The Guardian reports: The Magnus Carlsen era is over. Ding Liren becomes China's first world chess champion. The country now can boast the men's and women's titleholders: an unthinkable outcome during the Cultural Revolution when it was banned as a game of the decadent West.
After 14 games which ended in a 7-7 draw, the championship was decided by four "rapid chess" games — with just 25 minutes on each players clock, and 10 seconds added after each move. Reuters reports that the competition was still tied after three games, but in the final match 30-year-old Ding capitalized on mistakes and "time management" issues by Ian Nepomniachtchi. Ding's triumph means China holds both the men's and women's world titles, with current women's champion Ju Wenjun set to defend her title against compatriot Lei Tingjie in July... Ding had leveled the score in the regular portion of the match with a dramatic win in game 12, despite several critical moments — including a purported leak of his own preparation. The Chinese grandmaster takes the crown from five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen of Norway, who defeated Nepomniachtchi in 2021 but announced in July he would not defend the title again this year...

[Ding] had only been invited to the tournament at the last minute to replace Russia's Sergey Karjakin, whom the international chess federation banned for his vocal support of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Ding ranks third in the FIDE rating list behind Carlsen and Nepomniachtchi.
It's the second straight world-championship defeat for Nepomniachtchi, the Guardian reports: "I guess I had every chance," the Russian world No 2 says. "I had so many promising positions and probably should have tried to finish everything in the classical portion. ... Once it went to a tiebreak, of course it's always some sort of lottery, especially after 14 games [of classical chess]. Probably my opponent made less mistakes, so that's it."
Ding wins €1.1 million, The Guardian reports — also sharing this larger story: "I started to learn chess from four years old," Ding says. "I spent 26 years playing, analyzing, trying to improve my chess ability with many different ways, with different changing methods. with many new ways of training."

He continues: "I think I did everything. Sometimes I thought I was addicted to chess, because sometimes without tournaments I was not so happy. Sometimes I struggled to find other hobbies to make me happy. This match reflects the deepness of my soul."

According to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Chinese hackers vastly outnumber U.S. cyber intelligence staff "by at least 50 to 1." CNBC reports: "To give you a sense of what we're up against, if each one of the FBI's cyber agents and intel analysts focused exclusively on the China threat, Chinese hackers would still outnumber FBI Cyber personnel by at least 50 to 1," Wray said in prepared remarks for a budget hearing before a House Appropriations subcommittee on Thursday. The disclosure highlights the massive scale of cyber threats the U.S. is facing, particularly from China. Wray said the country has "a bigger hacking program than every other major nation combined and have stolen more of our personal and corporate data than all other nations -- big or small -- combined."

The agency is requesting about $63 million to help it beef up its cyber staff with 192 new positions. Wray said this would also help the FBI put more cyber staff in field offices to be closer to where victims of cyber crimes actually are.

According to Phoronix citing multiple local North Carolina news outlets, Red Hat is cutting "hundreds of jobs" in an initial round of layoffs announced today. From the report: According to WRAL, Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks is said to have told employees in an email "we will not reduce roles directly selling to customers or building our products," which is hopefully good news for their many upstream Linux developers they employ that ultimately build Red Hat Enterprise Linux and associated software products. Red Hat will begin notifying affected employees today in some countries while the process will continue through the end of the quarter. IBM, which acquired Red Hat in 2019, has already slashed some five thousand positions so far in 2023.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: According to Google Trends, peak "Lean to Code" occurred in early 2019 when laid-off Buzzfeed and Huffpost journalists were taunted with the phrase on Twitter... As Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently put it, "We're in a different world." Indeed. Encouraging kids to pursue CS careers in Code.org's viral 2013 launch video, Zuckerberg explained, "Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find."

