Financial services companies play the same game - bonuses get paid first couple months of the year so around Christmas they cut as many people as they can. Real jerk move but not as bad as working someplace thirty years and then losing your retirement three months before.
When people refer to a "pension", they're usually talking about a defined benefit plan that requires little or no funding from the employee's paycheck. The amount of money you get at retirement is determined upfront, and based on things like years of service and average wages over some prescribed time period.
I was going to fight you on that, but you're right. TIL.
I am stunned that anyone here believes that any of the digital assistants are anything other than data ingestion and analysis vehicles.
Now apply this context to the voice assistant market. If computer interactions shift from the web to voice, the digital assistant is the new search box. Being the company who creates the leading digital assistant means you’re in the position of getting paid billions for that traffic, rather than paying billions to get it.
In short, I think the idea that voice assistants must exist to obtain new kinds of data misses the point. The creators of these services are going to want to collect data to train models, to debug, etc. but it’s all a means to an end. The end is to put a troll toll in place to extract a chunk of the value of any economic activity organized through the voice assistant. Imagine if AT&T could collect a tax on the value of any service sold over the phone - that’s the kind of economic opportunity we are talking about here. There’s no need to search for other hidden motivations.
Of course, other entities like governments would actually like the ability to listen to all your conversations, so they are going to try to get ahold of this data too.
Don't pensions usually vest within 5/10 years of working for a company (possibly in tiers) rather than when reaching age 55? I'd assume anyone who has been at MS long enough to be eligible for a pension (which was probably last offered in the 90s or earlier) would have vested decades ago. You simply can't draw upon your pension until you reach 55 but you lose nothing. Makes me question the whole article to be honest.
>“Microsoft rarely, if ever, allows anyone working there to reach 55 and have their pension become vested.”
>“Microsoft was twice as likely to lay you off if you were over 40.”
>“Cortana is an analytics and telemetry app that data mines people while pretending to be a digital assistant,”