How is it hand waving? It's literally true a large corporation can fire a customer support agent while sponsoring a software engineer, it is not interchangeable talent

If we had a union we would be training people from customer support to engineer.

I truly believe that software would be improved immensely if all developers spent a few years doing tech support for the elderly.

> If we had a union we would be training people from customer support to engineer

This, to my knowledge, very rarely works.

> software would be improved immensely if all developers spent a few years doing tech support for the elderly

This, on the other hand, absolutely does.

I've worked with several excellent people in my career who progressed from customer support to QA to QA engineer to software engineer.

It's not common though, and I don't think it's a case of "training". Some people have the drive to figure that path out, and those people should be encouraged and supported.

> Some people have the drive to figure that path out, and those people should be encouraged and supported

Totally agree. I don’t think that means institutionalizing that pipeline is likely to yield those folks. They’re rare.

> This, to my knowledge, very rarely works.

Strictly a function of management quality and experience.

Not everyone is interested in programing. Some people are amazing at customer support and super extroverted and seek out jobs where they interact with customers and would be miserable looking at code all day. The opportunity should be there, but some people are just never going to be engineers. Management quality can't fix that.

> Not everyone is interested in programing.

This isn't a pipeline, it's a pool.

Actually, let's think of it as a stew. Lots of different base ingredients, add seasoning and heat. When the individual bits are delicious they start bubbling up to the surface. Not every bit is a carrot or chunk of meat. Some are potato, maybe that's a bean.

I'm sorry but this is just absurd. Not everyone has the same aptitude for every job. For a company or country to function you have to acknowledge this and put people in jobs suited to their natural talents.

I doubt that's the argument they're making. They're saying they are laying of a software engineer in one org, and hiring another software engineer in a different org. Not cross functional roles.

The army of developers stuck working helpdesk right now because they can't find work, would like a word.

Maybe they weren't exactly doing that. Calling a developer something else doesn't make it so.

Talent can be trained, less across jobs (although it's often what public services ask to entrepreneurs in some European countries), much more across departments.

I mean in the LLM era you need fewer employees and you need them to be very good to not become 10x bad engineers, so you could be processing green cards for your super stars while having to do layoffs

In a lot of cases they are claiming that the layoffs are not based on performance. The government's argument is that if there are high-performing American nationals or green card holders that are being laid off, then there is no point in giving more green cards, or H1Bs.

That's the playbook Microsoft has been accused of running in various tech press for years, and is backed up by the fact that all of their products are going to shit. Azure, Exchange, XBox & first-party titles, just to name a few of the things I've seen takedown posts about how the departments are staffed exclusively with inexperienced devs overseen by burnt-out seniors, using Copilot to duct tape shit into a somewhat-working state.

I remember not to long ago we got a service impact email from Microsoft saying they expected exchange services to resume normal operation in a sodding WEEK. Completely unacceptable for a provider my company, a smaller one, pays six figures per year for services.

That doesn't feel accurate to me. If you're laying off employees en masse while getting new h1b visas, maybe - but everybody I know who's gotten a green card from tech employment was employed and working for a long time before that process even started.

If one is just waiting on a status change that’s ok. The labor certification is complete. If labor certification is being applied for as layoffs happen or if large tranches of new H1B are applied for at about the same time - that’s clearly an issue.

Not if the category of employees is different. You are assuming all candidates and roles are fungible.