Latest news with #softwareengineer
The Independent
6 hours ago
- General
- The Independent
Jordan Johnson-Doyle: Body found in search for British backpacker who went missing in Malaysia
A British backpacker who was missing for over a week has been found dead at the bottom of a lift shaft in Malaysia, police have said. Jordan Johnson-Doyle, 25, vanished after last being seen at a bar in Kuala Lumpur on 27 May. Kuala Lumpur police chief Commissioner Datuk Rusdi Mohd Isa said that his body was identified by a relative based on a body tattoo, according to local news website FMT. The software engineer, from Southport, had spent the past 18 months travelling around across Asia while working remotely for a US company, his mum said. His mother, Leanne Burnett, told the Liverpool Echo that her son's last known location was Healy Mac's Irish Bar in Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur. He is believed to have then visited a nearby bar called The Social. She alerted authorities last Friday because she hadn't heard from him in three days. An appeal on social media read: "My son is missing in Kuala Lumpur. "Please help us find him, all his family and friends are so worried. Please please share share share." This week his family flew out to Malaysia to help local officials with the search. But his body was found in a construction site lift shaft in Bangsar, a suburb of the Malaysian capital, on Wednesday, authorities said. A post mortem found the cause of death was a chest injury due to a fall from height. Kuala Lumpur police said they are not treating the death as suspicious. The police chief said in a statement to MalaysiaToday: 'It is hereby confirmed that the body found is that of Jordan Johnson-Doyle who was reported missing on 2 June. 'The cause of death is that of chest injury due to fall from height following an autopsy conducted earlier. 'No criminal elements were found at the scene. The case is classified as a sudden death report.' An FCDO spokesperson said: "We are supporting the family of a British man who died in Malaysia and are in contact with the local authorities.' The family previously spoke of their agony during the search. Ms Burnett told the Liverpool Echo: 'I have been been feeling just sick, numb. I just want to get over there, find him and bring him home. 'I want him to know we're looking for him and we're coming to get him.'
Free Malaysia Today
4 days ago
- General
- Free Malaysia Today
British backpacker missing after night out in Bangsar
Jordan Johnson-Doyle, 25, was last believed to be at Healy Mac's Irish Bar in Bangsar on May 27. (Facebook pic) PETALING JAYA : A 25-year-old British man has been reported missing by his family after a night out at a bar in Bangsar on May 27. According to the Daily Mail UK, Jordan Johnson-Doyle was on a solo tour of Southeast Asia and had been backpacking in the region. He was believed to have gone to Healy Mac's Irish Bar in Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur, for a pub quiz, based on a photo he sent to his mother, Leanne Burnett. AdChoices ADVERTISING 'I have no idea what has happened. All I know is something is really wrong for him not to contact anybody,' Burnett was quoted as saying. 'I know what he's like and he knows how worried everyone gets at home. That is why he checks in all the time.' Burnett said even if his phone or laptop had been stolen, her son knows her number and would have found a way to call. 'He would go to the nearest hotel to use the phone, or go to an internet café. He'd find a way to get hold of us,' she said, according to the report in the UK daily. She added that a location check using the Find My iPhone app showed his phone last pinged at a residential building near the bar. The signal stopped three days later on May 30 when the battery is believed to have died. Jordan, a software engineer, had arrived in Malaysia on May 17 after travelling from Vietnam. He works remotely while backpacking across the region, his mother said. It is unclear where he was staying in Kuala Lumpur. A missing person report has been filed with Merseyside police, the British consulate, and Malaysian police. Inspector-General of Police Razarudin Husain told FMT he will ask Kuala Lumpur police to check for any such reports and promised to investigate further. FMT has also reached out to the British high commission for comment.
