Want the best software engineers? Stop looking at Stanford and Berkeley. – Protocol
Swarthmore and UVA grads are among those scoring higher than students from elite institutions on the widely used SAT-style test for software engineers.
CodeSignal’s new report draws on just one data point: how people perform on its standardized assessment of the General Coding Framework.
It should feel safe to assume that the average computer science graduate from Stanford University would ace a coding proficiency test like the one given to entry-level software engineers at companies like Square. Most of them do. But on average, they are not the best of the best.
Stanford CS grads don’t even make the top 10 list for high scorers on the General Coding Assessment, the coding proficiency test designed by CodeSignal and given to software applicants at most major tech companies. Neither do those from the University of California, Berkeley, which is tied with Stanford for the second-best engineering school in the U.S. News and World Report college rankings, behind MIT.
Ranked ahead of Stanford (at slot 13 on this year’s CodeSignal list) and Berkeley (17) are schools like the University of Virginia, Charlottesville (1) and Swarthmore College (10), neither of which are famous for their CS degree programs. Twelve schools on CodeSignal’s list don’t appear anywhere on the U.S. News and World Report’s list of top 30 computer science schools, including Ivy League institutions like Yale (3) and state schools like the University of Colorado at Boulder (11), the State University of New York at Stony Brook (22) and Arizona State University (29).
Meta, Robinhood, Square, Uber, Instacart, Zoom and Asana are among the companies that have used or currently use CodeSignal’s assessments in hiring. CodeSignal creates these ranking reports each year as part of an effort to convince these companies and the rest of the industry that recruiting primarily from universities with prestigious reputations in software engineering is an inefficient use of resources. Elite universities like Stanford produce graduates with generally high scores, but the report aims to show that plenty of other schools train students who are just as competitive, if not more so, according to CodeSignal CEO and co-founder Tigran Sloyan.
“You could find a whole bunch of amazing software engineers at the University of Central Missouri, which graduates more CS grads than Stanford and Harvard combined. Companies spend millions and millions of dollars chasing grads from the Ivy Leagues, and they don’t even recruit sometimes from the other schools,” Sloyan said. “In this incredibly competitive market, it’s crazy.”
The tech industry’s racial, ethnic and socioeconomic makeup has remained relatively stagnant over the last several years. For tech companies that profess a desire to change that, recruiting from schools beyond the stereotypically elite institutions might be one of the most straightforward ways to go about it. “Talent is everywhere; you’ve just got to be able to look for it directly by measuring skill set versus by relying on, ‘Oh, we hear people from this university are good,’” Sloyan said.
Unlike traditional college rankings, which calculate degree program success based on attributes such as graduation rates, job placement rates, reputation among peers and funding, the CodeSignal report draws on just one data point: how people perform on the company’s standardized assessment of the General Coding Framework.
Sloyan argues that the industry’s widespread adoption of CodeSignal’s assessment has created a statistically significant data set that companies and job applicants should trust. Students and entry-level engineers everywhere grind in preparation for this test, and all types of tech companies use it to screen their applicants. More than 160,000 engineers have taken CodeSignal’s assessment, and the company estimates that more than 50% of graduating CS students take the test. Most college computer science programs teach algorithmic problem-solving skills, and the test is designed to assess those skills rather than knowledge of a specific language like Java or Python.
Students applying for competitive tech jobs train themselves on practice problems and tests that emulate the assessments these companies use, trying to estimate what score they might be able to get. Subreddits like r/csMajors are loaded with questions like “How high of a codesignal general score should I aim for to get an interview at Square?” and “How hard is the Facebook codesignal assessment for University grad role?”
CodeSignal scores range from 600-849, and the company says that scores above 800 indicate excellent problem-solving skills equivalent to the 84th percentile. The university ranking list is based on how many test-takers from each school score above 800 out of the total pool of people from that school. An impressive 43% of test-takers from UVA Charlottesville scored above 800 in 2022, while Swarthmore’s 22% sits just above Stanford and at about the same level as the California Institute of Technology.
At Swarthmore, a tiny liberal arts college, the computer science program will graduate just over 50 students this year and managed to best not only Stanford and Berkeley, but the Georgia Institute of Technology and other massive engineering institutions. Swarthmore CS graduates are excelling in more than just the CodeSignal test; at the North American championship for the International Collegiate Programming Competition last year, a Swarthmore team placed fourth, becoming the only liberal arts college in the United States to qualify for the world championship.
Andrew Danner, the college’s computer science department chair, speculated that the school’s focus on algorithmic problem-solving over teaching specific languages might explain its success.
“Our intro course, it’s taught in Python, but the goal here is not to teach you Python, it’s to teach you enough Python so that you can solve some computational problems with it. We do that again in our intermediate courses too where we switch the language and teach them C and C++ so that they see a variety of different languages throughout their career,” Danner said. “There are also a lot of schools, you come in and you start learning Java, you do Java your entire time, you know that language extremely well and maybe do not know how to adapt to other languages.”
