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Slashdot Stories Firehose All Popular Polls Ask EventsSoftware Newsletter Jobs Submit Search Slashdot Login or Sign up Topics: Devices Build Entertainment Technology Open Source Science YRO more...Follow us: RSS Facebook LinkedIn Twitter Youtube Mastodon Newsletter Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading! Nickname: Password: Public Terminal Forgot your password? Close binspam dupe notthebest offtopic slownewsday stale stupid fresh funny insightful interesting maybe offtopic flamebait troll redundant overrated insightful interesting informative funny underrated descriptive typo dupe error !Sign up for the Slashdot newsletter! OR check out the new Slashdot job board to browse remote jobs or jobs in your area Do you develop on GitHub? You can keep using GitHub but automatically sync your GitHub releases to SourceForge quickly and easily with this tool so your projects have a backup location, and get your project in front of SourceForge’s nearly 20 million monthly users. It takes less than a minute. Get new users downloading your project releases today! × 173865189 story Ordered Back To the Office, Top Tech Talent Left Instead, Study Finds (washingtonpost.com) 1313 Posted by BeauHD on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @09:00AM from the surprise-surprise dept. An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: Return-to-office mandates at some of the most powerful tech companiesApple, Microsoft and SpaceXwere followed by a spike in departures among the most senior, tough-to-replace talent , according to a case study published last week by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan. Researchers drew on resume data from People Data Labs to understand the impact that forced returns to offices had on employee tenure and the movement of workers between companies. What they found was a strong correlation between the departures of senior-level employees and the implementation of a mandate, suggesting that these policies "had a negative effect on the tenure and seniority of their respective workforce." High-ranking employees stayed several months less than they might have without the mandate, the research suggestsand in many cases, they went to work for direct competitors. At Microsoft, the share of senior employees as a portion of the company’s overall workforce declined more than five percentage points after the return-to-office mandate took effect, the researchers found. At Apple, the decline was four percentage points, while at SpaceXthe only company of the three to require workers to be fully in-personthe share of senior employees dropped 15 percentage points. "We find experienced employees impacted by these policies at major tech companies seek work elsewhere, taking some of the most valuable human capital investments and tools of productivity with them," said Austin Wright, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Chicago and one of the study’s authors. "Business leaders should weigh carefully employee preferences and market opportunities when deciding when, or if, they mandate a return to office." While the corporate culture and return-to-office policies differ "markedly" between the three companies, the similar effects of the RTO mandates suggest that "the effects are driven by common underlying dynamics," wrote the authors of the study. "Our findings suggest that RTO mandates cost the company more than previously thought," said David Van Dijcke, a researcher at the University of Michigan who worked on the study. "These attrition rates aren’t just something that can be managed away." Robert Ployhart, a professor of business administration and management at the University of South Carolina, said executives haven’t provided much evidence that RTO mandates actually benefit their workforces. "The people sitting at the apex may not like the way they feel the organization is being run, but if they’re not bringing data to that point of view, it’s really hard to argue why people should be coming back to the workplace more frequently," Ployhart said. Senior employees, he said, are "the caretakers of a company’s culture," and having to replace them can have negative effects on team morale and productivity. "By driving those employees away, they’ve actually enhanced and sped up the very thing they were trying to stop," Ployhart said.173864821 story Cruise Is Back Driving Autonomously After Pedestrian-Dragging Incident (theverge.com) 2121 Posted by BeauHD on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @03:00AM from the look-out dept. Cruise’s autonomous vehicles have resumed operation in Phoenix, Arizona , following an incident in San Francisco last October where a driverless vehicle dragged a pedestrian . The Verge reports: Cruise spokesperson Tiffany Testo said the company is deploying only two autonomous vehicles with safety drivers behind the wheel. In addition, the company has eight manually driven vehicles in the city. Eventually, the service area will "gradually expand" to include Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Tempe, Mesa, Gilbert, and Chandler"measured against predetermined safety benchmarks." Cruise’s slow return to the road is noteworthy, given the huge hurdles facing the company in the wake of the October incident. Regulators accused the company of misleading them about the nature and severity of the incident, in which a pedestrian was dragged over 20 feet by a driverless Cruise after first being struck by a hit-and-run driver. Several top executives have since left the company, including founder and CEO Kyle Vogt, and around a quarter of employees were laid off . GM has said it will reduce its spending on Cruise. And an outside report found evidence that a culture of antagonism toward regulators contributed to many of the failings.173864357 story Slashdot Asks: How Do You Protest AI Development? (wired.com) 9595 Posted by BeauHD on Monday May 13, 2024 @11:30PM from the before-it’s-too-late dept. An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: On a side street outside the headquarters of the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology in the center of London on Monday, 20 or so protesters are getting their chants in order. "What do we want? Safe AI! When do we want it?" The protesters hesitate. "Later?" someone offers. The group of mostly young men huddle for a moment before breaking into a new chant. "What do we want? Pause AI! When do we want it? Now!" These protesters are part of Pause AI, a group of activists petitioning for companies to pause development of large AI models which they fear could pose a risk to the future of humanity . Other PauseAI protests are taking place across the globe: In San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Rome, Ottawa, and ahandful of other cities. Their aim is to grab the attention of voters and politicians ahead of the AI Seoul Summita follow-up to the AI Safety Summit held in the UK in November 2023. But the loosely organized group of protesters itself is still figuring out exactly the best way to communicate its message . "The Summit didn’t actually lead to meaningful regulations," says Joep Meindertsma, the founder of PauseAI. The attendees at the conference agreed to the "Bletchley Declaration," but that agreement doesn’t mean much, Meindertsma says. "It’s only a small first step, and what we need are binding international treaties." [...] There is also the question of how PauseAI should achieve its aims. On the group’s Discord, some members discussed the idea of staging sit-ins at the headquarters of AI developers. OpenAI, in particular, has become a focal point of AI protests. In February, Pause AI protests gathered in front of OpenAI’sSan Francisco offices, after the company changed its usage policies to remove a ban on military and warfare applications for its products. Would it be too disruptive if protests staged sit-ins or chained themselves to the doors of AI developers, one member of the Discord asked. "Probably not. We do what we...