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💬 Issue #2: Pizza vs. Rockets

💬 Issue #2: Pizza vs. Rockets

Amazon frowns, nerds choose pizza over rockets, and Microsoft goes WWE

20 Jan

Friday achieved. Welcome back to Everyone is Typing... where we fill you in on the weird future of work. Let's do it.

Today's dishes:

Amazon turns Smile upside down.
Nerds ditch rockets for pizza.
Microsoft's 50 vs. 10,000

AMAZON SUCCESSFULLY REMOVES LAST REMAINING SHRED OF HUMANITY

In an apparent attempt to dig in the couch for some coin Amazon just announced they're icing AmazonSmile, their popular program that gave 0.5% of sales through a special version of its store to a non-profit charity of a user's choosing.

Some chatbot real person representing the program stated, "After almost a decade, the program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped." The program's contributions totaled around $400 million since its inception in 2013 which sounds like hella big impact to us.

Live footage of non-profits getting the termination notice after hiring their 2023 staff

The bright side to all of this is that now Amazon isn't giving away $40m a year through Smile they can also fire everyone running the program and free up even more cash for very important purchases.

Big wheels keep on turning.

PIZZA-ADDICTED SILICON VALLEY NERDS TO ROCKETS: "NO."

There's a talent rush afoot from the likes of SpaceX to, did I get this right, pizza robotics companies!?

Yep, it says it right here in the thing.

Pizza Skynet product demonstration

Here's the deal: Engineers working for massive companies like SpaceX usually have small visible impact on the end product, if any. Taking on something like mobile automatic pizza oven trucks gives that good, good hacker feeling of doing something tangible with your smarts.

It's a whole 'nother topic to get into if we should be putting the humble pizzamaker out of a job, but dimes to pizzas donuts say it'll be the friendly neighborhood customer support specialist who is out of a job due to GPT-whatever before Pizza Skynet is fully functional.

Now get your pepperoni gattling gun over here and get me a slice.

MICROSOFT HOSTS TERRIBLE PARTY. THEN FIRES NEARLY EVERYONE

Picture this:

50 of the top Microsoft executives standing around at a stage in Davos.

The conversations are exactly as you'd expect:

arid.

All of a sudden a famous musical guest hops on the stage.

It's Sting.

For 50 people.

50 executives.

Sting.

Shit, wrong Sting. I meant the Every Breath You Take yacht rock one.

This would be atomically funny/lame if they didn't go ahead and lay off 10,000 (!) people the very next day in what would be the largest round of layoffs since 2014. CEO Satya Nadella wrote a very efficient heartfelt blog post with some words which I think is legally required nowadays.

Some people feel Microsoft laying this many people off during a time of record profits is a bad look, Sting concert or no Sting concert. Tech stocks are in the gutter and they're all looking to generate gobs of cash ahead of a real slowdown through any means necessary — even if that means canning people.