Computer science is the most rapidly expanding degree program for undergraduates at almost every school that offers it. At Swarthmore, it’s now one of the top three degree programs despite the fact the school doesn’t actively recruit students focused on CS. Because of the school’s small size, students have certain advantages compared to those at larger schools with famous degree programs. While a student at an elite research university might take a 300-person CS class with teaching assistants, the largest class at Swarthmore is around 60 students, and everyone will learn from the professor.
“I think debunking that myth that the best people only go to the top schools is such an important message for everyone: for companies, for parents, for students,” Sloyan said. “Students get it into their head, too. When you get it into your head, ‘There’s no way I can be great,’ that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s practice, dedication that gets you to that skill level.”
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (Twitter: @ anna_c_kramer, email: akramer@protocol.com), where she writes about labor and workplace issues. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.
Suzanne Martindale, who leads California’s financial consumer-protection efforts, sees the industry moving fast and regular people getting hurt.
Suzanne Martindale told Protocol why regulating crypto has become critical and challenging.
Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers crypto and fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Google Voice at (925) 307-9342.
Suzanne Martindale, head of California’s Division of Consumer Financial Protection, had just joined the state’s financial regulatory body in early 2021 when crypto suddenly became a serious consumer concern.
Crypto’s explosive growth sparked heightened worries about consumers dabbling in a volatile market and getting ripped off in the process.
“I would say that 2021 really was the year that everything seemed to get turbocharged,” Martindale, a senior deputy commissioner at California’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation as well as head of the financial protection division, told Protocol.
“We are getting complaints where people are just straight-up being defrauded,” she said.
The resulting push to regulate crypto has kept Martindale busy.
She began the week by studying a new bill — AB 2269, filed by Assemblymember Timothy Grayson — that would require crypto companies offering financial products in California to register with the DFPI.
Martindale described the proposal as “a massive new bill that would create a new kind of crypto native licensing program in California.” It would be a big change for a state that’s taken a mostly hands-off approach, even as San Francisco’s become a hub for the crypto industry and Sand Hill Road has raised billions to invest in startups.
In an interview with Protocol, Martindale discussed why regulating crypto has become critical and challenging, given the industry’s rapid expansion, and how California can play an important role in this effort.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
What would California’s AB 2269 do if passed?
By and large, it is a bill that would create a new licensing regime for crypto finance. It would direct our department to stand up a new licensing program over crypto finance. It would sweep up a lot of the crypto-asset-related financial products out there and subject them to required licensing and examination. It is designed to be a consumer protection bill, to establish minimum standards for various crypto-related products and services.
What is in place now? What are crypto companies required to do given the current laws?
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer at this point. We’ve had discussions over the last several years. The term “fintech” has become popular, and you have tech companies wading into the financial services market.
You can talk about technology all day long, but when it comes to consumer finance, there are four kinds of activities people engage in: They’re spending, they’re saving, they’re borrowing or they’re investing. That’s always where I start: What kind of activity are we talking about?
Because in some cases, some products and services that may be marketed as tech may still fall squarely under one of those buckets: “Oh, it looks like a deposit account. It looks like a form of payment. It looks like a loan or it looks like an investment product.”
What we look at is really the activity. There are different kinds of products out there. There’s a wallet where you can hold assets. You may send money to a friend. You may be borrowing against your bitcoin, using it as collateral or you might be taking on an investment product.
There may be a different answer depending on the use case for what laws may or may not apply. That’s the debate that everyone is having right now.
We’re trying to take a measured approach. We don’t want to go too slow or too fast. We want to do it right with the explosion in these offerings and the increasing activity at the retail customer level.
We know we need to act, but we want to do it right. We are getting complaints where people are just straight-up being defrauded. We know that there are people that are just outright just getting scammed, and so we don’t want to move too slow either.
If this bill passes, what would be the next step for the DFPI?
We would have to put in a budget request to hire a bunch of new staff to implement this. We would have to pivot quite substantially to implement a new licensing program that may indeed override some of the work that we were contemplating doing on the regulatory and administrative level.
Wouldn’t it help provide clarity, or create more confusion potentially?
We need to analyze it. I’m someone who likes to be plain-speaking and give clear, your-grandma-can-understand kind of answers. Part of the challenge, part of the vexing challenge with crypto — and this has been the case for years in the area where crypto meets finance — even getting stakeholders to use a common set of terms, we’re not even there yet.
You have people that are still saying “crypto assets” or “cryptocurrency.” In the Biden executive order, they use the term “digital asset.” By and large, in our executive order, we have “crypto assets and related” financial products and services.
People use different terms and have different kinds of preconceived notions in their heads about what this may or may not be. We need to all be speaking the same language as regulators and as stakeholders in this process so that we can be on the same page to even have coherent policy debates. And that’s part of the challenge here.
New York introduced its own crypto licensing program a few years ago. What have been the big lessons from that experience?
I can’t speak for New York. To create a crypto-specific licensing regime, that’s one approach.
What we’re doing right now is taking a look at the laws we already have. We have this new California Consumer Financial Protection Law that passed in 2020. That’s modeled after Dodd-Frank. That gives us broad and flexible general authority over financial products and services.
