The strategy outlines plans to present Ireland as a global leader in engineering by broadening the talent pool and accelerating learning velocity.

Engineering Skillnet and business representative body Ibec have unveiled a new strategic plan, ‘Engineering a Skills-First Future 2026-2029’, which aims to address industry skill issues. 

The plan was developed in collaboration with industry leaders, learners and the Engineering Skillnet steering committee to build on a robust approach to identifying talent gaps and mapping emerging technologies to ensure Ireland’s engineering workforce remains agile, productive and globally competitive. 

The strategy outlines plans to present Ireland as a global leader in engineering by broadening the talent pool and accelerating learning velocity, according to its creators.

According to research underpinning the strategy, 84pc of engineering employers are experiencing challenges in the identification of skills. Meanwhile, 54pc of all staff were found to be in need of major skilling or upskilling.  

To combat these challenges, the strategy found that there needs to be a fundamental shift from a traditional focus on job roles and fixed titles towards a more human-centric, skills-first approach, as a means of further developing the workforce. 

Commenting on the research and strategy, Pauline O’Flanagan, the director of Engineering Industries Ireland, noted a critical alignment with national competitiveness. 

“In 2026, global competitiveness is defined not by hardware or capital investment alone, but by the skills agility of our workforce to operate and optimise increasingly complex, interconnected systems,” she said.

“To remain a global leader, Ireland must look beyond traditional job classifications and embrace a skills-first approach.”

Fiona Fennell, the network manager of Engineering Skillnet, added, “Work is changing at a rapid pace, with jobs fragmenting and many skills now expiring quickly. Ireland has a uniquely multi-skilled workforce, but how we identify and develop talent needs to evolve. 

“We believe that a ‘skills-first’ blueprint is essential to secure Ireland’s economic future. This approach moves away from viewing talent purely through titles or credentials, prioritising instead the balance of confidence and competence needed to perform work well.

“Given shifting geopolitics and demographics, this strategic plan represents a profound commitment to future-proofing skills mobility, starting right from the factory floor.”

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Tech industry layoffs may be worse at large tech companies than the rest of the IT industry. The New York Times argues those layoffs have now shifted the culture at Big Tech companies, after interviewing more than two dozen of their workers. “Cooperation and collegiality are on the wane; chumminess between employees and managers has cooled as mutual suspicion pervades their relationships; and a throbbing economic anxiety infects almost every conversation.

“Perhaps no site on the internet reflects this transformation more vividly than Blind, where users can post in private channels restricted to employees of a single company, or public channels visible to anyone…”

Since 2022, large tech companies have collectively laid off more than 150,000 workers, unraveling what many tech workers once perceived as a guarantee of affluence and employability. The threat of being replaced by artificial intelligence has loomed over those who remain. This year alone, Amazon has indicated that it is laying off more than 15,000 workers, Block 4,000, Meta 8,000 and Oracle an estimated 30,000… By most measures, the sentiments that Blind tracks have taken a turn for the worse. During the nearly four years before tech companies began major layoffs in the fall of 2022, Meta and Microsoft employees posted about career success — topics like how to maximize their salary or win promotions — more than four times as often as they posted about job insecurity, according to Blind. Since then, the ratios have lurched in the opposite direction: Meta and Microsoft employees have posted about job insecurity roughly 1.5 times as often as they post about success…

The shift has had practical effects. A Meta employee said in an interview that some workers on her team now used less vacation time and that, in a break with custom, people frequently checked on their projects while on vacation. They increasingly worry about getting a poor performance review or losing their job if they aren’t constantly available. The employee, who declined to be identified for fear of retribution, said she and many of her colleagues frequently checked Blind because it could be comforting to see how many other Meta workers shared their anxieties. Employees at several companies said in interviews that their morale was further undermined by the feeling that the layoffs were abrupt and arbitrary, and executed with little empathy.

