T-Mobile Hacker Stole Data of 37M Subs, Including Name, Address, & Phone, But Not Passwords, SSN, Or CC; + more news

Thinking of the T-Mobile layoffs, I guess companies don't have to merge to can its people.

Note that in the layoff mode Human resources is the first to go, even in companies claiming to offer generous carear/severance benefits (if they fail to follow through who can you complain to ?? )

Just because you work at google or Microsoft doesn’t make you a tech worker I wish the news would stop classifying everyone at google who as a tech worker. A lot of people don’t even know how to turn on a computer or use one and just because they work at google or Microsoft they are considered a tech worker. I doubt Microsoft let go 10,000 programmers and data center engineers. Same for Amazon all my programming friends at Amazon are unaffected by this.

Google itself is considered BIG TECH. I'm guessing because they offer "tech" solutions and services that ride on the backs of what we IT types would call "tech". It's stereotypical. It's not the first term, or last, that is abused or misused. I could give you plenty of examples but I don't want to poke (gaslight) the bears who think it's ok to gaslight a word to drive their agenda or narrative. The past 3 years we have seen plenty of that from the Whitehouse and it's minions.

But all those peripheral people, from concierge services to "connector" bus drivers are part of what makes working at BIG TECH different then being a coder at a lean and mean (fast and agile) startup with a few dozen/hundred employees total.
from January2020 until now MS added 25% of the Dec2022 total, 50k+so triming 5% (10k) is not as dramatic as it sounds.
also evolving technology has allowed the employers to see a glimpse of AI as a code monkey which will be the industry buzz for this year, until it proves perfect (everyone goes home, nobody can afford BIG TECH products) or fails (rehire everyone to fix a years worth of ship it now- nobody to fix it)
the one constant in tech has been the boom and bust cycle, but even after this round of layoffs 100 of 1000's more are still employed.

perhaps the hardest thing is all the project begining to show progress getting flushed along with some clunkers that never should have reached daylight

That’s one reason why I do what I do. Not everyone can do shift work or work alone and be responsible for everything in a data center but because of that I basically been unaffected and employed since 2008. We would like to hire more people but apparently no one does this type of work not only in usa but japan and china and in China they pay outrageous amounts of money enough for elite status and your in the top 15% income bracket. China like japan is not a at will employer so stuff like this is unheard of or extremely rare unless the company goes bankrupt or it’s a small one because of this is why I am considering early retirement this year or the following. The work from home needs to change as well and not do I support Elon musk but the head of Morgan Stanley as well. If your a programmer especially embedded firmware programming you’re also unaffected all my friends that do this have basically like me been employed by the same company since 2004 right out of university and many of us are considering early retirement overseas because of national health insurance and lower cost of living.

But it doesn't make impacted laborers "tech" workers.

When you are a tech worker, you are a direct contributor of what defines the company to be a "tech" company. Microsoft is a maker of software, so "tech" workers there are coders and engineers.

Same applies for healthcare. If you work at a hospital, you are considered a healthcare worker if your line of work directly contributes to the core operation of a hospital; nurse, doctor, radiologist, practitioner, etc.

Everyone else calling themselves "tech" or "healthcare" workers are simply giving themselves participation trophies.

as i said Big Tech sees human coders as less and less important part of the tech picture
»komonews.com/news/local/ ··· hnology#

making the "support personal" an ever larger part of caring for the "tech workers" who are left.

Makes me think of the state of the healthcare system. 25 years ago never heard of a nurse practitioner. Nurses always worked for the doctor. Now they are practicing medicine in place of the doctor. Now I don’t even have a physician as my primary care anymore. I have a physician assistant as my primary care provider.

In another 20 years I predict that procedures that were done by physicians with 15+ years of training plus board certification will be done by “technicians” with 6-8 weeks of training. Case in point will be colonoscopies where the physician will tell the technician how much anesthesia to administer and then the technician will do the colonoscopy, take pictures/samples and then the physician will call with the results. Healthcare is being destroyed by those in charge.

Money comes from the same source. Tech or non-tech. Canning that many people, look at the impact on insurance (health and life), pensions/401k's, perks, etc. When I worked at Sprint, the janitorial staff got the same perks as we (switch techs) did. Raises, insurance, and even when a manager came to town and bought us all $30 a pop pizza, everyone was affected.

Yeah Id guess Microsoft didnt let go 10K worth of devs, but bear in mind Microsoft is more than Windows and office for software. They also have Xbox and numerous gaming studios. I know people at 343 Industries that worked on Halo for example were let go. 10K devs for Microsoft is probably a drop in the bucket as well. Im sure they will release a statement about record profits after this, I can imagine what the payroll is on 10K worth of employees.

As far as Amazon, funny enough they didnt really make money retail wise during the pandemic. Most of the money was eaten up but the supply chain issues. I know Amazon invested in ships, containers and other means to move goods around. They also over hired in their warehouses. My guess is most of the Amazon lay offs are warehouse workers. Amazon's cloud services is where they make most of their money anyway. I remember the commercials on the radio for Amazon's warehouses, fill out an app, no interview needed.

I know I used to work there back in the day before I moved to Shanghai before the economic crisis of 2008. I am very familiar with Microsoft.

They have their support staff like clerks, porters (cleaning staff), building maintenance, security guards, receptionists, etc. And not all of them work for the tech firm. Many of them work for vendors hired by the tech companies. Not everyone that works in the supermarket I work in wears our company’s apron. We have a lot of workers there that wear vendor aprons.

Just because you work in "IT" doesn't make you a tech worker either. Too many middle managers who work for IT departments haven't a clue how anything works. They are just there to go to meetings and collect a bigger than justified paycheck. Cisco figured this out a number of years back, but I am not sure anyone else has.

I'm wondering if they split the customer's data so the sensitive stuff is a little harder to get to.

Or so they don't have to offer a Credit monitoring program for a year or more type subscription as penance that they and every other company has had to.

Wow, there third party prepaid providers have better security. T-Mobile needs to turn off their leak faucets.

So I pay for 4 screens and if one of those 4 screens might happen to be at my mother in laws for when the kids are over is that really password sharing?

It is not. Netflix is trying to hassle families, roommates, and those that travel for work trying to lock it down like cable tv is. In the end paying customers will just cancel netflix when they get blocked and cant use it as long as other streaming companies dont have blocks like this.

Other streaming companies already restrict password sharing such as HBO and Disney+ among others. If they detect an odd/new IP being used they'll send an authorization request email to the account holder. Netflix is far from the only one doing this.