Big companies are also ridiculously overstaffed, as Elon Musk proved empirically. And many of them have only one thing that works and ambitions of doing more than will never work out. So there's a lot of wasted talent, in other words, but this ability to waste talent necessitates in person communication, just to make sure everyone is stack ranked according to the current arbitrary and probably mindless goals.

Musk didn’t prove anything. All he showed so far is that if you turn off the airplane engine mid-flight, it will glide for a time on momentum.

Still waiting for all the major failures people have been clamoring about. I think the real talk is that you can run a lot of dotcoms on a skeleton crew and when money becomes tight you can trim a lot of fat. It’s not something people like to hear because they realize they are the fat

Perhaps that’s me, the fat? If I were let go tomorrow there wouldn’t be any negative consequences for probably at least a year.

I do security things, and it seems those folks are all gone from Twitter.

But my hypothesis is that the negatives won’t emerge for some time, at which point something bad happens and everyone will be standing around shaking their heads at how negligent it was.

Although more generally I do sympathize with the idea that most tech companies are at least a little bloated because money has so often been cheap & revenues always go up historically

I don't like the "trim fat" methaphor. Layoffs are more or less random. There is no good, from the company perspective, selection.

Now is the time for managers and directors to find reasons to let go of the employees they don’t like. Some people don’t like eating fat, others will suck on it all day. Personally I trim a bit of fat off my meats before smoking them

There have been major failures. Several times there were outages at Twitter that were plenty serious enough to be a death knell, or near enough, for a company with less network effect keeping people using them.

I’ve taken FAANG sites down and took it personally when anyone got a 500 error for a minor change. Truth is, no one really cares. You can complain it’s down but who are you going to leave them for? Welcome to running a lean ship. Twitter isn’t hurting

Come on. I have been whining about Twitter et al. being bloated for years. There is no way all those engineers were needed.

I Twitter fails due to the mass layoffs it doesn't prove much either since it might be too hard to unwind a mess.

Neeva was TBTF. Had nothing to do with AI.

Then again, maybe you don't have much worth writing or much to contribute - better off letting previous iterations of humanity do it for you.

Dismissing an important skillset by pretending it could be magical is called clickbait. The advantage of knowing a second language is to be able to communicate and understand a new segment of humanity. This is like creating a paper: being able to pump gas into your car affords no general improvement in hair growth on your toes.

The paper is tapping on a long-standing debate about the effects of being bilingual. For a long time, it was thought that being bilingual was actively harmful, and indeed it's been shown in studies that babies with parents who speak different languages to them are slower to reach some linguistic milestones. Later research showed that this was just temporary, and not only was there no negative effect, but bilingual kids tended to do better on some tests of aptitude than monolinguals. And now this study is saying that no, maybe they're not better after all.

Wikipedia, as always, has more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_effects_of_bilingual...

especially on a programming forum. Knowing Python, SQL, and R has been hugely beneficial. I can read Ruby scripts and colleagues can talk me through JS without me ever writing those.

Would be surprised if knowing multiple spoken language didn't help at all!

Eek, why don't we fix AMT and stop treating employees so poorly? This whole scheme is utterly repellent to me and makes me feel incompetent to have to read and consume it. Why so many stratagems around something that is literally incompetent?

"I don't know what I'm doing, but I will figure it out in a transitory future period" Does Jerome Powell run FB?

You have violated the number one rule in Silicon Valley: If it doesn't take at least "N" "engineers" to "solve" a problem who report directly to moi, then how am I relevant? So I agree this is entirely possible, but no one would build this with any funding.

The fed generated money like Germany in WW2. Unfortunately people at tech companies don't understand the so called laws of supply and demand and just hired people with no logical thinking at all.

Based on what evidence do you suggest that they hired people with "no logical thinking". You are part of the problem. I'm sick and tired of engineers being ultra skeptical about the skills of other engineers. It leads to constant peacocking.

In the teach world, if you didn't blog about it you don't know it.

I don't think that's a fair assessment. The root reason is a lot of tech companies believed that the growth in users from the pandemic would be more sustainable ("buying the dip", as it were): after all heads you win, tails you have to lay off 17,000 people. This is, of course, the tails side of this.

Looks like they understood it and operated exactly according to supply and demand.

If the Feds did not raise interest, I doubt any of this would have happened, inflation might cross 10% though.

What bothers me about this space is that interest rates are seemingly not the right hammer to deal with inflation precisely and the Fed itself doesn't understand the relationship between interest rates and inflation (i.e. recall "transitory"). As a programmer, I liken it to seeing a kernel fault, isolating the fault to a certain file via a stack trace, then deleting that file and its upstream/downstream implications and hoping for the best.