Specifically, they cherry picked 2022/2023 and pretended those numbers were good examples of "normal" hiring. Looking at the chart, it's clear they had a huge hiring boom, enough to overcome the prior 5 years of demographic shift. This is consistent with the general hiring boom in tech that came about then, just before LLM hype launched into the stratosphere.

They talked as though 2024 was a precipitous drop, but as you say, it was just a return to 2021 levels.

Without AI, we probably would see similar employment trends in tech and note it as a "correction". With LLM in the mix, it becomes hard to say how much is genuine shift to LLM to take care of things or LLM as a rationalization to get rid of the tech workforce the companies probably didn't need to hire up so much in the first place. Can certainly say which option generates more clicks though...

Note this was mostly a simple demographic observation being written about, *not* about relative popularity of university among the populace.

It's not that there are the same number of high school students but fewer want university, it's just that not nearly as many people were born.

Since the housing crash, domestic stability has eluded so much of the population that you would count on to have children.

So particularly the cost management is certainly something to watch, but your deeper problem is just that society is failing to instill confidence in the people that they can support themselves and children.

I looked at some houses, and the Opendoor ones were just sad travesties.

What was likely nice wood grain cabinetry just blasted with paint. Just sprayed on and painted all the doors shut. Same for handrails, which felt horrible to touch. Nice grain patterns replaced with light beige wall paint. Looking deeper, they never fixed anything that I would have considered important, just made things worse with new paint without regard for the thing being painted. I think they were more valuable before they had it screwed over.

Changing a feather to a leaf seems a weird thing to consider harmful. A leaf is supremely uncontroversial and it's not like the feather was somehow core to why anyone should, even in theory, care about the ASF.

I don't know but *suspect* the people that were concerned would have been sufficiently satisfied by removing "Apache" and ignoring the feather, hence my theory that it's probably more reaction than was strictly called for.

I'm not exactly sure about the 'real' problem in this front. In my opinion the closest thing to a 'real' problem is that the foundation hasn't really had a specific meaning in a couple of decades.

I could see HTTP/3 as a bit more of a tricky thing for Apache. Other servers largely declined to have 'in-server' extensions and they get more freedom with how they treat network sockets.

Apache has a lot more things that are implemented as fairly intrusive extensions, and I could imagine a change from TCP to UDP being a more difficult thing to navigate.

If you have need of some of those, HTTP/3 is probably a broader problem for you anyway. If you don't need those extensions, then switching to something like nginx isn't a huge burden, and the default performance in nginx tends to be better than apache except for some of those select extensions.

But the ASF barely cares about Apache. It was the kindling to spark a 'foundation' when 'LAMP' was all the rage, but now it has next to nothing to do with anything they bother to think about and only remains as a residual brand from their heyday of the 90s to early 2000s.

I would wager it was less the feather, and more about doubling down on 'Apache' by adding the feather.

It all started with "hah, it's funny that "A patchy webserver" sounds like "Apache". Then when it actually took off, they retconned it as honoring the Native Americans, despite pretty much being a bunch of white guys with no particular affiliation with the people the name would represent.

I generally think the 'cultural appropriation' sorts of complaints are frequently overblown, but this seems a bit much. Without any context, one would reasonably assume 'The Apache Software Foundation' would have at least something to do with Native American involvement, despite it not being the case.

So I can see that 'ASF' being a compromise makes sense, the feather to leaf however might be an overreaction, but ultimately harmless.

Frankly in general I don't put a whole lot of weight behind ASF nor the LSF as they both got turned into more marketing assets for corps than curating some cohesive software sentiment across a portfolio.

Well, not necessarily that far. If you might possibly ever have any sort of personal data even with no intent to actually do anything sketchy with the data, GPDR compliance is a pain.

But still for good reason, you are making yourself a steward of the data which, by any sane measure, should be a responsibility taken very seriously. If you don't like it, good, you have a strong motivator to actually implement the feature at the edge and do everything to avoid ever collecting the information and avoid retaining it even in the edge device.

