Tag: Office Culture

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News You Can Use: 8/28/2019


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  • Google Tries to Corral Its Staff After Ugly Internal Debates

    The new rules are a marked departure from Google’s unrestrained culture that, along with the workplaces of its Silicon Valley neighbors, was once held up as a model for corporate America. But those companies have learned that encouraging employees to speak up in office forums can also court trouble.

    As Google’s work force swelled past 100,000 employees and the nation’s politics became even more partisan, Google’s culture has become a flash point. Employee walkouts have quashed several projects and political debates on internal message boards have grown so rancorous that they have drawn the ire of Mr. Trump.

    In the rules issued Friday, Google urged employees to be careful in their comments about the company.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/technology/google-culture-rules.html
    Google says only talk about work at work — and definitely no politics

    “Our primary responsibility is to do the work we’ve each been hired to do, not to spend working time on debates about non-work topics,” said the Google memo, posted to its website. “Avoid conversations that are disruptive to the workplace or otherwise violate Google’s workplace policies. Managers are expected to address discussions that violate those rules.”

    A company spokeswoman, Jenn Kaiser, said the guidelines were in response to “a year of increased incivility on our internal platforms.”

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/23/google-says-only-talk-about-work-workand-definitely-no-politics/
    Google employees ‘refuse to be complicit’ in border agency cloud contract

    In a petition circulated today inside Google and on Medium, a group of employees said immigration officials are “perpetrating a system of abuse and malign neglect” at the border. The employees point to the Trump administration’s family separation policy and the recent deaths of children in immigration officials’ custody. “These abuses are illegal under international human rights law, and immoral by any standard,” the petition reads. In the hours after it was released, hundreds of employees added their signatures to the petition.

    The employees point to a request for bids on a CBP cloud computing contract, which is a service Google provides. “The winning cloud provider will be streamlining CBP’s infrastructure and facilitating its human rights abuses,” the petition continues, and the employees demand that Google commit to not provide immigration agencies with any funding or work.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/14/20805432/google-employees-petition-protest-customs-border-cloud-computing-contract

  • All student debt in the US, visualized
  • I Shared My Phone Number. I Learned I Shouldn’t Have.

    Emre Tezisci, a security researcher at Fyde with a background in telecommunications, took on the task with gusto. He and I had never met or talked. He quickly plugged my cellphone number into a public records directory. Soon, he had a full dossier on me — including my name and birth date, my address, the property taxes I pay and the names of members of my family.

    From there, it could have easily gotten worse. Mr. Tezisci could have used that information to try to answer security questions to break into my online accounts. Or he could have targeted my family and me with sophisticated phishing attacks. He and the other researchers at Fyde opted not to do so, since such attacks are illegal.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/technology/personaltech/i-shared-my-phone-number-i-learned-i-shouldnt-have.html

Posted on

News You Can Use: 7/31/2019


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  • Our 6 Must Reads for Cutting Through Conflict and Tough Conversations

    When conflict arises in the workplace, people have two tendencies: Either they’ll hide from discomfort and hope the issue dissipate, or they’ll address the conflict head-on, often without filtering the words they use. Neither response is correct, nor constructive. Avoiding problems only allows them to fester and impact more people, while hasty, non-strategic communication can turn a small fire into a blaze.

    To help clients communicate through confrontations mindfully, Mehl recommends the A-E-I-O-U Model of Managing Conflict. It’s distinguished from other strategies by assuming that both sides of any argument mean well — basically, that there are positive reasons behind each person’s actions.

    Standing for Acknowledge, Express, Identify, Outcome, and Understanding, the A-E-I-O-U method can be used to resolve a variety of standoffs: employee-to-boss, peer-to-peer, co-founder to co-founder. It’s particularly useful for early startups, Mehl says, because everyone knows each other and is learning together. No matter how old your company is or how it’s structured, employees should always feel comfortable approaching managers and communicating on a level playing field.

    https://firstround.com/review/our-6-must-reads-for-cutting-through-conflict-and-tough-conversations/

  • Work at one of these 10 companies if you want a job you actually like

    Among the top 10 are:
    Adobe
    Facebook
    Southwest Airlines
    Live Nation
    Intuit
    Costco Wholesale
    Delta
    eBay
    Microsoft
    Johnson & Johnson

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90376970/work-at-one-of-these-10-companies-if-you-want-a-job-you-like
    Adobe…? That can’t be right.

  • Have you accidentally offended someone? Here’s advice for you and them
  • Everybody Hates the Key Card. Will Your Phone Replace It?

