I can't take mark zuckerberg seriously anymore. He's made so many missteps recently: meta-verse, meta-glasses, llama, hiring wang, meta reality labs, etc.
He should probably hire a proper "number 2" (not someone political like sandberg) -- someone who "gets" the internet, like how he did when he was a harvard geek making a hot-or-not clone in his dorm room. I'm not sure acqui-hiring the moltbook founders is the move.
That being said, I think the one silver lining is that it seems like big-tech now has a willingness to hire people who actually ship things of value, like peter steinberger. Another nail in the coffin for leetcode, I hope.
He’s still making money out of adverts on Web 2.0 platforms. A lot of money. Clearly Zuck is a brilliant businessman. That does not mean he is a brilliant technologist. He doesn’t have to be, so long as he can keep making money.
Eventually there may be a big misstep, perhaps, something big enough to bring down the company. But he’s never come close to date. He’s so good at making money from ads that he can afford to keep burning cash on fruitless projects, hiring people that don’t deliver, building infrastructure he might not need. That’s a testament to his performance as a money maker.
Meta is an advertising machine. Not something I’d want to be associated with, but you cannot deny that he has built an incredible ad machine, probably the greatest ad machine ever built - whereas Google had to deliver sophisticated and costly tech to maintain their machine (maps, google search, gmail) meta’s only technical breakthrough has been to hyperscale a php website.
> Near zero interest rates + COVID remote work + PPP loans = Booming economy
One more factor to add to the equation...when everyone went remote during COVID, all brick-and-mortar businesses had to quickly move to conducting their businesses online driving demand for SWEs.
Company wanting to hire essentially has two options: (1) hire from the pool of fresh candidates coming out of the Universities, (2) hire people who are already employed.
This means that to inflate the numbers of software engineers on the market you also have only two options: (1) have the Universities start to somehow exponentially produce the number of software engineers which the market could not amortize, (2) let go a substantial number of software engineers who now (in between 2020-2025) all of the sudden cannot find a new job anymore
(1) is a non-sense and for (2) to take place market needs to stagnate, which is what is happening. Reasons are manyfold.
> In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.
This is the K-shaped economy playing out. Its a signal that the american middle class is hollowing out. Bad, very bad.
Really? Anyone here feel like the job market is thriving right now? Anyone surprised?
Bc I was like - yeah, totally, makes sense, not surprised at all.
If anything, I am waiting for that dreaded "business update" calendar invite from HR. I am already researching and taking notes on trade schools. Ready to punch that ticket any day now.
> Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world.
I get the impression that microsoft and the pc world have given up on consumer hardware and instead are completely focused on enterprise and ai. That's why windows 11 is saturated with bugs and is basically unusable, but enterprise is forced to buy it.
It definitely feels that way. Microsoft has made it clear they don't care about the consumer market anymore. Xbox is dying or already dead, they've done nothing with the game studios they acquired, Windows laptop OEMs still ship plastic 1080p crap targeted at general office workers.
They'll continue to sell it, because it's effectively free surveillance for them, but they certainly aren't focusing on the consumer market as a target demographic.
And with less and less windows-specific apps now a days, there's very little reason for the average user to buy a Windows laptop, especially over this new macbook.
Indeed they haven't, Microsoft is only one of the biggest publishers in the world, and regardless of XBox the console, Microsoft Games Studios is doing great.
What have they produced recently? I found a few lists online and looked at Wikipedia, and their big hits are all > 10-15 years old (or sequels/re-releases). Many of those are decade-old acquisitions of franchises that were ancient at acquisition.
Distribution and marketing? I wouldn't even know how to buy one of their games. I have a Linux gaming PC, a Mac, a switch, an iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and a XBone. We spend a few hundred dollars a year on video games, but I haven't seen anything suggesting any MS studio products work on any of our hardware, or are available on any distribution channels that reach any of our devices. Maybe they're on iPad, iPhone or Android? I haven't checked because we don't use those for gaming.
