* have their own niche so they don't have to fight for survival but don't have to aggressively expand either
if you know where to look.
The caveat is that they probably are not hiring many people right now, and the bar is not low at all (even though most employees are mediocre). In the current market, many people want to work at those companies.
My advice to anyone who wants to work at a place like this but who doesn't have connections is to try to find a good recruiting agency. An agency put me in a business like this, and the business hired me after 6 months.
It was one of the best places I've worked. People were kind, had families, and went home after their 40 hours. I stayed for 6 years before deciding to strike out on my own.
Is this true for updates that might affect the way it interacts with the network (eg baseband firmware updates)? I assume it's much easier for iPhones to decouple that layer from the rest of the OS, which isn't the case for Android/Linux.
Nope. When a new iOS update comes out, all supported devices may immediately install the update if they seek it out. Or it will usually auto update on its own, or at least nag the user to update.
It’s gotten slightly more confusing with the major updates now being optional. You get a choice between getting a feature update or just security patches. Unless I missed it, my phone never really asked me to update to the latest iOS 26. But I can, it’s there. I’m instead on the latest version of iOS 18. (They changed number schemes. 18 is last years major update)
Apple also does security updates for quite a long time. iOS 15, from 2021, got a security patch in September of this year, and works on the iPhone 6s from 2015.
If you heavily rely on Word and PowerPoint. I know several companies that almost never use those products except in limited situations (legal, keynote presentation etc). All "regular" discussions/presentations take place on Confluence/Notion/Quip etc. I wish my company did the same thing.
We talk about "probability" here because the topic is hallucination, not getting different answers each time you ask the same question. Maybe you could make the output deterministic but does not help with the hallucination problem at all.
* If a company controlled by PE goes bankrupt, shareholders (PE) likely make a profit
* But if a publicly listed company goes bankrupt, shareholders lose their money
In other words, PEs almost never lose money, so they could extract the last bit of a company, even more short sighted than shareholders of a public company
> If a company controlled by PE goes bankrupt, shareholders (PE) likely make a profit. But if a publicly listed company goes bankrupt, shareholders lose their money
This isn't remotely true. Plenty of private equity investments go bust before they can pay themselves back. And plenty of public company investors milked a company for interest payments or dividends into the ground.
> PEs almost never lose money
Private equity funds regularly lose money. Usually to lenders.
You're complaining about leverage in general. Probably not private equity per se.
>* If a company controlled by PE goes bankrupt, shareholders (PE) likely make a profit
That's not necessarily a bad thing, or sign of anything sinister. If a business is failing, and you buy it for pennies on the dollar, and despite your best efforts it still goes under, so you liquidate it, you can still turn a profit if the price you paid is lower than what you got from liquidating it. That's not bad, because private equity (or anyone else, for that matter) isn't expected to operate as a charity. The only reason they're willing to stump up the cash to buy the business in the first place is the expectation that they'll make money. It's also not bad for the original owners either, because the fact that they hold to PE rather than someone else, or liquidating it, suggests that the PE offered a better deal than either.
>But if a publicly listed company goes bankrupt, shareholders lose their money
My code wasn't written to be hard to decipher, and it wasn't a goal to get everything on one line by any stretch, I just didn't like an if with regext was 2 lines minimum in python, it felt inelegant for a language that is pretty elegant in general
I don't necessarily disagree with "Libreoffice is junk" but that's not actually a problem, or all the problem. As the article has stated, 80% of the licenses were dropped, while 20% of the use cases continue to be supported by Microsoft Office. To me that is already a big win compared to 100% Microsoft Office.
You see, most Office users are not heavy/expert users and they only occasionally need the basic features that exist everywhere and do good enough of a job. I personally have only used Word maybe 3 times over the past few years, because almost all work documents live elsewhere, while Google Docs is good enough for my personal word processing needs (which could probably be done with Libreoffice as well). In the old days I used to install pirated Microsoft Office when I got a new laptop. These days I don't even think about it.
Imagine every company starts to evaluate how many employees actually need Microsoft Office, and then drop licenses for those who would be ok with Libreoffice or nothing at all. Microsoft would be shitting their pants.
That says nothing other than that the interviewers have a narrow mind and/or are ignorant. OMSCS is a very well known program, and it's their problem if they don't know it.
