AFAIK Verizon is doing something similar with edge compute in their 5G towers/data centers. If Starlink gets big enough, I'd expect them to do the same. However, I think it's much more likely for Starlink to put the edge compute/cache at the Starlink ground stations, rather than in the satellites themselves. I think the tech/cost still isn't good enough to have significant compute on a satellite.
Last I saw, it requires an antenna that’s about the size of a television satellite dish. Maybe portable enough to stick on an RV or campervan, but almost certainly not something you can take with you while hiking or backwoods camping.
Musk himself has said that Starlink is primarily meant for rural customers, and most urbanites should not expect to use it. He even specifically addressed that Starlink will not "stick it" to Comcast+co, and may actually "help" them.
> "I want to be clear, it's not like Starlink is some huge threat to telcos. I want to be super clear it is not," Musk said. "In fact, it will be helpful to telcos because Starlink will serve the hardest-to-serve customers that telcos otherwise have trouble doing with landlines or even with... cell towers."
> Starlink will likely serve the "3 or 4 percent hardest-to-reach customers for telcos" and "people who simply have no connectivity right now, or the connectivity is really bad," Musk said. "So I think it will be actually helpful and take a significant load off the traditional telcos."
...and if you look at the second half of wherever you are quoting that from, you'll see that the person you're replying to is correct. Starlink is meant for rural customers, and according to Elon Musk himself it will not be "plenty good to replace anything else available out there for home internet" for urbanites.
> Despite that, the SpaceX CEO argued that Starlink won't be a major threat to telcos because the satellite service won't be good enough for high-population areas and will mostly be used by rural customers without access to fast broadband.
> The amount of bandwidth available will be enough to support typical Internet usage, at least in rural areas, Musk said.
> So will Starlink be a good option for anyone in the United States? Not necessarily. Musk said there will be plenty of bandwidth in areas with low population densities and that there will be some customers in big cities. But he cautioned against expecting that everyone in a big city would be able to use Starlink.
>It sounded like they just said "A12Z" in a Mac. I'm not entirely sure I got that right.
That is what was said, but the A12Z is the current SoC that is in current iPad Pros. Craig said that the machine he was on was a "Development Platform" for testing software using the iPad Pro chip. I don't think that necessarily means the new non-iPads will be using the A12Z. My guess is that they are saving the announcement of the new chip's name until later (maybe until the end of the keynote).
edit: no mention at all of the chip specifics or name for new "Apple Silicon". Maybe they're holding that off until the actual hardware announcement later in the fall?
I've always thought part of the "charm" of Giphy in Slack is that does give you those somewhat silly or "not exactly what I was looking for but actually this is funnier" type of GIFs.
The couple of times I have tried to use it to search for a very specific GIF (like searching for a specific clip from a movie) it hasn't really worked, but whenever I use it for more general stuff like "/giphy cardio sucks" or "/giphy hooray" I get some pretty pleasing results.
IME this is very common and in some situations can be beneficial for everyone involved. The company hiring the consultants get the flexibility of being able to quickly hire you/fire you if needed, rather than going through a lengthy recruiting/hiring/firing process. They pay the premium for it, but it can be worth it.
Then the consulting agency obviously makes a nice profit off of it.
And then the consultant themselves can usually benefit from it as well, because typically they get a higher wage than the average employee to begin with, and also it becomes a very easy conversation to have with the company "just hire me as a FTE instead of paying the consulting company. My salary is currently $50/hr, you're paying them $150/hr for my work. Instead you can just pay me $100/hr, and we both benefit." I've seen a lot of consultant -> FTE transitions happen like that.
That only does work if the company is actually looking for a long-term FTE, though. Like I mentioned above, a lot of the time the company is paying the premium in the first place is so that they can quickly and easily drop you off their payroll if needed. They lose out on that by bringing you on as FTE.
>The percentage that is overhead will vary, but only by so much. Otherwise, someone will come along and find a way to undercut your prices and take your business. It's reasonable to assume that if one hourly cost is double another, the developer's pay is higher.
That's really only true if you assume that all of these dev agencies are equal. In reality, a lot of them have different specialties (both tech wise or industry wise), better (or worse) reputations, or certain partnerships. All of these things can greatly change the amount that the dev agency can charge.
I've personally seen plenty of agencies charging $100/hr while another agency with a different "specialization" (but otherwise similarly skilled and paid devs) charge $250/hr. The bill rate hardly ever corresponds with salary, IME.
Lot's of commenters in this thread are trying to draw conclusions about dev salaries from this data, but you really can't do that for exactly the reasons you described. It gets even more disproportional for some of the bigger, high price tag consulting firms. In the Big 4 it's common to have entry level devs making $80k/yr ($~40ish/hr) while being billed out to customers at $200-300/hr.
>Honestly, how much data would the typical company need to transition off?
In many cases, all of it.
Data retention laws require many companies retain copies of certain types of internal company communications for extended time periods. This is why some companies have policies that discussions about topics such as company finances or government contracts have to be done via more easily archived channels. But if your company doesn't have those policies and you just use Slack for everything, then everything in Slack has to be retained on the off chance that someone discussed an upcoming earnings report in your company Slack.
>It seems the "decent" jobs are going away, replaced by ones that turn workers into robots to better extract value from their labor.
