Spillikins No. 721. The time for mass layoffs in IT has come. Need more work!

Hello.

For a few days I escaped on business from Moscow to Sochi, managed to speak to an excellent audience

— independent regional retail, those whoforms sales and is experiencing today an unprecedented rise in the current situation. Large companies and retail chains are under pressure, but small players, on the contrary, are making a profit.

For me, the end of the year is always a big volume.work, but this year will surpass many - do not breathe. I don’t always have time to read the comments on the site, sometimes I don’t even have time to answer in the Telegram chat of our channel, but I try. Approximately the same feeling among people around the industry, there is a lot of work, and it becomes even more. But far from everyone, there are reverse examples, when people fell out of the cage and could not find themselves again, they sit and feel sad. The main topic of this issue is what is happening in Silicon Valley and in the US with IT professionals, as well as the consequences of cutbacks for telecom. I think that it is possible and necessary to draw analogies, since the global crisis and something similar will be observed in different parts of the world. So enough preamble, let's go!

GRAD from Google - how to painlessly fire ten thousand people
German mobile network outages - monkey with grenade
Sales crisis at Apple - the first ever discount on the Apple website
MagSafe external battery from Anker, fakes for Apple on marketplaces
Noise cancellation at its best - Sony WH-1000XM5 headphones
A few words about Pixel Watch - the first watch from Google

GRAD from Google - how to painlessly fire ten thousand people

With endless interest I watch how it changesculture in Silicon Valley, and from there, the sprouts of the new spread around the world. In the coming years, the struggle for jobs will become even more fierce and, one might say, uncompromising. The days of employees getting licked and fighting for their attention are over. Only a few can count on a special attitude, those who have been able to establish themselves as an indispensable and important element of the team. But they are not insured against anything either: a change in the owner of the company, as happened on Twitter, and you will be asked to leave with things.

At the beginning of this year, I was convinced thatIT business is protected from any troubles of the outside world. The need for programmers, administrators and other IT specialists is not satisfied, and minor layoffs in individual startups will not affect the overall market. There will always be work, there will be a lot of work, and there is nothing to worry about. You know, I have always been amazed at how intelligent people, good specialists in their field, can consciously ignore reality and turn a blind eye to everything that causes irritation. Instead of realizing the future, trying to prepare for it, they take a position of happy ignorance.

The global crisis is so noticeable that it is notcan be avoided by any of the existing players. First, there is a freeze of salaries and bonuses, then they stop hiring people, at the next stage they start laying off employees, cutting positions and forcing those who remain to work more to compensate for the shortage of those who were fired or forced to leave. We are now at the stage of the first wave of layoffs that will overwhelm the IT community in early 2023, many employees of small companies or huge corporations will be left without work. In some ways, they can be envied, since the conditions for their dismissal will be quite mild, they can count on severance pay, the so-called parachute, a salary for several months.

Mask's actions inside Twitter look typical,he reduced literally all divisions of the company, cuts to the quick. One of the recent corporate mailings described how the remaining employees have to work hard, carry out a bunch of responsibilities and give their best. They had to click on the link in the email, which automatically meant they agreed with the above. Let's read this letter together:

From: Elon Musk

To: Team [on Twitter]

Subject. Fork in the road

Date: November 16, 2022 [timestamp removed]

In the future, to create a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in a world where competition is ever-increasing, we need to be extremely tough. This will mean long hours of high intensity work. Only an exceptional performance will be considered a passing score.

Twitter will also be morefocused on engineers. Product design and management will still be very important and will report to me, but those who write great code will make up the bulk of our team and will have the most impact.

At its core, Twitter is a software and server company, so I think it makes sense.

If you're sure you want to be part of the new Twitter, click Yes on the link below:

[link removed]

Anyone who does not do so by 5:00 pm ET tomorrow (Thursday) will receive three months' severance pay.

Whatever decision you make, we thank you for your efforts to make Twitter a success.

