News You Can Use: 3/23/2016

sn_bridge_Simon Stratford

  • Why 2016 Is The Year Of The Hybrid Job

    The 21st-century workplace demands versatility. Big data, for example, is becoming increasingly important to the success of businesses, and every industry is making considerable investments. “Not surprisingly, occupations pertaining to data analysis are the fastest growing today across multiple industries,” says Brennan. “The ability to compile, analyze, and apply big data to everyday business decisions is driving major change. In the IT space, big data roles have seen a nearly 4,000% jump in demand. But with the availability of data comes the requirement to analyze and visualize data.”

    http://www.fastcompany.com/3057619/the-future-of-work/why-2016-is-the-year-of-the-hybrid-job

  • An interesting post on the history of Amazon Web Services (AWS)

    At the same time, Bezos became enamored with a book called Creation, by Steve Grand, the developer of a 1990s video game called Creatures that allowed players to guide and nurture a seemingly intelligent organism on their computer screens. Grand wrote that his approach to creating intelligent life was to focus on designing simple computational building blocks, called primitives, and then sit back and watch surprising behaviors emerge.

    The book…helped to crystallize the debate over the problems with the company’s own infrastructure. If Amazon wanted to stimulate creativity among its developers, it shouldn’t try to guess what kind of services they might want; such guesses would be based on patterns of the past. Instead, it should be creating primitives — the building blocks of computing — and then getting out of the way. In other words, it needed to break its infrastructure down into the smallest, simplest atomic components and allow developers to freely access them with as much flexibility as possible.

    https://stratechery.com/2016/the-amazon-tax/

  • Rebranding The American Man

    According to research from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, single, unmarried women under 30 are now out-earning single, unmarried men across the country. In New York City, Los Angeles, and San Diego, women make 17%, 12%, and 15% more than their male peers, respectively. A big part of this shift has to do with the fact that women now earn 60% of higher education degrees, so this trend is likely to continue. And women are the primary jobholders in 13 out of the 15 job categories projected to grow in the United States over the next 10 years.

    http://www.fastcompany.com/3057609/rebranding-the-american-man

  • The Air You Breathe at Work May Be Slowing You Down

    The culprit is carbon dioxide, according to a series of studies since 2012. The most recent research, led by Joseph Allen, who teaches at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, analyzed the performance of knowledge workers, including engineers, programmers, creative marketing professionals and managers. For several hours each day, unbeknownst to those employees, the researchers raised and lowered the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, and then tested everyone on nine different kinds of cognitive ability, like responding to a crisis, strategic thinking and applying their knowledge to a practical task.

    The higher the concentration of CO2, the lower the test scores. Even allowing for uncontrolled factors such as diet, previous night sleep quality and mood, employees’ overall sharpness fell by an average of 15 percent when CO2 levels reached “moderate” levels of about 945 parts per million (ppm). In modern office buildings, designed to maximize energy efficiency by letting in as little outside air as possible, CO2 levels around 1,000 ppm are common.

    http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/272519

  • IT workers dispute Disney rehiring claims

    “This is nothing more than corporate speak intended to muddy the waters,” Perrero said. “New more exciting jobs were promised by Disney that acted as a carrot to keep us around just long enough to have us Americans be the trainers and the foreign workers as the trainees.”

    http://www.cio.com/article/3044098/outsourcing/it-workers-dispute-disney-rehiring-claims.html#tk.rss_all

  • John Oliver on Encryption (NSFW language… don’t watch this in the office!)

    Related:
    WhatsApp’s Other Encryption Dilemma

    The messaging app has made clear it hopes to sell businesses on using WhatsApp as a way to communicate with consumers. Tests of WhatsApp business accounts are expected to start by the end of this year, Facebook has said. But WhatsApp has told potential clients that one of its biggest challenges is how to roll out a customer service application for businesses without giving up end-to-end encryption protecting messages on the app, according to a person briefed by WhatsApp.

    https://www.theinformation.com/whatsapps-other-encryption-dilemma

  •  D.C., San Francisco tech leaders aim for ‘future-proof’ procurement

    The idea of future-proofing procurement, Vemulapalli said, is to make it easier for city governments to procure technology from a diverse group of vendors — from massive international companies to local startups in the civic innovation space.

    http://statescoop.com/d-c-san-francisco-tech-leaders-aim-for-future-proof-procurement 

Photo: Simon Stratford