Tag: Career

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News You Can Use: 7/24/2019


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  • Amazon Offers Sellers a Leg Up, With a Catch

    Amazon.com Inc. is offering independent merchants on its platform marketing support, product reviews and prominent display. The catch? Amazon gains the right to purchase a merchant’s brand at any time for a fixed price, often $10,000.

    The program—which allows brand rights to be bought for a fixed price on 60 days’ notice, according to a contract seen by The Wall Street Journal—is part of a push by Amazon to obtain a stable of exclusive brands for the platform. It is the first selling program that allows Amazon to obtain direct control over independent brands that sell on its website, according to merchants familiar with Amazon programs.

    Also:

    The contract sets the price at $10,000, but says designs, patents and trade secrets will remain with the seller after the sale. Sellers in the program may sell the same product elsewhere under a different brand name and keep rights to brands they haven’t entered in the Accelerator program.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-offers-sellers-a-leg-up-with-a-catch-11563452450

  • Most of the Google Walkout Organizers Have Left the Company

    The employee resignations highlight growing hostility between Google and its most outspoken employees, who have grown increasingly organized and strident in their demands for significant changes to Google’s approach to issues including sexual harassment claims, military contracts, censored search in China, and equitable treatment of contract workers, who now outnumber full-time employees. That tension presents a challenge to Google’s open company culture, which encouraged employees to debate and dissent on internal forums, but established strong social norms around secrecy. Google evangelized this culture, elements of which have been adopted by other Silicon Valley firms, and the company’s response to employee activism is being closely watched.

    https://www.wired.com/story/most-google-walkout-organizers-left-company/

  • The biggest threat to America? Americans.
  • ‘The climate has changed’: Agencies are finding more young employees report burnout

    Burnout among millennials has been a major talking point this year. At the same time, agency sources say there has been a cultural shift in the way the industry approaches mental health and burnout. Agencies have employed new policies, like no answering emails after 7 p.m. or no Slack on weekends, to combat the burnout. It makes sense to do so, as 32% of agency employees are worried about their mental health, per Digiday+ research.

    “Fifteen years ago, [agencies] dismissed the idea of burnout,” said Jean Freeman, president and CEO of independent shop Zambezi. “The climate has changed, which is for the better, and now we’re paying attention to physical and mental health. If you pay attention to your staff, you can see it.”

    https://digiday.com/marketing/burnout-is-contagious-why-agencies-need-to-listen-when-younger-employees-self-diagnose/

  • The 5G Health Hazard That Isn’t

    According to experts on the biological effects of electromagnetic radiation, radio waves become safer at higher frequencies, not more dangerous. (Extremely high-frequency energies, such as X-rays, behave differently and do pose a health risk.)

    In his research, Dr. Curry looked at studies on how radio waves affect tissues isolated in the lab, and misinterpreted the results as applying to cells deep inside the human body. His analysis failed to recognize the protective effect of human skin. At higher radio frequencies, the skin acts as a barrier, shielding the internal organs, including the brain, from exposure. Human skin blocks the even higher frequencies of sunlight.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/science/5g-cellphones-wireless-cancer.html

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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

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News You Can Use: 3/6/2019

  • When the Bully Is the Boss

    By nature, any study of group dynamics in a real-world setting is plagued by design limitations, including the lack of a control group and the hidden personal grievances of the employees. But the vast majority of findings point to the same conclusion: Bullying bosses tend to undermine their own teams. Morale and company loyalty plunge, tardiness increases and sick days are more frequent.

