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Employment situation in Singapore remains positive, although the job market is showing signs of cooling in yet another report. According to the latest Q3 release by ManpowerGroup Singapore, the Net Employment Outlook index fell to just 13%, which is the lowest reading since 2022.

NEO is measured as a simple difference between the share of companies anticipating an increase in hiring and those which are expecting cuts.

Of course, as ever, these are only averages, and your situation is going to depend not only on specific industry but also the type and size of company you’re either working for or are interested in.

Manufacturing leads the ranking, which is not a surprise given the impact that AI has had on demand for locally made electronics and semiconductors.

Almost all other industries have suffered precipitous drops, however.

While the IT sector is stable and quite strongly positive, it is not immune to layoffs—like the recent round just announced at Shopee.

Meanwhile, Finance & Insurance dipped into negative territory after losing 13 points. It would appear that some of the most lucrative jobs in Singapore might be harder to find this quarter.

It may be compounded by the fact that many of the companies in the sector employ thousands of people.

Yes, you read that right: the NEO score for companies of 5000+ employees and over is negative 26%, after dropping 29 points. Put simply, more large employers are planning workforce reductions than new hires.

This is an alarmingly low reading, especially compared to the global average of a positive 24%.

In fact, all companies employing 50 pax or more are reporting a significant drop in hiring sentiments, although no other group sank into negative territory.

Meanwhile, hiring appears to be booming at the bottom end, with a net positive of 42% for businesses under 10 employees and 34% for those over 10 but under 50. Both have also recorded strong positive swings ahead of Q3, defying the negative sentiments of larger businesses.

This is unlikely to bring comfort to those wary of potential layoffs at the biggest employers, since smaller businesses are rarely able to match the pay and benefits, unless, perhaps, for the lowest-paid roles.

Compared to 2025, Singapore’s employer sentiments have worsened moderately, at -11 points. The worst performer globally is UAE, which shouldn’t be a surprise given the fallout from the war with Iran which has disrupted local business and led to flight of thousands of people, with currently no established date of return to normalcy.

But not all is bad in the world, as UK, US or Sweden are reporting decently positive attitudes (among the developed nations) despite the geopolitical turmoil.

That said, all of them are grappling with much higher unemployment rates than Singapore (currently around 3% for residents), with the US at 4.3%, UK at around 5% and Sweden at a whopping 8.7%. Perhaps this explains why more companies are expecting their headcounts to increase soon, whereas Singapore is quite known for suffering quite persistent shortage of talent.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singapore’s current affairs here.

Featured Image Credit: jovannig/ depositphotos

In a system serving nearly 1 million students across more than 1,800 schools, the distance between a central office cubicle and a second grade classroom in New York City Public Schools can feel immense — yet they are inextricably linked. When the central office works, schools get the resources and support they need. When it does not, the friction and challenges can ripple directly into classrooms.

Supporting that system requires thousands of central office staff whose work rarely makes headlines but directly shapes how schools function, from budgets to policies to resource allocation. Recently, the district tried something unusual: offering executive coaching — including human- and AI-powered options — to those behind-the-scenes employees.

The move came as staff navigated shifting priorities and persistent uncertainty in the years after the pandemic, raising questions about how best to provide a stable foundation for schools. Through a partnership with the digital coaching and workforce development company BetterUp, central office staff are developing skills such as agency, agility and clarity — capabilities district leaders see as essential to sustaining and stabilizing the nation’s largest school system.

EdSurge spoke with Tracie Benjamin-Van Lierop, New York City Public Schools’ executive director of organizational development, talent and culture, about what this coaching looks like in practice and why investing in the people outside the classroom supports the success of the people inside it.

EdSurge: What was the climate like for central staff before coaching began?

Benjamin-Van Lierop: Coming out of the pandemic, there was a lot of uncertainty. I would say the biggest challenge was feeling seen.

A lot of focus is rightfully on supporting school-based staff, but the people behind the scenes — the ones making sure schools run smoothly — also need development and support.

How did you view coaching at first?

At first, my schedule was just crazy, and I thought, “This is just one more thing I have to do.” One colleague attended the orientation, came back excited and said, “I think this is something we should really look into.” I tried one session, then a second, and three years later, I’m with the same coach.

A lot of focus is rightfully on supporting school-based staff, but the people behind the scenes — the ones making sure schools run smoothly — also need development and support.— Tracie Benjamin-Van Lierop

Sometimes coaching can be seen as punitive — maybe that isn’t the right word — but it’s like it’s there to fix something, and that’s not what I wanted. I wanted us to see coaching as a lever to improve the culture in the organization. We want people who want to work here, and if the environment has room for improvement, we want to hear that.

