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Tech’s talent wars have come back to bite it

nytimes.com

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Re: Tech’s talent wars have come back to bite it

#81

Post by zeroonetwothree »

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #16
larrymyers wrote: post #3

The feels like exceptionally lazy reporting in the NYT. What was the expectation, that tech companies would be up and to the right perpetually? That public tech companies are immune to general market downturns? While a lot of tech companies are going through post-pandemic layoffs, most of them have headcounts that are still larger than where they were in Feb 2020, and have valuations that show steady growth. My predi…

The NYTimes has been hostile to tech for as long as I can remember, and my memory on the matter goes back to the 90's when Thomas Friedman was writing about how our jobs were going to India practically every other week. After Google had taken off, that stopped, and they changed their tone to some sort of embrace-and-extend. It's been many many years of this. It's not going to change. The signal-to-noise ratio isn't g…

I thought Friedman is pro globalization?

Re: Tech’s talent wars have come back to bite it

#82

Post by zeroonetwothree »

rayiner wrote: post #77
itsdrewmiller wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech is one of the least capital-intensive industries, no?

Paying developers to build new products is a capital expenditure.

Typically employees are considered operating expenditure, not capital expenditure.

Re: Tech’s talent wars have come back to bite it

#83

Post by zeroonetwothree »

zug_zug wrote: post #29
bambataa wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if moving to a FAANG means you work just the same as before, except get paid twice as much and are surrounded by competent colleagues?

> FAANG means you work just the same as before, except get paid twice as much (Ex fang) : Wish this were true. My experience is its working on a stack of entirely proprietary/2nd-rate tools with minimal documentation, weekly bugs within your core toolset, and with as much as 50% of your time being people-work.

Sounds about right based on my experience too. But the pay is hard to beat. Even with the stock drops I'm still at 500k...

Re: Tech’s talent wars have come back to bite it

#84

Post by zeroonetwothree »

socialismisok wrote: post #45
aborsy wrote: post #41

NYT, and left in general, don’t like the tech that much. It creates inequality, with value going to a small group of talented people. They have responded with regulations, taxation, painting the tech in media in bad ways, highlighting its negative consequences, etc. Look into relationship of EU with technology.

It's more complex than that, I think. Being on the left (the actual left, not some anemic pro corporate centrism that passes for the left like the Dems). Tech is seen as a potential force for good that has squandered opportunities. Amazon has dramatically gentrified Seattle, for instance, and done little bit shrug and make some relatively small donations to Mary's Place. (Which is good, but not enough.) Meanwhile, th…

Who made you the arbiter of what counts as "the left"?

Re: Tech’s talent wars have come back to bite it

#85

Post by wmorgan »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #82
rayiner wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying developers to build new products is a capital expenditure.

Typically employees are considered operating expenditure, not capital expenditure.

The term of art is "capitalized labor." For example, this is from Microsoft's accounting policies:

> Costs incurred internally in researching and developing a computer software product are charged to expense until technological feasibility has been established for the product. Once technological feasibility is established, software costs are capitalized until the product is available for general release to customers.

Then later

> The amortization of these costs is included in cost of revenue over the estimated life of the products.

https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar21/index.html

Re: Tech’s talent wars have come back to bite it

#86

Post by fmajid »

justin66 wrote: post #27
nindalf wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This decision matters because the NYT influences other journalists to a large degree. The person who took that autocratic decision was AG Sulzberger, the 37-year old publisher and chairman of the NYT. Surely a man wielding so much power and influence would have earned the post through merit and hard work, right? In reality it’s a hereditary post of the Sulzberger family. It’s shocking that a man who is a product of n…

> The person who took that autocratic decision was AG Sulzberger, What evidence is there of this? Asking because it's not traditionally the case that the NYT editorial staff needs to be interfered with by ownership in order to make terrible decisions.

Not so at all. The Judy Miller warmongering fiasco was directly attributable to Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (A.G. Sulzberger's dad), whose favorite she was for whatever reason.
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