    “Productivity may rise in the short term,” Dr. Greenbaum said. “But over time the performance of the staff or team deteriorates, and people quit.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/health/boss-bullies-workplace-management.html
    How to Deal With Jerks at Work

    Remember that even the jerkiest colleagues rarely want to be jerks. Sometimes finding a way to work around their apparently clueless behavior can be easier than trying to get them to change their ways.

    https://lifehacker.com/how-to-deal-with-jerks-at-work-1832819304

  • China banned millions of people with poor social credit from transportation in 2018

    The government rolled out the travel ban on people with low social credit scores last May. According to a report from China’s National Public Credit Information Center from last week, people have been blocked 17.5 million times from purchasing airplane tickets, and 5.5 million times from buying high-speed train tickets. These people had become “discredited” for unspecified behavioral crimes. That’s up from only 6.15 million citizens being blocked from taking flights as of 2017, according to China’s supreme court.

    As part of the system, the Chinese government also employs a public blacklist of those who have been found guilty of crimes in court and punishes them partly by limiting their ability to buy plane and train tickets.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/1/18246297/china-transportation-people-banned-poor-social-credit-planes-trains-2018

  • Why the school-college-job pathway is about to go extinct
  • To Stop Worrying So Much, Deflate Your Own Ego

    Look for any subtle entitlement or self-absorption hidden in your ruminations. Do you expect things to always go your way? Do you tend to believe people are scrutinizing you when, in reality, they’re probably thinking about themselves? Do you spend time comparing yourself to business superstars or celebrities?

    In other words, if you’re being too hard on yourself, maybe it’s because you think way too highly of yourself. You don’t even have to think you’re wonderful to fall into this trap, you just have to think you’re important. Because you think everything you do has grave consequences, and that everyone is paying attention to you, you mentally magnify even your smallest mistakes into national emergencies.

    https://lifehacker.com/to-stop-worrying-so-much-deflate-your-own-ego-1832941435

  • These Microsoft Employees Think They’re Brilliant Heroes, But They’re Really Quite Foolish. Here’s the Brutal Truth They Simply Refuse to See

    But, those of who have actually served in the military, or have seen war firsthand and actually had to make hard decisions, know that the ability to “cause harm and violence,” is far more complicated than a Tweet would suggest.

    Fortunately, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella quickly rejected the MSW4G petition.

    “We made a principled decision that we’re not going to withhold technology from institutions that we have elected in democracies to protect the freedoms we enjoy,” Nadella told CNN Business. “We were very transparent about that decision and we’ll continue to have that dialogue.”

    In other words, if the MSW4G crew don’t like working on HoloLens and benefiting the IVAS contract, they can find other projects within the company. Or, they can go work for another company.

    https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/these-microsoft-employees-think-theyre-brilliant-heres-brutal-truth-they-simply-refuse-to-see.html

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Posted on

News You Can Use: 2/27/2019

  • A digital gangster destroying democracy: the damning verdict on Facebook (UK)

    The scale of the report – it drew from 170 written submissions and evidence from 73 witnesses who were asked more than 4,350 questions – is without precedent. And it’s what contributes to making its conclusions so damning: that the government must now act. That Facebook must be regulated. That Britain’s electoral laws must be re-written from the bottom up; the report is unequivocal, they are not “fit for purpose”. And that the government must now open an independent investigation into foreign interference in all British elections since 2014.

    Cambridge Analytica was already on the committee’s radar when the scandal broke in March last year. But, over the ensuing weeks and months, it interviewed an extraordinary cast of characters to drill down into the underlying machinery of the new political power structures. And the result – a doorstopper of a report covering multiple interconnected issues – damns Facebook not just once or twice but time and time again.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/18/a-digital-gangster-destroying-democracy-the-damning-verdict-on-facebook

    I am no fan of Facebook, but this feels like scape-goating

  • It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town

    Skilled tech workers now flock to New York from everywhere. But the homegrown talent engine that city officials sought to jump-start a decade ago is also revving up. The new Cornell Tech graduate school campus on Roosevelt Island, a product of the city’s development plan, has 300 students, with expansion plans for a student population of 2,000 over the next two decades. And new courses, buildings and research institutes are underway at Columbia, New York University and the City University of New York.