We already have statutory authority, and a broad definition of financial product and service where we could leverage the existing tools we have to establish supervision and examination and potentially draft rules of the road through regulation for financial products and services.
There’s an open question: Do you craft an entirely new bucket that’s for crypto? Or do you leverage the existing laws that you already have and just clarify when a company that is engaging in financial products and services, XYZ-product features, you know, does it already fit under an existing bucket? Or do you have to create a new bucket?
That’s kind of the open question that we’re now going to be facing, particularly with this legislation now being introduced.
So, there’s still a debate.
Very much so. Absolutely, there’s a debate.
Coinbase wants a separate regulator for crypto.
Right. I understand that people get frustrated all the time with the fact that technology outpaces the law. The California Consumer Financial Protection Law gives us broad definitional jurisdiction over financial products and services. You can call yourself whatever you want, but what we’re going to ask is: What are you doing?
Are you offering a product or service that facilitates deposit taking? Does it look a lot like banking? Are you offering some sort of product that looks like an investment? Are you maybe a security? Are you offering a way to send or receive funds? Does that look like payments? Or are you offering something that gives people an advance on funds that kind of sounds like credit or loans?
Again, the four pillars of consumer finance are spending, saving, borrowing and investing. So we’re going to look at the activity first. So I’m always going to ask the question: Do we need a new law? Do we need a new licensing regime? Or are these products, all things being equal, already covered by existing financial laws?
Maybe those financial laws aren’t good enough. Maybe they don’t quite fit. But let’s start with what authority do we already have before we’re looking at whether there are actual changes [we need to make] or you need a new license, or you need a new regulator completely to somehow handle these products and services.
All of those things you mentioned many crypto companies are doing.
Yeah. If there is something in a particular statute that just doesn’t quite fit, let’s have a conversation about it. But I think starting at the high level, I am not someone who says, “Oh, there’s a new technology involved. Therefore, we need entirely new laws.”
That may or may not actually be the case. You really have to drill down, look at the facts and circumstances, look at what these companies are actually offering. Again, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer in this.
That’s why the executive order in California includes extensive stakeholder engagement. We published our invitation to comment a few days ago. We asked a series of questions about approaches to regulating this space. We’re also directed to develop consumer protection principles.
At a very high level, if you want to be a good guy, here’s the kinds of things you should be thinking about.
A lot of it’s going to be pretty common sense, like truth in advertising, good customer service and a way to have error resolution procedures so people can fix problems, have a way to handle complaints — stuff that traditional companies have long been required to do under various laws.
We’re going to be having meetings with various stakeholders and various industry segments and obviously with community groups and people who are using these products as retail customers to get a better sense for where the biggest risks are and where we should be allocating our resources to really provide some sanity to what is still an increasingly growing and often volatile ecosystem.
What are the most common consumer complaints you’ve received?
Some of it’s been customer service issues. Some of it’s been criminal fraud: the romance scams and affinity scams. It’s — often, unfortunately — heartbreaking that there’s just really very little we can do.
How do you compare the need to regulate crypto with the way other past trends or technologies had to be regulated?
It’s moving very fast. I would say that 2021 really was the year that everything seemed to get turbocharged. For a while, it was just some early adopters and people that had money to burn. It was folks that were kind of crypto enthusiasts who were comfortable with the speculative nature of it. It was a relatively small pool of people, largely in the tech world, who are engaging.
But last year was the first year that we started getting complaints from regular folks that were saying, “Hey, I saw what I think was going to be a great deal and I thought, ‘Oh, this would be an alternative to traditional banks, and I could put my savings in it’ and, oops, my account got wiped out by a hacker and now I have no money.”
Last year was the first year we really heard that.
It’s still an emerging issue. It doesn’t quite compare to — I’m remembering back in the years building up to the foreclosure crisis, where community groups and advocates are sounding the alarm bell: “This is a ticking time bomb; you’re putting people in mortgages they can’t afford.” Then we hit that precipice and the global collapse of the financial system.
I don’t think that we’re there, in part because this has become a parallel system, right? These folks, by and large, are not in the banking system. So it’s not quite the same thing as the real estate bubble of the 2000s or anything like that.
It still feels like early days. But it also feels like the pace is so much faster. It does feel like the next year to two years are going to be very critical for regulators across jurisdictions to start to put down some guardrails where the law is clear, where [if] there are obvious violations really start to draw some lines in the sand, like, “No, this is clearly illegal.”
The next year or two I think is going to be critical.
Another trend is the growing interest of institutional investors in crypto, highlighted by Fidelity’s announcement that it plans to allow retirement account holders to invest in bitcoin.
Certainly, we’re seeing a lot of capital flowing. That certainly is going to be of interest to us. We’re not necessarily going to say that a lot of investment in a particular space is an unqualified good or unqualified bad.
We need to take a look at what’s going on and get the best information and then just make sure that we are adaptive. People may find this odd coming from a regulator, but we’re trying to be nimble here. We’re trying to get in front of these emerging issues so that we’re not waiting until after everyone’s been ripped off, or you and the bad actors have made good money and the good actors have been outcompeted. We don’t want that to happen.
