pre-empting the AI non existent returns
Absolutely no sympathy from me.
They like the abuse and attack anyone who doesn’t.
They know what’s coming and That’s going to make America grate again.
So I recently interviewed for a job that I did at a competitor. I was a team leader. I was a Senior engineer. I was going up against 300+ people for a single job and I didn’t even make it to the in person interviews. That’s how hard this market is right now. I have 10 years in the industry. And I can’t find a job besides a store clerk position at a grocery store.
Try from India or wherever they’re outsourcing work to
There has never been a better time to switch to Mint, Pop_OS, or Bazzite.
You could just say Linux, lol.
We gotta stop upvoting distro-shilling.
Right and people that don’t know which distros to use will get lost
How are you supposed to get new people in without advising?
Yeah, went Mint 18 months ago. Started at MSDOS in the 1990s, ended at W10.
Well done!
I sometimes feel like bare-metalling FreeDOS. Except that and modern laptops, ha-ha, shouldn’t work too well, but at the same time Lenovo even sold some with it pre-installed.
Would just play X-Wing and TIE Fighter and WarCraft II, edit simple text documents, smile at how right it’d feel.
Did you see that e-mail?
“Nope!”
I am sure the people who just lost their job will be super happy about that.
Already on the way babayyy. Ubuntu gang here we gooooo I know, i know. There are other popular distros but I wanted to start there
Way to go!
I will be looking into these, thanks for sharing! Any top recommendations from the three??
Pop!_OS is my top recommendation for Windows expats, followed by Mint (Cinnamon Edition), and then Bazzite (KDE Plasma desktop). Bazzite is so, so, so good, but it has some unique features that make it a little more frustrating for Windows power users who are new to Linux. But honestly they are all good. Pick one, and if you aren’t vibing with it, try something else.
Also, keep in mind that “distro” and “desktop environment (DTE)” are two different things. Sometimes a distro has a default DTE and sometimes it gives you a choice. The DTE makes the biggest difference to your experience. There are many different DTEs, but the two biggest are GNOME (MacOS-like and moderately customizable) and KDE Plasma (Windows-like by default, but very customizable).
I cannot recommend Bazzite. It’s an atomic distribution, which is pioneer tech that tries to make some things better but in effect makes a lot of things more difficult. FWIW, I’ve been using Linux for 20+ years.
Just go with regular Fedora KDE Desktop. https://fedoraproject.org/kde/
I see that Fedora uses Btrfs, so it should be able to take file system snapshots, which are sort of an alternative to the immutable thing, isn’t it?
Yes, but not really. It can be convenient. Just remember it takes more space so provision accordingly for /.
- Disable secureboot so you don’t have to run a few commands and restart in order to sign keys
- Ensure your drives are formatted to a linux format to reduce headaches with steam libraries
- if the command starts with “sudo(superuser Do)” it’s time to read up on what each part of the command does exactly.
- Linux wants you to mount and unmount your drives(filesystems) manually. Plugging them in won’t instantly allow data transfer.
- Don’t be surprised that almost any linux is a perfectly functional OS with fantastic UX and less day to day hassle and management compared to windows.
Also…
- everything is changeable. But not everything should be changed.
- There will come a time when you need to interact with the command line. This is expected, and no you did not do something wrong.
- Have fun.
Oh if your looking for a distro? Mint is a great entry point (and even can support crusty old graybeards as well).
I recommend Mint. It’s super easy to install and maintain. And very easy to use.
They didn’t have growth mentality.
Cool. I mean I haven’t been able to get past a single 10-minute “I just want to go over the job with you and collect some basic information” phone interview in 6-months.
But ya know. Another 6,000 people on the market is cool too.
I’ve been saying for years the corporate world was getting ready to pull the rug from tech workers. Why do people think educational standards (and as it goes, engineering standards) for software development have been pushed down so much over the last decade? “What if you get hit by a bus??” A well strangely well backed movement to “stop gatekeeping” software development now revealed as a trojan horse to make developers fungible.
Well it might take 2TB of RAM for this buggy prod system to store and retrieve a JSON blob but at least anyone can work on it.
I keep hoping this will spark some sort of anti-capitalist zeitgeist. But labor might be too scattered and individualistic.
Like, why are we all scrambling for a handful of jobs when the rich have so many resources?
“But that’s communism!”
- The USA, probably
It’s easier to fight with each other than it is to fight our puppet-masters.