Several tech workers said it was the scarcity of information about possible layoffs that raised their cortisol levels and made it difficult to focus on their jobs. They often fill the vacuum by turning to Blind, which, in addition to posts by workers, features a “tech layoff tracker” that lists both layoff rumors and those it has confirmed. “I was on Blind five days a week,” said Faith Wilkins El, a software engineer who was laid off from Oracle in late March, after more than four years at the company. Wilkins El, who is part of the Oracle Workers Collective, a group seeking better severance agreements with the company, said navigating Blind was sometimes stressful because it was hard to know what was true or false. (Blind says it has a security team to weed out bad actors, like those who may try to register under fake email addresses.) Still, she found it more helpful than not because the layoffs came as less of a shock after she spent time on the site. “I was trying to get prepared mentally,” she said.

Blind is capitalizing on the increased interest with new products. It plans to unveil a service called Blind AI, which will allow employers to simulate their workers’ reactions to certain changes, like a stricter in-office mandate. And it is close to releasing a feature to alert users that layoffs are imminent.

I’ve been covering deals since 2013, and I still think Memorial Day sales are worth checking out. There are so many made-up shopping holidays these days that it can be difficult to ascertain when items are actually cheaper than usual. Now is one of those times. To help you out, I’ve scoured through our buying guides full of hand-tested items to find gadgets and gizmos that are discounted—and worth buying. If you’re in the market for something we’ve tested, keep checking in through May 26 to see if you can snag a deal. We’ll update this post again between now and then.

Make sure to check out our various buying guides for recommendations on the best laptops, the best printers, and more. You might also be interested in the rest of our Memorial Day deals coverage.

Updated May 25: I’ve added 5 new deals, removed expired discounts, and checked for accuracy throughout.

WIRED Featured Deals:

Birdfy Lite Smart Bird Feeder (Lifetime AI, No Solar) for $120 ($110 off)

A few different combinations of our favorite smart bird feeder are on sale. You can choose a version with or without solar charging. There’s also the option of buying a model that comes with lifetime AI bird identification; otherwise, if you decide you want it later, it’ll cost you $5 per month, but it isn’t required for enjoyment. This bird feeder is equipped with a 1080p camera that can capture decent footage of whoever comes to snack. It has a wide field of vision as well, and the feeder is easy to clean and refill.

Gemini wants to talk. All the time.

Xreal’s Project Aura smartglasses are a maximalist take on Android XR

Karissa Bell for Engadget

Google’s Gemini Omni can generate ‘anything from any input,’ starting with video

Spotify is adding more AI gunk for podcasts and audiobooks

Meta’s latest attempt to copy its rivals is a Reddit clone

Meta

The consumer A/V industry keeps consolidating, and the headphone category is no longer watching from the cheap seats. Sony’s acquisition of Audeze made that clear in 2023, AXPONA changed ownership almost before the elevators at the Schaumburg Renaissance had recovered from the 2026 show, and now Fidelity Collective has acquired Westone Audio and Etymotic. That puts two of the most respected names in professional and enthusiast IEMs under one newly formed company, and it is another reminder that even niche audio brands with fiercely loyal followings are now very much in play.

Who is Fidelity Collective?

This is where the story gets more interesting.

Most recent A/V industry acquisitions have followed a familiar pattern: one established company, investment group, or brand owner buying or partnering with another established player. This one appears to be different. Fidelity Collective is not an old name with a deep catalog of legacy brands. It is a newly formed holding company that seems to have been created specifically to bring Westone Audio and Etymotic under one roof.

Fidelity Collective is led by CEO Sam Roney, known for his work with Dekoni Audio and Grell Audio, and COO Tal Kocen. The deal was finalized on Friday, May 15, 2026, with both Westone Audio and Etymotic now operating under their leadership.

That distinction matters. This is not simply another large A/V company adding a respected audio brand to the shelf. It is a new entity built around two very specific names in the IEM and earphone categories. That suggests a more targeted play, and one that could have real consequences for professional audio users, hearing-health customers, musicians, and personal audio enthusiasts who have followed these brands for decades.