In Learning to Code Isn't Enough, a new MIT Technology Review article, Joy Lisi Rankin reports on the long history of learn-to-code efforts, which date back to the 1960s. "Then as now," Lisi Rankin writes, "just learning to code is neither a pathway to a stable financial future for people from economically precarious backgrounds nor a panacea for the inadequacies of the educational system."
But is that really true? Vox does note that the latest round of layoffs at Meta "is impacting workers in core technical roles like data scientists and software engineers — positions once thought to be beyond reproach." Yet while that's also true at other companies, those laid-off tech workers also seem to be finding similar positions by working in other industries: Software engineers were the most overrepresented position in layoffs in 2023, relative to their employment, according to data requested by Vox from workforce data company Revelio Labs. Last year, when major tech layoffs first began, recruiters and customer success specialists experienced the most outsize impact. So far this year, nearly 20 percent of the 170,000 tech company layoffs were software engineers, even though they made up roughly 14 percent of employees at these companies. "Early layoffs were dominated by recruiters, which is forgoing future hiring," Revelio senior economist Reyhan Ayas told Vox. "Whereas in 2023 we see a shift toward more core engineering and software engineering, which signals a change in focus of current business priorities."

In other words, tech companies aren't just trimming the fat by firing people who fill out their extensive ecosystem, which ranges from marketers to massage therapists. They're also, many for the first time, making cuts to the people who build the very products they're known for, and who enjoyed a sort of revered status since they, like the founders of the companies, were coders. Software engineers are still important, but they don't have the power they used to...

The latest monthly jobs report by tech industry association CompTIA found that even though employment at tech companies (which includes all roles at those companies) declined slightly in March, employment in technical occupations across industry sectors increased by nearly 200,000 positions. So even if tech companies are laying off tech workers, other industries are snatching them up. Unfortunately for software engineers and the like, that means they might also have to follow those industries' pay schemes. The average software engineer base pay in the US is $90,000, according to PayScale, but can be substantially higher at tech firms like Facebook, where such workers also get bonuses and stock options.

Walt Disney plans to cut thousands of jobs next week, including about 15% of the staff in its entertainment division, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the plans. From the report: The cuts will span TV, film, theme parks and corporate teams, affecting every region where Disney operates, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details aren't yet public. Some affected workers will be notified as early as April 24. The company declined to comment. Disney said in February it planned to eliminate 7,000 positions from its workforce of more than 220,000, part of an overall strategy to shave $5.5 billion in annual costs. Cuts are being carried out across the company, the people said, including at Disney Entertainment, a unit created in a restructuring this year as a home for the company's movie and TV production and distribution businesses including streaming.

The Seattle Times reports: After losing their jobs at one of Seattle's biggest tech companies, some workers find themselves facing an unexpected question: Do you want to return to the company that just let you go?

There's a catch. Those offers, from third-party recruiters eager to place workers at the companies they just left, are for contract positions rather than staff positions. They would come with an end date, a lower salary, no benefits and no stock options.

For workers the messages range from insensitive to insulting. "We all just got the shock of our life, the last thing I need is for you to continue to ask me to go to a company that just let me go," said one former Microsoft worker who was laid off in March and asked to remain anonymous during the job hunt. Another worker who was laid off from Amazon in January and also asked to remain anonymous out of concern for future job prospects said they've heard from several recruiters looking specifically for people with Amazon experience. In one response, the former Amazonian passed this message to the recruiter: "Tell Amazon if they want an engineer, they can just not fire me later this month...."

Because companies and recruiters cast such a wide net, workers who were recently cut are still getting caught in the pool of potential candidates — whether they want to be or not... [T]ech companies often ask recruiters to find workers who have already worked at their company, particularly when hiring for a contract position that would require a worker to get up to speed quickly, said Nabeel Chowdhury, senior vice president at recruiting firm 24 Seven Talent. That's what happened with the former Amazon worker. One recruiter sent a message that began "Reaching out to see if you might be open to returning to Amazon on a contract position?"
One former Microsoft worker told the Seattle Times "I do have a sense of pride. There's no way I want to go back ... making half the amount."

