffs. (Or if you do, they would be much smaller.)
4. This is less disruptive for teams and managers, because with voluntary layoffs, they have time to plan for these people leaving, instead of showing up to work on Thursday, and being told that 5 people on their team were given the pink slip this morning.
5. This is also, obviously, less disruptive for employees who take the offer (as they can control their exit, and get a payout), and less disruptive for anyone who doesn't take the offer (lower odds of showing up to work on Thursday, and getting a pink slip).
> What if all the people they wanted to keep accepted while those they didn't want to keep stayed
That's not an outcome they'd like, but it's an outcome they have to accept, in order to not piss off everyone else.
1. For anyone they want to keep who takes them up on the offer, they always have a chance to try to convince those people to not take the buyout offer.
2. If you make the buyout offer conditional to particular individuals, it will sow resentment and division.
It's generally better for the employees and the employer to do this kind of blanket buyout. If they voluntarily hit the reduction targets, nobody needs to be laid off. If they don't, the layoffs will be there, but smaller. If the 'wrong' people want the buyout, there's still a chance to convince them to stay. If they don't want to stay after the convincing, it's probably best for them to go on their way.
Didn’t Microsoft have an issue with VP Vance regarding layoffs and all the perm processing were stopped. So why is MS doing this which will bring more trouble.
You cannot act with perfect information when you're making an offer to 25% of a company that size. If they were able to and willing to plan this on a per-person basis, they wouldn't be in the position of mass-buyouts.
It's very common in these situations to target every org in the company with a goal of X% reduction. If a small fraction of these teams now need extra headcount, easy enough to allow those teams to hire. Usually you don't keep the severance if you return in under X days.
I've personally been laid off, only for the post-re-org team to hire several people, including asking to rehire me. It's rare, and those affected should probably plan to find new jobs, but it happens.
typically in that case the boomerang is they come back but as a consultant. just doing the same thing they were doing before but at a different rate. usually higher to cover health ins plus a bit of a bonus.
If you get the offer take it and start your own company with it. There's no use in staying if you're not wanted and even though you'll get a severance package it won't amount to much more than a couple months back pay.
Currently the difference in my work between the best models and okay models is pretty night and day to the point its not worth using the older models. Now I haven't used the newest top open source models. But if I give the same code base to say Qwen 3.6 and GPT 5.6, Qwen will analyze the source of the problems wrong, provide actually wrong solutions, write code that takes 100x as long to run. Its not even worth it outside of querying for snippets of code. GPT 5.6 will help actually root cause the problems.
Ah but if the price is 10x - as the IBM CEO suggests - your employer might just ask you to use that, and then expect you to make up the gap between the cheap and expensive models using your own brain instead of just pissing money up the wall on high token costs AND your salary. You know, like the old days when we actually had to do the work ourselves.
I think the point is that you are not everyone. Not everyone has your requirements, sounds like paying the premium is worth it for you, but others simply don't need it.
To play devils advocate, in NYC which has a massive transit network. There exists a series of private transit "companies" (sometimes just a guy with a 10 person van), that provides routes that are poorly served by the publicly run transit network. The famous Chinatown buses would be another example, that run between Chinatowns in the North East, are incredibly cheap, fast, and are profitable.
This is a great example/argument for how a competitive local ISP market can work. The city/county/state should string fiber to every single house, and then various ISPs can just plug a customer into their particular switch/OLT/splitter.
A common "monopoly" of the physical last mile served by many providers traveling over it
The difficulty is that most of this competitive dynamic is already provided by IP itself (remember when you got your email address from your ISP?), and what remains is basically the physical layer technology which is exactly where the worries lie about stagnation.
There is a small angle where several ISPs can compete around customer service, data caps, equipment rental, business support, price margin, etc. While then forming larger units that put pressure on the physical provider to not stagnate the underlying infrastructure.
On the other hand I've got municipal fiber, and it just works. Great friendly local support (at least from what I understand, I don't really call them), no data caps, the price has stayed fixed for it's whole existence. I don't see any reason to want another layer on top of that, as it would only make all of those things worse.
The incumbent coax provider ("cable compay") still exists. If the municipal fiber provider stagnates on technology, then they could theoretically step up, right?. But given they had been coasting on a monopoly for decades (the other option being DSL), and that their service is still slower than the municipal gigabit (now deployed for a decade), I think that is giving them too much credit! In fact I've seen more talk about next-gen connection speeds from the municipal fiber provider.
For all the marketing about "free market competition", large corpos can be less innovative and responsive than small governments. So for the foreseeable future, I see no reason to not just voice my support for municipal fiber everywhere.
But what about large governments? Japan has amazing internet service, and NTT is mostly private (with the government retaining only 1/3 ownership).
I would trust my county to deliver my fiber internet. All my government services work great. I literally marvel every time I visit our municipal dump, which is cleaner and mode efficient than my home country of Bangladesh. But I wouldn’t trust most of the other counties I’ve lived in before to do it (Baltimore, Wilmington DE, Chicago, etc.).
Given that the argument about municipal fiber centers around a dynamic of large corpos preventing competition from small municipalities (by lobbying for state level prohibitions, etc) that seems besides the point. If a city can't get its own network off the ground, then the whole thing becomes a noop (apart from having wasted the money, which they would have done on something else regardless).
But when cities have the population density to support multiple competing Internet providers with decent physical layers and non-extractionary terms, then there generally doesn't seem to be much of a call for the city to provide its own services in the first place.