    The Cornell Tech proposal fully embraced the Bloomberg administration’s priority of blending science and industry. Graduate students’ projects at local companies are a mainstay of the curriculum.

    “In New York, people are driven by real-world problems that can be solved with technology,” said Daniel Huttenlocher, the dean of Cornell Tech, who has also worked in Silicon Valley and is an Amazon board member. “In Silicon Valley, the heritage is much more to build cool technology and then figure out how it can make money.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/technology/nyc-tech-startups.html

  • How health care quietly powers the U.S. economy
  • ‘You need a thick skin’: Ad agencies grapple with workplace bullying

    A Society of Human Resource Management study found that 51 percent of organizations report incidents of bullying last year, with 62 percent reporting gossip or lies and 50 percent reporting threats. Another survey, sponsored by the Workplace Bullying Institute in 2010, found that 35 percent of U.S. workers have experienced or witnessed bullying. The survey also found that men bully other men more, while women bully other women.

    Workplace bullying and verbal harassment, although related, are a little bit different. Bullying is not illegal — mostly because no laws really exist to protect people from being bullied. Unlike race-based, gender-based or other forms of discrimination, those who are bullied aren’t considered a protected class unless that bullying spills over into harassment that is targeted because of race, gender, sexual orientation or another reason.

    https://digiday.com/marketing/need-thick-skin-ad-agencies-grapple-workplace-bullying/

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Posted on

News You Can Use: 12/5/2018

  • There’s definitely reason to worry about Brexit, says Accel’s London team

    Though they reiterated that no one can know for certain what Brexit’s impact might be, Botteri raised a handful of things that have the firm worried, beginning with “immigration and hiring talent and the movement of talent,” which could be meaningfully hampered by Brexit. “Even companies that don’t move their headquarters to London will often at some point begin to build a team,” he noted, questioning whether that will continue to happen.

    There’s also the nontrivial issue of what happens to fintech companies, which have been thriving in London as a gateway between the U.S. and Europe and that have easily operated across all of Europe. Asked Botteri, “What about that?” post Brexit.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/30/yes-do-worry-about-brexit-says-accel/

  • Confessions of a procurement director: ‘We don’t want to overpay our agencies’

    It’s procurement’s fault to a degree that agencies have shifted their income model. That’s basically a result of forcing down margins. It shouldn’t be that way. The team I work in is more advertising and marketing-focused than others I’ve worked at, so we’re able to draw up contracts with partners that aren’t always trying to secure the cheapest price and are more about how we get value and better return on investment. We don’t want to overpay our agencies and ad tech vendors, but we really don’t want to do the opposite because we see them as partners and if those businesses aren’t profitable then they will not work with us.

    https://digiday.com/marketing/confessions-procurement-director-dont-want-overpay-agencies/

  • How super rich companies harm us all — and try to cover it up
  • Empower the Employees Who Will Build an Amazing Culture

    Empowerment is often interpreted as giving people control over daily details like what hours they work or what kinds of snacks they find in the break room. While those things certainly make day-to-day living more comfortable, they don’t give employees an overarching sense of ownership over the work they do.

    Empowered employees are given the opportunity to do work they value or work that fuels their growth. Anything less feels like lip service, and companies that want to keep their employees genuinely empowered — and engaged — have to keep this mind. Empowerment isn’t necessarily about making work more enjoyable; it’s about making it more meaningful.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/323575

  • How to Become the Best of the Best

    You can be the best at something, but if no one knows, no one cares. Work on making friends in your field, especially with people more successful than you. That means having people skills, introducing yourself at parties, going to events, and throwing out favors.

    It kind of sucks that just being extremely good isn’t enough, but a lot of skills don’t have a “best of” category. An athlete may consistently win, thus establishing themselves as the best, but most of us do stuff that is much harder to measure. That’s why who you know (and who likes you) matters so much.

    https://lifehacker.com/how-to-become-the-best-of-the-best-1830571441

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