CIO magazine reports on "a growing number of managers and executives dropping degree requirements from job descriptions." Figures from the 2022 study The Emerging Degree Reset from The Burning Glass Institute quantify the trend, reporting that 46% of middle-skill and 31% of high-skill occupations experienced material degree resets between 2017 and 2019. Moreover, researchers calculated that 63% of those changes appear to be "'structural resets' representing a measured and potentially permanent shift in hiring practices" that could make an additional 1.4 million jobs open to workers without college degrees over the next five years.

Despite such statistics and testimony from Taylor and other IT leaders, the debate around whether a college education is needed in IT isn't settled. Some say there's no need for degrees; others say degrees are still preferred or required.... IBM is among the companies whose leaders have moved away from degree requirements; Big Blue is also one of the earliest, largest, and most prominent proponents of the move, introducing the term "new collar jobs" for the growing number of positions that require specific skills but not a bachelor's degree....

Not all are convinced that dropping degree requirements is the way to go, however. Jane Zhu, CIO and senior vice president at Veritas Technologies, says she sees value in degrees, value that isn't always replicated through other channels. "Though we don't necessarily require degrees for all IT roles here at Veritas, I believe that they do help candidates demonstrate a level of formal education and commitment to the field and provide a foundation in fundamental concepts and theories of IT-related fields that may not be easily gained through self-study or on-the-job training," she says. "Through college education, candidates have usually acquired basic technical knowledge, problem-solving skills, the ability to collaborate with others, and ownership and accountability. They also often gain an understanding of the business and social impacts of their actions."
The article notes an evolving trend of "more openness to skills-based hiring for many technical roles but a desire for a bachelor's degree for certain positions, including leadership." (Kelli Jordan, vice president of IBMer Growth and Development tells CIO that more than half of the job openings posted by IBM no longer require degrees.)

Thanks to Slashdot reader snydeq for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, has declared that 2023 will be the "year of efficiency" at his company. So far, efficiency has translated into mass layoffs. He has conducted two rounds of cuts over the past six months, with two more to come; these will eliminate more than 21,000 people. Mr. Zuckerberg is also closing 5,000 open positions, which amounts to 30 percent of his company's work force. At the same time, some of Meta's top executives have moved away and are managing large parts of the Silicon Valley company from their new homes in places like London and Tel Aviv. The layoffs and absentee leadership, along with concerns that Mr. Zuckerberg is making a bad bet on the future, have devastated employee morale at Meta, according to nine current and former employees, as well as messages reviewed by The New York Times.

Employees at Meta, which not long ago was one of the most desirable workplaces in Silicon Valley, face an increasingly precarious future. The company's stock price has dropped 43 percent from its peak 19 months ago. More layoffs, Mr. Zuckerberg has said on his Facebook page, are coming this month. Some of those cuts could be in engineering groups, which would have been unthinkable before the trouble started last year, two employees said. "So many of the employees feel like they're in limbo right now," said Erin Sumner, a global director of human resources at DeleteMe, who was laid off from Facebook in November. "They're saying it's 'Hunger Games' meets 'Lord of the Flies,' where everyone is trying to prove their worth to management."

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is not the only big tech company that has hit the brakes on spending. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and others have laid off thousands of workers in recent months, shed office space, dropped perks and pulled back from experimental initiatives. But Meta appears to face the most challenges. Last year, the company reported consecutive quarters of declining revenue -- a first since it became a public company in 2012.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Over the past month, classified Pentagon documents have circulated on 4chan, Telegram, and various Discord servers. The documents contain daily intelligence briefings, sensitive information about Ukrainian military positions, and a handwritten character sheet for a table-top roleplaying game. No one knows who leaked the Pentagon documents or how. They appeared online as photographs of printed pages, implying someone printed them out and removed them from a secure location, similar to how NSA translator Reality Winner leaked documents. The earliest documents Motherboard has seen are dated February 23, though the New York Times and Bellingcat reported that some are dated as early as January. According to Bellingcat, the earliest known instances of the leaks appearing online can be traced back to a Discord server.

