Meet The Tech Billionaire Giving Students A Boost
It's not often that college undergraduates are taught by tech billionaires.
But this fall, computer science students at UC Berkeley will have the option to take a class on operating systems and system programming with Professor Ion Stoica, the billionaire cofounder of four startups, including unicorns Databricks and Anyscale—the latter of which he started with former students.
It's Stoica's emphasis on real-life applications that has made him popular amongst Berkeley students, reports Forbes' Martina Di Licosa, and his emphasis on private funding helps, too.
While the federal government is cutting down on research funding, Stoica's lab has not suffered, thanks to being privately funded by big tech companies, including Google and IBM. Still, he believes universities are the key to solving problems practically.
'Everyone can use [university research]. Compare this with a company,' Stoica tells Forbes. 'They are not going to publish… They are not going to open-source their best systems.' Both Databricks' Spark and Anyscale's Ray started as open-source projects and are available to the public to this day.
Stoica, worth $2.5 billion, is now chairing a task force to address the widespread research cuts, helping both his students and fellow professors seek out private funding to fill in the gaps left by the government. It's been helpful for the entrepreneurs in his class who are seeking venture capital funding. And his connections in the industry have been valuable to graduating students, especially in today's tough tech job landscape.
Happy reading, and hope you have a lovely week!
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REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: Why Cognizant Decided To Launch A Weeks-Long Vibe Coding Event
Employees want more upskilling opportunities. Employers want their workforces to use AI. Cognizant decided to take a stab at pleasing both in the last two weeks, recruiting its 330,000 workers to join a 'vibe coding' week to test out the technology with low stakes. I spoke with Cognizant's CTO Babak Hodjat to speak about the company's effort.
Ever participated in a company-wide hackathon? Cognizant wants all its employees to do so.
The information and technology consultant launched its vibe-coding event last week to encourage employees to 'play around' with vibe coding software, partnering with almost all major vibe coding companies, including Lovable, Windsurf, Google's Gemini Code Assist and Github Copilot.
'The number one priority for us was upskilling, training, educating and helping nurture our employee base in adopting vibe coding,' says Hodjat.
Employees across all departments have already participated, with an average of 20,000 employees a day experimenting with the software. As of Monday, nearly 20,000 projects had already been submitted from employees across a number of departments, including human resources, marketing and IT.
Beyond the productivity gains Cognizant is piloting with this program, Hodjat is really focusing on employee education, a win that goes beyond their engagement and satisfaction scores. It's a selling point to their clients: Cognizant employees not only know their customers, but also know how to use AI to best serve their needs. 'In many cases, we know our clients better than the clients know themselves because we've built their data systems, their processes. We know them holistically, with an added value on top of the AI,' he adds.
It's why Cognizant partnered with a number of different vibe coding companies. 'If a client comes in and says, 'Hey, I want that software,' we can say we've got it.'
Not all the projects submitted by the end of the Vibe Coding week will result in improving actual systems. A number of privacy restrictions—including a strict no-client data rule—restrict the realistic results of the projects submitted, especially since the hackathon-esque nature of the week was designed to allow employees to play around and experiment with different software systems and requests, more so than improve productivity.
That analysis will come by the end of the week. 'Part of this whole exercise is for us to actually then look at what is coming out of it,' says Hodjat, including preferences between the different providers.
TOUCH BASE
News from the world of work.
'Fake it 'till you make it' will only get you so far in corporate America. Entrepreneur Daniella Pierson cozied up to everyone from designer Diane von Furstenberg to actor Selena Gomez, touting millions in net-worth and growing subscriber numbers for her lifestyle newsletter The Newsette. But a new Forbes investigation found that her so-called business empire was just 'smoke and mirrors,' with a reputation built on Pierson's exaggerations and self-promotion.
Fear of superintelligent AI is driving a number of Harvard and MIT students to drop out of the prestigious institutions, reports Forbes' Victoria Feng. Some are scared that generative AI will take away many entry-level roles, while others are more worried about the technology's potential devastating effects on humanity. But their response is the same: leave school and start pursuing a career before it's too late.
U.S. manufacturing contracted at its fastest pace in nine months in July, as overall hiring slowed, according to Bloomberg. While President Donald Trump has made reshoring American jobs a key part of his administration's goals, companies are still weary of hiring amid tariff negotiations. Some subindustries, however, did grow—most notably data center construction.
As federal employees struggle to find jobs after taking Trump's deferred resignation offer or being fired, one segment may find ample employment in the private sector: tax lawyers. Tax law firms are busier than ever, reports Forbes' Kelly Phillips Erb, especially in the areas of employment, crypto and state and local taxes. Former federal lawyers could be the perfect next hire for a number of firms.
A majority of U.S. employers are not planning on increasing their salary budgets for next year, according to Payscale's latest pay report, showing that a cooling labor market and economic jitters will likely continue to keep wage growth relatively flat.
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How The South Park Creators Became Billionaires
QUIZ
The head of which government agency was recently ousted just weeks after being officially sworn in?
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B. CDC
C. Environmental Protection Agency
D. Bureau of Labor Statistics
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