What shifts have you seen in how people approach coaching?

One person’s story was very similar to mine. They kept hearing colleagues talk about their positive experiences with coaching and said, “Let me try it out.”

They tried it and ended up getting a promotion because they learned to speak up in a respectful way. A lot of that newfound confidence and professionalism came from role-playing with their coach. Role-playing felt like a safe way to prepare for difficult conversations. That person said, “I don’t know that my supervisor would have seen me in the light that they see me in now had I not been able to do those role-play activities with my coach.”

Other signs of success are easy to see: People vote with their feet. If they did not want to continue, they wouldn’t. We’ve gone from “This is something that I have to do,” to “This is something I want to do.”

This affects the work itself. We’re seeing stronger work products and stronger connections between offices and schools as we develop a clearer understanding of why we do this work.

Employee Resource Group (ERG) leaders were among the first central-office staff invited into the coaching pilot. Several describe it as an important source of support as they work to amplify employee voice and strengthen culture across the system. Because ERG leadership is layered on top of full-time roles, coaching has offered space for reflection and skill-building in a complex and demanding environment. The benefits carry into the teams and schools they serve.

How does AI coaching fit in alongside human coaching?

It depends on comfort level and sometimes generation. I’ve tried my AI coach and thought, “No, thanks. I need a human.” But some of our [younger] leaders choose AI because that’s their comfort level. One colleague will only do role-plays with their AI coach because they feel it’s a safe, nonjudgmental space.

I wanted us to see coaching as a lever to improve the culture in the organization. We want people who want to work here, and if the environment has room for improvement, we want to hear that.— Benjamin-Van Lierop

At the end of the day, if that tool is supporting what is happening in schools, then it’s helpful. I see that as an area that will continue to grow.

How has coaching shaped your own leadership?

It has changed me — or I would say transformed me — in a holistic way. It’s not just at work; it has transformed my whole approach to decision-making, my sense of impact and my intentionality.

It has also made me a more curious leader. Sometimes I make judgments based on a story I’ve created in my head, and that story may not be true. I’ve learned to recognize that tendency and ask, “How am I getting to the heart of the matter?” Nine times out of ten, when I take that curious stance, it elevates the work in ways I wasn’t able to three and a half years ago.

What advice would you give to districts thinking about coaching?

First, make it voluntary. Coaching can be seen as, “You’re getting a coach because you’re not doing your job well,” but that’s not what it is. People who opt in often become the biggest supporters later.

Second, coaching requires effort. It’s not just about meeting for 45 minutes. It’s a partnership — a two-way street — and you have to put in the work. It won’t work if you don’t.

Third, really use the data from your coaching partner to track progress and refine your approach.

Coaching is often seen as a nice-to-have, and I understand that, especially with all the demands right now. But this is an investment in your people. If your people are going to do the job well, they need to feel invested in, and this is one of the best investments I’ve experienced in my career.

Once you’re done with your smartphone, it either ends up in a drawer, on the growing second-hand market, or perhaps in a recycle bin. However, it’s a computer and, when combined with others like it, can offer real processing power.

Computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, working in collaboration with Google, plan to deploy a rather unusual compute cluster built not from conventional servers, but using 2,000 retired phones.

The goal is to demonstrate how these devices might continue to serve as a low-cost, low-carbon computing platform after their original owners have abandoned them for a shiny new widget to doomscroll TikTok on.

“The project was the brainchild of Jennifer Switzer, a former PhD student at UCSD who is now working on a post-doc at Google,” Ryan Kastner, an associate professor of computer science at UCSD, told El Reg.

In particular, UCSD will be using 2,000 Pixel Fold smartphones courtesy of Google. 

Google estimates that the average person upgrades their phone every four years or so. While the physical device and battery may show some wear and tear from their years of service, their core computing functionalities remain intact.

“It’s just a vast amount of sort of thrown away compute and recycling is a terrible option for most of these smartphones,” Kastner said, adding that Switzer started by building a couple of small clusters using smartphones to prove the concept. Since then, the project’s scale has grown considerably.

According to the Chocolate Factory, the motherboard represents about 50 percent of the smartphone’s embodied carbon. 

A lot of early testing used unmodified smartphones, Kastner noted, but as the team quickly learned, this wasn’t practical or safe. “In some early meetings with Google, their engineers said that, if you’re going to put these in the datacenter, those batteries are no-go — a lot of things are a no-go — because they’re just fire hazards,” he said.

