You're Going To Be A Gig Worker

Hey there, LGTM here. The official newsletter for people who have memorized the compensation bands for every major tech company.

Here's what we have for you this week:

• Zuck tells Facebook managers to start cranking out coding or they'll get the stick

• The Lowdown on Bounties: You're about to be a gig worker, buddy

• The AI Battleground and what it means for you

Git Krackin'

In a push for efficiency, Facebook tells some managers to transition to individual contributor roles or leave the company.

Many managers will have to start coding. And no, Jira Query Language doesn’t count.

Zuckerberg told investors in Meta’s most recent earning’s call that this will be a “year of efficiency”, the company’s first major strategy shift since its pivot to the Metaverse over a year ago.

• Meta’s org structure will be “flattened” to remove redundant layers of managers reporting to other managers

• Some Meta individual contributors currently have 10-11 layers of management between them and Zuckerberg

• Many managers have only 1 or 2 direct reports

If the trend continues we might not just see managers demoted to IC’s but also executives demoted to managers and coders demoted to PM’s. 😉

In all seriousness, this is just another example of big tech getting more serious about operating efficiently.

Software Engineers Have a Bounty on Their Heads

The mood amongst software engineers has been pretty bleak these last few weeks. Being a software engineer in 2023 feels like being a banker in the crash of 2007, except you didn’t go to a good school and you have no idea what “bottle service” is.

But the news gets worse: The gig economy is coming for software engineering.

He dropped it

Bounties are a low friction way to get fixed scope coding work done by a freelancer. Programmers can assign small, fully specified projects like filling in the body of a function, directly from within an IDE for anonymous freelancers to perform.

Masad spoke at length about bounties on the Moment of Zen podcast. He envisions a world where “10x engineers” (coders who microdose acid and have a live-in shaman) focus on high leverage activities and farm out the menial coding tasks. The rest of us (you especially) will be relegated to dutifully knocking out tasks like a line cook fulfilling orders at Five Guys for low wages and no benefits.

Masad believes AI will be able to handle increasingly significant portions of the bounties and possibly completely phase-out manual programmers eventually (along with their W2 paychecks, All Birds sneakers and annoying whining about how JS promises aren’t technically monads).

Sorry ChatGPT, We have Chat AIs at home

Occasionally, we like to check in on Bing to see what new scheme they're cheffing up. Did you know that they give you points for just using Bing that you can redeem for gift cards and stuff? Every Bing search is like pulling the lever of a slot machine except you get Outback Steakhouse and Joe and The Juice gift cards.

Bing has a lot going on but not as much as the plot of Spider Man 3.

This week, Bing leaked their AI chat feature on a subset of users. Word got out after someone’s parents called them when “the computer was acting up again” but it actually wasn't just more malware their dad got from downloading a report on "The 10 Best Gold Stocks to Own Before The Coming Collapse."

The AI was not so impressive. When asked to implement bubble sort in Python, it answered at the same level a senior developer would (it told you to look it up). We will give it partial credit, though, for citing its sources, something ChatGPT doesn’t do.

Now Google's Turn

Google, once the crown jewel of Silicon Valley, got caught with its pants down. After bad PR from the layoffs, Google aimed to go head-to-head with ChatGPT by demoing Bard, a conversational chat bot. At the Paris demo, Bard made a flub, which then caused Google to lose $100 billion in market value. 

Blind users were irate and throwing punches

Soon every other tech giant will be announcing their AI feature sometime in the near future. Here at LGTM, we're not sweating it because it means we’re one step closer to being obsolete and ditching our tech jobs to go work on a fishing boat in Alaska.

Other Noteworthy Stories

📣 A CEO taking a cut: Zoom lays off 15% of its workforce, but CEO Eric Yuan is reducing his salary 98%. This guy is desperate for us to call him a good dude, but we're not buying it.

📣 Goodbye Menlo Park, Hello DC?: A surprising report from Vertis AI Inc. shows that at the end of last year, there were more tech job postings in Washington, D.C. and New York than the Bay Area. Interesting development, but we can only imagine those jobs are a whole lot less cushy than the bucolic Silicon Valley campuses.

Well, that's all we got for now. We're going to try to drum up some good news for a change. Until next time 👋 LGTM