> I'm calling to tell you that we have found out that your insurance needs renewal. It would be of the utmost importance for you to renew it in order to avoid fees. Moreover, we'd like to offer you a 20% discount in order to continue our great partnership together.
> Banana Insurance
And go this:
> Hey,
> Your insurance is expiring. Renew it or pay fees. We'll give you 20% off to keep milking you for cash.
Software industry is a giant bubble 90% of the time, so it's usually the first one to go. But no most industries seem to be hiring averagely to better then average at least as per the JOLTs report.
Software companies are pretty uniquely positioned such that they have far more employees than are operationally necessary.
Not to say that those employees don't provide value, but the spread between operationally stable employment levels and current headcount is far wider than other industries.
During COVID, software companies massively overhired, because the executives in charge went all "hurr durr, digital is the future boys! Nobody is going outside anymore!". Not to mention the government was handing out money like candy through various schemes complete with low interest rates. I believe Facebook (as example) alone went from a headcount from 40k to over 80k employees in just 2 years of COVID.
2022+ was the "return to normal" with online trends quickly reverting back to pre-COVID levels. This resulted in a sudden drop in online economics (such as ad spend) that could justify the bloated workforces.
Drastically increased interest rates to fight inflation also cut off the cheap money flow to companies that would previously burn it like crazy on "R&D" and the like.
It's the end of the internet service software business cycle. This plus a ton of unprofitable VC funded companies unable to get the funding they were hoping to get with interest rates up lead to a massive pullback.
Will things change next year? Maybe if some IPOs hit and the VC pump and dump pipeline gets back up and running.
A lot of these companies have people doing no real work, even afterwards of layoffs, they're bloated. You can't layoff essential people otherwise you die.
You can look at companies like Spotify and Twitter, they ship like one feature a year if you average.
Only to a small extend. Mostly it happens in software. And no it's not just "overhiring" (that doesn't happen across so many industries). That's only part of it. We all know with AI we won't need white collar jobs anymore. If I had children I wouldn't allow them to study CS. Not anymore.
What would you have them study instead? If you're optimizing for what AI is least likely to be able to accomplish, some forms of blue collar labor would probably rank highest on the list.
I feel like you're overestimating the impact of AI on the current wave of dismissals. It's hard to say without any actual data, but there seems to be a lot of FUD regarding AI replacing white-collar and CS jobs.
I don't have better data than you, but I'd be very much surprised if AI would replace computer scientists rather than being a tool which will change what we'll have to be good at as computer scientists.
There is a lot of digitalisation to be done and AI might change the price of doing that, but it won't make a whole academic discipline obsolete.
Squiggle Golf is fun! Would be great if users could opt-in to get emailed with the new level once it's ready. You can bcc all of them in a single email to avoid costs (I'm not sure if this would work).
Thanks a lot! I think the current setup generates the level based on a hash of the date, so you should get a new level at your local midnight hour based on your browser's reported timezone. There might be some small issues around daylight savings times or leap seconds since it was pretty quickly hacked together.
You can play the game completely offline as a PWA and still get a new level every day (and you can in theory also play an infinite number of past and future games if you just change the url params). It was inspired by the pre-NYT Wordle where the game was always playable offline and you still get the same game as everyone else that day, but instead of using a fixed number of possible words/games, it makes levels with a seeded PRNG using the date.
If I find the time to work on it again I'll add the level editor so people can share custom levels, and a backend so you could sign in and share your levels or daily scores. But with my growing family I'm too busy for the foreseeable future, so it may remain as just the proof of concept that it is right now.
Since you're talking about business specifically, then no it's not the best piece of advice imo. There are plenty wonderful things and works of art that nobody really wants to buy or pay money for.
You could make a really great website with a lot of cool animations, but if it serves no utility then people will probably not pay for it. Maybe a 1-month subscription or a one time payment to take a tour of the website, but that's probably going to be it. So it's not sustainable on the long-term, or in other words, it's probably not a good business.
"Make something people want" (YC's mantra) seems much more fitting for business intentions.
I can usually read 10 minutes of spoken content in less than 3 minutes. Accompanying video is often useless, unless there are specific diagrams or illustrations/photos. I don't need to see someone's face moving to absorb the info. Probably lots of people out there with similar gripes.
I didn't create the tool, so I can't claim to know the author's intentions. To me, this would be very useful in a variety of circumstances:
- the 15 minute video containing 3 minutes of useful information
- tutorials that you're trying to follow step-by-step that have been tightly edited such that actually doing each step while following along is impossible
- the video equivalent of listicles in which you're really only interested in the list, not the padding
- quickly getting an idea of whether or not it's worth your time to watch a lengthy video by quickly scrubbing through the content
