Except we don't, not really. We're still leveraging 15 or so years of experience living the real world and walking on sidewalks and crossing streets and observing how other humans drive cars and being passengers in cars before we ever try driving ourselves. Not to mention, some humans definitely don't learn to drive in a matter of hours, they need weeks if not months.
From what we were told this morning, this is a purely Red Hat decision not influenced by IBM, primarily intended to reduce our spending and save cash in light of the increased cost of money caused by rising interest rates.
Roles affected will be "general and administrative" (apparently this is a GAAP - Generally Accepted Accounting Practices - term), and folks directly involved in developing or selling products (my interpretation: software engineers and sales) are safe.
Source: am Red Hatter, opinions/interpretations are my own.
For the causes of R&D layoffs, I'm curious about the split between (a) increased interest rates, vs. (b) changes to U.S. tax code that disallow 5-year amortization of software-development costs.
I'm only hearing people mention (a). So maybe (b) is less relevant than I'm imagining?
CORRECTION: I think I stated (b) exactly backwards. IIUC, previously a company could fully expense the cost of software development in the year it occurred, but now it must be amortized over 5 years.
There is so much misunderstanding about the amortization of software dev costs rule (and yes, I see your correction).
I've worked in large and small companies in my career, and nearly every large company desperately wanted devs to count as much time as possible as capex (vs. opex). Reason being that, if you're a growing software company, counting dev salaries (often your largest expense) as capex can make you look a ton more profitable, which is of course good for your stock price and valuation (indeed, counting opex as capex is one of the oldest frauds in the book - it's what brought down WorldCom 20 years ago). It's just that, in a modern software company, it's really hard to separate any individual dev's time into separate capex vs opex buckets. The reason I hated capitalizing my time as a software engineer is because the line between capex vs. opex is gray beyond belief for modern SaaS companies that do continuous delivery.
Now that you put it that way, maybe (b) is the ugly truth, and (a) is just the prettier (everyone else is doing it) scape goat.
I see interest rates being the number 1 excuse for layoffs, but there has to be something else on why Software is getting screwed so much in this down cycle. I used to think AI/LLMs, but who knows.
Im not seeing as many layoffs internationally but that might be biased, one would thought climbing interests rates would have more of a first order global effect
Conversely, I think it should make sense that the growthiest of growth areas, tech, would see the biggest pullback once money starts costing money again.
A lot of loss-making / future growth speculative tech business models make a lot less sense when you can make about 5% risk free.
It doesn't get discussed much, but during the boomiest tech hiring days of COVID.. interest rates weren't just 0%.. they were, in real terms, negative.
Circa 2021 the treasury/risk free rate was about 1.5% while inflation ended the year at about 7%.
So you were getting paid 5.5% to take risk. This incentives speculation as parking your money in a safe CD/bond/whatever loses real-money with time.
Now inflation & risk free rate are at about parity.
AI is too nascent to be the sole reason for so many layoffs. Emulating HR is about all it can be trusted to do autonomously.
Old people (50+) and troublemakers (PIPs) comprised the entirety of my own company's most recent layoff round. They're not even trying to hide it anymore.
My hunch is that [America] is laying off domestic engineers so we can outsource more of the positions to India during the next hiring phase. If anything, AI is playing middleman in flattening a lot of the communication hurdles.
Management in the Red Hat's Support organization said recently they were hiring new support engineers out of India to help alleviate burnout. A hiring freeze in all countries except India effectively is outsourcing.
But why would companies want to say (a) and not (b)? Seems like “you lost your job because the government raised taxes” would be a pretty popular explanation and PR strategy to get the change reversed.
1: "government" would likely be a large customer, and putting blame on one of your large customers is not a good business plan.
2: As much as we know the Biden Administration is largely responsible for our rampant inflation, to point out their significant part into our trashed economy only invites retaliation from them and their cronies. This administration is quick to attack anyone who even slightly besmirches or questions them (much like their masters in the CCP).