Windows is at ~ 95% of steam market share, so I guess that's one bright point for MS studios. However, many game developers release on Steam and console, so it doesn't imply that 95% of those other studios' customers could run a MS studio game.
Customer retention? The last time I plugged the XBone in, I spent 45 minutes screwing with bugs in the account password dialog, finally logged in, and then walked away. I unplugged it for good after the updates completed. In contrast, I spent less time than that installing Linux + Steam on my most recent PC. I guess they dropped support for XBox One at some point? I started having problems with it five years ago. I don't remember a big compatibility-break launch since I purchased it, so I'd expect it to be able to turn on + connect to their servers, or at least run the games it's already downloaded + installed.
I do own one MS game that still works: A copy of Minecraft. It took over 8 hours to figure out how to get it stop constantly asking my kids for my master MS account password. That did convince me to actually wipe all data from my Microsoft account, so I guess it was a win.
There are some decent-looking AMD + nvidia laptops from Razer. No idea if they run Linux well, or are reliable, but they seem to tick all the spec boxes. For instance, they have a higher resolution than the monitor I owned in 2001. (3200 × 1800 @ 120Hz minimum on their 14"); probably OK battery life if you don't use the discrete GPU.
From what I've seen of Win 11 in VMs, it doesn't seem compatible with the phrase "decent laptop".
>That's why windows 11 is saturated with bugs and is basically unusable
That's far, far from my experience. What bugs are you talking about that make it "unusable"? I've been on Win11 for years and it's been no problem at all. No bugs that I can think of.
You must be lucky. They have been well-documented. [1]
The constant, annoying reminder to sign up for One Drive is enough to drive me crazy and want to throw my device out the window (I am writing this from a windows 11 laptop that I use for experimentation).
Apple seemed to copy this one exactly as iCloud asks you the same all the time. Honestly these days Linux feels like the only sane platform as you can customize it properly.
I am a big fan of the command line, but running linux as my daily driver is like trying to daily a kit car -- it breaks all the time and i spend more time than i want fixing it. With macos, i get my beloved command line, nice hardware, and a reliable OS. Win win win.
> I am a big fan of the command line, but running linux as my daily driver is like trying to daily a kit car -- it breaks all the time and i spend more time than i want fixing it.
Linux powers the entire world. Billions if not tens of billions of devices. It doesn't "break all the time like a kit car". I switched my wife's desktop from Ubuntu to Debian about a year ago and I haven't heard a single complain. Not a single crash. She hardly reboots her computer. The thing is just rock solid and it needs to be: she works from home and she spends 8 hours+ on her (Linux) computer.
Fair. Last time I tried to daily Linux was 2016 with a crappy dell I had laying around, and I am pretty sure that I did not know what I was doing. I have been on Mac since 2012 and I tried windows in 2019 only to regret it, then went back to mac.
That is also far from my experience. I'm starting to think it's more about you than about the tech. I have 5 machines running Linux, and they never break (1 server and 4 VMs). I have 4 machines running Windows (3 physical, 1 VM), with zero problems for many years.
that really doesn't make sense to me. You need to have people use Windows in everyday life so that they don't need to be retrained when in the workforce for Windows to keep its stranglehold on the enterprise.
Quite the opposite -- you get promoted for complexity and inefficiency, and pretending like you are the only SME who can handle it, thus creating a dependency between you and your manager. A good technical manager can see this coming a mile away. Bad ones don't but it costs the company.
The sad thing is that it is common to get fired when you make things better bc then your work is perceived as "done" and your skills are no longer necessary. There are countless IT job stories where someone delivers a technical solution that saves a company a ton of money or generates revenue, then they get fired bc the solution has been delivered and an off shore team has been hired to maintain the work.
Big corps suck.
Edit -- reading some the responses here on this topic and they are...eye-opening and depressing.
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