Some of this work was done by researchers, including Switzer and another UCSD computer science prof Patrick Pannuto, but for the full deployment this fall, Kastner said, Google is working with a third party to extract the phones’ motherboards from their cases.

Once the phone’s motherboards have been extracted from their shells, the researchers say that the chips hiding within remain more than potent enough to be useful for a variety of tasks.

In many cases, the single-threaded performance of these chips is as good as, if not better than, what you’d find from a many-cored datacenter chip.

The Pixel Fold smartphones, which will form the basis of the cluster, are powered by a Google Tensor G2 processor with two 2.85 GHz Cortex-X1, two 2.35 GHz Cortex-A78 and four 1.80 GHz Cortex-A55 Arm cores, a Mali-G710 MP7 GPU, and 12 GB of system memory.

Early benchmarking using the SPEC suite suggests that 25-50 phones should deliver performance similar to that of a conventional server.

The major challenge, instead, is distributing workloads across multiple devices, each of which has a handful of cores of one or more varieties, and most have 8-12 GB of memory.

UCSD researchers are approaching this challenge from a couple of different angles. The first is by targeting applications that can easily fit within a single device. The second is using Kubernetes to orchestrate container deployments across clusters of 25-50 phones.

For this to work, the devices first need to be flashed with a Linux operating system suitable for the job. While Android makes for a great handheld experience, it is not intended for server duty. In the blog post, researchers note that Android includes functionality intended to stop rogue applications from chewing up excessive amounts of memory and draining your battery. In server context, these safety mechanisms are no longer necessary.

Kastner told us this was by no means an easy task, but the team has made steady progress toward getting Linux running smoothly on these devices, including support for the phone’s onboard GPUs. Access to some functionality, like the chip’s integrated tensor processing unit, remains elusive.

Clustering these devices will require networking the phones together. Normally these devices would connect over cellular or Wi-Fi, but at this scale, this not only isn’t practical, but also has implications for security, he explained. Instead, the team will employ PCBs that both supply power and break out wired Ethernet networking.

The researchers suggest that many EdTech, grading, and research workloads commonly run by universities in the cloud are small enough to run on the cluster without issue.

“The vast majority of these applications are within the capabilities of a single smartphone to host, with the standard grading backend running on small cloud instances,” a blog post detailing the planned deployment reads. “Early experiments show that even a moderately-sized cluster of 20 phones is capable of supporting peak submission rates for a 75+ student class.”

“A lot of the sort of function as a service workloads seem to make a whole lot of sense, because they’re sort of sporadic, and don’t need a whole lot of high-performance compute,” Kastner said.

Alongside traditional IT applications, the cluster will also support exploration into parallel computing and systems programming, which sounds an awful lot like the smartphone equivalent of the Beowulf clusters of the ‘90s, which saw researchers cobble together supercomputers from consumer PCs.

UCSD is also home to the San Diego Supercomputing Center. Kastner told us the plan is to make the cluster available to teams working at the center, which suggests we could see a High-Performance Linpack run before long. 

The full smartphone cluster is expected to launch this fall. Depending on how well the initial phase goes, we’re told the cluster could grow even larger.

This is far from the only unorthodox cluster we’ve seen in recent memory. Just up the Pacific coast from San Diego, UC Santa Barbara deployed what at the time was the largest Raspberry Pi cluster ever.

The system, built in collaboration with Oracle, featured 1,050 Raspberry Pi 3B+ single board computers.

More recently, we came across a tiny cluster developed by Gigabyte that packed 40 Intel Lunar Lake notebook processors, each with eight cores and 32 GB of memory, into a system the size of a pizza box. ®

You’re not limited to using Samsung pay just because it’s a Galaxy Watch

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? A couple of the clues were tricky today. Read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Distort, as data
Answer: SKEW

5A clue: Give a ❤️ on a text thread
Answer: LOVE

6A clue: Like a post that’s been shared a bajillion times
Answer: VIRAL

7A clue: Signs of things to come
Answer: OMENS

8A clue: Dog walker’s restraint
Answer: LEASH

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Snail’s trail
Answer: SLIME

2D clue: Home to kimchi and Kim Jong Un
Answer: KOREA

3D clue: Bob ___ (restaurant chain)
Answer: EVANS

4D clue: Like the phrase “pen gwyn” (“white head”), from which the penguin gets its name
Answer: WELSH

6D clue: Loudness dial: Abbr.
Answer: VOL

As India cut off access to messaging app Telegram for a week over concerns about exam-related fraud, users turned to virtual private networks (VPNs) and alternative messaging apps in unusually large numbers.

