How did they ask all these random people and not bother to ask a single software engineer?

"Hi is this excuse real, or is it just a sign of an inappropriate relationship between the local council and a dodgy software company that pays more dividends than developers? Oh it's the latter? Okay, thanks."

They are not stupid at all. Their interests are in conflict with the interests of tech workers and they are winning effortlessly, over and over again.

The big tech companies are all owned by the same people. If these layoffs cause google to lose market share to another company, it's fine because they own that company too.

What matters is coordinating regular layoffs across the whole industry to reduce labour costs. It's the same principle as a strike: if the whole industry does layoffs, workers gradually have to accept lower salaries. In other words, the employers are unionised and the employees are not.

This process will probably continue for the next 20 years, until tech workers have low salaries and no job security. It has happened to countless industries before, and I doubt we are special.

I'm sure the next big industries will be technology-focused, but that's not the same as "tech". They won't involve people being paid $200k to write websites in ruby.

“As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” said Google spokesperson Alex García-Kummert. “To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers, and align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Through this, we’re simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers”

There was this incredible management consultant in france in the 18th century. Name eludes me, but if he was still around Google could hire him and start finding some far more convincing efficiencies.

The guy was especially good at aligning resources to remove layers

Wait until this guy finds out that Elon doesn't actually build the cars

I mean, let's be real, Rust is really called out because it causes high drama between C devs and Rust advocates, which drives engagement.

It's probably all kicking off in about 10 different comment sections right now

5 years ago everything was moving to TypeScript. Now everything has moved. Developers are still catching up, but it will be one-way traffic from here.

I'm guessing your manager thinks TypeScript is like CoffeeScript. It is not like CoffeeScript.

Also, TypeScript is only the beginning. In the halls of the tech giants most devs view TypeScript as a sticking plaster until things can be moved to webassembly. It will be a long time until that makes any dent in JS, but it will also be one-way traffic when it does.

You have imposter syndrome so bad you don't even think you're a real imposter!

Counter-point: Atom is terrible. Its electron competitors are terrible. Big IDEs are terrible. Simple text editors are terrible.

If you are under 50 and chose to learn vim or emacs, there is a 100% chance that you were also forced to learn latin at school and honestly it's not your fault that you turned out this way.

These are all the options. Sometimes all the options are terrible.

eh, more like self-important plumbers

Also somewhere in the middle:

"There's been no report of this for a while so we're marking it resolved."

I use a Tokonami KX450, which is not the newest but it's the most widely available military-grade model that the average silicon shop is able to customise.

With that in mind you'll want a uranium microreactor to really get that turbo button cranking out the keycodes (the french stuff is cheapest but ukrainian kit is worth the extra), as well as a mercury cooling solution and ideally a set of maglev keys for all the most common letters (NOT backspace; frankly you should remove that key entirely to avoid habits that damage your WPM).

Assuming you've got a solid pair of high-torque power gloves that should get you up to at least 20000 WPM, which admittedly won't cut it if you're trying to keep all the NPM dependencies up to date in a modern bank's transaction processing software, but it's probably enough if you're just doing a bit of data analysis in python.

Three things off the top of my head:

• Unionisation
• Way more stuff publicly funded with no profit motive
• Severe sanctions on US tech giants all around the world, with countries building up their own workforce and tech infrastructure. No more east india company bullshit.