Elon.

Hard?Not enough, so Elon Musk took only the first steps and this style of management is becoming the norm in the valley. The letter seems delusional only at first glance, it can be compared with questionnaires when applying for a visa to the United States, where they ask deliberately provocative questions - are you plotting something bad on the territory of the country and so on. It is clear that all those who fill out the questionnaire answer “No”, there is simply no other answer, otherwise why apply for a visa. Villains write “No” in exactly the same way. And many believe that bureaucrats created the questionnaire, who wasted someone else's time and did something stupid. In fact, this is a kind of trap, since any person who does something against the country, and was plotting it even earlier, will be guilty of lying when filling out visa documents. The system creates hooks for legal proceedings so that ironclad charges can be brought. About the same situation with letters like the one that Musk wrote - this is just an excuse to be able to fire people in the future who signed up for the new rules, albeit in such an ornate form, but do not follow them.

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A chain reaction of layoffs will spread throughoutindustry, let's look at the same Twitter, the social network uses AWS servers, the cost of them is about a billion dollars (in total for infrastructure). Musk's goal is to halve those costs. Which directly means the disappearance of part of the Twitter audience, the number of failures will increase and repel people (some countries will be in a worse position, the US will try to keep it to the last, since Twitter is a campaign tool).

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Twitter abbreviations will automatically abbreviateAmazon revenue, the company will also be forced to optimize its costs, its staff. All companies begin to pour down the chain, there are simply no exceptions. And this also means that promising projects will be closed, those developments that do not have a quick implementation, but are expensive and drag companies down. It's only a matter of time before Zuckerberg realizes that the VR universe he's betting on can't take off like this and it's a shot in the milk. And there, too, cuts will begin, since the company cannot drag out the topic of VR to infinity.

It is interesting to see how Google has clearly and simply solved the problem of laying off those who do not work well enough.

Google has always had a performance appraisal system.employees, when the head of one or another area twice a year explained to each of his subordinates why he gave this or that mark, what needs to be corrected. The size of the bonuses always depended on this, so many aspired to get a good grade, almost like in school. For a couple of percent of employees who showed a consistently poor result two times in a row, a breakup prize was prepared (not always and not everywhere it was two marks, but in general everything worked like that).

New grading system now only works oneonce a year. But the boss is now obliged to find 2% of those who do not affect the company's business, in fact, these are employees who will say goodbye. Potentially there are about ten thousand of them in Google.

It is important to understand that the system is relative,the boss is obliged to find the 2% of employees who work the worst. Estimates come from a statistical model where a stellar team is impossible and there are always people who underperform, do not give their best or even more. And this gives a kind of distortion, since some departments of Google have star teams, but people will be judged by a common measure or exceptions will be made.

The conclusion that can and should be drawn is simple.We live in a time when it is not enough just to work and fulfill your duties, you need to give all your best, do the job perfectly and even a little better. This rule applies to any country in the world, as there may be more applicants than good places. And we are just starting to face cuts in IT, they will increase around the world.

From the signs of the crisis, I will note an article from San Francisco,in it, an Indian programmer shares a life hack on how not to spend money on food and live only on what companies offer in offices. Yes, this is a real world story and a sign of the crisis unfolding around us.

Let's see what savings on engineers lead to, using the example of Europe's strongest economy.

German mobile network outages - monkey with grenade

European telecom in recent years is experiencingfar from the best of times, the first bell was a pandemic. Operators kept suicidal plans for the development of 5G, in the same Germany they cheerfully reported on the successful transfer of networks to a new generation of communications. But they did not have an economic model that would give such a connection advantages, would bring them money. Moreover, with the rising cost of electricity, operating costs for maintaining the operation of 5G networks have become cosmic, and operators could not raise prices for subscribers, they were limited in this by local laws. The European authorities were also unwilling to allocate additional subsidies for operators and directly banned the shutdown of networks anywhere for the sake of economy.