    The number of hotels in the United States that have digital keys available rose from 6 percent in 2016 to 17 percent last year, according to a survey by the American Hotel & Lodging Association. Marriott International, Hilton, MGM Resorts and Disney hotels are among the brands offering loyalty members the option of using digital keys at some properties.

    Some, including Hilton and Marriott, only allow a single phone to receive a key during a stay, and other guests in the room receive card keys. Like the card keys, the digital keys can be used to access elevators, fitness centers, parking garages and other common areas. Some mobile keys require the user to touch a button on their phone screen to unlock the door, while others require that the phone be held up to the lock.

    Digital keys are hugely popular with travelers in some areas, like Silicon Valley, but overall, only about 10 percent of all hotel guests use them, Mr. Aznar estimated.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/travel/hotel-security-mobile-keys.html

  • In major switch, DoorDash announces that customers’ tips will now go to workers

    Just as things were calming down, a July 21 first-person New York Times article about working for various delivery services, including DoorDash, went viral. While the Times article didn’t break any news about the payment system, it thrust the issue back into the spotlight, prompting a new round of outrage.

    Xu had long defended the practice of using customer tips to pay drivers, with DoorDash chipping in only as a way of “making Dashers whole when a customer left no tip,” as he described it on Twitter. “But it’s clear from recent feedback that we didn’t strike the right balance,” he wrote.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90380942/in-major-switch-doordash-announces-that-customers-tips-will-now-go-to-workers

Posted on

News You Can Use: 6/19/2019


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  • Does Amazon Really Pay No Taxes? Here’s the Complicated Answer

    So is Amazon getting a $129 million refund?
    Not necessarily. There are indications Amazon paid little or no federal income taxes for 2018. Its federal net operating loss carryforwards—accumulated losses that offset future taxable income—rose to $627 million at the end of 2018 from $226 million a year earlier, according to securities filings. Its federal tax credit carryforward—accumulated credits that offset future taxes—rose to $1.4 billion from $855 million, largely because of the research-and-development credit.

    Those are signals that Amazon accumulated losses and tax credits faster than it generated income and tax liability. The law lets carryforwards smooth tax payments across business cycles and a company’s lifespan.

    “Because we are in a low-margin industry and invest in innovation and infrastructure, we don’t make as much pretax profit as other tech companies, so our taxes are lower,” Amazon said in a statement.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/does-amazon-really-pay-no-taxes-heres-the-complicated-answer-11560504602

  • Is It a Good Idea to Be Friends With Your Employees? This Entrepreneur Says Yes
  • Determine if a Hot Dog Is a Sandwich With the Cube Rule
    There are legitimate tax conversations around a variety of different sandwich-like foods, and the entire conversation is insane:

    Things start off reasonably enough—a single starch at the base makes a food “toast,” an additional starch on top makes something a sandwich, and a base plus two parallel walls means you’re dealing with a taco (which means a hot dog is a taco). But then you get to the fourth image, and you realize this chart is trying to classify an enchilada as “sushi.” Things get even crazier (and intentionally contradictory) if you go to cuberule.com, where they list nigiri sushi (a piece of raw fish on top of rice) as “toast.” It’s almost as if this rule wasn’t meant to be helpful.

    Verdict: The cube rule is wack in terms of identifying foods, but it’s a hack in that it identifies the utter futility of trying to fit things into neat little boxes (or cubes). Being technically correct isn’t always useful, and pedantry very rarely wins one any friends. Just as you would never suggest going out for enchiladas to satisfy a sushi craving, you probably wouldn’t suggest hot dogs if someone said they were in the mood for a sandwich. It doesn’t matter if a hot dog is a sandwich; a hot dog is good. And that, I think, is all we need to know.

    https://skillet.lifehacker.com/determine-if-a-hot-dog-is-a-sandwich-with-the-cube-rule-1835581739

Posted on

News You Can Use: 6/12/2019


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  • A look at the many ways China suppresses online discourse about the Tiananmen Square protests

    Online discourse is already strictly controlled by the Chinese government, which requires all websites to do real-name checks on users when they register an account (for example, by linking phone numbers, which are tied to government-issued IDs). Discussions on Douban E Zu often center around politics, which may have prompted heavier restrictions. Real-time comments (called “bullet screens”) on Bilibili and AcFun are harder to monitor for banned content and even though the government recently issued new guidelines for screening comments on bullet screens, censors may still be working on ways to maintain control on them.

