I keep seeing this over hiring argument everywhere. What's the evidence for that?
And weren't the layoffs of 2023-24 supposed to correct that?
In my experience, in every big tech company for the past two decades, almost everyone always complained that they were understaffed to meet their goals/okrs.
IMO, the real explanation is:
- Some unprofitable companies don't want to raise money in a high interest rate world, and are using AI as a partial excuse, partial ambition to do layoffs to cut costs. Eg: NET
- Other companies are investing heavily into data centers (eg: META) and need to cut costs elsewhere to offset that.
And in both cases, there's some real productivity gains that they have already seen due to AI that will offset, plus they expect to see more gains as the remaining people will work harder and be more motivated to increase their productivity for job security.
A lot of home computers are capable (with a large margin) to run a large amount of self-hosted services (eg: jellyfin, immich, minecraft, plex, karakeep, ... whatever people want to use).
And yet, less than 0.01% of the population (made up number, but I am more likely to be overestimating than underestimating) do so.
Running local models to do real work is likely to be another niche hobby.
The funny thing is that a lot of Google's internal training content uses an imaginary product "gShoe", and discusses the privacy implications of data that such a shoe might collect :D
The parent poster is saying (and I agree) that Airpods and Airtags are only superior because Apple anti-competitively privileges their integration with iPhones. It's not that they are better at the hardware level by itself.
And since iPhones form the largest single company's device network in the rich countries, that is a pretty big advantage.
I agree that this would be an awesome feature, and it would also significantly enhance iPads' value for me.
That said, having worked on account/identity systems at another FAANG, I think that the commenters saying that Apple is holding this back purely to sell more iPads are underestimating the complexity of this feature.
This is not a feature that you just bolt on to the top. It will require a significant ground up rewrite of iOS' fundamentals if you want to support account switching without a full shut down of the device (and even with that, there are complications with shared storage).
There are likely tons of singletons across the iOS codebase for the "current account", and switching between users will easily lead to bugs where the new account shares/accesses state from the previous account.....and these "violations" are much harder to detect via static analysis than you might naively imagine.
UPDATE: I wasn't aware that Apple already supported a bunch of this via MDM. My only point was that if they didn't already build this into the foundational layer of the OS, then this is a very difficult feature to add later. If they already have this, then I don't have any defense left for them.
But setups get equally complicated, even with human software engineers. The approach that the OP is talking about applies only to experienced, good architect-level SWEs, and I suspect that the code quality and its problems are going to be the same whether they are directing LLMs vs a set of junior SWEs to write the code.
There is an inherent level of complexity in projects that solve some real world problem, due to all the code handling edge cases that were added incrementally over time.
I do exactly the same as you. I wish that I didn't need windows for gaming, and things are getting better on that front, but my favorite game (AoE 2) works significantly better on windows than on wine :(
- very few teams have headcount, or expecting to grow
- the number of interview requests get has dropped off a cliff.
So BigTech is definitely hiring less IMHO.
That said, I am not sure if it's only or even primarily due to replacement by AI. I think there's generally a lot of uncertainty about the future, and the AI investment bubble popping, and hence companies are being extra cautious about costs that repeat (employees) vs costs that can be stopped whenever they want (buying more GPUs).
And in parallel, they are hoping that "agents" will reduce some of the junior hiring need, but this hasn't happened at scale in practice, yet.
I would expect junior SWE hiring to slowly rebound, but likely stabilize at a slower pace than in the pre-layoff years.
eg: If you think NVDA is overvalued relative to the overall tech sector, you could short NVDA, go long QQQ.
And if you have a more opinionated trade in the same currency, eg: you think AAPL will be fine if the AI trade pops, you can do short NVDA, long AAPL.
Finally, an even more advanced version would be to go long on something else in the same sector, but which is less overvalued in your opinion. eg: Short ORCL, long NVDA.
The only reason I use Windows is for playing some old games (primarily Age of Empires II: DE) that only work well on Windows. In the AoE2 case, I also need CaptureAge that only works on Windows.
The point is that even though I have 95% de-Microsoftized my life for the past 2 decades, I still need to run Windows for a few specific flows, and I run into the same issues as the article author here.
Any meals/coffee/drinks outside, streaming subscriptions, gaming purchases, shopping, groceries, child activities, home services, mobile, gas + ev charging, home utilities, occasional cleaners, charity, hotels/flights, ubers....and there are probably things that I am missing.
Feels like a lot of work to me to track everything. And it's impossible to ask my partner to do the same.
This was the first year of Trump's new term and most of the anti-immigration executive orders happened in the last few months. By August, most international students had already accepted offers, made travel and stay plans, and likely paid some part of their tuition already, and just continued due to sunk costs and hope that things will stabilize.
However, at this point, I think a lot more people will not even apply to US schools for next year.
On iPhones, you need to pay Apple $99/yr+taxes to do even personal development.
Yes, technically they have a free tier, but it supports a max of 3 devices, which you can't change, ever. It's so painful that it might not as well exist.
Is Android doing the same?
Do you have to pay them money to install your own, or open source apps?
Maybe a few pros have been playing for 20+ years, but most of the top players (by championship wins) are young.
Hera, Lierrey, Vinchester, Lewis...are in their 20s. And even the previous #1 Viper isn't that old.