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 »The Curse of the Creator Economy
Journalist Taylor Lorenz isn’t the first to declare legacy media a dead industry walking. But few voice it with the conviction that she does—and an even more vigorous claim that they know its successor. The future of media, she says, lies in social media influencers and the “creator economy.” Let’s …
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 »Epic Games’ Sale of Bandcamp Has Left the Artist-Friendly Music Platform in Limbo
After work hours on September 27, employees of Fortnite maker Epic Games received a calendar invite informing them of a mandatory meeting the next morning, according to an employee who received the message. Just before the surprise all-hands was scheduled to begin, employees of the online record store Bandcamp, which …
Read More »‘A Galactic Embarrassment’: The Crypto World Is Already Sick of SBF’s Trial
The trial of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, now coming to the end of its first week, is far bigger than just crypto. Reporters from the largest media outlets (including WIRED) have flocked to New York to cover it, TV stations are airing feature-length documentaries on the fall of the crypto …
Read More »This Exec Is Forcing Google Into Its First Trial Over Sexist Pay Discrimination
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 …
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 »Hey Zuck, Get Those Robots out of My Social Feed
Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote presentation at the Meta Connect event this week started late. The delay was on-brand for the company’s decade-long project to make virtual reality mainstream. Back in 2014, a demo of the then-primitive Oculus VR headset hit Zuckerberg like a lightning bolt, and within weeks he owned the …
Read More »Smarter AI Assistants Could Make It Harder to Stay Human
Researchers and futurists have been talking for decades about the day when intelligent software agents will act as personal assistants, tutors, and advisers. Apple produced its famous Knowledge Navigator video in 1987. I seem to remember attending an MIT Media Lab event in the 1990s about software agents, where the …
Read More »Does Using AI Make Me Lazy?
To write this piece, I ran prompts through ChatGPT and generated a series of interview questions—the majority of which were good enough to pose to my experts. I also used an AI-powered transcribing tool, which saves me countless hours a month. When inspiration ran dry or I found myself drifting …
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