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Layoff numbers

It’s all over the news that tech layoffs are everywhere. It appears that layoffs in tech are already well above the pace of the Great Recession of 2008. The treading for 2023 is looking to be even worse. Some say that the fundamentals of this tech crash are much better than the 2001 dot-com crash, but we’re clearly on a very bad, and accelerating, job loss trajectory.

Dot-Com crash of 2001	300,000 tech jobs lost, with around one million jobs lost total in following years.
Great Recession	60,000 jobs lost in 2008 and 60,000 in 2009
2022-2023 Tech layoffs	90,000-150,000 jobs lost in 2022, 68,000 in January of 2023

Many people have pointed out that these layoffs might have been completely inevitable due to the unbridled hiring during Covid. In some ways, painful as it is, this is now a return to pre-Covid tech employment levels as the jobs lost in 2022-2023 still only represent about 50% of those hired during Covid. For many young people who started in the last 10 years, this is their first experience of a crash. For vets, this is the 3rd.

Packages

So, what are the packages that many of these laid off employees are receiving?

Alphabet: 16-week base severance package with an additional two weeks for every year of employment at Google, Pichai said in a memo to employees. Laid-off employees will also have “at least” 16 weeks of share vesting accelerated and receive 6 months of health-care coverage.

Microsoft: Benefit-eligible U.S. employees are to receive severance, six months of health care and stock vesting, and 60 days of notice.

Amazon: Amazon is offering full pay and benefits over a 60-day period, when Amazon will keep them on the payroll but they won’t be expected to keep working. After that period, Amazon will offer laid-off employees several weeks of severance depending on their length of time with the company, a separation payment, transitional health benefits and job placement. It’s unclear if Amazon’s severance package includes any provisions that would allow employees to accelerate the vesting of stock compensation.

Salesforce: Laid-off employees would receive a minimum of “nearly” five months of pay. Benioff’s letter to employees also said that laid-off employees would receive health insurance benefits and career resources. Severance packages would include six months of health-care coverage and a “minimum of two months outplacement support.”

Meta: Zuckerberg promised “every” laid-off employee 16 weeks of severance, plus two weeks for every year of service, as well as vesting of restricted share units and health insurance coverage for a predetermined amount of time.

Twitter: Musk had previously said that laid-off employees would receive three months of severance pay. But some Twitter employees said that when they got their severance letters, they were offered only one month of severance in return for a non-disparagement agreement and a waiver of their right to sue the company.

Links:

• https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/05/tech-jobs-hit-the-hardest-by-layoffs-last-year-report.html
• https://layoffs.fyi/
• https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/google-amazon-microsoft-meta-twitter-severance-packages-compared.html?utm_content=Tech&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1674833466-1

Valefisk is a game designer that has decided that games can be a great way to troll and torture his friends and players.

In the past, he’s done a variety of game playthroughs – but severely abusing the mechanics in hilarious ways and with completely bonkers self-imposed challenges. The videos are all really good examinations of our assumptions about games and how violating those assumptions produces hilarious results. He took the low-budget peasant farming game Farmer’s Life and played it trying to stay as drunk as possible while completing challenges (he called it the Eastern European living challenge). Playing the empire building game Victoria 3 but with a traitor like Among Us. Imagine playing a CS:GO tournament but the actual player is blindfolded and a second person is trying to tell the player where to go and shoot. He creates cities in Skylines that are nothing but roads. Plays battle games with no unit caps and even playing Crusader Kings but only allowing marriage alliances that are incest.

More recently he has started purposefully making games to torture and befuddle his friends. He’s made such creations as EXTREME Monopoly, a first-person adventure game with purposefully broken mechanics and puzzles that make no sense, and a host of other troll playthroughs of games. more recently a board game that is just…hilariously evil.

He unleashes it on his friends – one of whom appears to be nursing a massive hangover.

A clinical drug trial recently provided some groundbreaking results at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York for people with mismatch repair-deficient rectal cancer.

The findings of a small clinical trial with 14 patients were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting in June 2022 by researchers from MSK. In six months of treatment with dostarlimab, a monoclonal antibody therapy drug, all 14 patients saw their colorectal cancer tumors vanish entirely.

