Have you done this from a position of not having a job in tech though? Having thousands of other employees also vie-ing for that same position with equivalent experience or better?

If you have obligations any job is better than no job from a position of no job, no pay.

Might sound like a bit of a conspiracy theorist here, but if all of the big tech companies lay off people at the same time, why could they not hire their recently laid off competitors for a fraction of the cost?

Obviously it drives down the cost of the salaries and lowers the average hiring rate. Huge wins for all these massive companies.

And to prove that they all did this “together” when they all did it a few weeks apart will be rather difficult too.

Maybe that’s just me thinking from both corporations and employees side at the same time, though…

If you’re not into the whole Google Home/Alexa/Apple Home echo system, and have Home Assistant already running, you could use them to build a bunch of smart assistants with Open Thread Border Routers.

I was just looking at doing this in my house but the cost of Pis vs used Google Gen2s with Thread Border Routers built in was cost prohibitive for me.