We are in a (or entering a) transitionary period where said workers are soon to be literally replaced by robots. The current market expects robot-like efficiency from these jobs, but the robots aren't ready to fully take over yet, which means people get stuck filling the gap with jobs that require more and more of them. Transitionary periods always suck for the people caught in the churn.
On one hand, once the robots are more widely deployed for warehouse work and delivery, there will be less stories about overworked, tired humans. On the other hand, there might be more stories about less availability of low-skill jobs, and these same humans now being underemployed.
FWIW this is the direct opposite of my experience working in both strategy and technical consulting. When it comes to dev work, it often actually was just a 23 year-old new grad writing code with little oversight (when I was 23 I actually wrote a lot of code that was reviewed by no-one, tested by only myself, and is probably still being used across a couple of F500s). Strategy work on the other hand was almost always reviewed and revised by several tiers of higher-up, more experienced consultants before being delivered to the customer.
>You’re going from getting perspective to getting directed by an outsider
Yes, but it's not like this outsider has no idea what they're talking about. This outsider has decades (sometimes centuries) of knowledge working with organizations exactly like yours, and they have seen what works and what doesn't. When McK goes to consult for the NSA, they likely bring along with them experience from doing similar projects for the CIA, or DIA, or DoD. Your own organization likely doesn't have much insight into the successes and failures of your fellow (sometimes competitor) organizations, while a consulting company does, and they can lend you that knowledge.
At least, that's what is supposed to happen (and indeed it does happen if you are diligent about the specific team of consultants you hire). I have increasingly witnessed a lot of deception and bullshit in the consulting industry, so it's completely understandable to me why people are skeptical.
> What skills are really developed as a management consultant?
Hard to answer because "management consultant "(MC) is really an umbrella term for a lot of different roles. One MC might gain quite a lot of experience analyzing the financials of mergers & acquisitions, and so they would develop those skills and be valuable to a company looking to acquire another. Another MC might specialize in projects doing market research for athletic clothes. A third might specialize in finding inefficient processes in a supply chain.
Outside of niche specializations like that, most MC firms (especially the 'elite' ones) work you really hard and expect you to be able to adapt very quickly to new types of projects. This requires a lot of dedication to your work (and willingness to sacrifice non-work obligations) and the ability to learn new things very quickly. If you survive that work for a few years, then, having something like McKinsey on your resume is more like a certification that you are willing to work hard and can learn quickly, which is obviously valued by a lot of companies.
>It seems like you’re just paying people for critical thinking.
That's exactly what it is. Unfortunately most organizations, probably even ones like the NSA, really struggle with doing any kind of critical thinking on their own. This is especially true when trying to decide on a future direction for the org: the org itself is most likely biased to just doing things the way it's always been done. In that regard, having an outsider's perspective, especially one that has also done work at other similar organizations and has taken note of all the various ways other orgs do things and knows what works and what doesn't, can be quite beneficial.
There's a lot to unpack here, but the general gist is that McKinsey is overpaid for mediocre services. It's hard to argue against that, and McK in particular does have some insanely unjustifiable rates, but I do think the author has a bit of a misunderstanding of why consultancies are hired in the first place.
To be clear, when a consultancy like McK puts a 23 year old analyst on a project, the $50k/week bill isn't just paying for the knowledge in the analyst's head. The analyst is really just a vehicle to deliver the expertise of the actually-experienced consultants and knowledgebase of the entire firm. The experienced consultants don't have the time to sit and write out the powerpoint deck, so instead they throw as much knowledge as they can at the analyst and the analyst is the one who synthesizes it into something digestable by the customer. Is it worth $50k/week? Fuck no. But it is at least worth recognizing that you are getting more expertise than a sole bachelor's degree.
Second, as someone who has both worked as a consultant at major companies like McK and worked on the other side of the table, and as someone who has long despised the consulting profession because of its overpriced bullshit, I think the author would be surprised at how effective even a measly 23 year old can be. As a consultant, it would drive me insane that my company was billing me out at $700/hr to help implement an IT system when all I was actually doing was reading and regurgitating the software's documentation and making sure that the client didn't ignore it. Surely the client could do this themselves and save the $700/hr, right?
It took me a long time to realize that the answer to this question was actually no. The typical HNer will probably be surprised (and saddened, if you're like me) to realize that the average corporate worker bee is in fact not competent enough to do the most basic tasks, such as refer to documentation, without hand-holding. It is an unfortunate reality that sometimes a well-educated and well-vetted 23 year old analyst can do things much better than an 20-year industry veteran. Companies do know this, and this is what they are paying for, much to the chagrin of the rest of us.
As a last note, the author mentions the possibility of just hiring an IT professional to do the work instead of hiring a consultant. This is something I also see come up a lot in consulting discussions. The reason this isn't done is because hiring an employee full-time brings on a lot of risk to the hiring company. It can take months to hire someone, many more months to train them, and then if they don't perform up to snuff, it can take years to build up a case to fire them, all the whole they are sitting on your payroll taking up budget. A consultant, on the other hand, can be hired in a day, trained in a week, and if needed, can be fired in a minute. You pay a premium for the agility to hire and fire them quickly, but that's the entire point.
https://www.fiercewireless.com/5g/verizon-partners-aws-to-br...