#tech-workers

#tech-workers

Spreading across a highway so that no cars could pass, 100 or so protesters banged saucepans in a deafening racket that echoed through this remote valley of eastern France last month.They were marching toward a nearby castle where the French president was due to arrive, determined to stand in his way and create cacophony around the visit.

Working from the office should be the default for employees, chancellor Jeremy Hunt told business leaders on Wednesday as he claimed that logging on from home could stifle creativity.He told the British Chambers of Commerce conference he believes the shift to home working during the Covid-19 pandemic is being reversed by firms.

For most of the Information Age, companies that wanted to scale invested in server farms and hired teams to keep them running.At one of my first startup jobs, I walked in one day to find two sleeping co-workers who'd spent the night configuring servers at a co-locating facility 60 miles away.Soon after, when I worked at a publicly-traded company, our on-prem data center was resilient enough to operate through a moderate earthquake.

Recently, there has been a lot of debate over working hours among people who have jobs.The debate mentions how some companies exploit their employees and make them work for long hours.For example, many Amazon employees have said on record that they work more than 10 hours a day.However, some tech workers claim that they work for four hours a day.

Some early adopters are already experimenting with the generative AI program ChatGPT at the office.In seconds, consultants are conjuring decks and memos, marketers are cranking out fresh copy and software engineers are debugging code.Almost 30% of the nearly 4,500 professionals surveyed this month by Fishbowl, a social platform owned by employer review site Glassdoor, said that they've already used OpenAI's ChatGPT or another artificial intelligence program in their work.

The world of UX/UI design can be daunting, and knowing where to start if you're studying on your own is the first hurdle.It doesn't help that there are an overwhelming number of beginner resources, either.People considering a career in UX/UI design can find blogs, podcasts, tutorials, and free courses galore, yet there's no easy way to piece all of that information together to form a single cohesive career path.

Amazon plans to lay off 9,000 corporate and tech workers by the end of April, adding to the 18,000 roles it already cut late last year and this January, Andy Jassy, the company's chief executive, said in a note to employees on Monday.The new layoffs, which amount to roughly 3 percent of its corporate work force, will target workers in some of Amazon's most profitable divisions, which had previously been spared, including Amazon's cloud computing business and its advertising operations.

Get Laid (Off)
Amid rumors of a multi-billion dollar deal with OpenAI, Microsoft has announced that it's laying off a whopping 10,000 employees, making it the latest tech company to let go of a large chunk of its workers.In a memo sent to employees and published on the company's blog, CEO Satya Nadella said that over the next few months, the company would be laying off up to five percent of its global workforce, with some impacted being notified immediately.

In retrospect, it seems like it had to happen sometime.The shining, glorious, high-flying tech sector has come hurtling down to Earth.Not that it's been so horriblewe're talking more of an emergency landing than oxygen masks and brace positions.But ambitions have been checked as rising interest rates brought an end to years of easy cash, a point driven home in recent earnings calls and unprecedented mass layoffs from companies that used to do everything short of sending gold-plated helicopters to snatch up graduating computer science degree-holders from the nation's top universities.

Image: Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images Tech analyst Gartner forecasts that 51% of US knowledge workers will work under hybrid arrangements by the end of 2023 and 20% will be fully remote.The blend of hybrid and fully remote knowledge workers will be more pronounced in the US than the rest of the world, which on average should see 39% of knowledge workers in hybrid work and 9% fully remote.

Keystone, a 176-unit Marriott TownePlace Suites hotel at 491, 493 and 497 West San Carlos Street and 270 Josefa Street in downtown San Jose, concept.SAN JOSE A project to build a new downtown San Jose hotel has officially gotten underway with demolition work for the 176-room lodging complex that would sprout near the footprint of Google's proposed transit village.

Bailey Harris, 25, worked as a recruiter for a big tech company for more than a year and a half before she was laid off in January.After the initial shock wore off, she decided to tell her story three days later on TikTok.I was never really worried about layoffs, she said in the video, which she recorded from a car.

kikovic - stock.adobe.comBy
 If customers were demanding before the pandemic, the increased need for online shopping and digital retail during lockdowns has made them even harder to handle.The past year has seen firms which have never before considered being online taking to digital in a bid to change with the times.

Leaky Faucet
After catching snippets of text generated by OpenAI's powerful ChatGPT tool that looked a lot like company secrets, Amazon is now trying to head its employees off from leaking anything else to the algorithm.According to internal Slack messages that were leaked to Insider, an Amazon lawyer told workers that they had "already seen instances" of text generated by ChatGPT that "closely" resembled internal company data.

The agency estimates that the rule will raise wages by a collective $300 billion annually.FTC Commissioner nominee Lina M. Khan testifies during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee nomination hearing on April 21, 2021, in Washington, D.C. Graeme Jennings-Pool / Getty Images The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Thursday that it has proposed a sweeping new rule that would bar employers from imposing noncompete clauses on workers, a move that could have major benefits for tens millions of workers across the U.S.
The FTC said that employers' use of noncompete clauses, which typically prohibit workers from moving jobs to competitors within certain time frames, is "​​a widespread and often exploitative practice."

Joe Biden is planning  on seeking a second term in 2024, which could make him 86 years old at the end of his presidency.Some democrats question if Biden really should run again considering his age.A  New York Times poll conducted this July with more than 800 democratic voters shows that 64 percent of them don't want Biden to be the party's next presidential candidate.

November was a bleak month for tech workers.Meta, Amazon, Lyft, Stripe and Twitter laid off thousands of employees.Microsoft and Google announced hiring slowdowns.The cutbacks and hiring freezes affected not only veteran employees.Some tech companies laid off recent college graduates or rescinded their job offers.

November was a bleak month for tech workers.Meta, Amazon, Lyft, Stripe and Twitter laid off thousands of employees.Microsoft and Google announced hiring slowdowns.The cutbacks and hiring freezes affected not only veteran employees.Some tech companies laid off recent college graduates or rescinded their job offers.

The messages, in simple white text, flashed onto the walls of Twitter's San Francisco headquarters Thursday evening."Musk's Hellscape.""Launching to bankruptcy.""Worthless billionaire."Other messages called Elon Musk, who closed his $44-billion purchase of Twitter late last month, a "Space Karen" and "lawless oligarch."

/dogfooding/ The practice in which tech workers use their own product consistently to see how well it works and where improvements can be made.Software engineers are hungry for excellence.Dogs are hungry for dog food.And software engineers at many companies are hungry to dogfood.In the world of tech, dogfooding means consistently using a product you built, just as a user might, to figure out what works and what needs to be fixed.

Last week, billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk cut close to 3,700 jobs at Twitter - roughly half of the social media platform's workforce.Musk, who paid a reported $44 billion for the service has been looking to find ways to reduce expenditures, while at the same time has begun to implement the "24/7" work culture that he is famous for - including calling upon employees to work around the clock to make the changes he'd like to see.