Again, we have to balance that with: If we rush in too fast before we have good information, we could potentially make the wrong call. We don’t want to make the wrong call.
Where the money flows may or may not be indicative of what actually is responsible. It just indicates stakeholder interest, and it means that we need to be where those conversations are happening.
California, historically, has been known to set the pace for different areas of regulations. How do you view efforts to regulate crypto in Washington and other states?
Well, California, on its own, is the fifth-largest economy in the world. Often, businesses and industries often start and grow here. We are a resource-rich state in more ways than one. In many instances, where California goes, so goes the nation. We do think we have a responsibility to play a leadership role in this space.
Washington can’t do everything from Washington. We strongly believe that there is an important role for states to play in regulating industries and protecting our residents. So we’re doing this all in concert with our federal partners. We don’t want to create conflicting rules that don’t make sense.
Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers crypto and fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Google Voice at (925) 307-9342.
Internet for Growth, an initiative of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, supports the transformative role the advertising-supported internet plays in empowering America’s small businesses, helping entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life. Supported by a diverse community of over 700 IAB members including marketers, agencies, publishers, platforms and ad tech providers, as well as hundreds of small businesses and creators, Internet for Growth highlights the benefits the internet delivers to local economies, expanding opportunities for innovators to reach markets far beyond their neighborhoods. Their work ensures people understand the limitless opportunity the internet provides for creativity and commerce, fair competition, and connecting with consumers on mutually shared values and interests, no matter the background or geography.
Smaller companies like ours are buckling under the weight of unprecedented price increases, supply chain shortages and rising labor prices. To increase our marketing reach on a slim budget, the internet is our best option. Internet marketing is critical to the survival of our business. It’s one of the most affordable, effective forms of marketing at our disposal.
Limiting our options will only hurt us at a time when we need every opportunity possible to stay in business. Small companies like ours are competing with much larger competitors to reach the same customers in a busy, crowded space.
How many Valpaks, grocery store flyers and random postcards from local businesses have you discarded in the last month? We’re all overloaded with physical junk mail. Even if an offer catches our eye, there’s no instant online access or interactivity. Generational shifts have also impacted marketing. For younger generations, digital media is a part of everyday life. How they shop, date and travel: It’s all digital. For most of our customers, shopping online is the norm, and their payment choices are digital too, including at pop-up and live events. The digital economy is a way of life and here to stay. Congress needs to be careful tampering with digital advertising tools that Pot Pie Factory needs to stay in business.
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Over 100 years in business, Virginia Diner has learned and shifted approaches to advertising through changing times and overcome inevitable hurdles.
The idea that politicians could restrict cost-effective online advertising and marketing is daunting. These laws could potentially cripple the way small companies like ours do business in this ever-evolving digital age.
The recent pandemic was devastating for many brick-and-mortar small businesses relying on in-person transactions, especially those in remote, rural areas like ours in Wakefield, Virginia. E-commerce was a lifeline. As consumers spend more time online, they also demand goods be delivered directly to their doorsteps, quickly. Targeted, tailored advertising has become a critical tool for Virginia Diner to identify and serve customers, maintain growth and stay viable in a rapidly changing marketplace.
Traditionally, our core business had been wholesale, with retailers selling our products in brick-and-mortar stores. But during the pandemic, direct-to-consumer sales (DTC) became our biggest revenue channel, generating enough volume for us to stay at full capacity and keep all our team members employed. Proposed restrictions on data-driven advertising would demolish DTC sales. Our ability to identify and advertise to customers inclined to do business with us is at risk. Speaking as a consumer, I enjoy learning about and purchasing unique brands that meet my tastes, which I might not discover without personalized ads. I hope legislation making it hard to use data responsibly and to personalize ads to serve more customers never gets enacted.
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I founded my small business to help other small businesses grow. Whether they need help amplifying a brand, an artist or selling a product or service, our clients rely on S.S. Creative to connect with more customers, and much of that relies on consumer data.
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Consumer data and digital marketing aren’t just nice tools to have: They’ve been essential to my clients’ survival. They range from recording studios and musicians to hair salons and lawyers, and the one thing they all have in common is that during the last two years, every one of them has had to move his or her business online to forge a path to success. The only reason my clients’ businesses are still surviving today is because they can connect with their customers digitally.
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Baby Chick is a digital media company covering everything from pregnancy and birth to postpartum and parenthood, helping parents make the best decisions for their families. My wife Nina and I started the company on Mother’s Day in 2015. Since then, Baby Chick has influenced over 26 million (primarily) women over the past seven years and gained over 81 million pageviews. If we didn’t have internet advertising, it would be challenging for us to continue operating the company.
Internet advertising has enabled us to grow our business to what it is today, but proposed regulations limiting advertisers’ ability to reach target audiences would hurt media publishers like us. With less precise information, advertisers would likely reallocate budgets from programmatic ad-buying or bid less money on digital ads, which would negatively impact Baby Chick’s revenue and our family’s income. The readership experience would suffer if site visitors weren’t seeing ads relevant to their interests and Baby Chick’s unique content. If Congress enacts restrictions on using data for advertising, it would be extremely difficult to deliver the content our customers enjoy and to pay our staff.
