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Thought this was interesting. Across 160 teams of researchers, just about all failed to make good life outcome predictions on things like GPA, evictions, layoffs, and others. Data followed 4.5k families across 15 years, with 13k features (varied over time). Haven't looked at it directly yet, but will be turning the docs and data inside out... In the meantime, authors claim this as showing the limits of ML. Oh, and it's published in PNAS, so you know there's some big publication energy there.
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/15/8398
Which agencies are going through layoffs
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Wells Fargo merger news. What’s it mean?
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You know - it’s also interesting how so many former consultants now in tech love to announce on Fishbowl how much they get paid and how little they work.
Could be why they are getting dismissed?
I went consulting -> tech -> consulting
There's good money to be made in both. For me, personally, consulting presented a higher ceiling. I do miss routinely quitting for the day at 1pm to kayak out to a small island with friends for afternoon drinks. I use to think I might go back to tech for WLB; now I think I'll just retire sooner.
Pro
I worked for MySpace when Newscorp came in and bought us, thinking they knew how to run our operation. At the time, we had just moved from Coldfusion to .Net, and we had huge changes underway.
MySpace Music was in the middle of building a subscription based streaming music program. It would be the first in the world of its kind. As hard as it is to believe, in 2007, MySpace music had more streaming music than any other platform. Our plan was to offer an unlimited catalog of streaming music for only $7.99 per month. It would be the first time our platform ever had a subscription or paid service.
Newscorp said the idea of streaming music would never work, and scrapped my entire department. Everyone was laid off, including me.
Six months later, about 80% of the staff had been cut. Everyone that knew our platform was gone, except a few people in management. Code that was “glue holding things in place” was neglected. Eventually Myspace just crashed all the time. The community teams were gone. All the changes that the core team were working on… disappeared.
Even our video team was gone. (They had a product that was eventually going to live on an iPhone app that looked remarkably like Instagram, but with videos and photos in different tabs.)
Twitter will suffer the same fate. Years of institutional knowledge will be gone. People will say that Twitter needed to be revenue positive, or that advertisers never wanted to be there. Twitter, like MySpace, was toxic and weird. But it still worked.
Remove the engineers, drop morale, put in your own ideas. Watch the entire thing fall apart.
Em2, Apple is never the first mover, but offers the best of it when it launches. I guess MySapxe would have been that.
Buddy of mine said they will know by 9am tomorrow
Rising Star
Well I guess the severance is going to be quite impressive. 6 monthly salaries ?
It’s two months of “we have to keep paying you but consider this our notice of 60 days” because of the WARN act, and one month of severance after that.