What Westone Audio and Etymotic Bring To The Table

This strategic move opens a new chapter for Westone Audio and Etymotic, two brands with deep roots in in-ear audio, hearing protection, professional monitoring, and precision listening. Together, they represent decades of work in products used by touring musicians, audio professionals, hearing specialists, and serious listeners who care about what actually reaches their ears. Imagine that.

The new leadership team also brings direct familiarity with both brands, which matters. Tal Kocen previously worked with Westone Audio and Etymotic, while Gary Boyer will remain on board as EVP, providing some continuity as both companies move under the Fidelity Collective umbrella.

CEO Sam Roney also brings broader audio industry experience through his involvement with Dekoni Audio, Grell Audio, and Dark Matter Audio Labs. Combined, the leadership team appears to understand the history, product philosophies, and customer bases behind both Westone Audio and Etymotic. That does not guarantee success, but it is a better starting point than handing two specialist IEM brands to people who think “balanced armature” sounds like a yoga injury.

Westone Audio was founded in 1959 and has been a major influence in the development and manufacturing of custom in-ear monitors for musicians, with its background in hearing protection and acoustics helping shape products used on stage, in studios, and by serious listeners. 

Etymotic, founded in 1983, is known for its research-led approach to hearing and sound. They helped define the category for high-isolation, precision in-ear listening, with products developed from a foundation in auditory research, diagnostics, and hearing protection. Its ER4SR and XR series became a reference point for accurate in-ear sound, while its wider product range continues to serve musicians, professionals, and listeners who value clarity and faithful sound reproduction. Etymotic’s hearing protection products are also widely recognized for providing solutions for one of the biggest frustrations with traditional earplugs by maintaining clarity and balance while simply reducing volume.

The Fidelity Collective Umbrella

Under Fidelity Collective umbrella, Westone, and Etymotic will continue their research and product heritage. The company’s focus will be on maintaining the distinct identities and core values that made Westone Audio and Etymotic trusted names.

At the same time, the new group is expected to bring fresh energy, expanded R&D, renewed product development, and long-term investment into both brands and their passionate user base.

Fidelity Collective says the goal is not to abandon or reinvent what made the brands successful, but to build on their foundation with new momentum, modern innovation, and long-term vision across both professional and consumer audio categories.

“Westone Audio and Etymotic are brands with genuine history and credibility,” said Sam Roney, CEO of Fidelity Collective. “Tal and I share a vision of bringing startup-level energy to these epic legacy brands while fully respecting the heritage they’ve built over decades serving musicians, audio professionals, and hearing protection users.”

Tal Kocen, COO of Fidelity Collective, added: “For me, this is incredibly personal because these are brands I already know closely. There’s already a strong foundation here, and our role is to build on that with fresh ideas, modern product development, and long-term commitment to the communities around both brands.”

Fidelity Collective also confirmed that they will be investing in staffing, engineering, product development, and operational infrastructure as both brands move into this next phase, including the re-establishment of sales operations in Dallas and engineering and lab facilities in Chicago.

Both brands will continue serving existing users, including professional musicians, stage performers, engineers, hearing-conscious listeners, and music enthusiasts, while expanding into new product categories and market opportunities.

Further product announcements from both Westone Audio and Etymotic are expected in the coming months of 2026 and beyond.

The Bottom Line 

Fidelity Collective’s acquisition of Westone Audio and Etymotic matters because it gives a newly formed company two established IEM brands at a time when wired earphones are clearly gaining momentum again.

Recent CanJam shows in New York, Singapore, and Dubai made that obvious, with brands like Noble, Shure, DUNU, Astell&Kern, Meze Audio, and Sennheiser fighting for the same serious listener. Westone brings professional IEM credibility, while Etymotic brings accuracy, isolation, and hearing-focused design.

