Github secured its status as a programmer's best friend by combining tools for managing software with collaboration features that create a kind of social network for the code-literate. Its success has seen it pick up a less welcome feature of social platforms: a black market in fake engagement. An ecosystem …
Read More »Job Hunting Sucks. This Programmer Filled Out 250 Applications to Find Out Why
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 …
Read More »Finding a Tech Job Is Still a Nightmare
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 …
Read More »New York’s Airbnb Ban Is Descending Into Pure Chaos
As few as 2 percent of New York City’s previous 22,000 short-term rentals on Airbnb have been registered with the city since a new law banning most listings came into effect in early September. But many illegal short-term rental listings are now being advertised on social media and lesser known …
Read More »Generative AI Is Coming for Sales Execs’ Jobs—and They’re Celebrating
Wining and dining, wooing clients with creative offers, and cashing big bonuses provide the glamor to sales work. Drafting answers to hundreds of dull questions posed by a prospective customer’s request for proposals? That’s just drudgery. Mercifully for workers, after months of speculation about ChatGPT-style AI taking over white-collar work, …
Read More »How Neuralink Keeps Dead Monkey Photos Secret
The tan macaque with the hairless pink face could do little more than sit and shiver as her brain began to swell. The California National Primate Center staff observing her via livestream knew the signs. Whatever had been done had left her with a “severe neurological defect,” and it was …
Read More »The ‘Green’ Future of Furniture Is a Sofa Stuffed With Seaweed
In 1919, an entrepreneur named Nils Halvorsen Norheim set up an automated factory for making flatbreads near Barkåker in Norway, the first of its kind in the country. A century on, his great-great-granddaughter found herself peering into an oven in a tiny kitchen in Trondheim, doing some baking of her …
Read More »Men Overran a Job Fair for Women in Tech
It was meant to be a week for women in tech—but this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration was swamped by men who gate-crashed the event in search of lucrative tech jobs. The annual conference and career fair aimed at women and non-binary tech workers, which takes its name from a pioneering …
Read More »Your Project Management Software Can't Save You
When I worked as a copywriter at a dog-toy-slash-tech company, we used Airtable and Basecamp to organize our workflows. At my next job, the marketers made us learn Asana (“same as Airtable but much better”), but the product team pushed their work and sprints through Jira. I was laid off …
Read More »The Gruesome Story of How Neuralink’s Monkeys Actually Died
Fresh allegations of potential securities fraud have been leveled at Elon Musk over statements he recently made regarding the deaths of primates used for research at Neuralink, his biotech startup. Letters sent this afternoon to top officials at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by a medical ethics group …
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