Problem being that IBM HR and Legal direction is actively bad for business. So it's a little less mundane than usual. Especially IBM legal has a habit of painfully intervening in open source engagement by IBM personnel.

On HR, IBM has been known in the industry for eroding their formerly respectable benefits to substandard. So they expect to apply IBM HR principles to RedHat, and that's going to be terrible for attrition. Don't know anyone that would actively *want* to work for IBM anymore after the changes they've put into place.

And Legal, oh boy. IBM's legal team last I dealt with them were horrific for a company trying to do open source. If any of that remains, expect RedHat to really screw up their bread and butter as they become crippled trying to do anything that involves open source participation one way or another.

If you went the other way, ditching IBM's HR and Legal and letting RedHat call the shots, that would make sense, but I fully trust IBM to do the stupidest way possible.

And that assessment of Red Hat's dead culture and what replaced it... Yeah, that totally brings back memories of my time at IBM.

Indeed, but the ratio of 'boring code' can be pretty low, leading some micromanaging leaders to see lower proportion of LLM generated output from their senior devs and think of them as luddites, no longer able to adapt to 'obviously' better new tech rather than the tech having limited capability in nuanced ways beyond their ability to understand. Some people in my company have taken to generating side slop to pad the metrics so that execs stop asking why the senior devs aren't using enough AI. In the name of it not being totally wasteful, they take on grunt work that they might have formerly offloaded to interns so that LLM can actually generate some viable code that can be shown in the actual team output.

I think the training could be difficult to the extent LLM burns away typical straightforward well trodden new guy fodder, and we do have this to an extent in other fields like math. You could teach a kid right out the gate here's a calculator, don't worry about the details, that's offloaded. Instead we go through this phase that seems like nonsense to the kids, do it by hand without a calculator. Then after enough has happened to prove their worth, they are allowed ancient levels of calculator while they manually do the things more modern calculators can do. Until at some point, the education no longer cares what tool you use for the things the tool can do. So some sort of nonsensical "ignore the helpful tech" seems to be the ticket. Challenge being that traditionally the workplace is where a huge amount of software development is learned, and companies aren't too big on educational style "limit your resources to do the task".

But broadly speaking it's felt like throughout my entire career Gartner has said various things with all the accuracy of coin flipping. I'm shocked that business people have kept citing them time and time again like some grand Oracle as they keep flubbing the details with little or no particular insight than anyone else.

Yes, but it's got a more decent chance at a viable result for entry level than advanced. At all levels you have to audit, just the relative likelihood that it will screw up and the amount of correction needed varies. If you ask it to make a function to initialize a set of variables from argv, it'll do that fine and quick, but sometimes screw up a variable or omit something and just need a little amendment.

So when Altman sees two sorts of outcomes, young entry level people that can see significant gains by having an LLM crank out something and auditing, and an advanced career person that is barely helped if at all by LLM, he concludes that the person is screwing up not that the LLM is limited.

Of course, that can be hard with an irrational market inflating everything into fly-by-night territory

Suppose the question remains, what is *different* compared to the previous experiments of similar design, or is it just a matter of "yeah, it's the same experiments, just trying to get a larger sample size"?

The person recognized this is a test of the crew, not the tech, but just wondering why since we've experimented with crew before.

In a lot of places, the only career ladder is to leave tech behind by 45 to 50 and become management.

Those who cling to tech get stuck with stagnant compensation because they are organizationally considered a dead end.

So at least some of the older half of that age range are out of 'tech roles' but because they are getting more money for doing stupider stuff.

Of course the ageism is a problem, hiring managers wondering what a loser a 55 year old must be if they haven't started reaping some cushy management position. We actually did hire someone for some tech work who was 50, and it was actually more understandable because they worked landscaping until then and hiring managers were happy to have a rational explanation for why an old guy would be settling for a tech role.