Reasons it's being done....trim employee rolls, make sure they can use that investment in commercial real estate, and of course....observability...control.

From my observation the folks making the argument you are tend to be older, and I am 51 so.... because they didn't have those things paid for, no one should.

But of course that leaves out how those things often cost less awhile ago.

The other challenge simply comes in terms of costs outpacing wages. And not just current inflation. It's all of it.

Office work puts strain on families, parents with small children, costs of auto repair, fuel, parking, etc. All with little to no compensation increase to beat back inflation and other cost increases.

A company who offers compensation for these things will attract more workers. So while I wouldn't suggest it be a mandate - it should be considered, just like flexible work schedules, more paid time off etc. The US labors under the idea that we are so much more awesome because we only take 15 days off a year in vacation, while we are routinely out paced by areas where workers take 30+ days off paid a year.

We need to quit this glamorization of "work".

Until enough steps are taken to walk back the labor market into the hands of employers - they will continue to struggle finding talent to fill positions without remote work being an option.

Even then they're going to struggle, as everyone who wants to work or has to work for the most part has a job. Even with these layoffs. The reductions are almost all in the big tech sector which is but a portion of the total technology sector.

Feb labor numbers were pretty revealing there.

From an unemployment perspective the US over the last couple months has been where it was under Trump pre-COVID. And yes that's both the headline number and the often cited "real unemployment" number which is always higher than the headline number.

But yea this is all a real estate play. It's crazy too how hard it's being used to push the agenda. Must protect corp real estate! haha nope, no we don't.

IMHO one of, if not the best thing which could happen to humanity is for us to not be reliant on "work" to survive, and to stop glamorizing or sanctifying "work" as some end all be all state which defines your value as a human.

True contribution to society would be more along the lines of what we put out into the world and what we then have the freedom to build for ourselves, minus the requirement to be toiling 7 days a week for the chance at meager earnings to survive.

That of course ushers in a situation where the de-facto financially based class system disappears - and I am not sure those in high status are going to be willing to let that go, but it would probably mean the value of money and the NEED for money to go away as well.

It's easy to say that we can build a robot to do anything and it'll be AI controlled. Whether that works in practice or not, time will tell.

You replace the guy putting caps on toothpaste tubes with a machine, then the guy you fired learns how to fix the machine...has job again. Until we build an AI bot to do that too I suppose.

The Cloud and all such things we do in datacenters often times require obscure manual work which again is easy to say nope w will do that with AI/robotics...and then see how well that would work. Cabling a rack would be interesting to see their thought process, realizing that a PDU line cord isn't attached and having to reach deep behind a whole crap ton of cables to get it attached properly...I suppose a humanoid could do that if trained properly.

So the doom & gloom scenario is we either all have nothing to do and robots & AI do it all for us, and we live with their bad decisions just like we do with human decisions. Cool. And what's our general stipend to be able to buy anything and support ourselves? Or will we just let most of the population starve if they weren't wealthy before AI took their jobs?

History not yet written, but I do feel like a lot of this is moving too quickly. It seems all about eliminating humans and cutting payrolls.

Pretty sure that's the whole point.