Day: November 25, 2025

• I had to book Amtrak instead of flying, and it made my holiday travel experience less of a hassle.
• A generous luggage policy and my worry about airport disruptions made train travel more appealing.
• The trip can be uncomfortably long, but flexible seating and beautiful views make it worth it.

After procrastinating to buy my flight home for Thanksgiving one too many times (sorry, Mom), I’ve been left with no other option but to turn to the Pennsylvanian, a 9-hour and 20-minute Amtrak train that travels from New York to Pittsburgh.

This time, I paid $316 for the round-trip ticket, and was happy to book the train instead of a flight. I’ve taken this train ride almost a dozen times in the past five years, and have turned into somewhat of a train enthusiast because of it.

Additionally, flying disruptions — such as the recent government shutdown — and the seemingly endless construction at my hometown airport have made me more inclined to take the train over the past few years.

It’s not perfect, but from avoiding never-ending security lines at the airport to having a row to myself, here are the four reasons I prefer traveling by train.

1. There are no security lines or airport hassles

I’ve been stranded in too many hour-plus airport security lines to count. When I arrive at the train station, I simply wait for my track to be announced, which typically occurs 15 minutes before departure, and then board the train when it arrives.

There aren’t any annoying security lines or shuttles to take between terminals, so I can get to the train station around 30 minutes before the train leaves. Plus, boarding usually goes pretty fast because the train attendants can stagger the boarding lines between train cars.

2. I don’t have to worry about size restrictions or checking too many bags

Have you ever shed a tear watching TSA throw away a precious perfume or hand lotion you just bought?

One of the lovely things about traveling by train is that there are no size restrictions on liquids. This is a small win, but when I fly, I’m constantly holding my breath to see if my carry-on toiletry bag will make it through TSA, so it’s another tick on the pros list for me.

Additionally, Amtrak has a really generous luggage policy. Each passenger is allowed one personal item, two carry-ons, and two checked bags free of charge. Additional checked luggage is only $20 a bag.

3. There aren’t assigned seats, and I usually have a row to myself

With no assigned seats, there’s usually an opportunity for me to find a row to myself. I’ve taken this train route five times in the last year, and there’s only been one ride where I wasn’t able to snag that luxury.

There’s a roughly two-to-four-hour period of the train ride where I lose cell service entirely, and I use that time as a deep work block to get writing, planning, or anything else that I need to get done accomplished.

One benefit of having a row to myself, besides the obvious extra room, is that I can spread out my work in front of me and not worry about bothering anyone.

4. It’s a beautiful train ride

Lastly, it’s a scenic ride. Although I try to focus on getting some work done or taking stock of my priorities, both personally and professionally, I sometimes can’t help but get lost in the views for hours.

My favorite part of the ride is about halfway through, when we go on the horseshoe curve in Altoona, PA. It’s a 220-degree railroad curve that was finished in 1854. I’ve now seen the curve through almost every season and look forward to marveling at the view each time.

As much as I do love the train, the ride itself isn’t always the smoothest, the café car never has consistent hours, and sometimes, by hour six, the 9-hour ride feels like it will never end.

But overall, if I have the time to spare, I’ll always choose the train over flying. I’ve realized that having this time for myself helps me reset in between destinations.

Got a travel hack to share? Email this reporter at aapplegate@businessinsider.com.

• Pinterest CEO Bill Ready is all in on search.
• Google dominates the all-purpose search market, but rivals are making gains in particular niches.
• This story is one of a five-part series exploring the changing online search landscape.

Four years ago, Pinterest was bleeding users.

The platform known for mood boards had made a big effort to compete with TikTok — as did nearly every other social media platform at the time — with short-form video, shoppable livestreaming, and paying creators.

It didn’t work. When Bill Ready took over as Pinterest’s CEO in 2022, he felt the company needed a new direction.

“I didn’t think the world needed a fourth or fifth best TikTok,” Ready told Business Insider in an interview. Ready, who left his previous post as Google’s president of commerce, decided that a search experience that was both personalized to each user and highly visual would be the platform’s special sauce.

“Search is the core of the business,” Ready said. “The business didn’t have that clarity three years ago.”

Pinterest’s user growth has rebounded since Ready’s takeover, steadily increasing for the past nine quarters. It recently hit 600 million monthly active users, and about two-thirds of the interactions on the platform are related to search.

Pinterest’s focus on search has been a hit with users, with about 80 billion monthly search queries, according to the company.

It’s also helped Pinterest win over Gen Z users.

More than half the platform’s users are now Gen Z, Ready said. In a 2025 survey conducted by Adobe of 800 consumers and 200 business owners, 47% of Gen Z respondents said they used Pinterest for search.

“At the core of why we’re winning with Gen Z is what we’re doing with visual search and what we’re doing to make it more positive than social media,” Ready said.

Pinterest has more to prove. The company’s share price hasn’t returned to its pandemic high. While Pinterest’s revenue increased 17% year-over-year in the third quarter, its stock plummeted over 20% following its earnings release, which included an earnings miss and weak guidance for the fourth quarter. Pinterest management said ad sales had been negatively affected by tariffs.