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Since the pandemic, European operators have becomechange your employees. They tried to refuse expensive employees with long service, and instead of them - to attract young people with little experience and prospects. The maneuver is understandable, it looks great in financial reports - the number of employees is the same, but how much we save every month! The “oldies” were additionally burdened with training young people for real work, and this applies not only to offices, but also to engineers, those who deal with networks.

In Germany, since 2020, disruptions in the work of mobileoperators began to occur quite often, and the canvas looks exactly the same as that of operators in other countries of the world, for example, in Canada. The staff did not understand something, they pressed something in the wrong place, a smart colleague was not around, and everything fell apart. As a result, subscribers might not be able to make calls or use the Internet for several hours. We see such stories in Canada in the work of the largest social network.

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It doesn't happen in life that you leavetrained personnel, and newcomers are able to successfully replace them. At the level of small companies, this is comparable to when you change the system administrator and a young novice begins to experiment, as a result, sometimes the work gets up for half a day, or even longer. The boss chastises the administrator, and for the first time he gains experience, learns what not to do.

On November 18, all over Germany, people began to experienceproblems with calls, mobile Internet. Moreover, the number and quality of problems gradually increased. The chronology of this local telecom apocalypse is clearly visible from the messages of the O2 operator.

At 6.25 am, the operator reported that calls using VoLTE/VoWiFi might not work for a small number of people.

At 8 am, the failure has already affected the fixed line,calls via GSM and so on. At 17 pm nothing had changed, the problem remained the same. By 19 o'clock it was partially solved, the connection began to be restored. At 21.53 most of the problems were resolved, communication was gradually returned to all subscribers affected by the failure.

O2 does not explain the reasons for the failure, but you can talk about them witheasy to recognize from the outside. Another hardware update, and it should be noted that in Germany, operators often share their infrastructure (hence the failures throughout the country and for all operators). Someone took the software update on the infrastructure equipment as a simple task akin to updating the firmware on the phone. Without preliminary tests, without thinking for a second, the update began to be rolled out early in the morning and to speed up the process immediately to all parts of the country. According to reports from people familiar with the situation from the inside, there are many impossible factors at one point. In particular, the update file turned out to be broken (!), the person who downloaded it was in a hurry to go home (!!), he ignored all warnings that the file was broken and started the update manually (!!!). When the update broke, instead of stopping it and informing his colleagues, he tried to fix everything himself and hid the problem (!!!!). As my friends said, such a situation was impossible at the system level a few years ago, when such actions required the participation of a number of employees. Today, due to staff cuts, the decision-making chain has been reduced to a minimum, as well as the number of “fuses”. That is, a conditional pest can break the network in several steps, and no one will know about it until the problem becomes massive, as happened in this situation.

Can operators avoid this? I think not, because now the Europeans are entering the maximum savings regime and they will not be able to recruit staff again. Crashes will become the norm.

Take a look at Vodafone Group shares, investors are expecting problems from this giant.

In the latest report from Vodafone, the European operatorsaid that in order to combat inflation, he raised prices in eleven European markets out of twelve. CEO Nick Reid had much to say about the crisis: “We are taking a number of steps to alleviate the economic backdrop of high energy prices and rising inflation. First, and perhaps most importantly, given the historical deflation in our sector, we have taken strong price action in our European markets.”

By the end of the third quarter, the cost of electricityfor Vodafone increased by 300 million euros. The company is going to reach the level of additional savings of 1 billion euros annually within 3.5 years. Where does this savings come from? Including due to both staff reduction and hiring cheap employees.

The largest European market for Vodafone isGerman, here things are going very badly for the operator. Service revenue is accelerating the fall, in the first quarter it was minus 0.5%, in the second quarter - minus 1.1%. It is interesting that the anti-crisis steps taken by the Europeans are exactly the same as those we saw in Russia - the sale of support-mast structures (towers) to an infrastructure company. Joint development of networks with other operators, consolidation of costs for certain things. Telecom all over the world faces the same problems, there are not so many ways to solve them.

