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.
A debt crisis like in eurozone countries in 2008 is very unlikely to happen in the US. For it to happen, it would require the fed working against the us government.
Well, the US clearly has far, far more rope than Greece or Italy. Question is, is that a buffer, or a perfect noose in the making.
The Fed seems already constrained by the administration to not raise rates. Yields went up anyway. US primary deficit is huge and so debt to GDP is accelerating from different angles - interest, increased spending, increased yield demand based off uncontrolled inflation expectations etc.
In fact I suspect that the mega-pivot to AI is an attempt to solve the problem by massively inflating GDP, so that the debt doesn’t matter - ie radically grow the economy. It remains to be seen if it pays off and solves US’s problems.
At the end of the day, the US cannot escape from the forces that drowned Greece - inflation, investor confidence, debt spiral. It’s totally avoidable, but the US seems determined to race full speed ahead at it. Let’s see if Trump can play chicken with economics.
It's basically the Liz Truss situation, except the UK could actually remove her after just one budget because the Conservative party weren't fully on board with her level of brainworms. Whereas the US's two legislative houses are 100% supportive of this.
> Whereas the US's two legislative houses are 100% supportive of this.
I think that it's more likely that many of them just like their jobs, and Trump has a history of orchestrating primary challenges against people who disagree with them.
Now, one could additionally argue that this is only possible because of their frankly insane gerrymandering, and one would be correct, so maybe it is ultimately their fault.
Greece doesn't have its own currency and is completely reliant on private debt markets. Investors, mostly banks, started demanding higher yields, and Greece couldn't do anything about it. The EU used that as an excuse to impose garbage economic policies (austerity) on them, but the whole crisis could have been avoided if the ECB had intervened to keep Greek bond yields close to the ECB's interest rate.
A garbage article. Yields went down after the housing bubble in 2007 because the central bank interest rates were lowered, not because the investors decided to flock to a safe asset.
Yields are high because the inflation is also running high and it doesn't like it will come down anytime soon so the central bank interest rates will also be kept at a higher level.
Long term bonds can be replaced with short term bonds which are constantly rolled over. The bond yields are pricing in the future interest rates, nothing more.
That’s the news. The fed is desperately trying to get interest rates lower, but the free market isn’t buying it. The treasury is also pulling out some very desperate moves to control this, like selling euro for JPY without even telling the EU, we will see how it works out.
> Long term bonds can be replaced with short term bonds which are constantly rolled over
Bessent tried that, didn't work to calm down the bond yields. Unless you meant the USA is not interested in longer term bonds, which is obviously untrue, because Bessent is intervening.
> The bond yields are pricing in the future interest rates
For investors, the price is the risk they want to get compensation for. The investors are increasingly worried about the credibility of the USA. Sure, the USA can print dollars, but Banana Economics Class teaches you that trying to inflate oneself out of debt with reckless printing will have some adversarial effects. You can't fool smart money that easily.
selling stocks and buying bonds in a recession where interest rates go down (so bonds are priced higher) and expected revenue for most sectors go down is a no brainer.
Agree, but there's also the expectation of future debt. A bigger debt means a bigger issuance of bonds, so the new supply-demand equilibrium moves the rates higher as it's the only way to convince investors to allocate more to bonds.
Technically, yes, but if you create demand for long term bonds and create supply for short term ones, you'll flatten the yield curve and pay long term yields for short term durations.
We are in a different phase of
Capitalism, real interest rates will be kept low mechanically. Nominal Inflation rate will always be lied about. Bonds holders will lose value by design.
The governments and central banks across the world have no other choice. Corporations and big money have robbed our world of capital and are now changing the game to pull up the ladder behind them
Treasury interest rates just decoupled from bond yields. That's the news.
They were only coupled in the first place because treasuries were seen as the safest of havens. That means everything else had to pay more interest than them. So is that no longer the case?
The last Fed meeting saw high inflation and decided not to adjust interest rates, with the stated reasoning that the market will fix it by itself. This could be how the market fixes it by itself.
Late update: by "treasury interest rates" of course I mean the Fed interest rates. By definition, the "Treasury interest rate" is the yield on a treasury bond.
Short term government bond yields are trading within the fed interest rates (as it should be) and long term yields are a bit higher as it usually is (an inverted yield curve is rare). It's nothing unusual.
There is actually a substantial debate on whether wolves and dogs are the same species or separate, precisely because they produce fertile offspring so easily. While wolves are firmly identified as Canis lupus, you can find modern sources calling dogs both Canis familiaris (a separate species), and Canis lupus familiaris (a subspecies of wolf).
Probably the better example you could give is bears, where brown and polar bears are always considered separate species, but they do successfully interbreed, even in the wild occasionally.
The species concept is a little too vague, and essentially the difference between two closely related species and two distant varieties of the same species is fuzzy and often historically biased (if the two populations were considered separate species for a long time, there is large inertia against re-categorizing them as a single species when evidence of genetic similarity and interbreeding arises).
The definitional limit on interbreeding includes geography and preference; black/brown/polar bears can and do interbreed in captivity but because they live in different locations and they look sufficiently different/have different diets we consider them different species.
If Aliens landed on our earth 20k years ago and used our definition of the word there's no doubt in my mind they'd consider us different species, we'd be like bears. As far as I can tell the only reason we don't classify people as different species is for the sake of society, as people would naturally then try to determine differences and rank them, which has an obviously bad long-term outcome.
There are much better arguments that brown/polar/black bears should be considered a single species, and that they perhaps would be if they were first discovered today. It is true that the distinction between "two closely related species that diverged recently" and "two distantly related varieties of the same species that are diverging more and more" is quite vague and subjective - especially when there are large phenotypic differences.
However, few of these arguments apply to human populations. With the exception of dogs, cats and other domesticated animals, few or no other mammal populations that have diverged as recently as humans are categorized as separate species (for example, brown and polar bears have diverged ~600k years ago, before our species even existed). Human populations only began spreading out of Africa some 150k years ago, which is not a lot of time in evolutionary terms at all, for a mammal that only reproduces around 1/year and needs more than a decade between generations.
Not to mention, the separation between all human populations is merely geographical. When different human populations came into contact, even ones that had been isolated from each other for tens of thousands of years, they virtually always interbreeded in significant numbers, contrary to, say, wolf and dog populations. This is also a strong argument against considering distant human cousins different species.
Additionally, morphological variation among isolated human populations is actually quite small, compared to intra-population variation. Skin color is the single biggest morphological difference, by far; followed by the size/hardness of our hairs, especially the ones on the head. Apart from these, virtually all other differences are more about statistical prevalence of certain traits (e.g. blue eyes are more or less common in various populations, body hairyness is more common in some populations than others, tallness is more common, etc).
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