Zuckerberg strikes again and his employees are getting Meta PO’d by the layoffs. Despite that 4 out of 5 companies world wide are struggling to find and hold top tech talent. And how much data is there on used routers when you buy them? Spoiler alert – more than there should be.
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These stories and more on Hashtag Trending for Thursday, April 20th 2023
I’m your host Jim Love, CIO of IT World Canada and TechNewsDay in the US – here’s today’s top tech news stories.
Meta is set to layoff what could be, according to once source 4,000 people. The cuts were announced in an internal memo which was seen and reported on by Vox.
The memo says that the layoffs will start on Wednesday and will hit employees at Facebook, Instagram, Reality Labs and even WhatsApp.
A Meta spokesperson has confirmed the memo was sent, but would not comment further.
The layoffs come after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company would cut more than 10,000 more jobs in the current months, after cutting 11,000 jobs last November.
These cuts are focused on the technical side of the company and Zuckerberg has said previously that the next set of cuts in May would focus on the business side of the company.
Meanwhile, an article in Yahoo Finance points out what these layoffs and terminations are doing to morale at Meta. At a recent employee town hall, the staff reductions were the most popular questions posted on an internal company forum.
One of these questions pretty much summed up what must be the mood at Meta and is aimed squarely at Zuckerberg’s vision of 2023 as “the year of efficiency.”
“You’ve shattered the morale and the confidence in leadership of many high performers who work with intensity,” read one question, seen by a Reuters reporter. The question pointedly quoted another favourite Zuckerberg word – intensity. The question finished with “Why should we stay at Meta?”
A very good question indeed.
Sources include: Vox, Yahoo Finance and TechCrunch
Despite the continuing bad news at Meta a study by ManpowerGroup is stating that global talent shortage has reached an all time high.
Nearly 4 in 5 employers (77 per cent) surveyed globally reported difficult in finding the skilled resources they need in 2023. That’s up 2 percent from last year and nearly double the number from 2015 where 38 per cent or 2 in 5 employers were struggling with this issue.
It’s clearly a global issue and almost every company had similar results. The country having the most difficulty was Taiwan at 90 per cent followed by Germany at 86 per cent and Hong Kong at 85 per cent.
Canada was not far behind the leaders with 79 per cent of companies struggling to find top tech talent.
The US was marginally below the average, but only marginally, with 75 per cent having difficulty.
What are the top tech skills? IT and Data is in first place with engineering, sales and marketing, operations and logistics and customer facing skills.
Data, engineering and operations are classic tech skills, but the other two – sales and marketing and customer facing skills show how IT skills are hugely important in all facets of our digital organizations.
The top five soft skills are equally important – with reliability and self discipline topping the list, followed by creativity and originality, critical thinking and analysis, reasoning and problem solving and resilience and adaptability.
How are employers trying to address this? The number one strategy for addressing the skills gap is to upskill and reskill their current workforce. 7 in 10 employers had that as their number one strategy.
And in terms of holding onto talent almost 6 in 10 were offering more flexibility – with only 3 in 10 focusing on increasing compensation.
We’ll post a link to this interesting report with the text version of this podcast at itworldcanada.com/podcasts
Sources include: ManpowerGroup
Global end user spending on public cloud is expected to increase by almost 22 per cent according to the latest report by analysts at Gartner.
While all cloud spending is projected to increase, the biggest rise in spending is in the area of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) which is projected to group by over 30 per cent, closely followed by Platform as a Service (PaaS) at 24 per cent.
Sid Nag, VP and Analyst at Gartner noted that “Organizations today view cloud as a highly strategic platform for digital transformation.” But Gartner also notes that the rush AI and large language models is also going to fuel enormous growth as companies pursue operational efficiency in all areas but also try to leverage AI to increase revenue.
Gartner is predicting that 30 per cent of outbound marketing messages from large organizations will be synthetically generated. If you want to learn a little more about that, check out the interview I did last weekend which talked about “When Machines Become Customers”
Nag noted “It’s no coincidence that the key players in the generative AI race are cloud hyperscalers.”
Despite some talk about repatriation and concerns about costs, Gartner is still predicting that by 2026, 75 per cent of organizations will adopt digital transformation and leverage the cloud as as their infrastructure platform.”
Sources include: Gartner
Now, you’d never sell or dispose of a laptop, server or a phone without wiping it. Some companies go so far as to destroy disks, others have secure wiping routines or programs.
But what about your router? Security firm ESET purchased a few used routers to set up a test environment and were shocked to find that a lot of these devices had not been wiped.
That led the company to do more extensive testing and they found that of 18 used routers they purchased, over half had configuration details and data still on the device.
What could you do with that data? A lot. There was customer data, router to router authentication keys, application lists – all of which could have been used to mount a killer, and probably very successful cyberattack.
And with the cost of access credentials to corporate networks selling on the black market for about 2,800 US buying used routers even at a few hundred dollars apiece could be a very profitable business.
ESET published this as a public service and we’ve heard they will present the data at the RSA conference next week.
What should you do? There is a NIST publication called Guidelines for Media Sanitization. It’s not exactly a page turner, but it does have guidelines for how to dispose of tech assets safely.
You may want to “route that” document to some of the people in your organization who hopefully will get the message.
That’s the top tech news for today. Hashtag Trending goes to air five days a week with the daily tech news and we have a special weekend edition where we do an in depth interview with an expert on some tech development that is making the news.
Follow us on Apple, Google, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to all the stories we’ve covered can be found in the text edition of this podcast at itworldcanada.com/podcasts
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I’m your host, Jim Love, have a Thrilling Thursday!