*If you’re in the US.
Some interns in the US make more than experienced engineers in Europe…
*If you’re in the US.
Some interns in the US make more than experienced engineers in Europe…
I work at a FAANG company. I’ve also worked at startups and smaller national companies. They’re all morally bankrupt, just in many different ways.
Hell, I’ve worked for “tech for good” clients that have done reprehensible things that required legal intervention…
A lot of people are giving Tesla shit here, but surely there should be regulations in place to ensure something like this isn’t allowed to be released for public use?
All of big tech is really worried about this.
If the AI boom is a dud, I can see many of these companies reducing their output further. If someone comes along and competes in their primary offering, there’s a real concern that they’ll lose ground in ways that were unthinkable mere years ago. Someone could legitimately challenge Google on search right now, and someone could build a cheap shop that doesn’t sell Chinese tat and uses local suppliers to compete with Amazon. Tech really shat the bed during the last economic downturn.
I remember joining the industry and switching our company over to full Continuous Integration and Deployment. Instead of uploading DLL’s directly to prod via FTP, we could verify each build, deploy to each environment, run some service tests to see if pages were loading, all the way up to prod - with rollback. I showed my manager, and he shrugged. He didn’t see the benefit of this happening when, in his eyes, all he needed to do was drag and drop, and load the page to make sure all is fine.
Unsurprisingly, I found out that this is how he builds websites to this day…
I work in AI as a software engineer. Many of my peers have PhD’s, and have sunk a lot of research into their field. I know probably more than the average techie, but in the grand scheme of things I know fuck all. Hell, if you were to ask the scientists I work with if they “know AI” they’ll probably just say “yeah, a little”.
Working in AI has exposed me to so much bullshit, whether it’s job offers for obvious scams that’ll never work, or for “visionaries” that work for consultancies that know as little about AI as the next person, but market themselves as AI experts. One guy had the fucking cheek to send me a message on LinkedIn to say “I see you work in AI, I’m hosting a webinar, maybe you’ll learn something”.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of cool stuff out there, and some companies are doing some legitimately cool stuff, but the actual use-cases for these tools where they won’t just be productivity enhancers/tools is low at best. I fully support this guy’s efforts to piledrive people, and will gladly lend him my sword.
Like most big tech companies, they’re actually several divisions all competing with each other. Lately, the AI divisions have latched on to the hype and they’re pushing their wares to other divisions, often with enough clout to keep those in security/privacy quiet. Integrating LLM’s is also a great way for a middle manager type to curry favour with the bosses, and to build little empires for themselves.
There have been several instances where people have released ebooks that are fully AI generated, and are basically scams with no real content or information.
Outside of the “Microsoft bad” comments, this is a prime example of why big tech companies need to stop promoting AI leads to a position where they are able to have influence over initiatives outside of AI.
The worst thing to happen to basically every product/service in tech right now is AI. It’s made Google unreliable in the eyes of normal people for the first time in decades, it’s destroying trust in Amazon content across reviews and Kindle, it’s adding features to Facebook that no one ever wanted, etc.
Most serious SW development is now on Linux laptops/desktops,
I’d love a source for this. To my knowledge, most people that build to Linux hosts still use OSX.
The article says what part of Amazon it was for. It’s for logistics, not AWS, which is a separate division.
Alexa has had AI backing its services for the better part of a decade.
Source: I worked on some of it.
Uhhh…it’s had AI backing it for most of the decade
There has never been a better time for someone to swoop in and remake web search. Hell, there are probably dozens of software engineers from Google that have direct experience with search AND were laid off.
I’m surprised that no one is trying to compete with Google at the weakest point it’s been since going public.
That’s definitely not what’s happening right now at Amazon (where I work), and based on what I’ve heard from coworkers from Google and Meta, it’s basically the same story over there.
Hell, we’ve just had another layoff in our Games division, and many software engineers were enticed to work there so they could cut their teeth on games tech instead of standard micro-services. Now, they’re frantically battling against external candidates for the few internal roles available.
I’m not so sure that’s true in big tech any more.
When goals aren’t met, or projects don’t show validity in the market, those teams get wound down and the employees are laid off. Moonshot projects still exist, but it’s not uncommon to see execs be parachuted into new orgs with the plebs being fired.
I’d love to, but in terms of pure availability I can get almost everything I’ve ever wanted to listen to, aside from some weird geoblocking or removal of defunct band’s back catalogues.
You would be mortified at how many people in big tech, including those that have directly experienced injustice or unfair treatment at work, simply want no part of a tech union.
Frankly, some industries absolutely need it (e.g. games). If they’ll put up with what they put up with and still choose not to unionize I don’t really know how software engineers will…
They also committed to providing open dumps of their data to make it free to all. At the start, they were doing all the right things.
Yeah, that’s true. It amazes me how some of my team in NYC will make double what I make, but live like I lived when I was a student, and be amazed that I own a car.