Hacker News Reader

Comment by breadwinner | Hacker News Reader

That would be surprising if developers were fungible. You can have a surplus of web developers (whom you lay off) while at the same time have a shortage of AI talent. Those web developers can't be hired in to the openings for AI talent.

View on HN

I would be surprised if programmers couldn't generally quickly pick up a new domain. I presume we're not talking 5,000 people doing heavy research (wouldn't that be O-1 anyway?), and I don't see how product development work becomes more complicated when you call it AI. e.g. you don't need a PhD to hook calls to a model into VS Code or to build the API and infrastructure around calling the model or data pipelines or all the other 90% of actually making it useful.

I wouldn't call developers fungible, but certainly good developers are adaptable.

I don't think Microsoft is lacking a supply of people capable of doing things, they're lacking a culture that lets you do things. The most annoying thing about Microsoft culture is that you have to pretend that Satya Nadella fixed it.

None of us knew how to finetune a model 18 months ago, we learned. This idea that what you've done in the past is all you can do is such a dumb big tech idea that needs to die.

but also the idea that anything you learned 5 years ago or earlier is no longer relevant.

Which is why we don’t hire for knowledge, we hire for thought patterns. There is room for much bias when considering past accomplishment.

how do you interview/test for that?

I come from a country where you'd basically have to prove that the people you laid off could not be retrained to do the new roles.

If anything, what is the difference between an employee and a contractor if you can just terminate them once you're done with them?

FTEs in the US get benefits and part of their taxes paid for them. Contractors are not (can be, typically are not).

Getting hired (getting an apartment, ...) is easier in the US as there are significantly less challenges at terminating those contracts by the 'provider' than in e.g. Germany, where it's really hard to fire or evict someone.

That's not what's happening though.

Account managers and sales engineers are the ones I’ve seen laid off. They seem to have kept the licensing specialists they need on calls because nobody understands the convoluted mess they’ve created. So, losing the people we were working with, on top of all the issues with the products themselves, it made going to OpenShift that much easier.

I mean Microsoft laid off 5% of the developers and 30% of the product managers in my org, so they think that they don't need Windows development.

Retrain or pay them until they can replace their lost salary, contingents and contractors broadly included.

Most MS employees aren't even engineers!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com