What is missing are the details: new products, updated lineups, and how much engineering or distribution overlap we will actually see. But the intent is clear. Fidelity Collective is not entering the IEM market quietly. It now has two respected names, and the rest of the category should be paying attention.

Pricing & Availability

While we wait to see what new initiatives and products result from these new company relationships, here are some currently available products from Westone and Etymotic. 

Westone Audio Earphones

Etymotic Earphones

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Amgen’s Helena Mulvihill explores how organisations in 2026 are navigating issues of environment, health and safety in the workplace.

“I often hear EHS (environment, health and safety) described as a broad discipline, but it really comes down to protecting people while supporting safe and reliable operations,” explained Helena Mulvihill, an EHS manager at biotech Amgen. 

She told SiliconRepublic.com, “It brings together environmental compliance, occupational health and safety, and in practice connects every part of the site. That means working closely with operations and support teams, often across multiple departments in the same day.” 

Her work largely involves the implementation of EHS management systems such as risk assessments, incident management, training, auditing and performance metrics; a big part of the role is also communication, making sure expectations are clear and that teams feel supported in applying EHS principles.

She said, “There isn’t really a typical day, which is something I enjoy. While I can plan my week, priorities often shift depending on operational needs. That balance between planned and reactive work keeps things varied and means I need to stay adaptable.”

How important is it to involve everyone in EHS and does that work in practice?

Involving everyone is essential because EHS cannot operate in isolation. It must be embedded across all levels of the organisation, from leadership to the people carrying out day-to-day tasks. I’ve found that the colleagues closest to the work have the clearest understanding of how tasks are actually performed. They’re making real-time decisions, so their input is critical.

While EHS teams provide guidance and structure, it’s important that individuals take ownership of applying those principles in practice. That’s what makes procedures meaningful.

I build that through collaboration and engagement. I spend time in operational areas, listen to feedback and learn about challenges from different perspectives. When people feel involved and see the reasoning behind decisions, EHS becomes part of how work is done rather than something separate.

What does a strong EHS culture feel like when you’re part of it?

You really notice it in the everyday decisions people make. Safety and operational impact are considered as part of the task, rather than something that’s addressed afterwards. It also comes down to trust. People need to feel comfortable raising concerns, asking questions or even stopping work if something doesn’t seem right. That openness is what allows issues to be picked up and addressed early.

When that culture is in place, you see people take responsibility, look out for one another and think about the wider impact of what they’re doing. Over time, that consistency makes a real difference to both safety performance and how effectively the site operates.

How can employees support EHS in their day-to-day roles, even if it’s not their main focus?

Supporting EHS often comes down to simple, consistent behaviours. One approach used at Amgen is ‘Take Five’, which encourages people to pause before starting a task and assess the situation. That might mean reviewing the environment, thinking through the task, identifying potential risks and choosing the safest way to complete the work. It also involves putting the right controls in place and communicating clearly with anyone who could be affected.

I’ve seen how effective that can be in practice. It helps people stay aware of their surroundings and think about the impact of their actions. Even if EHS isn’t their main role, those small actions make a real difference in reducing risk and supporting a safer workplace.

How does the work you do in EHS contribute to wider organisational goals at Amgen?

My role focuses on implementing the EHS management system onsite, which supports wider organisational goals by helping the site operate safely, consistently and in line with regulatory expectations. A key part of the role is anticipating and controlling risks before they lead to incidents, while working closely with different teams to identify and implement improvements effectively. Strengthening the EHS management system, while helping to build an inclusive, high-performing safety culture, supports reliable manufacturing operations and continuous improvement. 

What kind of opportunities are there for people working in this field?

One of the most appealing things about EHS is the range of opportunities it offers. You have the chance to specialise in areas like safety, environmental compliance, industrial hygiene or process safety, depending on where your interests lie. It also gives you exposure to various parts of the business from manufacturing and laboratory environments to supply chain and supporting functions. That helps build a broader understanding of how everything connects, and over time, many people move between these areas to develop a well-rounded skill set. You also get the chance to collaborate with global colleagues and learn from other sites, which brings fresh perspectives and helps you continue developing over time.

