Tech Layoff Tracker

Is it? I'd always heard Walmart was the first adopter of barcodes at scale.

EDIT: TIL -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcode

On 20 October 1949, Woodland and Silver filed a patent application for "Classifying Apparatus and Method", in which they described both the linear and bull's eye printing patterns, as well as the mechanical and electronic systems needed to read the code. The patent was issued on 7 October 1952 as US Patent 2,612,994.[1] In 1951, Woodland moved to IBM and continually tried to interest IBM in developing the system. The company eventually commissioned a report on the idea, which concluded that it was both feasible and interesting, but that processing the resulting information would require equipment that was some time off in the future.

IBM offered to buy the patent, but the offer was not accepted. Philco purchased the patent in 1962 and then sold it to RCA sometime later.

I'd argue many (most?) of these companies do not innovate or grow. What innovation has come out of Snap/TikTok/Twitter/{insert name here}?

They make one product, get ballooned up with endless cash (or used to) and then do nothing for years because they don't really need to do anything as long as money keeps flowing.

I'd argue many (most?) of these companies have so many employees not because they need all that manpower, but because the majority of management is engaged in empire building. As a department head/PM, more headcount = more power = more prestige = even more headcount = ...

I'd therefore argue that less than half the engineers are needed even if these companies wanted to grow. They only have so many employees because they had more cash than what they could put into actual innovation.

You can see this everywhere. Very smart PHDs get hired all over the place for very impressive salaries and the vast majority of them do absolutely useless busywork at best.