> there has to be something else on why Software is getting screwed
A lot of companies clearly overhired in the last few years, and had access to cheap money if needed to help with that. Perhaps that is most of what explains it? It was also biased to US companies, so would make sense that the reversal would be larger there also.
This change will have a real impact to cashflow, in the sense that you are paying more (in taxes) in the first year than you would under the previous model.
And cashflow is incredibly important, Free Cash Flow metrics etc. are all fairly critical within the investing world.
Yeah, but also keep in mind the previous quarter announcement about the complete revamp of performance evaluation, and bonus payout. They have setup a situation where it's much easier for managers to under-evaluate employees. They are creating the future where it's much easier to layoff so-called "under performing" associates, while making it much easier to label average folks as under performing, or performing folks as average.
The 4% figure they have given is a very low figure compared to other tech firms doing 10% ~ 20%, and while one might optimistically say the progressive nature of Red Hat trying to keep the percentage low, while the pessimist might say this is just the first round. So it's possible that during Q2 performance is being looked at closely, and now is the time to shine.
I wonder if this can be viewed as (yet another?) example of companies externalizing the negatives. Pollution is the classic example, both during manufacture and at the end of the lifecycle. In this case, it would be financial risk. Founders bootstrap a start-up, either with their own money or outside investors, and these folks carry all the risk. The established players can safely wait until the startup either fails or succeeds, and buy into a sure thing in the latter case.
I think it is simply a consequence of technology enabling instant global communications and decreasing marginal costs precipitously giving bigger players an enormous advantage.
I'm not sure about that. An acquisition is a risky thing for a company to do as well. It's never a sure thing and correctly pricing the acquisition or predicting if the company will be successful with the acquisition is also not guaranteed or easy.
For some highly regulated industries, it's hard to bring small products to market. In banking, there are tiered regulations based on your size (in the U.S.) so there's more overhead for large companies
I'm a Red Hatter, and I'm not sure what they mean either. I obviously only know my own little corner of engineering, but I've seen no signs whatsoever of being gutted. From where I stand, it's just a change of ownership that, at least for now, is completely transparent on the ground. I expect the situation to continue for as long as Red Hat keeps making money.
Hey, so I'm the very part time volunteer sysadmin for LibriVox, can I use this opportunity to ask for help?
I have a day job and two kids, the amount of time and energy I give to LibriVox is sufficient to keep the lights on, but not much else.
We don't have money, in fact we don't even have a legal entity, any donations we get are handled by Internet Archive, who also kindly provide us our two servers (yes, only two).
If you want to help and know PHP and CodeIgniter, we'd be very happy to have you on board! While I am a developper, it's currently Python, and not at all web related. LibriVox's tech sack has fallen woefully out of date (PH 5.6, CodeIgniter 2), and I can't bring it up to date all by my self.
I'll be honest, it's not glamorous work. There's no automated testing, anything we change has to be tested and validated by the volunteers themselves - who are awesome, by the way. But we're a fantastic little nugget of Internet, and I think we should stick around on a solid tech stack for as long as possible ;)
While checking out the project on GitHub I noticed that you're using GerritHub for reviews and made me wonder whether this is holding back some people from contributing. Not that it's bad in anyway, but I assume it's something a lot of people are unfamiliar with and the description of how to use it for the project is very limited, plus work in progress isn't directly visible as PR on GitHub.
Additionally, you mention in the CONTRIBUTING.md that there's a Google doc with a lot of issues listed that should be converted to GitHub issues. Where does one find that Google doc?
I'm not married to Gerrit, and I concede that it could be a hurdle. It's what I use for my day job, so I chose it out of laziness and familiarity more than anything else. I'll probably drop it, and learn the GitHub PR tools and workflow - I've gotten a few random PRs already.
Edit: I'll talk to the volunteers about making that Google doc public, good suggestion.
