The EU didn't have to impose strict austerity. It was just the policy they went with and it ended up being worse than what the US did in the financial crisis.
It is not possible that they won't be able to pay it off, but it is possible they will not pay it off anyway, and it is also possible that they will repay it with useless scraps of green paper.
With current ai models laying off 50% of engineers seems plausible. Obviously there would be some problems at the start but I'm quite sure it'd work over time.
This is quite weird to say imo.
I worked for mid-big companies (1-3k+ engineers) where we would never have enough people to execute the projects we wanted and kept postponing stuff to the next cycle. And this was 2024 to mid 2025
I believed that the moment when "coding was solved" we would see a massive improvement of productivity and these already postponed projects that we always wanted to start would be indeed carried out.
However, looks like companies don't strive to do More with AI, if that was the case we would not need lay offs. Big companies want to do the bare minimum to keep them alive. They want to do the same, while doing more per person, i.e. reducing employee costs.
>Why don’t we pay people to dig ditches with spoons? It would produce jobs!
Be glib all you want, but research has shown that displaced workers do not have great outcomes [1].
It's all fun and games to dunk on a person online, but when an entire industry employing millions of people starts to dissolve do to rapid automation, people will have wished there were more calls for organization, social safety nets, etc.
Every single other respectable engineering specialty is licensed, bonded, and insured. Most have local unions as well.
We are not going to stop dealing with the bootcamp script-kiddie middle-manager-with-an-LLM slopcode until we have an efficient way to confer proof-of-skills during the hiring process. It shocks me that ABET discontinued the PE exam subspecialty for software engineering due to lack of interest. Maybe we'll get smart enough to circle back and demand it.
Next is bonds. Large high-dollar government projects that take years to execute because they build critical public infrastructure are often paid in terms of bonds. Wanna know why? Because if the work is shoddy or the contractor tries to skip town, the bond can be rendered worthless. But if the job gets done, and gets done right, an engineering firm can list it on the balance sheet and continue paying salaries even when projects might take years and millions of dollars to come to fruition.
Next is insurance. Hospitals already found this one out the hard way with ransomware. And for those of you who think "it's just software, it's not a big deal"... I hope you never have to bet your life on your code. I wouldn't.
Finally, we have unions. I've noticed that game dev got smart and there was a bit of organization at a recent GDC. The rest of us, I guess, have glided along on the salary bump associated with the difficulty in finding and retaining software engineering "talent". I guess we're finally seeing that disappear now that folks are trying to see how many lessons they can learn the hard way through nontechnical brute force and LLM slop. Yeah, sure, some engineers are using LLMs responsibly in a way that matches their capabilities-- i.e. using it as autocomplete to type code faster. But there's a reason why other easily-digitized knowledge-work fields like law and architecture haven't been subsumed by LLMs. It's because accuracy matters, and because those regulations have already been written in blood.
I mean, I don't think unionizing will make such a difference.
Maybe, going in the sense I mentioned above, the work will be more sprayed around in startups.
Since big companies just want to do what they've been doing but with less people, instead of doing more per person.
This surplus will work with startups and new businesses to disrupt the big ones
This is a load-bearing statement, students will get left behind. Chinese students getting distilled knowledge will lead to a performance gap that New York students may never overcome.
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