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New markets are constantly emerging on the internet. That’s why we see the IBM and AOL of one era replaced by the Google and Spotify of the next. That’s why today direct-to-consumer brands like Madison Reed in hair care are winning market share from giants of the industry, and brands like Allbirds are finding entirely new markets. This pace of innovation is only possible because companies are leveraging data about consumer behavior to create truly customer-centric products, services and media.
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Used responsibly and transparently, data does not harm competition and innovation. It fosters it, as my research for the Interactive Advertising Bureau shows. A healthy economic future depends on fair and creative use of data.
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Internet for Growth, an initiative of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, supports the transformative role the advertising-supported internet plays in empowering America’s small businesses, helping entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life. Supported by a diverse community of over 700 IAB members including marketers, agencies, publishers, platforms and ad tech providers, as well as hundreds of small businesses and creators, Internet for Growth highlights the benefits the internet delivers to local economies, expanding opportunities for innovators to reach markets far beyond their neighborhoods. Their work ensures people understand the limitless opportunity the internet provides for creativity and commerce, fair competition, and connecting with consumers on mutually shared values and interests, no matter the background or geography.
People have been complaining about Slack’s chaotic notifications for years. Slack says the root of the problem is its sidebar.
Slack is aiming for simplicity with its revamp.
Lizzy Lawrence ( @LizzyLaw_) is a reporter at Protocol, covering tools and productivity in the workplace. She’s a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, where she studied sociology and international studies. She served as editor in chief of The Michigan Daily, her school’s independent newspaper. She’s based in D.C., and can be reached at llawrence@protocol.com.
What if instead of your standard stack of threads, channels and DMs, Slack presented you with one urgent message at a time? You would address each message in order of importance, never having to switch contexts. This hypothetical version of Slack, head of Design Ethan Eismann explained, would be “infinitely intelligent,” understanding exactly what information you need to see next.
Slack isn’t quite there yet, and it’s unclear if it ever will be. Infinite intelligence isn’t exactly easy. For now, Slack’s product and design teams have done the next best thing when it comes to simplicity: They’ve revamped the sidebar. The changes are subtle: spacing out text, changing the default notification color from red to white, removing unnecessary icons. But VP of Product Ali Rayl hopes that together, they’ll address the most common criticism levied at Slack: overwhelm.
“What have we done with the visual presentation of Slack activity that’s making people stressed out?” Rayl asked. “How can we change that visual presentation to just lower the temperature a little bit?”
The new sidebar is meant to reduce that always-on feeling.Image: Slack
The heart of the problem is our always-on work culture, a problem that only got worse for some with remote work blending together our homes and the office. Humans, not Slack, are the ones sending a cacophony of messages. We pressure ourselves to respond immediately, even when we don’t need to. “The obligation that we feel to one another is stronger than their immediate need for us in those cases,” Rayl said.
Still, the norms of instant messaging don’t help: “Instant” is literally in the name. The expectation for urgent, immediate responses is “baked into that particular medium in a way that it was never baked into email,” said Slack user and engineering manager Mykola Bilokonsky. To combat this, as well as customers’ general complaints about Slack sending them too many notifications, Rayl said Slack’s leaders first focused on features like “Do Not Disturb” and customizable statuses. But the feedback didn’t change.
“We went deeper,” Rayl said. “We were like, ‘What do you mean when you say notifications?’ And they said, ‘Oh, man, it’s the sidebar. It’s the badges and it’s all bold, and there are all these channels. That’s how we ended up here.’”
It’s not solely about the presence of notifications: It’s about their presentation. Eismann said every pixel within Slack corresponds to a number of “cognitive calories,” or the brain power that helps us interpret our computer screens. Removing icons and streamlining context menus help reduce the cognitive calories Slack requires. For example, “Slack Connect” channels (channels with external partners) used to have a special icon differentiating them. But Rayl said some customers actually had no idea what the icon meant, creating confusion. Now, Slack users can hover over a channel to get a text-based description.
Slack overwhelm affects neurodivergent people more acutely, Bilokonsky said. Bilokonsky, who is autistic and has ADHD, said Slack is “a nightmare for ND brains.” It’s difficult for him to shift contexts, and the incessant pace of notifications can heighten anxiety. Bilokonsky mostly just finds Slack annoying, but some of his neurodivergent friends find Slack’s presence debilitating.
“I’ve got friends who just cannot have Slack open while they’re working,” Bilokonsky said. “The possibility of being distracted in that way makes it impossible for them to allocate their attention on their work.”
Yet Slack is absolutely necessary for Bilokonsky’s job. He has found certain features indispensable, like grouping channels by priority and integrating all of his other tools within Slack. And he appreciates Slack’s commitment to improving its app design, noting that even little changes can make a difference.