But I can definitely say that so far the business mediathey intimidate us in Russia with the degradation of the quality of communication, they even claim that it has already happened, in Europe all this has become a reality. And not today, but, as they say, yesterday - but we don’t want to consider telecom in the context of the world, they narrowly look at one market and emphasize our every shortcoming. Although it is objectively necessary to erect monuments to the signalmen, who in such difficult conditions were able not only not to drop the networks, but to continue to develop them.

Sales crisis at Apple - the first ever discount on the Apple website

Steve Jobs was adamant about how he soldApple devices: you either pay full price or go for a walk. Part of the reason for this was the popularity of such expensive devices, they showed that the buyer had money. In later times, under Jobs, even partner discounts were not allowed, this was monitored, although discounts arose all the time, although they were small and not on all products.

Under Tim Cook, partners feel more at easeand make discounts all the time, as they need to sell goods and earn. But Apple has never made such discounts on its own behalf, at the end of 2022 this happens for the first time.

In some countries, when making a purchase in a brandedApple store offers you a company gift card for a different amount - from 50 to 250 dollars. A higher denomination goes with the purchase of certain MacBook models.

The company for the first time begins to compete with itsdistributors, reduces prices in his store to attract the maximum number of buyers during the high season. This will allow you to get a large margin, and distributors are already overstocked, the channel is clogged with Apple equipment. And such discounts will force other players, in turn, to reduce prices even more. The plan is simple - to speed up the sale of goods in order to clean the channels. But it is unlikely to succeed, too many goods on the shelves, too little time. And still, Apple products remain very expensive, which is impossible to ignore in this crisis. For us, this is an important milestone, we note that Apple has become like everyone else, under Tim Cook, the company was moving towards this very quickly.

MagSafe external battery from Anker, fakes for Apple on marketplaces

At the conference in Sochi I crossed paths with the guys fromTFN, among other things, they actively promote the Anker brand on the Russian market, bombarded them with all kinds of accessories so that they could try them. For me, Anker is a good price / quality ratio, nice design.

Of all the placers, I was the first to try the outerMagGo 622 battery - 5000 mAh, as in the original battery from Apple, is attached to the iPhone case in exactly the same way, you can charge other devices on the contact pad (wireless charging up to 12 W).

A nice battery that costs about $60 in the US, we have 5,500 rubles, but you can find it a little cheaper.

Interestingly, there is a reclining leather back, the battery can be used as a stand.

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While looking at the cost of this battery onmarketplaces, I caught myself thinking that the old tricks have not disappeared anywhere, there is a huge amount of counterfeit that is disguised as Apple. For example, here is such an offer on Yandex.Market. Moreover, Yandex does not allow the use of the word Apple, hence its absence. But in the picture there is something blurry, reminiscent of the company logo (this is no longer in the big picture). Suppliers cheat as best they can, Yandex does not carefully monitor these moments.

On Ozon, everything is traditionally much worse, there are a lot ofoffers where counterfeit goods are sold under the guise of an original product, the word Apple flashes everywhere, and it seems that for a thousand and a few you can buy an original battery. Which, of course, is not the case, the original one costs about 9,000 rubles!

All statements of marketplaces that they are going to fight against counterfeiting, as you can see, are empty words, as long as it brings money, and the punishment is very insignificant, we will constantly see such stories.

Unfortunately, today non-original accessoriesunder the guise of the original are sold in a huge number of places, the buyer is not at all insured. Chargers for MacBook, iPhone and so on, 80 percent on the Russian market are fakes. Moreover, the sellers do not bear any responsibility, and the same Apple, which used to follow this, simply left Russia and does not try to control anything. A sad story that, in the case of the same Apple, makes it more reasonable to buy non-original accessories, so you will not come across fakes.

