I don’t work in tech (and my question here will prove that) but how does a company lay off 10,000 people without seriously harming their product or ceasing products all together? Is tech that bloated? What are people doing all day where it’s realistic to lay of 10,000 people?
Working on R&D for anticipated features. The number of employees that work purely on KTLO is going to be under half at least. The rest are justifying the large revenue multipliers tech stocks get - from their rather high growth rates, which are from expansion and moonshots that pan out.
Now that interest rates are high, the calculus for expansion projects is very different. You may very well be spending more money than you anticipated returning from your moonshots.
This was such an unnecessary term to initialize by the parent, when it had a pivotal meaning in the sentence. I was wondering what the hell. KLTO meant and thought it was the internal codename for TikTok or something.
This is not borne out by the data. The data shows most layoffs are in recruiting, HR, product, design, data science. Yes, it’s cutting new projects but it’s also just trimming fat.
I don't understand your comment. If you're cutting back on future features, not existing operations, you'd absolutely expect product and design to take a big hit, and then of course recruiting and HR because your employee counts are down and you're not hiring.
Data science tends to span both (future product dev and analysis of existing functionality), and data science can be particularly tricky to assign a value to, so not surprised there are also significant cuts there.
1. You stop pretty much building anything new. That’s what most people are working on.
2. If you go deeper with cuts, most things will continue to work. But behind the scenes it’s a dumpster fire with people just trying to keep things running as much as possible. Things still work, but there will be bigger consequences down the road.
3. You go even deeper. Things work until they don’t. People who can fix it are no longer there. You decide to diversify away from that part of business and lose revenue.
The thing is there is a bloat in every single organization you have and tech companies are no different. But depending on how big 10000 is as a percentage of your total headcount, the impact can be anywhere from small to catastrophic
This mentality wouldn’t have worked out for MySpace or Snapchat or Facebook and it’s probably not going to be good for whoever is momentarily king of the hill.
I wonder if there will ever come a point where the algorithms are really just that good to keep people and newer generations hooked permanently, and that currently we are still in a supoptimal local maxima. For example, people play at the same casinos for decades.
Maybe they had internal teams that were working on a new social network app and are now divesting from that (not working on it, not releasing it). Maybe they had a lot of smaller teams who were iterating on the experience to increase engagement, lower friction etc which they will now not pursue etc. "Bloat" is a bit naive that somehow they are just paid to look at the left corner of their office or something. The company built out teams to look into new experiences or to make the experience better and they are going to be doing less of that at least for a while
The vast majority of employees at any tech company are working on the next version of the product. So huge layoffs will not impact their ability to keep the lights on, but will likely have an impact on the product roadmap a few months or even years down the line.
Not everyone at a tech company works on the product. It takes a ton of staff to do things like marketing, ad sales, content moderation. They may be backing away from some markets or maybe they automated a lot of the work.
It's essentially the same as R&D layoffs in other industries, it's just that tech companies have comparatively huge R&D departments funded by outsized proceeds from other business units.
Yes. The biggest companies, with the most political power, believe just that. I pray smaller companies make themselves more competitive by offering WFH but that’s yet to be seen.
hah. i have some bad news for them. the cat is out of the bag. they may be able to force people to do things in the short term but long term they are going to become obsolete.
This is so weird to me. I was an early KDE user and remembering thinking KDE was great but the integrated web browser was absolute garbage. At that time it could only render a tiny fraction of pages at a usable level, I certainly never expected it to become what it has.
Google does not have clean hands here, they paid to have chrome bundled with all kinds of scummy (and not so scummy) software and made it really difficult not to accidentally install.
This is something a lot of people forget. Among tech folks the narrative was always "Chrome won because it was faster", but in the real world most people got Chrome for the first time because they installed a Java or Flash update and Google paid for Chrome to automatically be installed and instantly set itself as the default browser (this is literally how I got Chrome installed for the first time, against my will, via a Flash update).
I don’t work in tech so forgive the ignorance. How is the communication at the DoD (especially the SF-86) not encrypted and why it is sitting on an email server?
It is encrypted, at rest. If this was taken from an active mail server, the mail server's software needs access to the unencrypted data to work, therefore that is moot.
As to why mail servers hold email? That's how they, namely IMAP or EAS, work. If the mail server didn't have the mail, and the authorized user wanted the mail, where is it meant to come from?
The more pertinent question is: Why was a DoD mail server connected to the public internet? The DoD have their own network.
I ran the mail servers for the Defense Information Systems Agency at DISA.mil.
For unclassified systems, of course those are connected to the Internet. How else would you communicate with the rest of the world? And I filled out an SF-86 when I applied to be hired by them. There's nothing classified on an SF-86. No classified data was leaked when OPM was hit by Chinese hackers that stole all sorts of PII data for everyone who held a security clearance, including fingerprints and retina prints. Oh, and OPM was hit by the Chinese not once, but twice.
For classified systems, those are connected to the SIPRnet or other classified "internet". And those classified internets are typically shared with other governmental agencies, and not unique to DoD.
There is, and for a DoD employee to not have sent a document like an SF-86 encrypted indicates a failure to follow basic procedures. Every DoD employee (military and civilian) has an encryption key they can use, and are required to use, for things like PII and many others (which an SF-86 would definitely contain).
Efforts to end-to-end encrypt e-mail have been disastrous, coming down to a combination of human factors and difficulty of coordination - but mostly, people want to be able to read their mail. Sometimes they want to read it from public terminals. Sometimes they lose their phone and still need it to be accessible. Often, e-mails are required to be unencrypted by the mail server for compliance purposes - Nearly all financial data has to be archived, and that's often the crown jewels you're trying to encrypt, anyway.
I don't know of a good oral history of PGP, but I suspect if you find one, it'll have the answers that you're looking for.
US DoD has CAC - Common Access Card (commonly called a "CAC Card", but that's as silly as a "PIN Number"). CACs have encryption keys and are used for signing and encrypting email. The data should have been transmitted and stored encrypted for something like an SF-86.
The actual SF-86 is filled out online. If it is on an email server then it probably means the person generated the PDF copy from the site for their records and emailed it to themselves.
The only SF-86s that should be outside of eQIP are hardcopies printed by investigators and copies saved by the submitters who emailed them to themselves for some reason.
Of course, this is the Pentagon so there's probably dozens of ancient generals who don't know how to use a mouse who had an aide fill it out and email it to another aide to be put into eQIP.
edit: lol nevermind it's SOCOM, those meatheads can't be trusted to not write a thousand books spilling the (mostly embellished) details of every little thing they did in the military as soon as they get out in the hopes that Tatum Channing will play them in a movie or amazon series so this isn't a surprise.
+1 for FreeTaxUSA. Simple software, reasonable rates, no dark patterns (that I’ve seen). However, with the slush fund that the government has, I don’t see why they can’t make their own.
>Rob Henderson has a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Cambridge, where he studied as a Gates Cambridge Scholar. He obtained a B.S. in psychology from Yale University and is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force.
What could you possibly read as being political in that pedigree? That he went to college? That he was in the military? God help us if we consider either fundamentally political.