“Our computer screens are our environment, to an extent,” Bilokonsky said. “Just like subtle variations in carpet color or wall decoration can really make or break a space, I think stylistic changes can make huge impacts on how it feels to use the app.”
Some people might have trouble pinpointing what design change would improve their user experience. This isn’t the case with autistic people, Bilokonsky said. “We know what we need; we’re screaming it from the rooftops,” Bilokonsky said. “Taking the time to create that feedback channel is awesome.”
Rayl said Slack’s team had accessibility in mind throughout the research process, consulting with neurodivergent and blind customers. It’s also made changes to the sidebar technology supporting screen readers which simplifies the text that’s read aloud.
Company leaders are bracing themselves for feedback. “I’m extremely cognizant of the fact that we are touching the most sensitive spot of the product right now,” Rayl said. But she’s hopeful that after a few days, people will find that the new sidebar has seamlessly improved their Slack experience.
Slack will start rolling out the new sidebar to people on Wednesday, but it will take a few weeks to reach everyone’s Slack accounts.
Lizzy Lawrence ( @LizzyLaw_) is a reporter at Protocol, covering tools and productivity in the workplace. She’s a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, where she studied sociology and international studies. She served as editor in chief of The Michigan Daily, her school’s independent newspaper. She’s based in D.C., and can be reached at llawrence@protocol.com.
We’re getting a better idea of why Meta acquired Crayta and how the game will help it compete with Fortnite and Roblox.
Meta is streaming Crayta for free on Facebook Gaming.
Nick Statt is Protocol’s video game reporter. Prior to joining Protocol, he was news editor at The Verge covering the gaming industry, mobile apps and antitrust out of San Francisco, in addition to managing coverage of Silicon Valley tech giants and startups. He now resides in Rochester, New York, home of the garbage plate and, completely coincidentally, the World Video Game Hall of Fame. He can be reached at nstatt@protocol.com.
Meta is taking another substantial leap toward its vision for the metaverse with a lesser-known social platform it acquired last year. Starting Wednesday, the company will stream Crayta, a game-making platform where players can design their own virtual worlds, for free on Facebook Gaming, making the title available to anyone regardless of the hardware they’re using.
Crayta falls somewhere between Roblox and Fortnite, with a more mature art style reminiscent of Epic’s battle royale but with the game-making tools and creativity focus of the former. U.K.-based developer Unit 2 Games originally released the game exclusively for Google Stadia back in 2020, where it gained little traction due to the cloud platform’s poor adoption. The following year, Meta (then still Facebook) acquired Unit 2 and Crayta with ambitions to turn it into something bigger and better, though it was not exactly clear at the time what Meta had in mind.
Now, a little over 12 months to the day since acquiring Unit 2, Meta is giving us a better idea of its plans for Crayta after its major corporate rebranding and its strategic shift toward the metaverse. Although Crayta remains available to stream through Google Stadia and available to download on the Epic Game Store, Meta’s decision to stream the game from its Facebook Gaming platform, both on mobile and in web browsers, could give it much more exposure.
“One of the things that I really love about this is the idea of being able to design a space or design a game from inside of the space or game,” Mark Zuckerberg said of Crayta during a video demo recorded inside of “Hacker Square,” a Meta-themed environment the company built to promote the news.
Crayta could play an integral role in Meta’s effort to catch up to game makers like Epic and Roblox. Both of those companies have rich virtual platforms with hundreds of millions of players. They’re also both making substantial inroads in transforming those products into early versions of what the metaverse may eventually look like, with brand deals to run in-game promotions for film and TV, rich avatars featuring Marvel and anime characters and a constant loop of new experiences and rewards to keep players logging in every day.
Meta has an existing social and game-making platform in the form of Horizon Worlds, which is available right now only on Oculus headsets, though the company has plans to launch mobile and web versions soon that drop the VR component. But Horizon Worlds has only a little more than 300,000 monthly users as of February. Roblox, on the other hand, has nearly 50 million daily players.
Crayta can now be streamed to almost any device, in part because it’s not a computationally intensive VR experience. That could give it an edge over the competition, which requires you to download software locally to devices like game consoles, PCs or higher-end smartphones.
“Historically, if you wanted to have something like this run in this high-quality of a 3D environment, that would be really hard to render in a browser or on phones, but being able to do it with cloud infrastructure and then send it down across the network after having already rendered it in the cloud is a pretty big advance,” Zuckerberg said.
“A lot of times today, people think about the metaverse as 3D experiences you can have in virtual and augmented reality,” he added. “But I think what Crayta shows is that you can both build and enjoy these kinds of experiences really easily on all kinds of 2D environments including just within the Facebook App on phones and on computers.”
By streaming the game, Meta is also able to bypass roadblocks on mobile phones, primarily the 30% commission on digital goods imposed by Apple’s App Store. Right now, Crayta does not have the same monetization options that, say, Roblox does, so game creators aren’t given a cut of sales of in-game goods.
Instead, Crayta has a creator fund that awards monetary prizes on a monthly basis. Roblox has been upfront about how much of its revenue it forks over to tech giants to distribute its game on Android and iOS, though it has decidedly stayed on the sidelines during antitrust and App Store regulation debates like the legal battle between Epic and Apple.
