I agree that this definitely is labor suppression, but it has a real cause: the end of low interest rates and inflation. They can no longer "grow" their way into their 6 month bonuses, so they basically have to trim fat and if they all collude on doing it, it _can_ work. If they dont all collude, someone gets cheap engine for growth.

collusion to suppress wages predates tbe raising of interest rates or inflation increases.

all the big tech companies used to have no-poach agreements to not hire from each other, such that they didnt have to compete on price

That real world activity is my underlying belief, but we shouldnt ignore that the free money era ended quickly and for these execs do continue to earn their ungainly bonuses, they have to cut costs. Modern texhnology/capitalism allows them to make the same choices without directing collusion.

Best example is the rental market and the landlords all using the same price setting "algorithm"

High interest rates benefit creditors and hurt debtors. These companies hold a lot of cash equivalent assets (think bonds, etc). Their balance sheets only grew. High interest rates haven't hurt these companies, but instead fattened them up. They are hoarding cash! Imagine earning high interest on that cash.

My thesis is most of these companies grow by VC funding and leveraged buyout of smaller firms. This requires cheap debt servicing.

Also the end of full R&D expensing, which made software engineers in particular much more expensive in the US.

But that got rolled back in the last budget bill if i was following correctly

Is the hypothesis that the next 24 months will be measurably better for software engineering jobs than the last 24 months?

Hard to say. There's kind of a lot going on.

Either the tax treatment has an effect or it doesn't. If the market doesn't get better we can at the very least say that the whole tax thing was overstated.

not if 996 is still a thing

I can’t imagine anyone colluding with LBT, unless they told him it was collusion to fool him, and he fell for it.

Doing more with less is warning sign like “curve ahead”.

And the agentic focus is not forward-thinking.

Our present is to a small degree agentic, and that will increase, but that won’t sustain because (1) latency and (2) technological evolution.

It’s more likely that everyone will have their own AI on-board which will have all of the data it needs in local storage that gets regular updates. Evolving to current agentic flows won’t help with that type of processing.

Erm, what?

He’s from the future, dammit!