At some point, a Discord user uploaded a zip file of 32 images from the leak onto a Minecraft Discord server. Included in this pack alongside highly sensitive, Top Secret and other classified documents about the Pentagon's strategy and assessment of the war in Ukraine, was a handwritten piece of paper that appeared to be a character sheet for a roleplaying game. It's written on a standard piece of notebook paper, three holes punched out on the side, blue lines crisscrossing the page. The character's name is Doctor "Izmer Trotzky," his character class is "Professor Scientist." They've got a strength of 5, a charisma of 4, and 19 rubles to their name. Doctor Trotzky has 10 points in first aid and occult skills, and 24 in spot hidden. He's carrying a magnifying glass, a fountain pen, a sword cane, and a deringer. [...]

But what game is it from? Motherboard reached out to game designer Jacqueline Bryk to find out. Bryk is an award-winning designer of roleplaying games who has worked on Kult: Divinity Lost, Changeling: the Lost, Fading Suns: Pax Alexius, and Vampire: the Masquerade. "I strongly suspect this is Call Of Cthulhu," Bryk said when first looking at the sheet. Call of Cthulhu (COC) is an RPG based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft where players attempt to stave off madness while investigating eldritch horrors. "This is a pretty classic Professor build. The sword cane really clinches it for me. I notice he's currently carrying a derringer and a dagger but took no points in firearms or fighting. I'm not sure which edition this is but it seems like the most he could do with his weapons is throw them." "After some research, Bryk concluded that the game is a homebrewed combination of COC and the Fallout tabletop game based on the popular video game franchise," adds Motherboard. "My best guest here is Fallout: Cthulhu the Homebrew," Bryk said, giving the home designed game a name.

The new management of FTX, headed by CEO John Ray III, on Sunday released its first interim report on control failures at the collapsed crypto exchange. There is a lot to digest. The Block: The 45-page report -- published Sunday afternoon by FTX Trading Ltd and its affiliated debtors -- describes in painstaking detail FTX's slapdash record-keeping, near non-existent cybersecurity defenses and its sparse expertise in key areas like finance. One of the more eye-catching items concerned Alameda Research, the trading firm that allegedly had access to billions of dollars in customer funds stored with FTX. The report states that Alameda "often had difficulty understanding what its positions were, let alone hedging or accounting for them."

Former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, now under house arrest and facing a litany of criminal charges, described Alameda in internal communications as "hilariously beyond any threshold of any auditor being able to even get partially through an audit," according to the report. He went on: "Alameda is unauditable. I don't mean this in the sense of 'a major accounting firm will have reservations about auditing it'; I mean this in the sense of 'we are only able to ballpark what its balances are, let alone something like a comprehensive transaction history.' We sometimes find $50m of assets lying around that we lost track of; such is life."

Long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid shares a new report from the Economist: Thanks to innovations such as fractal colouration patterns, which mimic nature by repeating shapes at different scales, the distance from which naked eyes can quickly spot soldiers wearing the best camouflage has shrunk, by one reckoning, by a fifth over the past two decades. That is impressive. On today's battlefields, however, it is no longer enough to merely hide from human eyes.

People and kit are given away as well by signals beyond the visual spectrum, and devices that detect these wavelengths are getting better, lighter and cheaper. Thermal sensors are a case in point. Today, one that costs about $1,000 and weighs as little as five sachets of sugar can, in good weather, detect a warm vehicle as far off as 10km. As Hans Kariis, deputy head of signatures research at the Swedish Defence Research Agency, notes, that is well beyond the range at which a small drone would be spotted. Two decades ago, he adds, a less sensitive thermal sensor weighing a kilogram cost ten times as much.
And then there's automatic target-detection software, the article points out, like the Kestrel software deployed in more than 3,500 aircraft around the world, which "scans feeds of visual, infrared and radar data, and places red boxes around people and other potential targets, even as their positions in the frame move." And the threat has only increased with the arrival of satellite-based synthetic-aperture-radar (SAR) imagery.

