The Axe

It was a melancholic start to the year. It rained incessantly outside and the mood was grey. Then came the axe in the form of layoffs at “BigTech” firms with Google doing it’s first major layoff ever . I was emotionally at-sea for 2 weeks as I reeled from the new of the Microsoft layoffs. As a 31 year old with sufficient financial savings and no kids or debts/loans hovering over me, I would be fine . But I’m also an immigrant who existence depends on having a job here and who had spent a lot of effort/time moving things around to get here. It would be annoying to put it mildly . I’m just happy that I coped by watching TV and reading books; and didn’t take up my usual route of getting drunk/stoned/spaced out.

It is a tough time and I directly know multiple people who have been affected. One silver lining was the report that most tech workers are landing a job within 3 months . So this is more of a displacement that a destruction of tech jobs. They’re moving away from more speculative areas to places of clearer ROI/need.

Layoffs also brought attention to economic iniquities with the tech industry itself with CEOs getting multi-million-dollar pay packets and no direct consequences while other bear the consequences of their decisions. People frame this as merely a moral problem, but it’s a public policy one . France and Germany make it hard to layoff workers which means the wanton hiring that’s triggering this is less likely to happen in the first. Of course, there is always the American claim that this makes industries “less dynamic” . Ah, hiring and firing are but key sources of dynamism in an organisation not the quality of its talent, it’s psychological safety or the ability of its workers to focus on their work.

It definitely felt horrible to realise that the big tech layoffs were largely financially motivated and felt opportunistic. Even accounting for economic contractions, the companies still earn billions in profit and pay dividends to shareholders . They face no chances of bankruptcy and could take a hit in profitability for a few years till they reallocate their human capital. But that would hurt the shareholders who are also common citizen and have financial interests in the stocks staying high . I don’t mind this financial book rebalancing per se as long as people have safety nets; we should aim to minimize the suffering and disruption involved.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT took over the airwaves and I (like many others) was genuinely impressed by its capabilities. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.“ say Arthur C. Clarke; and that’s truly what we have. After many years of research papers and demos, the world has access to some really cool new technology . The last time I was wowed similarly was when Google demoed Duplex. The excitement all around is palpable.

Creatives, technologists, and designers are excited by the possibilities. Engineers are happy that they have something other than a new Javascript framework to look forward to. Founders and Venture Capitalists are excited they have a new buzzword to add to their pitches and fool their LPs with. All in all a good moment. Personally, this feels like a truly transformative technology to me that will change a lot of worflows. It’s easy to see tech like this

• Writing my emails, documents, and more.
• Helping me compose things by providing inputs and bouncing off ideas
• Summarising information
• Enabling more programmatic creations for infinite games and custom movies It is not as behind-the-scenes, as say nuclear fusion. It is also much more real and obvious than “blockchains” - can’t believe we had to suffer through that.

Randoms

I watch a lot of Veep and am almost done with the show. It’s a British show in American shows clothing . I also got really confused by my insurance claim payment process for one hot moment.

Me and Namrata spent a lot of time looking for a new place to rent; zeroed in one one - only to realise that our lease ends a month later than we thought. All this effort wasted uuuggghhh.