Category: Specials

Is this a great time to be looking for a tech job or what!? But for every fantasy job, like the $100-million AI jobs Meta is supposedly offering, there are hundreds of tech workers who have kissed their six-figure positions goodbye and thousands of clerical staffers who will no longer be making five-figure annual incomes.  

There’s one little problem with all these job cuts. We still don’t know whether AI can deliver the work goods. Sure, some jobs, such as repetitive HR or call-center work, can be largely replaced.  Heck, we’ve seen that happen before. I remember when many call-center jobs were located in the US — before companies figured out that outsourcing such jobs to low-cost countries was cheaper. For jobs like these, AI is just the next step in cost-cutting. 

Companies often use AI like that — to cut costs. Not many are using it to help good workers become great workers. Instead, CEOs are buying the illusion that AI can magically replace highly skilled workers.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is continuing his aggressive recruitment campaign for new AI venture Meta Superintelligence Labs. After luring in staff from OpenAI, he has now targeted Thinking Machines Lab — a startup led by Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, Wired reports.

According to data provided to the publication, more than a dozen people have received offers from Meta — one of which is reportedly worth more than $1 billion dollars over several years. None of the employees at Thinking Machine Labs have yet to accept.

Several candidates are said to be hesitant despite promises of large sums, open source and an ambitious AI vision. Some are reportedly uninterested in Meta’s focus on consumer products; others express skepticism about lab director Alexandr Wang’s experience.

Feb. 4, 2025: Salesforce lays off over 1,000

At the same time as it’s hiring sales staff for its new artificial intelligence products, Salesforce is laying off over 1,000 workers across the company, according to Bloomberg. As of June, 2024, the company had over 72,000 employees, according to its website. Salesforce did not comment on the report. In 2024 the company reportedly laid off around 1,000 staff too, in two waves: January and July.

Jan. 14, 2025: Meta will lay off 5% of workforce

Mark Zuckerberg told Meta employees he intended to “move out the low performers faster” in an internal memo reported by Bloomberg. The memo announced that the company will lay off 5% of its staff, or around 3,600 staff, beginning Feb. 10. The company had already reduced its headcount by 5% in 2024 through natural attrition, the memo said. Among those leaving the company will be staff previously responsible for fact checking of posts on its social media platforms in the US, as the company begins relying on its users to police content.

Tech layoffs in 2024

• Equinix
• AMD
• Freshworks
• Cisco
• General Motors
• Intel
• OpenText
• Microsoft
• AWS
• Dell

Nov. 26, 2024: Equinix to cut 3% of staff

Despite intense demand for its data center capacity, Equinix is planning to lay off 3% of its workforce, or around 400 employees. The announcement followed the appointment of Adaire Fox-Martin to replace Charles Meyers as CEO and the departures of two other senior executives, CIO Milind Wagle and CISO Michael Montoya.

“We acknowledge that Apple might not have fully finalized their own approach to AI, but we also believe that anyone thinking Apple will acquire an AI-powered search engine to ‘solve their AI shortfalls’ is misguided,” Woodring said. “Apple almost certainly is not, and does not, want to compete directly in search, regardless of what happens in the DOJ v. GOOGL remedy ruling.”

Where is Apple going?

The analyst, instead, believes Apple’s approach will be to build a broad ecosystem of new virtual-assistant-like features embedded into their OS, “some of which run on homegrown LLMs with Siri acting as central command, and others (arguably more) leveraging white-labeled technology from leading AI labs (Perplexity, Google, Grok, Anthropic, Mistral, etc.) — that make their products and services better…”

If that’s true — that Apple wants to create its own unique family of AI tools and services to make life better for its customers, while integrating services from others for those tasks it does not provide — then getting there will take time.

“If ministries use AI merely to accelerate current processes, they’ll create sophisticated digital assistants rather than intelligent, autonomous systems and workers that can deliver genuine transformation,” Kalpala said, noting that getting into bed with big AI would never be risk-free.

“Single vendor partnerships create dangerous dependencies,” he pointed out. “A more sensible approach would involve specialist AI companies with deep sector knowledge, such as healthcare AI firms for the NHS or defense technology specialists for security services. These focused partnerships would reduce vendor lock-in risks.”

Hilary Stephenson, managing director of usability design company, Nexer Digital, also has doubts. To fulfil its ambitions, she argued, the government will need to develop inhouse AI knowledge and not simply outsource all the thinking to external partners.

In March 2023, the company agreed to change its cloud licensing practices to avoid an EU antitrust probe, and in July 2024, Microsoft and CISPE reached a settlement that required the company to pay €20 million ($21.7 million) and develop a new product, Azure Local.

Azure Local would have allowed members to run Microsoft software on their platforms at prices equal to Microsoft’s. It was to include multitenancy support for customer workloads, pay-as-you-go licensing for SQL Server, unlimited virtualization and multi-session virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for Windows, and free security updates.

But then in May of this year, the European Cloud Collaboration Observatory (ECCO), which is providing independent oversight of the deal, found that “both Microsoft and CISPE have now agreed that Azure Local will not deliver the full set of features outlined in the agreement.” ECCO also described Microsoft’s offering as “disappointing,” and gave the company an Amber rating, indicating that concerns exist and corrective actions have been proposed.

Any other cool features coming soon? “There’s one, AI Explain. As a product person, I get pulled into incident channels all the time. When something’s wrong with Slack, there’ll be an incident commander, engineers. I literally don’t know what they’re talking about.

“When I look at messages with acronyms I don’t know, if I mouse over a message, we now have little stars on it. If I click it, it takes that message, all the ones around it, smartly breaks it apart into searches, executes searches, and comes back with an explanation for me.

“That would have been like 10 searches from my past. That’s a great candidate for launching into an agentic experience. I got an explanation, now let’s say I want to take a next logical turn. That’s where we can train users that Slack’s a lot more than just communication.”

As I’ve noted before, it will take the better part of a decade for Apple or anyone else to manufacture smartphones in mass market quantities in the US. Getting there requires huge investments to solve big problems, including training, manufacturing, component sourcing, and raw materials supply.

And now, Apple is about to invest $500 million in the last of those, working with the only US rare earth supplier, MP Materials. The decision includes plans to purchase US-made rare earth magnets from the company in what is being billed as a win for the Trump Administration. Apple and MP Materials will build a new recycling facility in which to extract materials from used mobile, along with another factory to make components for Apple devices.

Unlocking the component supply chain

It’s a big deal because right now China produces around 60% of the globe’s rare earths and processes around 90% of that material. The investment puts at least some of that capacity in US hands, even though a recent deal with China saw the trade in those critical materials between the two nations resume. (The materials are available elsewhere, but they are so rare they are paid for in human misery.)

The team at Readiness has analyzed Microsoft’s latest updates to develop technically sound, actionable testing plans. July’s release brings significant updates to core Windows components, most notably in the areas of printing, networking, and media playback. Two components have been designated as high-risk and warrant immediate attention: the Printing Subsystem and Routing and Remote Access (RRAS).

As always, we have grouped Microsoft’s updates by Windows feature and accompanied each section with prescriptive test actions and rationale to help prioritize enterprise validation efforts.

Core OS and printing

Microsoft updated several core kernel drivers affecting Windows as a whole. This is a low-level system change and carries a high risk of compatibility and system issues. In addition, core Microsoft print libraries have been included in this month’s update, requiring additional print testing in addition to the following recommendations: