ZUCK WAS RIGHT – QUEST 3 *IS* BETTER THAN APPLE VISION PRO 😳

Several weeks ago I went to the Apple Store and checked out the Apple Vision Pro demo. It was amazing, but I wasn’t seriously considering actually buyng one any time soon. What it did do is convince me that I wanted wireless VR. My one complaint with my PSVR2 was having to always be mindful of that tether wire.

So I left Apple, ordered a Meta Quest 3 from Best Buy, and stopped to pick it up. Sometime between now and then, I got one for my youngest kid. Today, I ordered one for my oldest too (both have birthdays coming up the next two months, so I could justify it).

When Mark Zuckerberg did his #AppleVisionPro review and said the Quest 3 was better, you could say for the price and a couple specific things like games sure. However, a couple of months after Apple lit a fire under Meta’s ass, Zuck is closer to right than ever. There have been so many updates just since I got mine, this Q3 feels like a different beast – it is SO damn good now. From improvements in passthrough, hand tracking, to even spatial video, this machine absolutely rocks. I’ve now bought three of them for far less than half of an entry level Apple Vision Pro.

The Faceless Lady series on Meta TV shows how promising this format is for storytelling. Spatial concerts like a Bleachers show does the same for live events. Supernatural has become my go to for daily cardio workouts. Vader Immortal absolutely feels like you’re wielding a light saber. Watching movies and television alone or with other people in convincing theater environments in BigScreen Beta is legit. And there is a really fantastic, native YouTube app that is next-level – and not on AVP today.

Apple started with pretty incredible hardware, and just stopped. It’s like they forgot there was another part of the story of AVP. Meta has made sure there was an insane and continously growing amount of content, and keeps dialing in the hardware to perfection.

Y’all at least for this generation of mixed reality, Zuck was right. And I’m as surprised that I’m saying this as anyone.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE COMING FOR JOBS IS JUST THE NEXT EVOLUTION OF AUTOMATION

There is a lot of consternation around the growing proliferation and power of Artificial Intelligence, particularly in software engineering. Some even want to attribute the mass layoffs we’ve experienced over the last two years to AI, at least partially.

That still seems off in the future – for now.

While one can find examples of companies laying off employees and replacing them with AI, the use cases right now are still limited. But jobs like customer support have always been vulnerable to outsourcing, whether to automation or cheaper sources of labor. Businesses will always gravitate towards cost savings, but will still have to balance quality and cost. If the quality stays roughly the same or increases as the cost goes down, businesses won’t burn money for very long.

My brother, a web developer at a small company that builds and manages websites, called me last night stressed out about an AI-based website generation tool they tried out. In less than a minute, it had generated a draft WordPress site based on a prompt. There are probably dozens of these services out there, and he said he might have about two years left in his career before he had to find something else to do. He said sites generated by these tools will be good enough for 80 percent of potential customers.

Taking a step back, this AI approach is a natural evolution of previous types of automation, like multi-step forms that eventually spit out a draft site. At one time, we called these user interfaces “wizards”, implying some kind of high intelligence there too.

My advice to my brother was to use and master these tools himself. Let the tool do the boring grunt work, then apply your skillset on top of it. Then it becomes a marketing problem to solve – “Let me show you why you should pay me to build your site”. Which is a not a new problem at all. Humans have always competed in that arena; the only true difference is a new competitor has entered the fray.

The short-term risk to jobs is more likely to be positions not created or filled because of AI. As employees become more efficient because of better tools and automation, including but not limited to AI, additional job openings become less necessary. This is also not entirely new either; manufacturing has been dealing with this problem for decades, for example, as more and more robotics have been deployed.

Nevertheless, the trend lines are unmistakeable and irreversible.

The best advice I can give is to become familiar and comfortable with these tools, and push the fears aside. Fear is usually born out of the unknown anyway, so the best antidote is education. You’ll find that these tools can make you more productive and allow you to showcase your unique skills, which people will pay for – including employers who are already seeing AI experience as a key differentiator.

Humans are nothing if not adaptable; we’ll continue to develop new ideas, new businesses, and new roles, and stay ahead of the supposed “AI Apocalypse". Our new copilots will be helping us do that too.

LAST DAY (KINDA) AT BIGCOMMERCE

So because I was part of the layoffs in November, it’s not *really* my last day at BigCommerce. That was November 8, 2023. My last “official” day was December 2, 2023, but I was disconnected from everything and they wiped my MacBook Pro at 5am on Nov. 8 (neat trick, they did it while I was still asleep and it was in my backpack). That was the day they announced Q3 earnings, and 7% layoffs. It was a blindside, but probably shouldn’t have been. They did the same thing exactly one year earlier, which was the company’s first-ever layoff.

