A lot of comments are indicating you're alone on this, but I'm finding the contrary. Our team doubled in size in the last 6 months or so with an office mandate (to almost 20 now). With aggressive hiring goals, we discussed whether we might have to transition to a remote company to satisfy market expectations, but found that as long as we're completely transparent in the initial conversation, there are people who are all-in on RTO.
One of our recent senior hires specifically wanted an in-office role and a lot of our junior engineers are hungry to learn from the seniors.
What I suspect is there will be a divide in the coming years and as long as companies are open about who they are, people can make the choice of where they want to work.
This makes absolutely no sense to me and even as an American, often times reads like anti-China propaganda. If the algorithms are showing STEM content on the Chinese version of TikTok, it's likely the result of two reasons:
1. Chinese children prefer STEM content and the algorithm is providing that to them.
2. It's enforced by the Chinese government or someone who believes this kind of content will benefit the Chinese future.
In the case of #1, this is a cultural issue and we have no one to blame but ourselves.
In the case of #2, which I believe is what most folks who say this are suggesting, I can't imagine why children would then proceed to download the app, use it for hours a day, only to learn science and math. Sure, some may enjoy it (as some in the US would as well), but a vast majority of that market is going to reject this and delete it from their phone. In fact, we have this in the US -- we have educational TV shows, you can visit a library on your free time, etc, but kids don't do it-- because they're kids.
Chinese children don’t use TikTok “for hours a day.” Another key difference between their app and ours. They are limited to 40 minutes a day and cannot use it at all between 10pm and 6am.
It seems to be strongly synergistic with a lot of their existing product offerings.
Getting the technology done even better means that Chromebooks and Androids (or even the browser) could be heavyweight gaming machines -- and thereby increasing those audiences.
As those audiences grow (and they're already big), having better hardware streamlined into Stadia means they immediately have insane distribution power. If you consider mobile gaming dominance in Asia, and the ability to release triple-A games immediately to a billion devices worldwide, that creates huge leverage over iOS.
Then as you said, GCP. I think someone with an idea and roadmap was there, but FAANG incentive programs don't reward people focused on the long game.
I think for both of these companies, the path to profitability is eventually cutting out the human aspect for automated delivery. Self-driving cars is a good vision for the business and a very end-result. And for food delivery, I'm seeing more of those robotic carts that contain food driving around sidewalks in the Bay Area.
It's pilot-scale, relies on human labor, and has some obvious problems which would break down immediately at scale. Plus they're annoying to navigate around. But they do exist.
> The number of online interactions made on Facebook’s mobile app in the UK plummeted by 38pc between June 2018 and June 2019, according to the analytics firm Mixpanel.
I find it hard to believe that Mixpanel has any kind of insight into this kind of information.
> Interactions, which occur when users click on a web link or advert inside the Facebook app, declined in seven of the last 12 months, with an average monthly fall of 2.6pc.
I think a more likely explanation of the decline is the following if all they're doing is tracking link clicks (I assume these are aggregate figures for all their clients):
I'm the founder at Akia (https://akia.ai). We're using NLP to help hotels with the number of inbound they receive from guests who are coming on or staying on property.
Though I'm not personally a regular user, from what I've observed, the AI is able to very, very efficiently resolve a significant number of requests because a lot of the messaging is the same: "what's the wifi?" "bring me towels" "can i get my car?" etc.
The application of NLP for a niche industry has felt particularly appropriate for a small startup where in contrast, doing generic NLP really feels like a boil the ocean type strategy that makes more sense to those who have the resources (google/apple).
Hey guys! I'm the founder of Akia. We launched this chrome extension after we found that a two-sided approach to this market would help us drive sales.
To those who are testing: Akia shows up during the checkout process once you've entered payment and contact information.
Looking for feedback, questions, thoughts, or some first users on the product. :)
I think the distinction between async and sync messaging is really critical here and highlights a different form of communication that folks are incorrectly using Slack to solve.
When I was at Facebook, this type of communication was extremely abundant and took place on Workplace. When you are pushed information, there is some expectation to respond (as highlighted by the author). However, Workplace's opt-in type of communication via feed didn't have this problem. And interestingly isn't really prevalent outside forums and groups (which I don't think are used commonly at companies).
I think splitting out that kind of behavior was beneficial, it wasn't email (which is a push that people ignore), but rather a subscribe where there was no stigma to be late, and people could take their own time to catch up on posts.
Exactly. 99% of workplace coms don't need to be synchronous. Slack assumes that they do. Thus you get tons of noise and chatter and the feeling that you have to check it all the time.
Hell, even the idea of a chat room isn't productive to getting "work" done at all IMO. If you aren't watching it every minute, you immediately lose all the context and knowledge. It's such a waste.
But it means everybody has to keep one eye on Slack at all times, which translates into huge "engagement" numbers for Slack. So "synchronous everything" may be bad for you, but it's great for them!
Nah. Just turn off all notifications outside of mentions. If people want to reach you they can mention or message you. I do this and don’t check Slack for hours or even a whole day.
Most problems people have with Slack are people problems.
I'm not on Slack, we have Lync or whatever Microsoft calls it now at work. I have all notifications off, so I only notice new messages when I bring that window to the foreground.
One of our recent senior hires specifically wanted an in-office role and a lot of our junior engineers are hungry to learn from the seniors.
What I suspect is there will be a divide in the coming years and as long as companies are open about who they are, people can make the choice of where they want to work.