I will talk about different devices from Anker gradually, but I think I will make a separate article about the battery, it turned out to be remarkable and, in my opinion, better than the original.

Noise cancellation at its best - Sony WH-1000XM5 headphones

It is sinful that for many years I have been using differentgeneration WH-1000XM and I consider these headphones to be the best noise-canceling headphones for airplanes and other noisy places. I tried a bunch of different headphones, I did not find anything better. For a person who constantly travels, this is simply a must, they protect your hearing from aircraft noise, allow you to listen to music or podcasts calmly and without excessive volume.

In one of the menus, the headphones count how much youuse them, how loud you listen, and keep a record of how safe it is for your hearing. I was impressed and even wrote a text about what can happen to hearing when using different headphones. We have potentially 1.1 billion people who can damage their hearing due to improper or careless use of headphones, so I advise you to read the text and share it with your friends, hearing is an important part of everyday life.

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I missed the fifth version for the fuss of the beginning of the year, yesand there were no flights where they would be useful. Flying to Sochi is now about the same as it used to be to Barcelona, so I took a Sony and tried it out. There are a lot of impressions, but I drive them for some more time in order to formulate my feelings in full. Let's just say - I liked the headphones, they play well, although the sound has changed again, it is a little different. It takes some getting used to, but the headphones sound great. Noise cancellation is no problem.

But that's why they changed the folding design,simplified headphones in this regard? It is clear that they save on this - but before the bow was formed, and it was nice. Now the headband does not bend, the case has become noticeably larger and higher. Here I see all this as a minus rather than a plus, but you can get used to it.

To compare sound quality and otherparameters, I took the XM4 with me on the plane, I caught myself thinking that in the XM5 my head and ears sweat very much, in the previous ones it is almost imperceptible. I know that I myself complained that I was sweating in the same XM4, but the XM5 turned out to be some kind of bathhouse.

Outside the plane, the headphones are also great, complainjust nothing. In Russia, on the gray market, such headphones cost 22-24 thousand rubles, which is very close to the price in the USA, where they ask for $ 350. At the same time, the previous XM4 in Russia cost about the same. So there is something to think about, although both models are supposed to be comparable, there is no particular need to switch from XM4 to XM5. Here the situation is the same as in smartphones, you can safely skip one or two generations. The same XM2s that I bought a long time ago continue to live and work.

A few words about Pixel Watch - the first watch from Google

I am finishing the review of Pixel 7 Pro, I don’t see itSmartphone has special advantages and disadvantages, there are much more disadvantages. But having tried the first watch from Google, I can say: smartphones are perfect! The watch is only technically the first, since the partner watches had many of the same flaws, Samsung does not count, they redesigned WearOS. For example, to take a screenshot on the Galaxy Watch4, you do not need to dance with a tambourine, on the Pixel Watch it is a whole story and an endless problem.

Was in the mountains, decided to arrange a competition betweenmy Galaxy Watch 5 and Pixel Watch, see how they record the route, how their work will look like. Disappointed completely, as for several hours the Pixel Watch was looking for a connection to the GPS, they just did not start working! I shoveled all the menus, turned off and turned on the clock, gave and revoked permissions. Nothing worked. A couple of days passed, without updates, the clock suddenly began to work with GPS, then stopped again.

And such “little things” in these hours aresmall cart. I also remember how iFixIt dismantled the watch and hundreds of publications appeared that they were scary inside and assembled on the knee. And you can’t argue with this, there is no engineering school here, unless Google engineers are from the basements of Bangalore.

I'm under a huge negative impression of PixelWatch, they look like a raw prototype. And this attempt to combine software from FitBit and familiar applications from Google is just a song and a fairy tale. In a word, a monstrous product, there is no other way to say it. The review will be in the week.

P.S. Have a nice week, more kindness around inpeople and events. But the main thing that we undoubtedly need is calmness and prudence, the ability to do without emotional swings when people try to run headlong somewhere. Why and why is not clear.

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