Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

This week: Engineer jobs are being cut, cloud infrastructure is using too much energy, and Intel’s 802.11be silicon is alive.

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1. DevOps Jobs Going and Hiring Frozen

First up this week: The steady drumbeat of imminent recession is getting louder. Companies big and small are adjusting their headcount accordingly.

Analysis: 1973 all over again?

The jobs market is changing—fast. When you hear company leaders such as Cook, Musk and Zuckerberg use phrases like “economic slump,” “shaky economic environment,” and “one of the worst downturns,” you’d better listen.

We’ll always have Martine Paris: Apple and Alphabet are slowing hiring plans but many others in tech are cutting staff in the run-up to a possible economic slowdown

“Increasingly shaky economic environment”
With recession fears mounting — and inflation, the war in Ukraine and the lingering pandemic taking a toll — many tech companies are rethinking their staffing needs. … Here’s a look at the companies tapping the brakes. …

• • • • Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company … will be slowing the pace of hiring for the rest of the year. …
      • Apple Inc. is planning to slow hiring and spending … to cope with a potential economic slump. …
      • Carvana Co., an online used car retailer, laid off … 12% of its workforce. …
      • Coinbase Global [cut] 18% of staff [and] rescinded job offers … to prepare for an economic downturn. …
      • Compass Inc., a real estate brokerage platform, is eliminating … 10%. …
      • Meta Platforms … slashed plans to hire engineers by at least 30%; CEO Mark Zuckerberg [said] he’s anticipating one of the worst downturns in recent history. …
      • Microsoft Corp. told workers [it’s] eliminating many job openings — a freeze that will last indefinitely. …
      • Netflix … has had several rounds of highly publicized layoffs. …
      • Niantic Inc., maker of the Pokemon Go video game, fired [8%]. …
      • Oracle … is cutting workers. …
      • Robinhood Markets Inc., the online brokerage, terminated [9%] in April. …
      • Salesforce … has been slowing hiring and reducing travel expenses. …
      • Shopify Inc., an e-commerce platform, is laying off … 10%. …
      • Spotify … is cutting employee growth by about 25% to adjust for macroeconomic factors. …
      • Tesla … CEO Elon Musk [said] 10% of salaried employees would lose their jobs … in an increasingly shaky economic environment. …
      • Twitter Inc. initiated a hiring freeze and began rescinding job offers. …
      • Wayfair Inc., the online furniture retailer, initiated a 90-day hiring freeze.

Yikes. What can we learn from Aline Lerner?

These are uncertain times. … It looks like we’re entering a recession.

One of the hardest things about it is the lack of reliable information about whether companies are still hiring. … To make some sense of a bunch of contradictory information about Google’s and Facebook’s hiring freezes … we decided to ask the people who, outside of Google leadership, will probably know best what’s going on – engineers who are interviewing at these companies right now. …

• • • • Amazon [is] continuing to aggressively hire engineers. …
      • Facebook froze hiring for engineers below E7 … but there are some eng functions that are still hiring [such as] Machine Learning Engineers … Production Engineers (devops and/or SRE) [and] Enterprise Engineers (work on Facebook’s internal tools & systems). …
      • Google is indeed not extending offers [for now]. L3 or “early career” hiring is indeed frozen until next year. … The rest is murky. … Different recruiters are telling people different things … it feels like decisions are being made on a case-by-case basis [but] L5 and up are actively hiring almost across the board.

“Murky,” you say? yuan43 knows why:

Brace yourselves for impact. Google and Facebook are both advertising companies, so they are tightly coupled to the business cycle. When business spending starts to falter, they’ll feel it first. And they have.
…
The bubble has inflated so far for so long … those with fewer than 10 years experience have never seen the ferocity of the other side of the business cycle. When it turns, that **** turns. Those in top management positions have seen it, and they’re going to do everything in their ability to deny and evade it. … It’s not surprising that [they] are far from clear about this.

It’s about leadership, says jillesvangurp:

The organization is a reflection of its leadership and their vision—or lack thereof. … Google is MS under Ballmer: Just failing, tone deaf, never quite doing anything right. Enter Satya Nadella and suddenly MS is re-engaging with developers, doing all the things that were simply unmentionable before, and generally delivering great shareholder value. Google needs somebody like that. The current CEO is not it.

2. ‘Homes, not Data Centers,’ Cry Citizens

Cloud DCs near population centers are being blamed for pricing people out of the housing market. Densely populated places such as West London in the UK are feeling the effects as the regional grid operator threatens a ban on new connections until 2035.

Analysis: ARM and RISC-V could help

The problem isn’t so much power generation, but power distribution: Existing grid cabling is running out of capacity, and upgrading it is far from simple. Part of the solution is to make data centers more efficient.

Lauren Leffer: Too Many Servers Could Mean No New Homes

“Proliferation of data centers”
Data centers have caused skyrocketing power demand in parts of London. Now, new housing construction could be banned … in some neighborhoods. … Too many data centers are taking up too much electricity.
…
Multiple data centers have been built in and around west London in recent years, particularly along the M4 corridor, which is a major tech hub [for] Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, HP, Sony, Dell, Huawei, and others. [But] London is in the grips of a major housing crisis. The … government has pledged to tackle the problem, in part, by building more homes—but these power infrastructure limitations could make that promise impossible.
…
Other places have been facing similar grid and power supply problems: … The proliferation of data centers has been stressing Ireland’s electric grid in recent years. [And] cryptocurrency mining has been taxing the Texas grid.

Is this a job for ARM and its power efficiency? ShanghaiBill:

If we are going to do a big switcheroo from x86 to more efficient processors in the datacenter, we should go to RISC-V, not ARM. RISC-V is more efficient, and a more modern architecture.
…
RISC-V has code compression built-in for the non-embedded version. The code is more compact than either ARM or x86. So the cache can hold about 30% more code. … Code size is one of the few advantages of CISC over RISC, and with RISC-V, even that is gone.

“Sky falling. Film at 11.” Here’s Scouse Acorn:

This story should feature in every news bulletin for a week. We’re heading for the waterfall. Without an oar.

3. Intel is Latest Chipmaker to be Wi-Fi 7

Back in April, I told you about Broadcom, Mediatek and Qualcomm launching Wi-Fi 7 silicon. Now Intel’s joining the party.

Analysis: Great in densely populated areas

802.11be should be faster, naturally. But it’ll also be more deterministic, suffer less from interference and improve latency: It’s not just about speed.

Ji-woong Kim is lost in translation: Intel to commercialize next-generation Wi-Fi 7

“Advanced technologies”
Intel will unveil … 802.11be in 2024. The data processing speed is more than twice faster than the existing Wi-Fi 6E … 802.11ax.
…
Intel predicts that the application of Wi-Fi 7 … will expand its product application with advanced technologies such as high-end games, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and robots.

So far, so fluffy. Why do we need all this raw speed? drinkypoo has a go:

Remember, the bandwidth is split between everyone on the same AP, and most people only have one. … These days it’s common for literally nothing in the house to have a wired connection except the AP. Speeds like this enable a network with multiple users doing file sharing, streaming, etc.
…
For one or two clients, [802.11n] is just fine. For a bunch of users, not so much.

The Moral of the Story:
There’s no point in questioning authority if you aren’t going to listen to the answers

—Greg Landauer

You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or tlv@richi.uk.

Image: Pouriya Kafaei (via Unsplash; leveled and cropped)