What skills are best suited to professionals in this space?

I’ve come to realise that adaptability and patience are core skills because priorities can change quickly and you’re often responding to different situations. Being able to adjust and stay focused is key. Communication is just as important. A large part of the role involves listening, asking questions and understanding how work is conducted in practice so risks can be identified early. It also means explaining things clearly, so expectations are aligned.

Curiosity and initiative are also central. Taking the time to engage with people, understand processes and build relationships makes a real difference. Combined with a willingness to keep learning, these skills help you develop in a field that is constantly evolving.

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In December of last year, Microsoft told thousands of its engineers, product managers and designers that they could use Claude Code, Anthropic’s command-line coding agent, on the company dime.

By spring, the tool had spread well beyond engineering: into the kind of non-technical roles that, in earlier waves of enterprise software, would have waited years for a seat. Inside Microsoft, the rollout was framed as a learning exercise. Outside it, the surface signal was simpler.

The world’s largest software company, the one with its own foundation models and its own coding assistant, had just paid a competitor to put a rival product in front of its workforce.

Six months later, that experiment is being wound down. According to reporting in Windows Central and other outlets following The Verge’s original scoop, Microsoft is cancelling most direct Claude Code licences inside its Experiences and Devices group, the division that builds Windows, Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams and Surface.

Affected engineers have been told to migrate to GitHub Copilot CLI by 30 June, the last day of Microsoft’s fiscal year. The official reason is toolchain unification. The unofficial reason is in the calendar.

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The Claude pullback is the most credible signal yet that the unit economics of enterprise AI coding do not, at current token prices, work. Not because the tools are bad. The opposite: they are good enough that engineers use them constantly, and the constant use is what breaks the maths.

The clearest evidence is at Uber, which is not Microsoft and does not have Microsoft’s financial cushion. Praveen Neppalli Naga, Uber’s chief technology officer, told The Information in April that the company had burned through its entire planned 2026 AI coding budget in four months.

By March, Naga’s own figures had Claude Code use jumping from 32 per cent to 84 per cent of his roughly 5,000-engineer organisation. Individual engineers were spending between $500 and $2,000 a month on tokens. Around 70 per cent of code committed at Uber now originates with AI, and on the order of one in ten live backend updates is shipped by an agent with no human in the loop.

“I’m back to the drawing board,” Naga said, “because the budget I thought I would need is blown away already.”

That sentence is the whole story in miniature. The forecast was wrong because the variable being forecast, token consumption, behaves nothing like the licences and seats that finance teams know how to model. A traditional enterprise software deal is denominated in users.

A token-priced deal is denominated in how much the model has to think. Agentic coding makes the model think a lot. Sessions run for hours, spawn parallel threads and generate volumes of context that bear no resemblance to the autocomplete interactions that shaped the original pricing structure.

We have been tracking this fracture for months. In November, GitHub paused new Copilot Pro and Pro+ sign-ups because the agentic workloads of paying customers were generating costs that exceeded their monthly plan price.

Cost structures built for lightweight assistance, the company conceded, no longer held.

This is not an Uber problem or a Microsoft problem. It is an industry condition. Bryan Catanzaro, vice-president of applied deep learning at Nvidia, told Axios in April that, for his team, the cost of compute is now far beyond the cost of the employees using it.

This is the chip company saying it. Fortune followed in May with reporting that token-based AI tooling, when used heavily, can cost more per task than the human engineer it was supposed to augment.

A 2024 MIT analysis circulated widely in finance circles since then suggests that, on current pricing, AI automation pencils out as cheaper than human labour for roughly a quarter of the jobs people thought it would replace.

Set that against the spend forecasts. Gartner expects worldwide AI spending to reach $2.5 trillion this year, up 69 per cent on 2025.

