Hacker News Reader

650on Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to a quarter of its workforce

what about the kind of bureaucracy where it takes 10 people to do what 2 could get done in 30-40 hours of week? the kind where one engineer is digging the hole while the scrum master, project manager, program manager, swe manager, director, HR, business analyst look on?

650on Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to a quarter of its workforce

i think they most likely will choose to stay yes, i'm just saying from the perspective of an outsider looking in, many of the jobs at microsoft were not needed.

650on Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to a quarter of its workforce

my thoughts:

- bullshit jobs is a thing and many of these positions were make work anyways

- yes philosophically and economically, who will buy X product if all employees are laid off is a thing

- some of these will be rehired, some will be layed off if the voluntary buyout percentage is not large enough

- opinion: Microsoft as a company is a has been dinosaur, soon to be IBM, its (engineer) salaries were on the lower end and were very PM (Program Manager) heavy

- there is a lot of entrenched bureaucracy and top down mandates at this company.

- i personally use Macbooks/MacOS over Surface/XP, Google Docs over Word, GMail over Outlook, Slack over Teams, Firefox over Edge, etc. their user facing products are severely lacking in user experience.

- from my time in the tech industry/friends I understand their bureaucracy existing for the needs of the bureaucracy. their c-suite/leadership is a bunch of world salad morons

650on The era of speedball capitalism

Yes Safari copied it differently I guess

650on The era of speedball capitalism

The intro is great and has been making the rounds online:

“ In the past year American markets have digested the largest-ever initial public offering (SpaceX), equity raise by a public company (Google) or a foreign firm (sk Hynix), private-funding round (Openai) and private-debt deal (Broadcom), as well as most of the biggest bond issue in history (Amazon). There was the first $1trn exchange-traded fund, or etf (Vanguard), a record-breaking cash pile (Berkshire Hathaway) and stock-buyback programme (Nvidia), and the consummation of the largest-ever leveraged buyout (Electronic Arts). Then there are the enormous mergers in railways (Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern), utilities (NextEra and Dominion Energy) and media (Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery)—the last of which led, this week, to the largest ever junk-bond offering, beating a record set only last week (SoftBank). New markets have been created out of thin air (for compute) or become much bigger (for predictions). Worries about massive corporate scandals (First Brands) and hedge-fund blow-ups (Situational Awareness), which would have once occupied investors’ attention for months, are steamrollered by the relentless, totalising and extraordinarily flexible machine that is American finance.”

650on METR Report on OpenAI / Hugging Face Hacking Incident

I feel my job as an engineer is pretty safe, lots of domain knowledge required. Very confident no business type anywhere in the chain above me would be able to do the work I do in a month in even a year with the help of AI. Do we need 3 engineers now instead of 5 for the same output? Sure, can we replace a team of 5 junior, senior, staff with 1 staff - no unless all you do is maintenance. Business types are reaching.

650on The A.I. In Google's New Pixel 11 Is Not Helpful

Google is entrenched with career opportunists who are self serving, and are, excuse the lack of a better word, shitting out work to move stupid KPIs and continue the bureaucracy. A bloated Product org that advocates that something must be done, and is not focused.

650on Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

The first sentence is quite telling

>We’ve got amazing talent, world-class compute and products…

Products are third on the list. Google is an incubator for talent first and foremost. Products are an afterthought

650on Microsoft raises Xbox prices by up to 43%

Both the fact she spent 2 years at MS as a Marketing employee out of college and 4 years after she left MS she was VP at Facebook are true simultaneously, check the Wikipedia link I sourced.

650on Microsoft raises Xbox prices by up to 43%

Please provide a rebuttal. 4 years from a marketing role they were in out of college at Microsoft to VP Product and Engineering at Meta?

650on Microsoft raises Xbox prices by up to 43%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asha_Sharma

Bachelor of Science in Management from University of Minnesota

Marketing role at Microsoft 2011-2013 out of college, standard average college grad role.

---

There are thousands of more intelligent, harder working, better credentialed, better achieving college grads alone at this point.

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COO of Porch ~2013-2017 - how does one go from a standard marketing role to COO, ok whatever maybe its a smol startup

"After departing Porch, she joined Facebook as VP Product & Engineering for their Messenger and Instagram Direct products."

lmfao - more credence to the fact that most "Product" roles are leeches. VP Product and Engineering at Meta is absolutely crazy at this point in anyones career.