I think one can go either way, but the important part is that it's clear to those willing to contribute. I think explaining a bit more how Gerrit reviews work and who is actually reviewing them, would already help, and maybe adding a link to the README, so it's easier discoverable.
Cool, I wouldn't mind copying/creating a bunch of issues on the side.
Ah, I was actually browsing the volunteer page just now looking for a github link to contribute code or at least html/css.
I also am using python for work, not PHP. Does LibriVox plan to continue maintaining the current PHP codebase via a major version upgrade, or are you hoping to just do a rewrite in a more easily maintainable manner?
If someone's willing to put in the time to redo our code in Python, I wouldn't be opposed to that. However, keep in mind that it'd be a massive undertaking. Last time we re-wrote our apps, it took a full-time developer multiple months. Admittedly, everything was brand new, and included collecting requirements and validating the prototypes with the volunteers. So perhaps a "simple" rewrite, keeping all the logic the same, wouldn't be so hard.
Also keep in mind - a good chunk of the volunteers aren't tech-savvy, and are nervous when faced with changes. Just upgrading to a new phpBB version, with a new theme, was met with some grumbles.
I realize I'm a horrible salesman, but something about LibriVox just keeps me involved. I don't even participate in the audiobooks aspect of it, just tech. I was initially brought on as a paid sysadmin as part of that project to modernize our code that took that full-time developer months. When that ended, I stuck around as a volunteer.
If it's based on CodeIgniter it should be pretty maintainable already. The documentation of each version has detailed instructions how to upgrade the code to get up to speed with the new version up to CI 3. CI 4 is however a complete rewrite and needs a lot of work I guess but I haven't gotten that far yet. CI 4 requires latest version of PHP.
Playing devil's advocate for a bit, would the A220 have accumulated so many orders had it not been backed by Airbus? The program was clearly in trouble when Airbus took over, which may have discouraged airlines from taking a chance on a great aircraft, but whose manufacturer ran the risk of running out of money to keep the program going.
> Playing devil's advocate for a bit, would the A220 have accumulated so many orders had it not been backed by Airbus?
Yes, totally. Delta alone had ordered 75 CS100's [1] and were deeply involved in the tariff dispute as a result. It's a unique plane -- in size class, in passenger comfort and in fuel economy. Airlines realized that and were buying it up like hotcakes. Neither Airbus nor Boeing had competitive aircraft, and neither really did Embraer. It's closer to the Sukhoi SuperJet and some of the Comacs, but reliable [2], and domestic.
The only reason Airbus got it was they offered up their Mobile, Alabama assembly plant as a way of skirting the tariffs that never materialized.
> The program was clearly in trouble when Airbus took over, which may have discouraged airlines from taking a chance on a great aircraft, but whose manufacturer ran the risk of running out of money to keep the program going.
The program wasn't itself in any trouble except for the later-ruled-illegal tariffs the US tried to impose at Boeing's request.
> Playing devil's advocate for a bit, would the A220 have accumulated so many orders had it not been backed by Airbus?
Of course not! But that's not seeing the bigger picture: It's always safe to buy from Boeing/Airbus because you know that these two companies are backed by their respective governments. Same thing goes for Embraer.
But why? From my very limited knowledge on this, it seems everyone is saying that a no-deal crash out will be bad economically. So is it just ideology (dare I say dogmatism) from the Johnson government at this point?
The main reason is because some rich donors (to the governing Conservative party) have hedge positions that will make them a lot of money in the event of a hard brexit.
More or less. I don't think they even argue about the economics of it any more.
As long as they can blame somebody else (the EU, remainers, the global situation) they will be happy. They want to mould the UK into their own vision and don't care how many people are disadvantaged in the process.
As for "court jurisdiction and supremacy of parliament", given the way the government has abused its powers at times, I'd like a higher court than the UK one.
BTW I did raise a question illegality by the UK government with the EU. Stuff started to get done. The UK government's standard brush-off to being challenged on something they don't want to answer to, is "it's not in the public interest". Which is bullshit.
