Sales cycles stretch to match government budgeting timeframes, extending runway requirements. Companies that previously measured progress in sprints now plan around fiscal years and appropriations cycles. This fundamentally alters startup DNA, creating organizations structured more like government contractors than disruptive innovators.
The migration to Washington represents venture capital's ultimate admission of market failure. Unable to generate returns that attract private investment, they now seek capital that can't walk away - money extracted through taxation rather than earned through performance.
With a bit of experience, most job listings are simply an honor roll of dead IT projects. And because many executives hop onto the same bandwagons at the same times (but call it innovation), there seem to be specific patterns for the type of cog that companies are pursuing at any given moment. The friend who gave me most of the tips in here has an "Azure Data Engineer" CV, where he removes all mention of AWS work he has done so that government recruiters don't hurt their pretty little heads, and vice versa. Companies on Azure want Databricks because you can spin it up from the Azure UI, and companies on AWS similarly use Snowflake because of groupthink. Just smash those words onto the page.
Ludic's Guide To Getting Software Engineering Jobs — Ludicity
What once was Hollywood—with its goal of making the best film or series possible, its financial structure of gathering revenue to pay its actors, directors, and crews, its residuals for artists between jobs, its camaraderie on the set, the passion behind a marketing campaign, and the triumph of making a film or series that is not only very good but has the luck of being released to the public at exactly the right time to cause a sensation—has passed.
To me the other key aspect of the Soy Right psychological profile, beyond its desperate need for approval and respect, is a childlike refusal of agency and responsibility, even while in power. A 20-something with access to Treasury Department systems is a “kid” whose racism shouldn’t be disqualifying. The South African billionaire throwing Nazi salutes is a enthusiastic neuroatyptical man who needs our sympathy. The Vice President of the United States would never have attracted the attention of the Pope if it weren’t for “hysteric progressives,” the real villains. Silicon Valley oligarchs were “driven into Trump’s arms” by the perfidy of Democrats. No one in the Soy Right makes affirmative choices; they’re smol beans who need protection and care.
Last weekend, the Bay Area hosted the NBA Dunk Contest.1 Today, it will host the Humane dunk contest. We're going to get slam after slam after slam against the company after it was announced that they were acquired by HP for $116M.2 A regular person might read that headline and think, "wow, a startup sold for nine-figures – impressive." Of course, it's not impressive in this case. It's a fire sale for a company that has been under duress for months after their product, the Ai Pin, failed to catch fire in the market. Actually, that's not technically true. There was a literal risk of fire when charging the device, which led to a recall. And so you'll forgive me for sort of re-using a headline here – but this situation is much more akin to the Hindenburg disaster from which the phrase originates.
These are the demagogues, oligarchs, and literal teenage boys tearing apart our government right now. They are fueled by Silicon Valley’s dream of a monarchist network state and blood and soil white nationalism and they want to replace our money with the speculative cryptocurrencies they’re already holding, replace the country’s digital infrastructure with X, an online platform they invested in, and route all federal power to Trump, a president they’re actively bribing. They did not plan any of this in secret. They know this their moment and the coup is underway. They are serious. And every day they’re in power means more years, if not decades, of our lives that we will have to dedicate to trying to piece the country back together when they’re gone.
Fat, happy and lazy, and most of all, oblivious, America's most powerful tech companies sat back and built bigger, messier models powered by sprawling data centers and billions of dollars of NVIDIA GPUs, a bacchanalia of spending that strains our energy grid and depletes our water reserves without, it appears, much consideration of whether an alternative was possible. I refuse to believe that none of these companies could've done this — which means they either chose not to, or were so utterly myopic, so excited to burn so much money and so many parts of the Earth in pursuit of further growth, that they didn't think to try.
Ah, the tech industry. The same industry that once worshiped programmers now treats them like relics from an ancient civilization, like scribes who refuse to accept the printing press. Companies are convinced AI is the answer to everything, and programmers? Well, they’re just expensive, opinionated, and worst of all, human. But here’s the thing—if you think cutting programmers in favor of AI is a genius move, you might want to remember the last time a company fired all its engineers: it ended in lawsuits, product failures, and a desperate rehiring spree. But sure, go ahead. Lay them off. You’ll regret it faster than you can say "syntax error."
Tech's Dumbest Mistake: Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything
It was bad enough to have to deal with the cornucopia of threat actors when it did not include the federal government of the nation where most big tech lives. Now? What's to do? The little regulation that existed is gone or about to be. Your most sensitive data is available to some fuck who goes by the name "Big Balls". Why would anyone worry or invest in cybersecurity when you can just join Hitler Elon's Youth and grab what you want? What's stopping some really bad dudes from doing that? Nothing at all. Put on your Dark Goth Stupid MAGA hat, head to the Department of Defense, and grab some blueprints. Who's gonna stop you?