So far, 2024 is off to a start that looks a lot like 2023—with a week full of job cuts from tech companies. Duolingo cut 10 percent of its contractors earlier this week, citing artificial intelligence as part of the reason. Twitch announced a cut of 500 people, and its …
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The gulf between tech and government is legendary. In the 2010s, tech talent flocked to startups and big platforms where they could move fast, break things, and get people to click on ads. Venture capital flowed freely as firms jumped further and faster to stake a claim in businesses that …
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After a year of massive cuts, the tech job market is so unstable that the US government has come to be seen as an appealing, innovative employer. Tech companies have laid off some 400,000 people worldwide in 2022 and 2023, according to Layoffs.fyi, a site that tracks tech industry job …
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In July, software engineer Julian Joseph became the latest victim of the tech industry’s sweeping job cuts. Facing his second layoff in two years, he dreaded spending another couple months hunched over his laptop filling out repetitive job applications and blasting them into the void. Joseph specializes in user interface …
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As ChatGPT’s first birthday approaches, presents are rolling in for the large language model that rocked the world. From President Joe Biden comes an oversized “Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” And UK prime minister Rishi Sunak threw a party with a …
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Earlier this month, Google executive Ulku Rowe became the first person to face Google in court over sexist discrimination since a 2018 mass walkout led the company to stop forcing employees to settle such matters privately. A Manhattan jury rendered its verdict last week, finding that Google had discriminated against …
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The Luddites arrived on the streets of San Francisco much as they did in the English factories two centuries ago: under cover of darkness and with iconic weapons in hand. In this case, traffic cones. An enterprising activist had observed (or perhaps gotten an insider tip) that placing an object …
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Five months ago, software engineer Shikhar Sachdev adopted a peculiar hobby. While his friends met for drinks or played FIFA 23 to unwind after work, he would come home, boot up his laptop, and spend hours filling out job applications, for sport. Sachdev is content with his job at a …
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Dozens of applications and interviews, hours spent tweaking résumés, and a conference and career fair turned Hunger Games. Finding a job in tech is a mess. The past year has brought a reckoning for the once unsinkable industry. Tech companies around the world laid off more than 400,000 workers in …
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More than 20,000 fed-up Google employees staged a worldwide walkout in 2018 to demand a safer, fairer workplace for women after scandals over sexual harassment and unequal pay roiled the company. That fight was not an unqualified success: Pay equity data remains scarce and organizers say they suffered retaliation. But …
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