App intelligence firm Appfigures told TechCrunch that Tuesday, the day India announced the Telegram restriction, marked the biggest day for VPN app downloads in the country since at least the start of 2025. Downloads of major VPN apps rose 49% from a recent daily average of 139,000 to 208,000, the firm said.

Proton VPN and Turbo VPN recorded some of the largest increases. Downloads of Proton VPN on Apple’s App Store in India jumped 113%, while Turbo VPN downloads rose 85%. On Google Play, downloads of Proton VPN climbed 64% and Turbo VPN downloads increased 35%. NordVPN’s App Store downloads increased 41%, while ExpressVPN downloads on Google Play rose 31%.

The surge also pushed several VPN services up India’s app-store charts. Proton VPN climbed from 18th to 5th in Apple’s Utilities rankings between June 16 and June 18, while its Google Play ranking rose from 8th to 2nd in the Tools category, according to Appfigures.

The spike in VPN demand followed India’s decision to temporarily restrict Telegram until June 22 over concerns that fraudsters were using the platform to target candidates ahead of a re-test for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (Undergraduate), the country’s largest entrance examination by applicant volume. The Indian government said the measure was needed to prevent the spread of fake exam papers and related scams. Telegram has challenged the order in the Delhi High Court, arguing that authorities should target specific content rather than block the entire platform.

The response extended beyond app-store download data. Proton said daily registrations from India rose 120% above baseline levels on Wednesday, after hourly registrations had already spiked 150% on Tuesday evening following the Telegram restriction. The company described the increase as “extremely noteworthy” given its existing scale in the country.

Canadian VPN service provider Windscribe reported a similar trend. The company told TechCrunch that signups from India peaked roughly 100% above baseline levels, while first-time downloads of its iOS app in the country rose about 89%.

“The spike in India follows the same general trend we see in areas that ban specific apps, introduce age bans or verification requirements, or otherwise restrict internet access,” Rebecca Rosenberg, growth operations manager at Windscribe, said.

The trend was not limited to a handful of VPN providers. Sensor Tower told TechCrunch that downloads across the VPN app category in India rose 10% day-over-day on June 17, reversing a decline seen over the previous two weeks.

Users also appeared to be exploring alternatives to Telegram. Appfigures said downloads of Signal in India rose 72% on Apple’s App Store and 322% on Google Play following the restriction, while Viber’s App Store downloads increased 216%.

Telegram-linked messaging app iMe recorded one of the sharpest jumps. Its Google Play downloads rose from a recent daily average of about 827 to 50,900 on June 16, Appfigures said.

Yet the restriction did not immediately translate into lower Telegram usage. Sensor Tower said Telegram’s daily active users in India rose 17% on the day the measure was announced — the app’s largest day-over-day increase in the country since a widespread outage of Meta’s services in 2021.

Other data points also suggest heightened efforts to access Telegram following the restriction.

Cloudflare Radar Lead Lai Yi Ohlsen told TechCrunch that DNS requests for Telegram domains in India increased sharply over the two days after the measure was announced. The company cautioned that higher DNS traffic does not necessarily indicate successful access to the platform, and could reflect users repeatedly attempting to reach Telegram after it was blocked.

Telegram pointed to its efforts to cooperate with authorities during hearings in the Delhi High Court this week. Its lawyers said the company had removed channels identified by authorities and questioned the need for a platform-wide restriction affecting what Telegram says are over 150 million users in India.

Government lawyers defended the measure as a temporary, event-linked response tied to the NEET re-test. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the court that a permanent ban could raise proportionality concerns but argued the current restriction had a “logical nexus” to the objective being pursued.

After hearing arguments from Telegram and the government on Thursday, the Delhi High Court reserved its order and is expected to deliver its verdict on Friday.

The debate echoes questions raised elsewhere when governments restrict access to major online platforms. Sensor Tower said VPN downloads in the U.S. rose more than 40% week-over-week when TikTok was briefly removed from U.S. app stores in 2025, while Windscribe said it has observed similar patterns following restrictions in countries including Iran and Russia.

After all, pictures are only worth a thousand words.

At first glance, it feels like a genuine challenger to the likes of Oura, RingConn and Samsung. The ring itself looks good, feels lightweight on the finger and comes with a charging case, which is a welcome upgrade over the previous Circular model. Battery life is solid too, lasting around six days during my testing.

But unfortunately, the day-to-day experience doesn’t live up to that impressive spec sheet.

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The biggest issue is the software. Smart rings don’t have screens, which means the app is incredibly important. That’s where the Circular Ring 2 struggles the most.