If the UK government wasn't so tossy and incompetent, I might be a lot more sympathetic to "court jurisdiction and supremacy of parliament"
The UK has submitted a lot of ideas for various compromise positions, some of them incredible compromises that nearly amount to not leaving at all.
The EU has rejected all of them completely. It's even rejected proposals from the UK that were the EU's own suggestions.
It's just bad faith at this point. The EU itself is an ideology, an overwhelmingly cult-like one. They bend over backwards to make it hard to leave. The president of France has literally said that "there must be a threat, there must be a risk, there must be a price" with leaving it. That's not how cooperative groups of allies are usually described, is it?
Like with all such organisations they can't stand the idea of compromise because they know that many countries have large populations that don't like the EU. From their perspective if they bend here, if show flexibility and have friendly post-Brexit UK relations, then a whole lot of other countries will start to want out. Ultimately the EU is a bad deal: an all or nothing "with us or against us" proposition. If they cut a deal with the UK that allows local concerns of local voters to start mattering, the EU as a project of ideological unification will be over within a few years.
- May says her deal means the UK leaves the EU next March. The Withdrawal Agreement makes a mockery of this. “All references to Member States and competent authorities of Member States…shall be read as including the United Kingdom.” (Art 6)
- The European Court of Justice is decreed to be our highest court, governing the entire Agreement
- The UK will still be bound by any future changes to EU law in which it will have no say, not to mention having to comply with current law.
- Any disputes under the Agreement will be decided by EU law only
- The definition of UK citizen becomes controlled by the EU i.e. the EU would effectively control British elections by deciding who can vote in them.
- The EU and its employees are to be immune to UK tax law (even if they live in the UK)
- The UK agrees not to prosecute EU employees who are, or who might be deemed in future, criminals
Similar advantages and immunities are extended to all former MEPs and to former EU official more generally
- The General Data Protection Regulation is to be bound into UK law
- The Lifetime clause: the agreement will last as long as the country’s youngest baby lives
- The UK will tied to EU foreign policy, “bound by the obligations stemming from the international agreements concluded by the Union” but unable to influence such decisions
- All EU citizens must be given permanent right of residence after five years – but what counts as residence? This will be decided by the EU, rather than UK rules
- The UK agrees to spend taxpayers’ money telling everyone how wonderful the agreement is
- The EU decide capital projects (too broadly defined) the UK is liable for
- The UK is bound by EU state aid laws until future agreement – even in the event of an agreement, this must wait four years to be valid
- The UK will be liable for future EU lending
etc etc. It goes on like this.
This so-called "deal" was actually written in Brussels, by the EU, and Theresa May agreed to it! The only reason the UK/EU are still negotiating is that this attempted deal was so terrible even a Remain-dominated Parliament couldn't agree to it.
Of course May resigned eventually after trying three times to get this agreement through Parliament, and there was a leadership change.
The EU had originally insisted that given the original goals of Brexit, the only possible outcome sans compromise was a Canada-style deal. They even made a helpful slide that showed this:
At the time Theresa May felt that was unacceptable, hence the use as a pressure tactic. Johnson felt differently, and the EU wasn't willing to negotiate in good faith anyway, so went back and said "fine, we'll take the Canada deal". So Barnier changed his mind and decided actually a Canada-style deal wasn't an option anymore.
It's just time wasting nonsense at this point. The EU is rejecting options it has itself proposed. It's bad faith and the UK should walk away.
Half the meme posts on Reddit look exactly like that. I have no doubt anyone who released a product labeled like that would cause Juul to go out of business within weeks.
Did I understand your purpose wrong, or can the same thing be achieved by running sshd on a (cluster of) machine(s) that mount a GlusterFS/Ceph/OtherDistributedRedundantFS volume?
That would be similar. Indeed the redundant backend can be implemented in various ways. Now I would really like to experiment with Bup to provide historization in addition to deduplication (again this could be implemented with some underlying file systems, but I really like Git/Bup).