Management Degree -> Marketing Role -> COO of startup (lolwut) -> VP Product/Eng at Meta (cough nepotism? cough)

---

COO of Instacart in 2021 LMAO

President of Core AI at Microsoft in February 2024 LMAO

insert "i have no technical ability whatsoever"

650on Microsoft raises Xbox prices by up to 43%

Ponzi scheme stock market is also relevant here. Productivity will max out if RSI AGI doesn't pan out.

650on YC founder asks desperate job seekers to tattoo themselves for an interview

His apology seemed AI generated as well

650on Google kills Earth AI generator after one day

Product managers at Google have a strangehold on their bad releases. It's become a whole thing for engineers to have to please their XFN (cross functional) partners in product and UX for review cycles and promos.

650on Meta shares tumble as Mark Zuckerberg tries to sell his vision for AI 'agents

Stock is down more than 12% over the past 5 days. I think Meta still has a strong hold on the online advertising market, but growth from here is hard.

Noteworthy stats: EPS $6.18, missing the consensus expectation of roughly $7.14 due to heavy costs.

One-Time Charges: Impacted by a $2.4 billion charge for legal proceedings and $1.18 billion in severance from recent workforce reductions.

It's now down 23% over the past 12 months, and the stock is now the same price as Sept 2024

650on Meta Reports Second Quarter 2026 Results

Stock is down quite a bit after hours. I think Meta still has a strong hold on the online advertising market, but growth from here is hard.

Noteworthy stats: EPS $6.18, missing the consensus expectation of roughly $7.14 due to heavy costs.

One-Time Charges: Impacted by a $2.4 billion charge for legal proceedings and $1.18 billion in severance from recent workforce reductions.

It's now down 16% over the past 12 months, and the stock is now the same price as Dec 2024

650on I wouldn't say Pangram is broken, but I would say that it's brittle

Adding another anecdote, but Pangram flagged an essay I wrote last week as AI-assisted when it wasn't. I take Pangram results with a grain of salt now.

650on 'AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making'

I don't think this specific post is a dupe.

650on Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

"Shield the team from the business." The assumption underneath this one is that attention is finite and context switching is expensive. That assumption is intact. What changed is the cost of starving the team of context. Engineers prompting AI tools without business context just produce fluent, plausible, wrong work, at scale."

Too many teams and organizations have business types, mostly PM's who seek to lord over their area of know how and see themselves as delegators and mini CEOs, actively avoid looping engineers in to validate themselves. Engineers need to take on PM roles, and the PM role needs to be 1:50+ eng or go.

650on Politician reads AI prompt during assembly

I have both experienced and hear my coworkers across the tech industry complaining about having to parse slop from their peers, management and juniors they work with. AI comments on their merge requests that sound right, but are subtly incorrect and irrelevant that add to their cognitive load. PRD (Product Requirements Document) slop from PM's that are adding features for the sake of it and is essentially busy work. Leadership asking to add AI to evaluate employees and dashboards out the wazoo.

The floor has been raised for sure, and I am writing less boilerplate than before, and am able to diagnose bugs in my work quicker, but the amount of people that seemingly just copy and paste the AI output without critically thinking is causing me distress. There are seemingly no consequences either, more AI = more good.

650on The AI jobs apocalypse probably isn't coming anytime soon

You still need handholding, you can’t just give a few junior devs Claude Opus 5 and expect them to recreate Instagram in a few weeks. Frontend and backend basics sure, but security, scale, etc. need prior knowledge.

650on Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs

I very much agree with this. Even the top tier models today, without the unit tests, without integration tests, and domain experts reviewing the code would flounder for 50% of the work they do. Sure they can write the unit tests and integration tests themselves, but at that point you aren't in need of a specific system being built, but rather an out of the box solution would probably fit your needs. It does speed up the grunt boilerplate work of development quite a bit, it does help with gnarly bugs and the like, but expertise is still needed. And we as engineers/programmers have systems in place that make using AI easier, we have the human context windows to be able to parse the technical jargon the AI spits out. Will AI for the masses be akin to slightly better automation?

650on Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs

I've been seeing quite a few companies juicing short term margins and quarter to quarter maxxing even more than before, one such example:

https://x.com/MaxAnderson/status/2080229375773941871 https://xcancel.com/MaxAnderson/status/2080229375773941871 --- As someone who has personally spent $500k / mo+ on Google Ads for years, I can tell you with certainty:

This revenue growth in Search is artificial & extremely unhealthy for Google’s business long term

Search volumes are declining as legacy search is being increasingly cannibalized by non-monetized LLM queries

Google’s response?

