Turns out the Great Resignation goes both ways (Ep. 445)

The home team covers the hiring freezes and layoffs hitting the tech sector, burnout among freelancers and applicants for tech jobs, the dubious ethics of unpaid internships, and how to make Twitter safer by preemptively blocking people.

Episode notes:

Companies like Meta, Twitter, and Netflix are enacting hiring freezes and layoffs, a situation that’s not great for anybody but is likely to have outsize effects on people of color in tech.

Gen Z may not understand file structures, but they sure understand Twitter toxicity. MegaBlock from Gen Z Mafia allows users to block bad tweets, their authors, and every single account that liked the offending tweet. There, doesn’t that feel better?

Apple’s WWDC 2022 is just around the corner. What are you most excited about?

Machine-learning start-up Inflection AI raises $225 million in equity financing to use AI to improve human-computer communication. Another reminder that building sophisticated AI systems isn’t cheap: who could forget that Open AI paid its top researcher just shy of $2 million in 2016?

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Patricia Shanahan for their answer to Difference between int and double.

TRANSCRIPT

Tags: ai, hiring, the stack overflow podcast