In the study, all 14 patients received the immunotherapy treatment dostarlimab as the first-line treatment for mismatch repair-deficient locally advanced rectal cancer. MSK researchers administered single-agent dostarlimab, an anti-PD-1 monoclonal antibody, every three weeks for six months in patients with mismatch repair-deficient stage 2 and 3 rectal adenocarcinomas, to be followed by standard chemoradiation and surgery.

All 14 patients who initiated treatment and had at least six months of follow-up saw no evidence of a tumor through numerous tests including an MRI, PET scan, and biopsy to name a few. Because of the disappearance of the tumors, none of the patients required chemoradiation or surgery.

While mismatch repair-deficient colon cancer is not the most common type of colon cancer (only about 3-5% of colon cancers), the findings showed astounding results of what appears to be an actual cure for this type of cancer without surgery or chemotherapy. 5 years of follow-up monitoring will be required to confirm this result, so there is still a long way to go.

Links:

• https://www.manisteenews.com/news/article/Small-study-miraculous-results-All-14-patients-17225373.php
• https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2201445

William Shatner became the oldest person (90 years old!) ever to go into space in 2021. He spoke about the experience immediately after the fact. It was clear that it shook him up, but we would have no idea until 2022 when he released this statement in an op-ed for The Guardian. In it, he describes his experience of a well documented phenomenon experienced by many astronauts – the Overview Effect:

While I was looking away from Earth, and turned towards the rest of the universe, I didn’t feel connection; I didn’t feel attraction. What I understood, in the clearest possible way, was that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death. I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.

This was an immensely powerful awakening for me. It filled me with sadness. I realised that we had spent decades, if not centuries, being obsessed with looking away, with looking outside. I played my part in popularising the idea that space was the final frontier. But I had to get to space to understand that Earth is, and will remain, our only home.

This highly emotional and moving experience is a well known phenomenon. Wikipedia gives us a good description of the Overview Effect:

The overview effect is a cognitive shift reported by some astronauts while viewing the Earth from space. Researchers have characterized the effect as “a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus”. The most prominent common aspects of personally experiencing the Earth from space are appreciation and perception of beauty, unexpected and even overwhelming emotion, and an increased sense of connection to other people and the Earth as a whole.

One of the earliest experiences was by Edgar Mitchell in 1971 as part of the Apollo 14 mission and the 6th man to walk on the moon. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1970, but had this to say when looking at the Earth from his trip to the moon:

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.”

Casino Azul makes some pretty crazy Tequila bottles: weird still contraptions, animals, funky glass constructions with flowers in them, and even ships and AR rifle bottles.

No word if their tequila is actually drinkable, but that’s usually not the point with these sorts of things.

I think everyone has heard of the scandals at some of the largest game studios. Sexism, emotional abuse, gaslighting, and toxic working conditions were just some of the stories that have come to light. Many smaller developers have been extraordinarily vocal at denouncing these studios at GDC and online.

Fast forward a year or two, and now we’re finding out that some of the most vocal Indies are turning out to be as bad, if not worse, than those they were complaining again.

Some of them have had major allegations by dozens of former employees and partners – allegations that have now been confirmed as they have stepped down, issues apologies, and are being stripped of the very awards against abusive environments they claimed to be against.

This isn’t to denounce these particular people – but to point out that abuse can happen anywhere and everywhere. Anyone or any group that pretends to be superior than others are almost certainly putting themselves in a position to become hypocrites. After all, we’ve seen these issues from triple A studios to indies to Linux kernel development to world renown peace and love artists like John Lennon.

(Sidebar: John Lennon, known for his songs about peace and love, has been repeatedly and brutally denounced by his own son as being a hypocrite as his father abused, abandoned, and then physically assaulted members of his family.)

Warning: this might be a little hard for some to watch. It talks about some serious emotional abuse by trusted leaders.

Links:

• https://www.thegamer.com/indie-developers-abuse/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/th4yo8/investigating_three_indie_superstars_accused_of/