News You Can Use: 12/18/2019


Photo by Antonino Visalli on Unsplash

  • Administrative assistant jobs helped propel many women into the middle class. Now they’re disappearing.

    The United States has shed more than 2.1 million administrative and office support jobs since 2000, Labor Department data shows, eroding what for decades had been a reliable path to the middle class for women without college degrees.

    The job losses affecting administrative assistants, bookkeepers, clerks, data entry specialists, executive assistants and secretaries have largely continued even as the economy recovered from the Great Recession, suggesting these jobs aren’t coming back.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/administrative-assistant-jobs-helped-propel-many-women-into-the-middle-class-now-theyre-disappearing/2019/12/04/75686efe-f6a0-11e9-a285-882a8e386a96_story.html

  • Tech recruiters were once welcomed on campus. Now they face protests

    At universities across the country, including Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Duke, Carnegie Mellon and Brown, students have staged protests at recruiting events and demonstrated against tech companies that do business with ICE or U.S. Customs and Border Protection, including Microsoft, Palantir and Salesforce. They have called out Amazon for marketing its facial-recognition technology to immigration authorities and hosting Palantir on the Amazon Web Services cloud.

    Some 3,000 students from 30 schools signed a document pledging they would not work at Palantir until it severs its contracts with ICE; roughly 800 people signed a petition calling on the dean of UC Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department to drop its partnership with Palantir.

    It’s not clear whether these tactics are having a significant impact on recruitment.

    https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2019-12-07/students-protest-tech-companies-ice-contracts

  • What skills will set you apart in the age of automation?
  • 6 lies you probably tell yourself about giving feedback at work

    You only need to begin documenting notes for legal purposes if you’ve given the person much face-to-face feedback for several months, and they show no sign of improvement. In my research as a performance coach, I’ve learned 95% of employees can (and will) improve any skill with your honest, frequent coaching. Just talk to people! Be open, be honest, and give them helpful examples and ideas. When they realize you’re on their side, they’ll ask for more feedback. Have confidence in yourself. If you provide feedback to everyone all the time, it will be much easier to prepare written documentation that you might need later.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90436990/6-lies-about-feedback-that-you-need-to-stop-believing

  • How to Insult Your Enemies More Effectively

    The more creative you’re getting, the easier you can slip up. Years ago, I wrote a bad blog post, and commenters were roasting it. I retorted that they were misreading it. I didn’t want to tell them “learn to read” because it didn’t quite fit. So I came up with “Learn to parse.” That, of course, is lame as hell, something that kid from the “you frickin fricks!” video would say.

    I’d just made things much worse for myself. If your insults become illegible, overwrought, or sloppy, you’ll lose. And that’s not the only way you can self-own here.

    https://lifehacker.com/how-to-insult-your-enemies-more-effectively-1839501124