Daily Mail
29-05-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Software engineer who lost his six-figure job to AI opens up about being rejected from 800 roles
A seasoned software engineer - once earning a comfortable six-figure salary - is now living in an RV, driving for DoorDash and battling financial insecurity. At 42, Shawn K - whose full legal last name is just one letter - finds himself among the early wave of knowledge workers dealing with the economic fallout of AI advancements, a trend he believes is 'coming for basically everyone in due time.' In a personal essay on his Substack, Shawn painted a picture of his current reality. 'As I climb into my little twin sized bed in my small RV trailer on a patch of undeveloped deep rural land in the Central New York highlands, exhausted from my six hours of DoorDash driving to make less than $200 that day, I check my emails one last time for the night: no responses from the 745th through 756th job applications that I put in over the last week for engineering roles I'm qualified or over-qualified for,' he wrote. He closed in on the 800 application mark in over a year of being an unemployed software engineer. Despite owning three properties – a fixer-upper in upstate New York and two cabins on rural land – his financial situation has only worsened since being laid off from his engineering job, which paid around $150,000 annually. He has since told that he had moved to New York to care for his family and grow long-term equity with real estate, an opportunity he said didn't exist on the West Coast for more than 15 years. Shawn attributes his sudden unemployment and job search issues to AI. 'Something has shifted in society in the last 2.5 years,' he wrote in his Substack, describing how AI caused him and many talented developers at his previous company to be laid off despite the company's strong performance. He said in his Substack that getting his resume seen has become a 'sisyphusian task' - in reference to a task requiring continual and often ineffective effort - and the technical interview process a 'PTSD-inducing minefield.' Shawn explained that companies are doing what they know best: practicing capitalism. 'The economics are very simple: if you can produce the same product and same results while drastically cutting your expenses, what business wouldn't do that? In fact you would have to be crazy not to,' he wrote. 'We have reached a time where human labor is no longer a necessary input to generate economic value, which is a drastic departure from everything that has come in history before.' Shawn estimates he has interviewed with about 10 companies in the last year, often getting through multiple rounds but never receiving an offer. He wrote in his Substack that he suspects his resume is 'filtered out of consideration by some half-baked AI candidate finder service because my resume doesn't mention enough hyper-specific bleeding-edge AI terms.' If he makes it past the bots, he explained that he is then competing with 'the other 1,000 applicants (bots, foreign nationals, and other displaced-by-AI tech workers) who have applied within the first two hours of a job posting going live.' He said in his Substack that he is often more skilled than those who interview him for roles, and that he believes his age plays a factor in his inability to secure a job. Shawn also explained that he has gradually been lowering his job expectations. Initially targeting engineering manager roles, he then applied for positions at his previous level, then at lower pay, and eventually, 'anything and everything I was capable of,' including a Wordpress theme developer role offering less than half his worth. He even researched expensive engineering manager certificate programs, but lacked the investment money needed - this was also true for roles like crane or equipment operator, drone surveyor pilot, or CDL driving. Eventually, he decided to consider an entirely new career and is now attempting to start a pressure washing business. In the meantime, he rents out his city house but explained in his Substack that it doesn't make any profit, which is the same fate for a cabin he rents out on Airbnb. He also is a DoorDash driver - something he described as destroying his body and his mind. He recounted his struggles with the New York State unemployment system, which he described as 'one of the most ineffective, counterproductive, unhelpful, wasteful, hopelessly bureaucratic toxic messes.' Now living in an RV, Shawn told that the hardest part of this lifestyle shift is 'knowing I have the skills and capabilities of building software that can generate millions of dollars... yet I don't have the cash runway to focus for a few months on building a product like that and bringing it to market.' He emphasized, 'The mortgages still need to get paid. The pressure is extremely real to get money for the very real and immediate needs.' Despite the immense pressure, Shawn strives to maintain a positive outlook. 'It's mainly survival instinct. I don't have much of a choice,' he told explaining that the alternative is losing his houses and moving into his car. 'I've actually been through harder times than this,' he said. 'I went from being homeless in my car in Oakland California to owning three houses in four years.' He explained that he practices yoga, exercises often, spends time in nature, talks to his friends, and tries to lean into positive thinking. Forcing himself into a positive hopeful mindset is usually his primary task of the day. 'Some days I lose that battle,' he said. Shawn believes his story is not unique but rather something that will eventually happen to a lot of people. He wrote in his Substack that while people think AI job replacement is in some faraway future, it's actually happening in the now. The solution? He believes businesses should hire more technical people, abandon pre-AI playbooks, and reinvent themselves as AI-first businesses. He believes AI should be leveraged to 'invent new science, crack the challenge of clean renewable energy, solve cancer, etc.' 'AI replacing jobs is only a bad thing because we have a system that says you aren't entitled to feed yourself or have housing unless you spend the majority of your time working to make a company rich,' Shawn wrote. 'AI is exposing that as a lie.' He urged others to let the machines do the work and to instead focus on the real problems society faces. 'Let's put the rights of a human above that of a corporation, let's ensure every human has the right to food water and housing,' he wrote. 'Universal Basic Income is a start, it's the least we will have to do to avoid the worse of the coming collapse.'
