Career: Preparing For Skip Level Meetings
News You Can Use: 4/8/2020
Photo by Per Lööv on Unsplash
- Call for social media platforms to act on 5G mast conspiracy theory
Broadband engineers have also faced physical and verbal threats by people who believe that radiation from 5G masts causes health risks and lowers people’s immune systems.
The mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson, revealed he had received threats after he dismissed the theory as “bizarre”.
Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove branded the conspiracy theories “dangerous nonsense”.
And the NHS director, Stephen Powis, added: “The 5G story is complete and utter rubbish. It is nonsense – the worst kind of fake news.
- Tech supply chains are still a complete mess
On Friday morning, analysts at S&P’s Panjiva Research laid out a grim picture, with US sea imports from China (which includes most of the electronics you buy) down more than 50 percent in the first three weeks of March, a result of the countrywide lockdown in China. At the same time, the subcontracting companies that actually build the hardware (the most famous is Foxconn, but of course there are a lot of them) are thinking about getting out of China entirely, at least as much as they can. Wistron Corp, which does a lot of work for Apple, boasted last week that it could move as much as half of its business outside Chinese borders within a year.
It’s a huge sea change for tech manufacturing, and while it has been building for a long time, it’s going to be a lot faster and messier because of the pandemic. It also means that, while these companies are scrambling for labor and parts, they’re also going to be scrambling to stand up a whole new set of factories.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/4/21207276/tech-manufacturing-china-supply-chain-lithium-benchmark
- Tech hack: These 4 steps will make your phone less distracting
- Google’s director of talent explains how to write a killer résumé
In addition to what you learned, think about the impact you’ve made in your previous roles and projects. People are often taught to use data in a résumé, but it needs to be connected to impact, says Ewing.
“Include sentences to describe that data,” says Ewing. “You need language to bring it together.”
If you are applying for a business role—in account management, for instance—convey your experience by sharing what you accomplished, how it was measured, and how it was done. For example, “I grew revenue from 15 small business clients by 10% quarter-over-quarter by mapping new software features as solutions to their business goals.”
This framework can also apply to any relevant leadership positions, university honors, or other types of recognition. “It’s okay to humblebrag, but there is a way to do it with humility,” says Ewing.
- Know When to Stop Overdelivering at Work
Understand what it’s costing you to always aim for outperformance. What else don’t you have time, energy, attention, and willpower for? Perhaps your own health, your big goals, or your family. If you assess that the costs are significant, try having a rule of thumb for when you’ll overdeliver. For instance, you might decide that in three out of ten situations in which you have the urge to do so, you will, but not in the other seven.
She suggests switching to a mindset in which you give your employer and/or clients exactly what they ask for, within the discussed time frame—because that’s what both of you agreed to, after all. Doing extra work without extra compensation isn’t going to help your career as much as you might think it will, especially if you’re in the part of your career where you’ve already established a professional reputation and skillset.
https://lifehacker.com/know-when-to-stop-overdelivering-at-work-1842060789
News You Can Use: 2/19/2020
Photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash
- How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation
I never thought the system was equitable. I knew it was winnable for only a small few. I just believed I could continue to optimize myself to become one of them. And it’s taken me years to understand the true ramifications of that mindset. I’d worked hard in college, but as an old millennial, the expectations for labor were tempered. We liked to say we worked hard, played hard — and there were clear boundaries around each of those activities. Grad school, then, is where I learned to work like a millennial, which is to say, all the time. My new watchword was “Everything that’s good is bad, everything that’s bad is good”: Things that should’ve felt good (leisure, not working) felt bad because I felt guilty for not working; things that should’ve felt “bad” (working all the time) felt good because I was doing what I thought I should and needed to be doing in order to succeed.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work
- How to demonstrate 3 important soft skills during an interview
“When I’m assessing new talent, I want to see how the individual can create ease in a room, connect quickly with peers, and demonstrate capability,” she says. “All of that is done through soft skills of conversation starting, putting people at ease, creating an environment that leads to productivity. It means waiting for your interviewer to finish their sentences before starting, being introspective about the answer, and connecting with them as a person.”
“Though interviews can be rehearsed, a good conversation is one of the strongest indicators that a candidate has the soft skills needed to excel in a given position,” says Essenfeld.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90463823/how-to-demonstrate-3-important-soft-skills-during-an-interview
- How to use skepticism
- Why every workday needs to be fun (and how to have it)
Of course, back in the days of clients who overpaid, of overhead that was used to fund more overhead, and of computers that cost $5,000 and can’t be found on eBay for $5, there were a whole lot more people doing the same work that a whole lot fewer people do today. This is where I (and the science) argue that a layer of fat in the workplace, in all its iterations, is a good thing. It acts as insulation from burnout, anxiety, stress, and everything else these poor young people experience every day as they die a slow death while making a living.
From a practical standpoint, this is not about installing a climbing wall in the conference room or setting up a keg near the coffee maker. We’re talking minutes of investment, not mountains of money. And it must come from the top: Fun and productivity are not an oxymoron but a generous paradox. CEOs, especially boomer CEOs, may have forgotten how much fun they used to have at work and how that fun helped develop them as leaders.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90460615/why-every-workday-needs-to-be-fun-and-how-to-have-it
News You Can Use: 11/6/2019
Photo by Mario Azzi on Unsplash
- Stuck In a Rut? Here Are 15 Ways to Pull Yourself Out of a Bad Situation.
As Leo Babauta correctly writes, “You cannot maintain energy and focus (the two most important things in accomplishing a goal) if you are trying to do two or more goals at once.” The solution? Pick “one goal, for now, and focus on it completely.”
Personally, I would start with your meatiest goal and save the rest for later. If you’re deciding between several different options, zone in on the one that relates to your top priorities and make sure that it’s a SMART goal. Once you choose to focus on that goal, put the goal in writing and develop a realistic action plan with steps to achieve it.
- Is asteroid mining and space colonization legal?
- As Marc Benioff Calls For A Better World, Salesforce Lawyers Are Doing The Opposite
Benioff’s opposition to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — which allows technology platforms to moderate their services without being held liable for the content their users post there — is puzzling. “Facebook is a publisher,” Benioff said in a tweet on Wednesday. “We need to abolish section 230 Indemnifying them.” Without Section 230, Facebook might succumb to death by lawsuit‚ but Salesforce might too.
On Wednesday, as Benioff was sending his tweet, Salesforce lawyers were citing the piece of legislation in their defense of a lawsuit against the company. “Salesforce objects to the Requests on the ground that it is entitled to federal immunity from suit under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, 47 U.S.C. § 230, with respect to the claims in this action,” Salesforce’s lawyers wrote in a response to a discovery motion in a case in Harris County, Texas, one of seven lawsuits it’s dealing with regarding Backpage. In all seven cases, Salesforce has claimed protection under Section 230, Annie McAdams, the lead trial lawyer for the plaintiffs, told BuzzFeed News.
- Tech workers backing candidates looking to break up their employers
Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, who has called for breaking up Facebook, Amazon and Google, raised more than $173,000 from tech industry employees in the third quarter, according to Bloomberg News’s analysis of public data on political contributions from employees at 10 large tech companies.
Many of Warren’s largest tech donations come from software engineers at low-profile companies like Twilio, MongoDB, Adobe, and Mailchimp. But prominent names in tech like Andy Dunn, the co-founder of Bonobos, Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, Jennifer Pahlka, executive director of Code for America, and Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, all cut checks for Warren.
https://www.baltimoresun.com/sns-tns-bc-tech-campaign-money-20191019-story.html