But then the article lists examples of new camouflage that now tricks electronic sensors:

• Military vehicles affix hexagon-shaped sheets that can be cooled with electricity to blend into the temperature of their surroundings.
• Camouflage netting that absorbs (some) incoming radar beams with semi-conducting polymers while reducing heat signatures with insulation — and reflecting back the cooler temperature of the ground.
• Netherlands-based TNO makes "battery-powered sniper suits" embedded with 500 LEDs that match the luminosity and color of the surroundings using real-time data from a helmet camera.

InfoWorld reports: Zig, a general purpose programming language that interacts with C/C++ programs and promises to be a modern alternative to C, has made an appearance in the Tiobe index of programming language popularity. Zig entered the top 50 in the April edition of the Tiobe Programming Community Index, ranking 46th, albeit with a rating of just 0.19%. By contrast, the Google-promoted Carbon language, positioned as an experimental successor to C++, ranked just 168th.
Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen argues that high-performance languages "are booming due to the vast amounts of data that needs to be processed nowadays. As a result, C and C++ are doing well in the top 10 and Rust seems to be a keeper in the top 20." Zig has all the nice features of C and C++ (such as explicit memory management enhanced with option types) and has abandoned the not-so-nice features (such as the dreadful preprocessing). Entering the top 50 is no guarantee to become a success, but it is at least a first noteworthy step. Good luck Zig!
Tiobe bases its monthly ranking of programming language popularity on search engine results for courses, third party vendors, and engineers. Here's what they's calculated for the most popular programming languages in April of 2023:

• Python
• C
• Java
• C++
• C#
• Visual Basic
• JavaScript
• SQL
• PHP
• Go

April's top 10 was nearly identical to the rankings a year ago, but assembly language fell from 2022's #8 position to #12 in 2023. SQL and PHP rose one rank (into 2023's #8 and #9 positions) — and as in March, the rankings now shows Go as the 10th most popular programming language.

Australia's financial regulator has cancelled the local financial services licence of the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance. The Guardian reports: Earlier this year, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (Asic) found Binance had incorrectly classified hundreds of retail customers as wholesale investors. The Asic chair, Joe Longo, said the distinction was important because retail customers have access to more consumer protections under Australian law, including the right to dispute resolution. Binance's Australia's financial services (AFS) licence only allows it to provide derivatives products to sophisticated investors, rather than retail customers.

"It is critically important that AFS licensees classify retail and wholesale clients in accordance with the law," Longo said. "Retail clients trading in crypto derivatives are afforded important rights and consumer protections under financial services laws in Australia, including access to external dispute resolution through the Australian financial complaints authority. Our targeted review of these matters is ongoing, including focus on the extent of consumer harms."

From April 14, Binance clients will not be able to increase derivatives positions or open new positions. The exchange must close any remaining open positions by April 21. Binance can remain a member of the Australian financial complaints authority until April 8, 2024. "As we have said before, Asic supports a regulatory framework for crypto with a focus on consumer protection and market integrity. The final decision as to the regulatory settings is one for government," Longo said. Binance has been operating in Australia for many years but its now cancelled AFSL was with Oztures Trading, a company it acquired last year.

The online shop Book Depository is due to close at the end of April, vendors and publishing partners have been told. This comes after the bookseller's parent company Amazon announced it had decided to "eliminate" a number of positions across its Devices and Books businesses. The Guardian reports: The Gloucester-based bookseller was founded in 2004 by Stuart Felton and Andrew Crawford, a former Amazon employee, with the mantra of "selling 'less of more' rather than'more of less'". It aimed to sell 6m titles covering a wide variety of genres and topics, as opposed to focusing solely on bestsellers. While originally a rival to Amazon, it was acquired by the retail giant in 2011, causing some in the publishing industry to worry about the tightening of the American company's "stranglehold" on the UK book trade.