So while bypassing the Apple cut isn’t relevant to Crayta right now, it certainly could be down the line if Meta begins implementing more monetization options for creators to sell digital goods. The company recently stirred up controversy when it said it would begin testing sales of virtual goods in Horizon Worlds with a substantial commission of nearly 50% of sales.
It’s not clear right now whether those same rates will apply to Crayta if or when the platform greenlights the creation and sale of digital goods like avatars and virtual clothing. But streaming does allow Meta to remove the 30% mobile app store commission from the equation.
For now, Meta will stream Crayta through a variety of methods depending on what platform you’re on. It’ll be available on web browsers if you’re on a computer. For Android users, Crayta will be streamable from the Facebook app, the Facebook Gaming app and through a mobile browser. On iOS, however, Meta says it will be directing players to use the progressive iOS web app it released last year as a workaround to Apple’s restrictions on cloud gaming.
Nick Statt is Protocol’s video game reporter. Prior to joining Protocol, he was news editor at The Verge covering the gaming industry, mobile apps and antitrust out of San Francisco, in addition to managing coverage of Silicon Valley tech giants and startups. He now resides in Rochester, New York, home of the garbage plate and, completely coincidentally, the World Video Game Hall of Fame. He can be reached at nstatt@protocol.com.
CEO Tom Leighton thinks Akamai’s recent acquisitions of Guardicore and Linode give his company a much stronger presence in enterprise computing and security, more than 20 years after it pioneered the content delivery network.
Akamai CEO Tom Leighton says the company is the “world’s most distributed cloud services provider.”
Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol’s senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the ‘Big 3’ cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.
If you asked CEO Tom Leighton to describe Akamai Technologies five years ago, his response would have been different from his answer today.
Today he describes the company as the “world’s most distributed cloud services provider” with services in compute, security and delivery. The company, which continues to evolve from its start as a content delivery network (CDN) provider, hit a key milestone in that journey last quarter.
Revenue from Akamai’s security and compute business combined to eclipse its delivery revenue for the first time. Security revenue increased 23% year-over-year to $382 million, and compute revenue hit $78 million, up 32%. Delivery revenue, meanwhile, fell 6% to $444 million.
“Next year, security will be the largest of the three,” Leighton said in an interview with Protocol.
“It won’t be the majority yet by itself, but it’ll be bigger than delivery and compute. Depends how fast compute grows, but that’s an enormous market, and who knows, maybe compute will be the largest in five years. It’ll be a tough fight with security for that crown, because those are both very fast-growing areas for Akamai.”
Akamai bolstered its security and computing capabilities with two big acquisitions in the last eight months. It bought network security company Guardicore for $600 million in October, adding its micro-segmentation technology that blocks the spread of malware to Akamai’s zero-trust security portfolio for enterprises. In March, Akamai completed its $900 million acquisition of Linode, a cloud infrastructure-as-a-service provider that positions itself as an alternative to AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Leighton, who has led Akamai since 2013 after co-founding the company in 1998 and serving as its chief scientist, talked to Protocol about Akamai’s cloud-to-edge strategy.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Why did you decide to diversify Akamai?
It’s what customers want, and it’s something we always wanted to do. We started with delivery. Early on, we provided security solutions for the government, but the industry wasn’t ready yet for it, didn’t fully appreciate it. It wasn’t really until 2012 that companies started to appreciate they needed Akamai to protect them, that they just couldn’t do it themselves anymore.
Also, early on — 2000, 2001 time frame — we started edge computing and, again, we were ahead of the industry. That’s before AWS existed, and the industry wasn’t ready for edge compute then. We even had edge Java. We had edge WebSphere, Edge Side Includes. We pioneered the standard with Oracle back in 2001.
We did elementary things that our customers could use, but in terms of full-blown applications at the edge, it was too early. It just got popular lately. Actually, for 20 years the industry — our competitors — said edge was stupid. And all of a sudden they woke up and said, “Oh, edge is really the future,” and then they claim to have an edge, which they don’t. Now, fast forward, we have thousands of customers using our edge computing capabilities today.
And now with the acquisition of Linode, we’ll have core cloud computing capabilities. That’s the last big piece, in a sense, because now our customers can build their apps on Akamai, they can run them on Akamai, they can secure them with us and they can deliver, of course, through Akamai.
Akamai CEO Tom Leighton Photo: Akamai
What are Akamai’s security strengths and how does Guardicore fit into your strategy?
We’ve been in security a long time. I don’t know that most of the world realized it, but we have been providing security services to protect U.S. government websites since probably 2001. We really started protecting major banks in 2012, 2013. And today we have the market-leading web app firewall solution [Web App and API Protector (WAAP), formerly known as Kona Site Defender] by far. Pretty much all the major banks and commerce companies use our security services. We have the best denial-of-service-prevention capabilities, the best protection for end-user accounts so they don’t get stolen. That’s really important for banking accounts or commerce accounts, but, increasingly, media accounts — your gaming accounts or your OTT [over the top] accounts are big targets.