I lost my job in April 2024 and I finally got my new job at the end of January. Keep your chin up. Look for people you know who could give referrals. That’s how I ended up getting hired. Good luck!
I do try.
Every single former co-worker has ghosted me at this point and even my friends have basically taken a “Hahaha, for sure mate, for sure, hey have you guys ever changed the conversation?” attitude when I bring up connecting me with people.
People suck lol.
The Microsoft is dead. Long live the Linux!
Who will fuck up the settings, control panel, registry, etc. interfaces now? The person who keeps putting Candy Crush on the start menu like it’s their life mission?
It’s probably just another layer of “quality control” that’s gone now.
an LLM.
It’s so funny going through the control panel, getting to more and more esoteric settings, and seeing the UI getting older and older. I ditched Windows after Windows 7 but remember seeing menu themes that looked like they haven’t been updated since Windows NT
That’s because Windows NT is still in there
The Windows Webcam camera settings, when I finally find them on Windows 11 to control pan and zoom, have been the same for 25 years, maybe 30. The thing is, it used to be easy to find the controls, but they keep making Windows slower & harder to use. It’s such a rat nest.
I had pretty much the same experience finding the virtual memory settings on a win11 machine the other day. Same 20 year old dialog, now buried 5 more layers deep.
windows reminds me of the upper and lower facilities in Portal 2. once I somehow managed to trigger a warning window about the memory usage of 16 bit applications on windows 10, even though I think support was removed for them long ago
“Removed”
Dude a senior manager needs to get promoted somehow
Microsoft has 200,000 employees? Dang
And when they start going down financially, they might invade Madagascar or Guyana or something like that as a last resort and turn into a pirate republic, having enough troops. Yes.
Well, shit. Here we go again.
Is there an over/under going on for the rest of the tech sectors 's layoffs this year?
The beatings will continue until tech workers unionize.
There will definitely be more, especially as the economic situation in the US continues to worsen. Big tech works under the unsustainable model of unlimited growth, and even if profits increase, if they don’t increase “enough” they lay off workers. They could save a ton of money by laying off execs, but they’ll never do that.
I’ve found layoffs.fyi to be pretty up to date with tracking how many people are laid off in the tech sector. It’s no wonder that it’s nearly impossible to find a job in tech, and these execs and boards are to blame.
I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t considered a career change, not because of the work itself but because I’m exhausted from worrying about if I’ll have a job to pay the bills tomorrow. The only thing stopping me is that I have no idea what I’d do otherwise.
I have a question. Everyone keeps speaking of the “tech” sector. Does that only refer to IT or does it cover engineers as well? Because in Europe it seems they keep struggling to get enough people with IT knowledge into engineering projects.
is it still hard? even with layoffs, people can get some jobs, eventhough not as high as income as before.
cant say the same for other stem industries, where its already very difficult to get a job in the field prior to even the pandemic. im guessing with all the funding being cut from the sciences , universities might be suffering as are biotech jobs(which are limited and gatekeeped on purpose)
It is, at least in my experience. Further, my recently laid off colleagues have been trying to find work for months, some of whom have been applying for jobs that would require pay cuts, with no luck.
Pretty much every job listing in the tech space gets hundreds if not thousands of applicants because the layoffs have not stopped for three years. You can see what I mean at layoffs.fyi. In tech, 60,000 so far this year, 153,000 in 2024, 264,000 in 2023, and 165,000 in 2022.
That’s not even counting those that graduated in the last couple of years. Those people are in an extra bad spot because they have a large amount of college debt with no way to make their payments.
All of STEM is suffering because of corporate greed and rising anti-intellectualism.
All of STEM is suffering because of corporate greed and rising anti-intellectualism.
How do I say that even … it’s normal. When you are talking about infinite growth being unsustainable, that means that at some point the industry should implode.
They have sort of an oligopoly and stagnation now, which is why all these layoffs happen - the “AI” solves some problems cheaper than people, even accounting for the worse results.
But if we imagine the industry suddenly destroying that oligopoly and becoming interesting again, it still would require less people.
oh yea, i feel sorry for HS and recent grads, especially people in CS, i known about cs problems for a decade. most graduates from my non-prestigious state school are mostly CS majors, and they all complained about the lack of jobs. Biotech is just wierd in general difficult to get in the first place, and mostly a catch-22 situation(the experience is the jobs that already require experience in the entry level jobs)+ the coveted research experience some people are lucky to get in thier undergrad, typically via publish in a science journal, which is pretty much a big deal. i assume this alsos imilar to other schools, space for lab is very limited for each professor, and PI tend to be very stingy of who they let in thier lab.