According to the trade magazine the Bookseller, an email sent out to vendors and publishing partners explained that Book Depository will be closing, and that the last date customers will be able to place orders is 26 April. "Over the coming weeks we will complete a winding down of the business, including discontinuing our listings as a marketplace seller and closing our website," Andy Chart, head of vendor management, wrote. "I would like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you, from everyone at Book Depository and our book-loving customers, for your supportive partnership over the years in helping us to make printed books more accessible to readers around the world," he concluded.

Amazon laid off about 100 employees in its video-game divisions as part of its broader cutbacks, affecting workers at Prime Gaming, Game Growth and the company's San Diego studio. From a report: "Our resources will be aligned to support our focus on content," Games Vice President Christoph Hartmann wrote in a memo to employees Tuesday. "Going forward, we will continue to invest in our internal development efforts, and our teams will continue to grow as our projects progress." Amazon has struggled to capitalize on its resources in gaming, including through its Crown channel, an entertainment show on the Twitch streaming service. Twitch recently cut about 400 positions. The company has canceled and even removed titles from sale since the division kicked off in 2012. Amazon has only released one internally developed game -- the online role-playing title New World, which suffered a steep decline in its player base after the September 2021 launch. The Irvine, California-based New World team will continue to grow, Hartmann said.

Virgin Orbit is ceasing operations "for the foreseeable future" after failing to secure a funding lifeline, CEO Dan Hart told employees during an all-hands meeting Thursday afternoon. The company will lay off nearly all of its workforce. CNBC reports: "Unfortunately, we've not been able to secure the funding to provide a clear path for this company," Hart said, according to audio of the 5 p.m. ET meeting obtained by CNBC. "We have no choice but to implement immediate, dramatic and extremely painful changes," Hart said, audibly choking up on the call. He added this would be "probably the hardest all-hands that we've ever done in my life."

The company will eliminate all but 100 positions, amounting to about 90% of the workforce, Hart said, noting the layoffs will affect every team and department. In a securities filing, the company said the layoffs constituted 675 positions, or approximately 85%. "This company, this team -- all of you -- mean a hell of a lot to me. And I have not, and will not, stop supporting you, whether you're here on the journey or if you're elsewhere," Hart said. Virgin Orbit will "provide a severance package for every departing" employee, Hart said, with a cash payment, extension of benefits, and support in finding a new position -- with a "direct pipeline" set up with sister company Virgin Galactic for hiring.

Lockheed Martin has created a spinoff devoted to lunar infrastructure, Crescent Space, whose first project is a Moon-to-Earth satellite network. Engadget reports: Parsec, as it's called, uses a constellation of small lunar satellites to provide a non-stop connection between astronauts, their equipment and the people back home. The system will also provide navigation help. The technology should help explorers keep in touch, and assist with spacecraft course changes. As Lockheed Martin explains, though, it could prove vital to those on lunar soil. Parsec's nodes create a lunar equivalent to GPS, giving astronauts their exact positions and directions back to base. A rover crew might know how to return home without driving into a dangerous crater, for instance.

Crescent's first Parsec nodes should be operational by 2025, with Lockheed Martin providing the satellites. And before you ask: yes, the company is clearly hoping for some big customers. CEO Joe Landon (formerly a Lockheed Martin Space VP) claims Crescent is "well positioned" to support NASA's Artemis Moon landings and other exploratory missions.

Mass layoffs across the US technology industry have now claimed well over 300,000 jobs. And yet, companies are still hiring in areas they see as mission-critical. Contract positions are still commanding $120-an-hour wages. From a report:The industry hasn't seen cuts this deep since the dot-com bubble burst, but Linda Lutton, who has been recruiting for tech firms since 1987, says it doesn't feel like a bust. For one, she said, firms are still taking her calls. "I'm in constant contact with my tech clients, and they keep telling us, 'We will come back,'" said Lutton, who recalls how clients suddenly stopped answering their phones during the dot-com crash of the early 2000s because they had folded overnight. "I haven't had a single message from a single client saying, 'We have to cut everything down.'" Whatever happens to the tech industry in the coming months and years will ripple across the entire US economy. The sector now claims the biggest share of market value in the S&P 500, accounting for about one-quarter of the index. That's up from 18% a decade ago. Tech accounts for about 6% of US gross domestic product, and a similar share of jobs across the country. The average pay in tech is nearly twice that of the typical US worker.