In the past they made videos available via Udacity, which were removed after Udacity turned their focus to short & easy (which often means superficial) courses for enterprise training instead of "serious" university courses. I guess that was not a viable business.
Of course they did not come with any assignments, just like these courses. Can't blame them, but other universities offer much resources -- for the same topic, you can often find a course offered by another university that provides videos hosted on YouTube, full assignments and labs, even exams. The only thing you are missing is TA/office hours and the course credit. In other words, unless you actually want to earn credits and work towards a degree, I suggest that you skip OMSCS videos unless there is no alternative.
I was the head of enterprise curriculum in 2018 and an OMSCS grad in 2016. This was a weird time to work for Udacity and the company went thru a major shakeup in 2019. The “breakup” with GT happened before the focus on enterprise and the enterprise focus was somewhat short-lived as the CEO was replaced just as enterprise was ascending as the primary revenue stream. COVID was rough for Udacity, and content production was commoditized.
In 2013-2016 Udacity was very actively collaborating with GT and had in-house content production. The projects were designed by highly experienced instructors in direct partnerships with real companies to make them realistic and relevant, and there was a small army of hand-picked mentors and graders to review and provide feedback.
Unemployment was _relatively_ high at that time, so individual consumers were eager to invest their own time & money to upskill and differentiate themselves. By 2018 unemployment hit record lows and suddenly it was _employers_ who were struggling to attract talent and wanted to differentiate themselves by offering upskill training as a benefit along with highly intentional training programs to organically grow the hard-to-hire talent from their existing workforce. This precipitated a shift from huge growth in the consumer side to growth in the enterprise business.
Contemporaneously, platforms like Udemy and Pluralsight commoditized content creation. Pluralsight bragged that it cost them $15k to launch a new course—orders of magnitude less than it cost us in house. Udacity pivoted away from high quality in house production to more partnerships with external content creators and identified the project grading and mentorship services as the largest cost drivers of ongoing course support costs.
As growth wasn’t tracking fast enough, Udacity closed most of the international offices—except India—then had two rounds of layoffs where the remaining content production was practically eliminated, and the mentorship and grading were commoditized by transferring the programs to the Udacity India office to administrate. All the hand-picked and trained graders and mentors were eliminated.
Then COVID hit. (I was gone by then.) I heard Udacity raised a debt round, but I think they were stuck against headwinds from the past few years. Eventually they were acquired for an “undisclosed sum”.
So what could have brought in more business? IMO, focusing on what was working for us, not trying to pivot into what worked for someone else. The problem I think is that we weren’t on track to make a reasonable return on all the money raised. We were trying to swing for the fences, even if it meant eventually striking out.
I imagine what it means is basically, "Before COVID, universities had to collaborate with Udacity to produce these courses and manage course credits/online degrees. Now they realized that they can easily do it themselves (perhaps at the institution level)"
Nah. There was some of that as the tools available to unis improved alongside Udacity, but it was a very intentional choice. The business with GT made $X/year while the consumer & enterprise businesses brought in $20X/year. It seemed like we could maybe double the OMSCS or scale linearly with effort by making more partnerships, meanwhile the other lines scaled faster with much less effort. Terminating this partnership was just one of the business lines that got cut off to focus everything on the lines that were growing much faster.
Udacity recently released their own MS AI though with shaky accreditation via Malta's MFHEA which was recently rejected by EQAR, making it unaccredited abroad.
Princeton used to offer algorithm courses on Coursera with full assignments including auto grading, I don't know if that's still the case.
I don't know enough about (or have time to learn) other offerings, but I am sure there are a few more out there. Class central should be a good place to discover those courses.
Thanks, yes, those are ones I know about, I guess because of the prominence of some of the professors. I’m curious about the ones that people view as hidden gems, since I didn’t know about OMSCS until today.
I don’t view class central as being useful, could really use much more detailed filtering of results.
* are mostly B2B oriented
* are (usually) private
* have a healthy balance sheet
* have their own niche so they don't have to fight for survival but don't have to aggressively expand either
if you know where to look.
The caveat is that they probably are not hiring many people right now, and the bar is not low at all (even though most employees are mediocre). In the current market, many people want to work at those companies.