What Guardicore does is that [it] protects enterprises from ransomware, and ransomware is the top problem today for enterprises. It’s crushing, and Guardicore identifies applications when they’ve been hit with ransomware, and then stops it from spreading. And that’s the key for stopping the damage from ransomware.
Typically segmentation has had sort of a bad name in the industry, because it was done in hardware, which made it really hard to do and not very effective. You physically separated your networks, and that’s just really painful in an enterprise, so most enterprises didn’t do it. But Guardicore invented a way to do it in software, where they place an agent or think of it as a mini firewall in every application. That agent tells when an application is doing something it shouldn’t be doing or is being exploited in some way. It can also tell if it’s got vulnerabilities like Log4j, and then it notifies the IT shop or the security shop that “you got a problem here.” Even better, it stops the problem from spreading. It doesn’t let the malware jump from an HVAC unit into a critical operational system. And that way you limit the blast radius from ransomware. You limit the exposure to data exfiltration.
We view it as the cornerstone of a zero-trust strategy for an enterprise. The problem today is you could buy everybody’s security services, and malware’s still probably getting in somewhere. The key is really to know when it got in, where it got in and to stop it from spreading.
Why should enterprises use Linode over AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud or in addition to them under a multi-cloud strategy?
In short, it’s the same reason that so many enterprises use us for delivery instead of AWS and Google and the other hyperscalers, and the same reason why they use us for security instead of those giant companies. In fact, those giant companies use us for delivery and security today. We have edge compute, and we’re the best at that. Edge compute lives in 4,000 locations on Akamai, close to 1,000 cities around the world. Major companies, including those hyperscalers, use us for that.
For the core cloud compute, it is really easy to use Linode, very popular with developers and it’s less expensive. Now what we need to do — and will do over the course of the next year or so — is make sure that Linode has the capabilities and the features that major enterprises need. Today they have some large customers, but mostly small and medium businesses and developers, and so there are some things that we need to do there that will make it enterprise-grade. When you put it in connection with our edge platform that has edge computing — and, of course, our market-leading delivery and security — you get a really exciting combination.
There’s a lot of room for growth in cloud computing for the workloads. We know all the major enterprises or a lot of the major enterprises. They know us, and they’re using us for delivery and security. Many of them have been asking us to develop a compute capability. And many of those companies compete with the hyperscalers, and they would like to have Akamai provide that capability, because we don’t compete with them. We’re not a threat to them. We’re not a threat to be looking at their data. Of course, the fact that it’s really easy to use and less expensive, I think that’s helpful, too. It’s about a third off [competitors’] published pricing.
I expect that down the road the hyperscalers will also be using our compute solution as part of the overall Akamai platform. Some of the hyperscalers’ [parent companies Amazon and Microsoft] are our largest customers, and some are really good partners as well. It just broadens the capabilities that they can do on Akamai. I expect they will have applications that they’re going to want to have running on containers or VMs in hundreds of places close to end users, and Akamai will have that capability. We’re pretty unique in that.
What products or services do you need to add to entice enterprises? Will you offer managed services in the future?
There’s certain base capabilities that we’re in the process of adding — VPC, reliability zones, getting it to be PCI-compliant, FedRAMP-compliant, that sort of thing — just sort of basics. Linode has a good ecosystem of apps on top of it [that are] not managed today. And so for those customers that want to have managed third-party apps on top of Linode and not do it themselves, yes, we would be offering that capability over time or in conjunction with partners that would do the management of the services for them.
What edge computing products and services do you have today and what industries are using them?
There’s a variety of things we do. We have a JavaScript engine that’s running on all our edge servers, and customers can use that to create functions as a service. We also create packaged functions, we call them Cloudlets. In some cases, our customers created those, and then we offer them to other customers. So things you’d like to do with a website or application, A/B testing, failover capabilities, personalized content. And there’s a special class of capabilities we call Edge Side Includes, which we launched in 2001, that allows our customers to program their page so it’s dynamically assembled on the edge. We have thousands of customers using that today — have for close to 20 years.
Delivery is still your largest business, but the growth is slowing. What’s driving that, and do you expect it to recede to pre-COVID levels?
The traffic is growing, [just] not at as fast a rate. We’re in a year now where it’s a non-COVID year lapping on top of a COVID year, and so people are outside more, they’re actually going back and doing shopping in stores more, so there’s less traffic growth. I think this year will not be a strong year in terms of the delivery business revenue. Next year you get back into a more normal situation where you have a non-COVID year over a non-COVID year, and so you have more of normal dynamics then.
The main verticals for delivery are sort of two components. There’s the big traffic verticals, which would be OTT and media: software, gaming downloads. Then there’s the transaction verticals, which don’t have a lot of traffic, but have high value for the traffic that they have, and that would be led by commerce, retail, hospitality and so forth. They’re all growing traffic, but not nearly at the rates that they were.
This story was updated to correct a few transcription errors.
Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol’s senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the ‘Big 3’ cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.
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