News You Can Use: 12/26/2018

  • Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success—Until Users Fled

    Snapchat’s popularity among young people and celebrities once helped give its owner a peak valuation of about $31 billion after its March 2017 initial public offering. The messaging app, which lets a person send a friend “snaps”—photos and videos that can disappear seconds after the recipient views them—once looked capable of becoming a viable social-media competitor to Facebook Inc.

    The redesign mess adds to troubles swirling around Snap and raises questions about whether Mr. Spiegel’s management instincts can help it pull through. His style—trust instincts, take control of details, ignore naysayers—paid off during Snap’s meteoric rise after its 2011 founding.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/evan-spiegels-imperious-style-made-snapchat-a-successuntil-users-fled-11545588892

  • Richard Branson Says the 9-5 Workday Grind Is About to Die. Here’s Why.

    Two other ideas that Branson supports are the proliferation of three and four day weekends and job sharing. These would prioritize a work infrastructure that allows employees to have full lives outside of an office, to spend time with friends and family, to devote time to the things they are passionate about, and to focus on being physically and mentally healthy.

    Branson explained how flexible work is a big part of how he leads Virgin Group. “If you trust people and treat them as adults, they will repay you by working effectively and efficiently,” he wrote. “Choice can empower people to make good decisions and feel positive about their workplace, helping to keep great employees and attract new talent. If we all work smarter, we won’t have to work longer.”

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/324969

  • GoFundMe and a broken healthcare system
  • Advice For Employees: There’s a Limit To Your Complaints

    But to all employees — particularly those who are too young to remember what it was like during the 2009 recession — I do have a warning: you may want to zip it, just a little.

    There’s nothing wrong with giving feedback and by all means if your employer is doing something illegal you should be reporting it. Otherwise — and I say this with peace and love — you may be wise to tread carefully with your concerns about how the owners of the company you work at manage their company. Big firms like Google and Amazon that are in the public eye seem to have a higher tolerance for agitation. But smaller companies? Not as much. We don’t need the headaches. If you’re really not happy with how your employer runs his or her company then by all means: take advantage of the strong economy and make a move. That advantage isn’t going to last forever.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/324626

  • Stop Sending Regular Text Messages

    In more granular terms, the FCC has done to text messaging what it did to the internet when it overturned rules protecting net neutrality. The FCC’s latest decision reclassifies both SMS and MMS texts as “information services” under Title I of the Communications Act. Information services, however, aren’t subject to the same level of regulations as Title II-classified “telecommunication services” like phone calls, which is how they were classified before the December 12 decision. If you’re questioning the comparison to net neutrality, it’s literally the same issue: Broadband internet service was classified as Title II, allowing the FCC to enforce net neutrality rules. But the FCC voted to ditch these rules last year and once again classify broadband under Title I.

    Bottom Line:

    Basically, if you were looking for a push to switch to Signal, this is it. It’s secure, it has a desktop app, and it works across iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows.

    https://gizmodo.com/stop-sending-regular-text-messages-1831258324

Photo by Christophe Hautier on Unsplash