Joseph Bou-Younes's Website

Tag: tech

  • It’s going to be a tough summer for tech headcount

    Several tech companies are reshaping their workforces as they focus on AI. Earlier this year, Salesforce Inc. planned to cut over 1,000 employees as it hired for AI-focused sales roles, particularly in sales. CEO Marc Benioff also said the company will reduce its hiring of engineers in 2025 due to the use of AI. When Workday Inc. announced a layoff in February, CEO Carl Eschenbach said hiring would continue in strategic areas like AI.

    Beyond software engineers, many of the hardest-hit Microsoft personnel ran software projects. Product management and technical program management roles together made up almost 600 of the reductions in Washington, or about 30% of the total. 

    The job cuts also targeted some managers and workers assigned to AI projects, according to a person familiar with the cuts.

    – Bloomberg: Microsoft Layoffs Hit Coders Hardest With AI Costs on the Rise

  • +1 for “context engineering”

    I agree with this. The output you get from an LLM is only as good as the context you provide.

    The term context engineering has recently started to gain traction as a better alternative to prompt engineering. I like it. I think this one may have sticking power.

    Context Engineering

  • Distribution in digital products

    Distribution in digital products

    This was a great story about how Google’s search distribution deal dramatically increased cost of entry for Neeva, a putative competitor.

    This also reminded me of the Monster/AB InBev deal mentioned in “The Little Book that Builds Wealth:”

    To be fair, it is occasionally possible to take the success of a blockbuster product or service and leverage it into an economic moat. Look at Hansen Natural, which markets the Monster brand of energy drinks that surged onto the market in the early part of this decade. Rather than resting on its laurels, Hansen used Monster’s success to secure a long-term distribution agreement with beverage giant Anheuser-Busch, giving it an advantage over competitors in the energy-drink market.

    Anyone who wants to compete with Monster now has to overcome Hansen’s distribution advantage. Is this impossible to do? Of course not, because Pepsi and Coke have their own distribution networks. But it does help protect Hansen’s profit stream by making it harder for the next upstart energy drink to get in front of consumers, and that’s the essence of an economic moat.

    Once you find product-market fit you need to quickly scale distribution to own as much of the market as possible and preempt new entrants.