Manufacture revenue growth via short-sighted, highly extractive, customer-hostile tactics. I.e. charge advertisers more for lower quality clicks, including clicks they do not want and explicitly did not approve Google to charge them for

A few examples to illustrate:

For all of its history until recently, Google operated on a 2nd price auction model

I.e. if you bid $5 CPC and the next highest bidder bids $1 CPC, Google charged you $1.01 for the click (one penny more than the 2nd highest bidder) rather than the $5 you bid

This was a genius move by Google early on as it incentivizes advertisers to input their true maximum willingness to pay rather than trying to play the game of bidding low and constantly adjusting to try to stay just ahead of the next highest bidder while still not paying too much

However recently, Google silently deprecated the 2nd price auction and began charging advertisers as much as their bid and budget caps allow, regardless of what anyone else is bidding

It’s a short-sighted cash grab at the expense of the long term health of the advertiser ecosystem

Making thing worse, Google also recently nerfed keyword targeting precision

Google previously had precise keyword targeting settings that allowed advertisers pick individual search phrases to bid on, defined down to the character w/ exact match or phrase match targeting

This was one of the core features that made search advertising magic, enabling advertisers to run extremely precise campaigns based on exactly what their target customer typed

But now, even if you bid on a specific term or phrase using the strictest exact -match targeting settings, Google will show your ad across 1000’s of unrelated keywords, labeling them as as “exact match (close variant)”

The definition of “close variant” means whatever they want it to and changes constantly. The result is advertisers get billed for clicks that are totally irrelevant to their business and that their targeting settings explicitly forbid Google from targeting. Google does it anyway and there’s no ability to turn this off

So now exact match is broad match, and broad match is just meaningless spam

This is all very bad for advertisers, but for Google, it allows them to show your ad and bill you for clicks across 1000x more searches that were previously going unmonetized (mainly because they’re garbage queries no one wants)

This is how you grow revenue atop declining search volumes

Lastly, and perhaps most egregiously, Google quietly stopped respecting budget caps by a factor of 2x. For example campaigns we’ve been running for years with $1000 daily budget caps suddenly began spending $2000+ per day

And the extra spend is entirely on the garbage keywords Google arbitrarily throws in as “exact match (close variants)” which have no value to our business, but can’t be turned off

Google offers no refunds nor any recourse for overspend or spend on keywords you explicitly did not target

These are not the actions of a healthy business. These are the actions of company whose core business is in decline but desperately needs to pump quarterly earnings so Wall Street will continue to fund insane capex while hopefully looking through their rapidly deteriorating negative free cash flow

Google operated a benevolent monopoly for the better part of 25 yrs

Meaning the value Google captured from Search was but a small fraction of the value it created, and that spread produced a potential energy that justified expectations of high earnings growth far, far into the future

This is now no longer the case

At the alter of AI capex, Google is sacrificing the golden goose

650on The Kimi K3 Moment

> Where is the Fable-class Kimi model at all?

6 months away

650on Open AI No. 2 Exec at OpenAI Fidji Simo is leaving the company

People are positing she is saving face by claiming medical issues. She doesn’t seem to provide much value, whether its based on feedback from employees where she’s worked or the public interviews she’s done.

650on How to Earn a Billion Dollars

I don't think this essay by PG is sufficient to teach them log bases or compounding, and is manipulative to assume now that someone knows 2 million doubling 9 times is a billion, they should be accepting of how one can earn a billion dollars fairly.

650on Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

Uncle "Sam" is ironic here, alternative man one might say

650on Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

Anthropic is big hall monitor energy. Clownish behavior and exaggerations constantly. A holier than thou attitude derived from rationalists at LessWrong.

650on Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

What do you mean people used to do a lot better? As far as I know https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect was a thing until recently.

The human body is quite complex as well.

Graduating a for profit private college that is aiming to maximize profit, by churning out specific degrees does not mean you are educated. Having a college degree is not synonymous anymore with well educated.

The measure (college degree) became a target, and thus it stopped functioning as intended.

650on VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage

Why did a PM create the merge request? It seems like internal testing brought up issues, why was it merged regardless? Is velocity a metric you were aiming for when merging this?