What’s the rule, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me? Once is an anomoly, twice is a pattern? Both of those work, or maybe there’s another one even better.

They laid us off to improve financials to show profitability on their Q4 2023 earnings, which was a promise they made during the layoffs in 2022. I’m no business expert, but it seems to me that shedding salaries is not a great way to become profitable. I thought building things that people want to pay for and producing growth was the way, and that’s what I was all about at BigCommerce.

In addition to managing two teams I built from scratch, a highly-productive Mobile Apps team, and a stellar Engineering Brand team designed to not just elevate BigCommerce’s global profile and thought leadership but also its product and engineering personnel, I worked on the AI/ML Strategy Team developing the roadmap for 2024. AKA the most important development in technology since mobile, and the internet before it. I was the most active engineering leader in that team of directors, VPs, and the CTO, and based on my R&D designed a developer-focused strategy that leveraged the resources BigCommerce has, and was a decidedly different strategy than anything Shopify, Salesforce, Adobe, or anyone else in the sector is doing. If implemented, it would allow all of the AI expertise to be concentrated in a small domain team, while enabling all developers on the BigCommerce platform, internal and external, to implement powerful AI features with minimum technical AI expertise. If you know how to write prompts and what data you want to use them on, you could build AI features. It was well-received, until it wasn’t. And then the layoff followed shortly after.

So for the last four months, I’ve been applying to roles, both manager and individual contributor, and having a tough time getting anywhere. I’ve been close, and I currently have a promising opportunity, but over that time my severance, savings, and some of my remaining equity has evaporated. A lot of that is on me – I took them at their word that they never wanted to do another layoff again, and I wasn’t as prepared as I probably should have been.

I’m not gonna lie. I’m a little salty about it. I did the best work of my career there, but both it and my near future were so easily discarded over money that they actually do still have in the bank. And it was done ambush-style, while people slept. The only other time I’ve ever been laid off, in 2018 at Mutual Mobile, was done in person, to my face. It wasn’t fun, but I understood that. MM was a bootstrapped company at the time, and it couldn’t sustain itself when contracts wrapped up and they didn’t have enough work cued up. It definitely sucked and was embarrassing to be escorted out the door, but I respect how they did it way more than I do the way tech companies, especially public ones, handle it today. And it seems like they don’t even pay a penalty for it, either.

Except maybe BigCommerce. They weren’t rewarded by the market at all, not by the layoffs, and the Q4 earnings did nothing for them either. The stock drifted downward even further in the last week after earnings.

So not only did they eliminate my job (but not the position itself, they kept my team and moved someone else onto it), but also all my not yet vested equity, and put a timer on what was vested that expires at 3pm today. Whatever options I had vested, I can still do something with, but the rest was just gone. The *vast* majority of my options are underwater right now, by $1.50. This is the part that is heartbreaking to me – that was my retirement one day, and unless some miracle happens in the next few hours, it’s completely worthless. Until the layoff, I had until 2030 to act on them, so I thought there was still plenty of time. I thought that especially with what we were wanting to do with technologies like AI and Catalyst, they would be worth something by then.

I do still have a small number of options that aren’t underwater, and today is my last opportunity to sell those for whatever I can get. And then I’ll be done with BigCommerce for good. (I do have a small number of stock too, but I’ll be looking to unload those eventually, once they all pass through to long term gains territory. But mentally, I check out today.) 

Enough with the past. The future looks a lot more interesting.

I never hear anyone complain about the #Finewoven iPhone cases anymore. I do know that my Taupe one looks f’n amazing - these age better than the leather ones ever did IMO

WHAT'S WITH ALL THE LAYOFFS LATELY?

People try to blame AI for all the layoffs in tech, but I think it’s something else entirely. Eventually, AI will come for jobs, but what’s happening now is entirely about money. Companies, profitable and not, can no longer get cheap money for growth. That’s it.

Especially if they’re a public company, where it seems like shareholders are infinitely more important than employees (regardless if we’re one and the same). It’s a sad development, that seems to be particularly cruel in the tech industry.

I heard Ben Thompson and Om Malik discussing on Ben’s Stratechery podcast how so many large tech companies have become critical to the funds used for almost everyone’s 401k, which gives the industry a large impact on essentially the Economy itself. I’m no analyst or economist, but this feels like it has a lot of truth to it.

Well, looks like my streak of never having COVID has come to an end. I suppose it was inevitable. #winning