Times
22-05-2025
- Business
- Times
Know your boundaries: take our workplace harassment quiz
From jokes about bald men, to unwanted birthday cards, to wearing trainers in the workplace, employment law tribunal cases can range from the truly traumatic and shocking to the slightly bizarre. This week a judge in Southampton warned that expressing frustration can legally be considered harassment, after a software engineer successfully claimed that his manager's 'sighing and exaggerating exhales' were discriminatory. One novelty about the tribunal is that for the most part it is an area of the law where lawyers cannot be the big winners. Much of the justification of launching what were originally industrial tribunals in 1965 was that they would be an efficient and inexpensive method for resolving workplace disputes. Employment tribunal decisions do not form precedent, but they remain a good
CNET
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CNET
Duolingo Is Bringing New 'Energy' to Language Learning
Duolingo is on CNET's list of the best language learning apps, and on Monday the free version introduced a new Energy mechanic that could propel your learning experience further. "We want to reward you for doing well and find ways to motivate you via this mechanic, rather than just penalize you for getting things incorrect while you're learning," Moses Wayne told me in an interview. Wayne is a senior software engineer at Duolingo, and he thought up the new system. "We think this is going to make Duolingo a lot more fun and a lot more fair." The new mechanic replaces the Hearts system in the free version of Duolingo. The Hearts system gave you five hearts per day, and if you got a question wrong in a lesson, you lost a heart. If you got five questions wrong, you couldn't continue. There was a way to practice past lessons to get hearts back, but you'd have to finish a whole lesson to get one heart back. The old system could slow your progress or bring it to a standstill if you continued struggling with a particular lesson. But the new Energy system should make it easier for people to keep learning. Some people who use the free version of Duolingo on iOS will see the new mechanic now, and others on iOS will see it soon. People on Android should see the change later this year. Duolingo Learning with Duolingo can give you energy With the new system, you start with 25 units of energy, and you still lose one unit when you get a question wrong. But you'll "recharge" energy over time, and you can earn energy by watching ads in between lessons. Some treasure chests in the app could reward you with energy, too. But the main way to earn back energy is by getting questions right. "If you get a lot of things right in a row, like maybe the five combo mark, the 10 combo mark ... there's this little animation that shows some numbers and tells you how much [energy] you've earned," Wayne said. Duolingo's intent is to motivate people to keep learning, even when they make mistakes. That way, you can keep pushing forward in your lessons. Getting a streak in Duolingo can replenish some of your energy. Duolingo "Making mistakes is part of learning," Wayne said. "This is allowing learners to engage a lot more with Duolingo." Read more: What You Need to Know About Chess Lessons on Duolingo Though this is a seemingly minor change, I think it'll be a huge help for people trying to learn a new language or how to play chess. When I used the app to learn a little Italian before traveling to Rome last year, I felt like the Heart system forced me to really focus on what I was learning. But I still got frustrated when I had to restart lessons, because I used up all my hearts. I was doubly frustrated when I used up hearts on lessons I didn't think would be particularly helpful for traveling, like the lesson on describing a scary hotel. If I hadn't been using the app with the goal of learning a language for travel, I might've bailed on it. But I imagine the Energy system will help alleviate some of the frustrations people might feel when they make mistakes in their lessons. And according to Duolingo, folks who've already used the new system have responded positively to the change. "A lot of people have been engaging a lot more with Duolingo," Wayne said. "We're already seeing learners do more in the Energy system than they were with Hearts." For more on Duolingo, here's our review, and here's what to know about chess lessons on the app. You can also check out our roundup of the best language learning apps.