"According to one count, more than 280,000 people were laid off from tech jobs in 2022 and the first two months of 2023," notes a new blog post at Stack Overflow.

But then it asks the question: "What's different about these layoffs?" [T]he current economy has less in common than you might think with the wreckage of the dot-com bubble or the Great Recession. Overall, it's still a good time to work in tech, and the hiring market remains robust: One survey found that almost 80% of people laid off in tech found new roles within three months of launching their job search. There are more open tech positions than people to fill them (about 375,000, according to one estimate), and job listings between January and October 2022 were up 25% over the same period in 2021.

If the job market isn't as dire as we think, why does this round of layoffs feel so widespread, affecting companies often perceived as more recession-proof than their peers? Part of the answer may be what organizational behavior experts have termed "copycat layoffs." "Laying off employees turns out to be infectious," writes Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic. "When executives see their corporate competitors letting go of workers, they seize what they see as an opportunity to reduce their workforce, rather than having no choice but to do so...."

In many cases, workers laid off by household-name tech companies have found new jobs outside the traditional parameters of the tech industry, where their skill sets are in high demand. As Matt McLarty, global field chief technology officer for MuleSoft, told CNBC, businesses that have long needed tech professionals to upgrade their stack or guide a long-delayed cloud migration can now scoop up freshly laid-off tech workers (and those for whom Silicon Valley has lost its luster). Companies in energy and climate technology, healthcare, retail, finance, agriculture, and more are hiring tech pros at a steady clip, even if FAANG companies are less bullish. It's been said before that every company is a tech company, but in 2023, that's truer than ever. In fact, the biggest difference for tech workers this year, reports The New Stack, is that "the greatest opportunities may not lie exclusively in the FAANG companies anymore, but in more traditional industries that are upgrading their legacy stacks and embracing cloud native." Some of those opportunities also lie with startups, including ones helmed by Big Tech veterans ready to turn their layoffs into lemonade....

So whether you've been affected by the recent spate of layoffs or not, it's worth expanding your list of potential employers to include companies — even industries — you've never considered. You might find that they're thrilled to have you.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: More than 1,000 scientists and postgraduate students were barred from working in the UK last year on national security grounds, amid a major government crackdown on research collaborations with China. Figures obtained by the Guardian reveal that a record 1,104 scientists and postgraduate students were rejected by Foreign Office vetting in 2022, up from 128 in 2020 and just 13 in 2016.

The sharp increase follows a hardening of the government's stance on scientific ties with China, with warnings from MI5 of a growing espionage threat, major research centers being quietly shut down and accusations by a government minister that China's leading genomics company had regularly sought to hack into the NHS's genetic database. Geopolitical tensions stepped up further this week, as the US, Australia and the UK announced a multi-decade, multibillion-dollar deal aimed at countering China's military expansion in the Indo-Pacific. China said the Aukus plan to build a combined fleet of elite nuclear-powered submarines was "a path of error and danger."

The Foreign Office declined to give a breakdown by nationality, but data supplied by leading universities including Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College suggests that, at these institutions at least, Chinese academics account for a majority of those denied clearance. Some have welcomed the policy shift, with one security expert saying the number of academics being barred is "commensurate with the threat." But leading scientists say the scheme is leaving universities struggling to recruit the best talent from abroad. "A majority of applicants are thought to be scientists seeking to move to the UK to take up offers of research degrees or fellowships," adds the Guardian. "But the Guardian is also aware of researchers, including five Chinese scientists at Imperial college, who did not pass clearance despite having already held positions at UK universities for several years -- and who may have had to leave the UK as a result."