The same firm now places generative AI squarely in what it calls the trough of disillusionment, predicting in a May press release that 25 per cent of planned 2026 AI budget will slip into 2027 as proofs of concept die in the procurement pipeline.

A separate Gartner read from April found that only 28 per cent of AI infrastructure projects fully deliver against their business case. That is not the curve of a technology going through an awkward adolescence. That is the curve of a market repricing itself.

Microsoft’s retreat lands inside this repricing, and not by accident. There are two ways to read the move. The first is the one Microsoft has briefed: that Copilot CLI is the strategic destination, that engineers will continue to have access to Claude models inside Copilot, and that the company simply wants a product it can shape directly with GitHub. That story is true.

It is also a story that Microsoft could have told at any point in the past six months and chose not to. What changed was not the strategic logic. What changed was the bill.

The second reading is harder to discount. Microsoft is uniquely positioned to know what enterprise-scale Claude usage actually costs, because its own engineers were the heaviest users outside Anthropic’s customer base. Inside Experiences and Devices, Claude Code had become, by several accounts, the preferred tool.

If the maths had improved with scale, this would be the moment Microsoft locked in a multi-year deal at favourable terms. Instead, it is unwinding the experiment in a window that conveniently closes the books on a fiscal year.

When the company with the most leverage in the room walks away from a vendor whose product its own staff prefer, the signal is not about preference.

Whether this constitutes a bubble depends on definitions. Token-level pricing will fall, as it has fallen at roughly a factor of ten every eighteen months for the past three years. The more interesting question is whether per-task token consumption falls faster than per-token cost.

The evidence so far runs the other way. Each generation of agentic system, by design, consumes more tokens per unit of work, because it reasons longer, plans more elaborately and verifies itself against the world.

Anthropic’s own infrastructure team has spoken publicly about reasoning workloads generating order-of-magnitude more compute per query than chat. That is the bet baked into the next twelve months of model releases. It is also the bet that put Uber back at the drawing board.

There is a worked example in TNW’s own coverage. In April, Anthropic banned a popular open-source agentic framework called OpenClaw from running on consumer Claude subscriptions, after discovering that single instances could chew through the equivalent of $1,000 to $5,000 in API costs in a day of autonomous operation. The framework was running on a $200-a-month Max plan.

The economic transfer was so blatant that Anthropic had to write a new clause into its terms of service. Multiply that pattern across a Fortune 500 engineering organisation, and you have the Uber budget memo.

The counterargument is real and worth stating. The cost of a working AI coding agent compared to the cost of an additional senior engineer is, even at current prices, often favourable on a per-feature basis. The productivity uplift is documented; the substitution is happening. What is breaking is not the value proposition.

It is the procurement model. Companies that signed up for a productivity tool are discovering they signed up for a metered utility, and the meter runs when nobody is looking. The fix may be straightforward: capped budgets per engineer, tiered access for high-leverage roles, agent runtime quotas.

Many of the larger buyers are already there. But the implication is that the era of “give every employee a Claude Code seat” is closing, and what replaces it will look more like AWS billing than like Office licences.

That is what Microsoft’s quiet email to its Windows and Surface teams really announces. Not the end of AI coding. Not even the end of Anthropic at Microsoft, given that Claude models will continue to be reachable through Copilot CLI.

It announces the end of the experimental phase, the phase in which the world’s largest software companies were willing to absorb arbitrary token costs in exchange for learning. The learning is done.

What comes next is the harder part. Enterprises will keep buying AI coding tools, because the productivity is real and the competitive pressure is unforgiving. But they will buy them the way they buy electricity, with usage caps, with shadow meters, with a finance team in the room.

Somewhere in a Microsoft conference room earlier this spring, someone looked at a Claude Code invoice and did the arithmetic against a Copilot CLI roadmap, and made a decision.

The same arithmetic is now being done in every CFO’s office that bought into the December 2025 rollout. The retreat will not be loud. It will be a series of fiscal-year-end emails, sent on a deadline nobody noticed until the budget was already gone.