    Most recently, WeChat, the ubiquitous messaging, games and e-commerce platform, blocked users from changing their headshots, alias and What’s Up status. Then this weekend, users began reporting connection issues with their VPN services, which are used to get around mainland China’s “Great Firewall” and access forbidden sites.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/03/a-look-at-the-many-ways-china-suppresses-online-discourse-about-the-tiananmen-square-protests/

  • ‘I’ve paid a huge personal cost:’ Google walkout organizer resigns over alleged retaliation

    “I made the choice after the heads of my department branded me with a kind of scarlet letter that makes it difficult to do my job or find another one,” she wrote in an email to co-workers announcing her departure on 31 May. “If I stayed, I didn’t just worry that there’d be more public flogging, shunning, and stress, I expected it.”

    “The message that was sent [to others] was: ‘You’re going to compromise your career if you make the same choices that Claire made,” she told the Guardian by phone. “It was designed to have a chilling effect on employees who raise issues or speak out.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/07/google-walkout-organizer-claire-stapleton-resigns

  • Your boss wants you to lose weight
  • I create presentations at Microsoft. Here’s how I avoid “Death by PowerPoint”

    As soon as you put up a slide filled with too much text, people stop paying attention to you—they’re trying to read the slide. Ultimately, you want people to focus on the speaker rather than trying to dissect the slide. The slide is there to support the speaker and guide the audience through the content.

    The audience is there to listen to the speaker, no matter how great your PowerPoint. Yet at the same time, you want the presentation itself to have meaning and utility, so it stands on its own. Balancing these forces is the eternal question—what should go on the actual deck versus the role of the speaker?

    The answer is generally the well-known KISS rule. Break large chunks of information down to high-level text that just covers the topic, and then speak to the rest of it. And, keep it simple. Less is always more.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90355066/i-create-presentations-at-microsoft-heres-how-i-avoid-death-by-powerpoint

Posted on

News You Can Use: 4/10/2019

  • The anti-competitive forces that foil speedy, affordable broadband

    Big players such as AT&T routinely issue press releases touting new deployments. But on closer examination, many of those touch only a few homes or businesses in an entire census tract, thus inflating the actual scope of the deployment, says Joanne Hovis, the president of CTC Technology & Energy, the company that prepared the broadband report for San Francisco. “The FCC’s data is very flawed,” she says.

    What’s more, roughly half of the new fiber deployments cited recently by the FCC were mandated as a condition for approval of AT&T’s acquisition of DirecTV, says Ernesto Falcon, legislative counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And deployments have slowed because the major players have already cherry-picked the neighborhoods that offer the best prospects for high-paying customers, he says.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90319916/the-anti-competitive-forces-that-foil-speedy-affordable-broadband

  • In a WeWork World, Finding an Office Buddy Is a Social Minefield

    Co-working requires a special set of social skills. Nisha Garigarn was visiting the Wing, a women-focused work and community space in New York, when an acquaintance from an event at another venue three years earlier approached her.

    “She kind of inserted herself into the conversation I was having with my co-working friends,” said the 28-year-old co-founder of the co-working app Croissant. “It was really awkward.” Unable to extricate herself, Ms. Garigarn pulled out her laptop and pretended to read her email. Another friend got up to use the bathroom. Later, Ms. Garigarn watched a YouTube video on how to end a conversation gracefully.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-a-wework-world-finding-an-office-buddy-is-a-social-minefield-11553873968

  • Universal basic income: The plan to give $12,000 to every American adult | Andrew Yang

    In an UBI economy, corporations (especially retail) will view these funds as a subsidy and find ways to pay employees less, and squeeze out more profit.
  • Repairing All the ‘Structurally Deficient’ Bridges in the US Would Take More Than 80 Years

    The ARTBA’s 2019 Bridge Report said that 8 percent—or 47,000 of the country’s 616,087 bridges—are “structurally deficient,” which the ARTBA estimates would cost $171 billion to fix. The report, published this week, is an analysis of data from the US Department of Transportation’s National Bridge Inventory.

    “There’s a lot of conversation on Capitol Hill about investing in infrastructure; it’s the one thing both Democrats and Republicans agree should be done,” John Schneidawind, vice president of public affairs at the ARTBA, told Motherboard in an email. “But there’s little agreement yet on how to fund that investment.”

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yw8ypb/repairing-all-the-structurally-deficient-bridges-in-the-us-would-take-more-than-80-years-artba

  • How to (Politely) Get Someone to Sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement

    “In the interest of maintaining good governance with future investors, we’re asking that anyone closely involved with this project at this early stage sign an NDA.”

    What you are saying is that you’re planning to approach investors who will want to see that you follow best practices in the way you run your business. The fact that you can produce a list of people who have been exposed to the concept and who have signed an NDA will bode well with professional investors doing due diligence. It will also prevent them from using this as an excuse to nibble down the valuation.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/331079

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