Mike Andrews

☁️

[Mike Andrews @ma]

@igb Prisoner’s Dilemma and they all failed.

[Mike Andrews @ma]

@blowdart MSFT aren’t putting in billions for a new central campus only for everyone to WFT - come 2024/5 when that all opens up I’m sure there will be much more expectations for people to be on-site.

[Mike Andrews @ma]

I didn’t know anything about electric self-driving cars, so thought Elon was a genius.

Likewise, I didn’t know squat about reusable rockets, so thought Elon was a genius.

I know about software, and this man is a moron.

[Mike Andrews @ma]

@QuinnyPig Yes, but also it’s doing people a favor - SMS 2FA is insecure, so fewer people using it would not be a bad idea. It’s not as if authenticator apps aren’t free.

[Mike Andrews @ma]

That balloon, the one China sent for “intelligence gathering” over the US. It didn’t find any, which is why it’s floating around out there going 🤷🏻‍♂️

[Mike Andrews @ma]

@QuinnyPig @awscloud It’s never going to be a 180 and a crash. Growth will slow (organic or just law of big numbers) and if anything we’ll see it for 20…15…10… then hover there. There’s too much future commitments and book value for a “crash” of any kind. Even “repatriation” from cloud takes time.

[Mike Andrews @ma]

@ToddMitchem @silviabassi @profgalloway If you think that Amazon will be getting AI to write updates to, say, AWS S3, or the main payments gateway, I’ve got a bridge in London to sell you.

Yes, AI is getting better, and will have *some* place, but it’s not replacing a swath of people. It’s not trustworthy enough, yet.

[Mike Andrews @ma]

Well, a connection I didn’t think of*, but 🤣

https://t.co/F4DBNa8mAy
*guess I should have though - the crown owns lots of property in the UK

[Mike Andrews @ma]

@anna_biela3 @CrispinCowan0 @medus4_cdc I think it’s funny. I’m a Brit and @CrispinCowan0 is right - the UK has bad dental healthcare, *and* that particular family is very badly inbred (not particularly fair on Catherine, but 🤷🏻‍♂️)

[Mike Andrews @ma]

@hikhvar @halvarflake This 👆.

Oh, and that Americans are absolute full of themselves

[Mike Andrews @ma]

@pwlot @perplexity_ai No, thanks for the pointer. It certainly is better having sources. I don’t think LLMs in general work like that though - they combine a lot of signals (sources) in generating their models - being able to point to a single source for any part of the output isn’t how they work TMK

[Mike Andrews @ma]

@troyhunt I was part of team behind this https://t.co/DwIFJrg6FN. There was a lot of custom software & services, but it came down to a lot of Intel NUCs running React apps (could swap out for Grafana), Apache Storm (data processing/aggregating), and Barco hardware to combine/scale inputs.

[Mike Andrews @ma]

I’ll help whomever I can during this period - intros, network, even if just venting over drinks. This is certainly a watershed moment, but not the end for any not many - tech is too engrained and will still grow, but it’s not the guarantee job for life at BigCo that it was 😢

[Mike Andrews @ma]

This is a really shitty way of doing layoffs, but not sure if informing everyone all at once or doing it more personally and everyone waiting to see if/where the axe will fall is any better.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

We'll look back at this week as an inflection point when Big Tech lost its former attractiveness. It will be stories like Justin's, and the countless ones to be told, where many realize that, during layoffs, people become numbers, and 8% of those numbers need to be "marked."

[Mike Andrews @ma]

In any case this is a historic moment for tech - many (myself included) thought it was really stable and as long as performing well jobs were secure - I’ve seen too many excellent people announce their layoff to believe that, and in some ways it appears random. Bubble has popped

[Mike Andrews @ma]

@docjamesw Where I do think RIFs are necessary and correct in the business cycle is looking at products/services/teams that are no longer valuable - MS Encarta had its time but at some point needed to be retired (people with it unfortunately) - same is true for other business units.

[Mike Andrews @ma]

@docjamesw Sure, maybe more servers, bandwidth, call-center staff, recruiting is needed, but those are *raw resources* not people - if systems were designed right those should scale up *and down* with little (but not zero) change in the people it takes to manage those resources.

[Mike Andrews @ma]

@odnswim_ @Carnage4Life One of the reasons people stay at MSFT for so long is because they can have multiple careers, doing very different things (search, games, hardware, etc) without changing company. Or they can go very deep on one thing (OS, compilers, etc) when there’s few places that also do that.