Raymond James analyst Josh Beck rated the company at a neutral “market perform” following the third-quarter earnings, but wrote he was “encouraged” by Pinterest’s broader progress in shopping and “untapped” advertising opportunity.

Search will continue to play a significant role in Pinterest’s advertising strategy, as Ready emphasized in its latest earnings that Pinterest search results are “highly commercial in nature.”

Broadly, search has been undergoing a shake-up due to new consumer behaviors, such as using TikTok or ChatGPT to find answers. Advancements in technology, including visual search, are shifting how people — especially younger generations — search, said EMARKETER analyst Sky Canaves. (EMARKETER is a sister company to Business Insider.)

“Whatever is the easiest way to find information and has the least amount of friction will be most likely to be used for the particular search cases, whether it’s voice, or text, or images,” Canaves said.

How search is transforming Pinterest’s business

Pinterest has rolled out a series of revamped search tools under Ready’s watch, including an AI-powered tool that enables users to discover content tailored to their body type, skin tone, and hair pattern.

In May, the platform expanded its “visual search” features, allowing users to find exact products or similar items. It’s a category that competitors like Google, TikTok, and new startups are also targeting.

Here’s how it works: Imagine you’re redecorating your apartment and save an image for inspiration to your Pinterest board. With visual search, you can shop right from that image — clicking on a lamp, for example, will surface links to similar items and sometimes an exact match.

With stronger search tools — and the data that comes with them — Pinterest has opened up more doors for advertisers and in-app shopping.

Lower-funnel ads, meaning ads that drive the user to make a purchase, make up two-thirds of Pinterest’s business, Ready said.

“Search behaviors are key inputs powering its ads business,” Forrester analyst Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf told Business Insider. “That intel makes Pinterest a really attractive high-intent surface for advertisers.”

AI is also playing a significant role in how users shop via Pinterest by learning their tastes.

“Effectively, what we’ve created is an AI-powered shopping assistant,” Ready said. In October, Pinterest officially launched a shopping assistant tool that users can chat with verbally or over text.

Users who visit Pinterest to search, whether for shopping or inspiration, are “more valuable” than pass-by scrollers, said Kamran Ansari, Pinterest’s former head of corporate development.

“The whole reason why Google built a $3 trillion company is search has the highest kind of intent signal of anything you can possibly do,” Ansari said.

Why search is ‘up for grabs’ more than ever

Ready, who worked at Google for a little over two years before joining Pinterest, is well acquainted with the stakes in search.

Google still owns about 90% of the market share for traditional search, according to data from Cloudflare.

In a March EMARKETER survey, 93% of US consumers said they had used Google in the last year. There were also many players cited in the EMARKETER survey that fall outside the traditional search market, from e-commerce platforms like Amazon (56%) and Walmart (45%) to video platforms like YouTube (49%) and TikTok (29%).

“The future of search is more up for grabs than it has been in the last 25 years,” Ready said.

According to a recent McKinsey survey of US consumers, about 50% said they “intentionally seek out AI-powered search engines, with a majority of users saying it’s the top digital source they use to make buying decisions.”

As players like ChatGPT and Perplexity aim to battle Google for the wider, all-purpose search market, Pinterest is focused on improving its visually driven niche, Ready said.

• Four-day workweek trials surged in popularity a few years ago, when employees had more power at work.
• Now that the job market has cooled, many CEOs are demanding more from workers.
• AI could help bring about longer weekends if it could sufficiently boost economic gains, one CEO said.

For a time, the four-day workweek seemed like it just might happen.

Like pandemic-era fixations we thought would last forever — looking at you, sourdough starter — the dream of working 32 hours a week for 40 hours’ pay seemed within reach for some.

Now, years later, hiring is sluggish, CEOs are demanding that workers lock in, and 9-9-6 memes can feel as pervasive as 6-7 mishegoss.

The chill settling over the workplace means that many workers’ hopes for four-day weeks are on ice — for now.

There appears to be “a pushback from management on the things that workers were gaining during the pandemic,” said Juliet Schor, a Boston College economist who has researched shorter workweeks.

Yet the idea of permanent three-day weekends isn’t dead, Schor and other backers told Business Insider. Instead, thanks to return-to-office orders and companies’ relentless focus on AI, broader adoption might simply take longer than advocates might hope.

Thanks, 9-9-6

One challenge, for now, is that the four-day talk doesn’t always jibe with narratives about doubling down on work. Some leaders have tired of discussions about work-life balance, and big employers, in particular, have been calling workers back to their cubicles.

In some ways, ideas like 9-9-6 — slogging from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — are a response to the four-day workweek, Schor said.

That’s even though trials from the UK to New Zealand run by Schor and other researchers have indicated that spending less time on the job can leave workers happier and less burned out — without compromising productivity.

For now, many CEOs are focused on the merits of RTO and the need to hustle. Some of that sober speech is a way for big bosses to signal to boards and investors that their employees will work harder than ever, said Vishal Reddy, executive director of WorkFour, a nonprofit that advocates for making the four-day, 32-hour workweek the standard.