Furthermore cities that are incompetent about deploying infrastructure are going to be similarly incompetent at facilitating the permit process for private infrastructure - giving governmentesque incumbent providers a hold over a captive market regardless. So while this is a general problem that deserve its own exploration, it wouldn't seem to have much bearing on Internet access specifically. The real concern is municipalities that would be perfectly capable of providing Internet service (along with the rest of their municipal services), yet are being held back from even trying.
(Also I don't know what the Japan example demonstrates anything because 1. Japan and 2. that 1/3 ownership stake belies a much bigger controlling interest due to being the government)
There's more than just the physical pipe from the distribution point to your house
ISPs could compete on lack of congestion on their backbone, privacy, latency, price, "value add" features (like email, website hosting, etc), and speed depending on the model of the wholesale network
My point is that all of these points of "competition" would merely introduce tradeoffs that are worse than what I currently have.
Congestion/latency/data caps - I've observed no congestion, and have no traffic caps. "Competition" would create differentiation on providing less service.
Privacy - it's a municipal ISP. I'm pretty sure they're not selling my data to the surveillance industry. If it turns out they are, then I have recourse through the local democratic process rather than the standard "tough shit" response from a corpo. Given how the markets for cell service, webapps, etc work I don't have much faith that even in a competitive market, this would end up as a point of competition.
Email / website hosting / etc has nothing to do with the physical connection and therefore already has strong competition across the entire Internet. And actually this applies to the privacy point as well, with VPNs.
The model of the wholesale network is GPON. They obviously didn't string a dedicated fiber from the NOC to each house. So either speed is constrained by the gear the wholesale network buys, or the wholesale network would need to run a bunch of extra home runs so individual provider gets their own home run to light with their own gear.
I could see this last bit being a benefit in 10-20 years when gigabit isn't considered fast enough if the municipal fiber doesn't keep up. But given the municipal fiber built out the gigabit network while the coax incumbent was happy collecting rent on old infrastructure, I'm willing to give them a pass for the foreseeable future.
Your municipal ISP is buying upstream connectivity from someone. You're lucky that your local government is competent enough to run an ISP and keep it secure and reliable. At least we assume they are, maybe they've just been lucky till now. If that works for your town, go for it. In many places, though, that would be a tall ask
As to the wholesale network being GPON, there's always a point at which the network goes from a shared medium to a dedicated strand to the house. Wherever the PON splitter is, multiple splitters could be co-located, or, direct connections to be patched into for ISPs that don't want to use GPON. A dedicated connection is another place competition could exist, for example
It's not really devil's advocate, it's the way Capitalism should be structured. If we had government covered health care I'd expect private markets of vanity surgery or uncovered procedures to still exist. If we had government run utilities you'd still have private installments for demanding needs, generators, off-grid construction, etc, etc.
> To play devils advocate, in NYC which has a massive transit network. There exists a series of private transit "companies" (sometimes just a guy with a 10 person van), that provides routes that are poorly served by the publicly run transit network.
No, they are typically more impromptu set ups. $5 a person, leaves Queens for Bayonne at 8am, that type of thing. Some have set pick up/ drop off locations like a normal bus. Usually cash only, under the table.
They said transit as a class of natural monopoly and I showed a counter example where there are private companies entering a space where the natural monopoly already exists.
Tokyo uses privately run subway/train systems and is largely considered the envy of the world with regards to transit. The united states prior to WWII mostly ran on privately run transit systems, with private companies running street car and subway lines. So it does not appear to actually be that much of a natural monopoly.
It is though? Are you gonna open a second unconnected subway system in new York and compete with them? That's always the question for a natural monopoly I thought.
Youre gonna have another company digging a second set of tunnels?
> Are you gonna open a second unconnected subway system in new York and compete with them?
Yes thats how it works in Tokyo. They get land, build stations, then dig the tunnels. Their profit comes from fares and rents around the stations that they own.
Right, but they don't directly compete by digging parallel tunnels and routes, because that would be a poor allocation of resources for everyone involved.
Japan is very much an oddball in terms of capitalist nations. They are basically the only highly capitalist nation where corporations still put a high value on delivering high quality services and products at reasonable prices. They haven't yet ran into the vulture capitalist problems every other nation has. There's nothing stopping that from happening other than cultural values AFAIK.
Britain and the US are both good examples where privatization of the rail systems has been a complete mess. The US being the worst public transit rail system of any developed nation.
Not really. Tokyo has an entirely publicly owned subway system. And a separate subway system that was govt owned and then, after buildout, sold some shares to the public via IPO.
I wonder if the militia types like Trump because people like you, talk about them, like you do. Regardless how much Trump is on their side, he is your enemy, they are obviously your enemy with the disdain you feel for them, so its at worst an alliance of convenience.
I never said they were my enemy, and it's very telling that you put it like that.
They're easily convinced by simplistic causality arguments that, on the surface, satisfy what they feel is an injustice.
They're not even necessarily wrong about the injustices they feel, but they're too easily convinced about what may be the causes, and how those causes may be solved.
The fact we're talking about militia types indicates a simplicity of thought: enough guns can solve it. So we're starting with a pretty self selected group.
It is some kind of magic that Trump, son of a billionaire, success by nepotism, can have any chance of reaching them.
This is a good talk. There is some similar things in the private server / self hosted server space for World of Warcraft. There are bots that will play the game, talk with you, etc. using classical game aI, but people are also hooking them up with LLMS for more planning, strategy, and conversation.
> but people are also hooking them up with LLMS for more planning, strategy, and conversation.
I did this at https://github.com/agent-wow/agent-wow but haven't yet gotten to the level that the rs-sdk author has with benchmarks and running economy experiments.
That said, a lot of the key points he talks about in the video align pretty well with my experience too.
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