**Engineering Wednesday** It's actually the same old story... but lets go back to the beginning. In 1990 a set of tech companies looked at the same spreadsheet. Demand for engineers was rising. The supply of people who could do the work was not rising as fast. The result, left alone, was six-figure salaries. The millionaire tech bros. balked at that thought. Those salaries would have come out of the margin. Tech workers, mostly conservative, refused collective bargaining so were of little use to Democrats. Tech workers, red dots in blue districts that interfered with Chamber of Commerce interests were of little use to Republicans. So naturally... The Immigration Act of 1990 created the H-1B category. The public argument was a shortage of talent during a recession when people were hustling to tech degrees for a lifelong career. The private arithmetic was simpler. A larger pool of workers who needed the sponsor to stay employed kept the wage from clearing where it otherwise would have been with strictly American talent. The same arithmetic is now running on AI. The salary that used to leave the company as payroll can stay inside as revenue if the model does the task and the company sells the output. The worker trains the AI system as it had their replacement H1B- documents the edge cases, and corrects the failures until the failure rate is low enough to ship. Then the spot on the org chart is removed. The check that used to arrive every two weeks for the STEM employee now arrives as a subscription or a usage fee paid to the AI vendor. The vendor is not doing this as a public service. The price will be set at what the buyer will pay once the alternative has been reduced. It does not matter whether the replacement is a model in a browser or a robot on a floor. The structure is the same. The cost that used to be a wage becomes a payment to the owner of the AI system. The people who used to receive the wage are told the efficiency is a general gain. The gain is real. It is also concentrated. The CEO yacht and the private islands are not metaphors. They are what retained earnings look like when the largest line item on the old P&L has been converted into a product the same firm now sells. The H-1B version required a statute and a lobby. The AI version requires a training run and a contract. Both treat the engineer’s pay as a residual that can be captured. One imported the labor. The other is trying to delete the need for it. In every case our wages are seen as additions to their bottom line. Our prosperity is an afterthought. Question: Have you already been asked to document your own work in a form a model can use?