“Part of it, I think, is a performance,” he said of CEOs’ directives.

Reddy said another reason there is less buzz about a four-day workweek is that the idea is no longer as novel as it was in 2020 and 2021, when some employers, looking to attract and retain workers, implemented the concept.

Carrying the idea forward, he said, will likely require waiting for the market to change and for workers to regain power.

Reddy said that he sees proposed legislation involving four-day workweek pilots in New York and Maine as signs that supporters haven’t given up on the concept.

There are still a number of examples of companies that have adopted shorter schedules. In nearly all cases, once employers adopt the schedule, they don’t go back, Reddy said.

The impact of AI

The challenges to adopting shorter weeks aren’t just practical considerations, like how to meet customers’ demands that someone picks up the phone on a Friday.

To make it feasible for employers to pay people the same for working one day less, the economy would have to really take off — growing in the high single digits or even double digits, said Pavel Shynkarenko, founder and CEO of Mellow, a contractor-management platform.

One factor that could help: AI.

If the technology can crank up workers’ productivity enough, a shorter week could be doable, Shynkarenko said. Having only four days on the clock could also help prevent widespread unemployment due to AI by spreading work among more people.

Essentially, the four-day workweek would serve as a “safe harbor” for the economy as it transitions to one where bots take on more of the tasks that now fall to humans, Shynkarenko said.

One day, he said, AI could make it so that even a four-day workweek would be unnecessary. Workweeks might only last two days, he said. Regardless, any departure from five days as the norm would likely take years, Shynkarenko said.

Until AI can do more heavy lifting, Shynkarenko said, there will be little room for discussion of truncated weeks because employers will face too much cost pressure.

Plus, in ultra-competitive industries like tech, an abbreviated workweek could be seen as a concession to competitors.

Schor, the economist, doesn’t expect that employers will be able to avoid the issue indefinitely, however. That’s because although workers’ stress and burnout rates have improved from COVID-19 crisis levels, progress has plateaued, and remains above pre-pandemic levels, she said.

“We’re still in that level of heightened stress,” Schor said.

The four-day guilt

Even if economic growth were to occur at a rapid enough pace to allow for a four-day workweek, other factors might still arise. One is that, in some cases, employees might feel a sense of shame about working less, said Dale Whelehan, an assistant professor in systems psychology at Trinity College Dublin, who supports shorter workweeks. Until January, he served as CEO of 4 Day Week Global, a nonprofit advocating for less time on the clock.

“There was such an internalized sense of guilt towards not working hard enough or not performing hard enough,” he said, referring to what can happen at organizations that try out shorter weeks.

Nevertheless, Whelehan said, the benefits to worker well-being and companies’ performance are substantial enough that the conversation about the four-day workweek, which has been dampened for now, “is going to rise again.”

Do you have a story to share about your career? Contact this reporter at tparadis@businessinsider.com.

• Martin Fowler said software engineering is in a ‘depression’ due to a lack of investment.
• Fowler advises junior engineers to seek mentorship from senior developers.
• He said developers starting out should also be wary of the outputs when working with AI.

One of the most influential software engineers has hope for junior developers amid the industry-wide uncertainty caused by artificial intelligence.

Martin Fowler sat down on a November 19 episode of “The Pragmatic Engineer” podcast to discuss the state of the software engineering world in 2025 — a year when major tech companies aren’t holding back when it comes to job cuts. Layoffs.ai has tracked around 114,000 tech employee layoffs so far in 2025, compared with nearly 153,000 in all of 2024.

The 62-year-old, who has written several books about software development and is the chief scientist at software company Thoughtworks, said the massive job layoffs in the tech world are one sign that the software development world is in a “depression.” In this current era of “great uncertainty,” he said, businesses aren’t investing in software. And, while the tech world is pouring money into artificial intelligence, that growth seems to be a “separate thing” that’s “clearly bubbly.”

“While businesses aren’t investing, it’s hard to make much progress in the software world,” Fowler said. “And so we have this weird mix of no investment, pretty much depression in the software industry, with an AI bubble going on.”

The “unpredictable” AI bubble presents challenges and uncertainty for junior software engineers, in particular.

“The thing with bubbles is you never know how big they’re going to grow,” Fowler said. “You don’t know how long it’s going to take before they pop, and you don’t know what’s going to be after the pop.”

When asked about his advice for junior software engineers, Fowler didn’t discourage them from using AI for coding. However, he said, newer developers can’t always identify if the output of large language models, or LLMs for short, is useful. That’s where the knowledge of a more experienced coder comes in handy.

He said the best way for junior developers to learn is to find a senior engineer to mentor them. A good experienced mentor is “worth their weight in gold,” he said.

Fowler is widely regarded as a pioneer in the field of software engineering. He was one of 17 authors of the 2001 “Agile Manifesto,” which redefined how software is built collaboratively by teams.

He seemed confident in his industry to persevere.

Although he said the timing for software engineers starting out in tech may not be as great as it was 20 years ago, Fowler said there’s “plenty of potential in the future” since the core skills required of a good software engineer remain the same today.

“I don’t think AI is going to wipe out software development,” Fowler said.