My bro was laid off in 23, his degree was a wierd hybrid of some programming and tech related, so he dint find a job for a whole year, then landed a very high income job early last decade, until '23, and he hasnt found a job since after the layoff, and is living off of the severance, he hasnt shown interest in finding another job though. my other bro is still in his tech job luckily, they hadnt done massive layoffs yet.
I’ve been heavily considering a career change. I’m in government, so on top of the DOGE bullshit, I can’t even look to the private sector for reprieve because tech layoffs have been insane for over 3 years.
By “Big tech” I think you meant “capitalism”
Sure, it’s just even worse with big tech.
Not every company under capitalism is publicly traded with shareholders to answer to.
I have no idea but I’m definitely going to say the tone of rolling big tech layoffs doesn’t stop here.
This would LITERALLY Not have Happened if we just CUT THEIR TAXES! LITERALLY that’s the ONLY Reason Companies LAYOFF Staff!
We should have given Elon another billion! Then, we would truly live in utopia. Alas, it was not so.
now its going to be run by none other than VOUGHT, which is also the evil nazi corporation in the BOYZ.
The tech industry is about to become a total shit show. Mark my words
its been bad since it started in 2023. i shudder to think about stem labs though.
About to? It’s been brutal for the past 3 years.
Yeah but mainly because of how insanely good it was for the 3 years before that. Covid pumped insane amounts of money into tech, which in turn lead to hiring WAY more people than were actually needed. This is just the correction of that, getting back to sustainable levels.
That correction ended two years ago. This is larger and longer.
There’s interest rates, section 174, AI, and heaven knows what else.
No, this is a correction after the CEO made very poor investments into an LLM company run by a crypto grifter that’s amounted in little to no ROI. So now it’s either every employee is an AI grifter or unemployed. All other projects are cost recovery to feed the spiral of enshitification.
Are you sure about that?
It’s been a total shit show for quite some time now…
The article says that they outperformed expectations, and that they’d decided that they didn’t need some layers of management. I don’t think that that’s intrinsically crazy; there are tech companies that have emphasized having a relatively flat structure, like Google.
One objective is to reduce layers of management, the spokesperson said. In January Amazon announced that it was getting rid of some employees after noticing “unnecessary layers” in its organization.
Sucks for those that lost their jobs, but this sounds promising. Layer after layer of management slows everything down. It turns a 1 hour task into a 3 month crawl of endless meetings and back and forth and waiting.
The problem with companies like Microsoft is that they’ve become completely pointless. They don’t innovate anymore. They don’t make anything useful. If you make Microsoft more efficient, they’ll just suck ass more efficiently.
Sorry but this is completely untrue. Microsoft are still a very innovative company.
They have a shitton of other products, services, and tech though?
Just because it’s not marketed at you doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
I interact with the development ecosystem that Microsoft largely controls. They’re constantly doing new stuff there.
Shit megacorps? Yeah. No innovation? No.
The problem is that they’re too fucking big. Office used to be the shining star of Microsoft, but now, it’s a total piece of shit. My company recently switched from Google to Microsoft, and holy shit, it’s a downgrade.
Outlook is the biggest pile of shit software I’ve encountered in years. It’s eventually consistent but without user feedback, it’s very slow, meeting rooms aren’t consistent about meeting room responses, email filtering rules don’t work reliably… I could go on.
Word sucks, too. Google Docs is way easier to use. In Word, copy and paste doesn’t work as you’d expect, even from Word doc to Word doc, there’s no templating in OneDrive, there aren’t shared folders unless you set up a whole SharePoint site… I could go on here, too.
It’s this stupid, stupid focus on AI tools. AI ain’t making shit better! AI shouldn’t replace humans or things humans work on: it should augment humans. Products still need development on UX. AI should be incorporated into UX without being shoved down our throats. But these dumbass investors who don’t understand tech are jumping on the fucking bandwagon, and execs are towing the line.
Sorry for the rant, but Microsoft is more than just development tools.
Also, they need to get ads out of my fucking operating system. I don’t want my operating system natively communicating with the internet and recommending news stories. Fucking cancer
Give people the right to work so corpos can’t do this shit.
Or better yet, the right to life without work as a prerequisite
Can someone explain how the supply chains would sustain people not working