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.
- 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.
- 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
News You Can Use: 8/28/2019
Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash
- Google Tries to Corral Its Staff After Ugly Internal Debates
The new rules are a marked departure from Google’s unrestrained culture that, along with the workplaces of its Silicon Valley neighbors, was once held up as a model for corporate America. But those companies have learned that encouraging employees to speak up in office forums can also court trouble.
As Google’s work force swelled past 100,000 employees and the nation’s politics became even more partisan, Google’s culture has become a flash point. Employee walkouts have quashed several projects and political debates on internal message boards have grown so rancorous that they have drawn the ire of Mr. Trump.
In the rules issued Friday, Google urged employees to be careful in their comments about the company.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/technology/google-culture-rules.html
Google says only talk about work at work — and definitely no politics“Our primary responsibility is to do the work we’ve each been hired to do, not to spend working time on debates about non-work topics,” said the Google memo, posted to its website. “Avoid conversations that are disruptive to the workplace or otherwise violate Google’s workplace policies. Managers are expected to address discussions that violate those rules.”
A company spokeswoman, Jenn Kaiser, said the guidelines were in response to “a year of increased incivility on our internal platforms.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/23/google-says-only-talk-about-work-workand-definitely-no-politics/
Google employees ‘refuse to be complicit’ in border agency cloud contractIn a petition circulated today inside Google and on Medium, a group of employees said immigration officials are “perpetrating a system of abuse and malign neglect” at the border. The employees point to the Trump administration’s family separation policy and the recent deaths of children in immigration officials’ custody. “These abuses are illegal under international human rights law, and immoral by any standard,” the petition reads. In the hours after it was released, hundreds of employees added their signatures to the petition.
The employees point to a request for bids on a CBP cloud computing contract, which is a service Google provides. “The winning cloud provider will be streamlining CBP’s infrastructure and facilitating its human rights abuses,” the petition continues, and the employees demand that Google commit to not provide immigration agencies with any funding or work.
- All student debt in the US, visualized
- I Shared My Phone Number. I Learned I Shouldn’t Have.
Emre Tezisci, a security researcher at Fyde with a background in telecommunications, took on the task with gusto. He and I had never met or talked. He quickly plugged my cellphone number into a public records directory. Soon, he had a full dossier on me — including my name and birth date, my address, the property taxes I pay and the names of members of my family.
From there, it could have easily gotten worse. Mr. Tezisci could have used that information to try to answer security questions to break into my online accounts. Or he could have targeted my family and me with sophisticated phishing attacks. He and the other researchers at Fyde opted not to do so, since such attacks are illegal.
News You Can Use: 6/26/2019
Photo by Ümit Yıldırım on Unsplash
- To Take Down Big Tech, They First Need to Reinvent the Law
For decades, antitrust regulation has been overwhelmingly focused on the welfare of the consumer. No cost to the consumer, no problem. That opened the door for Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon — which offered digital services that were cheap or free — to become immensely profitable and powerful.
Now a backlash is mounting as renegade scholars try to reverse years of established doctrine that they say does not appropriately take the clout of those companies into account. Economic absolutism is making way for other considerations as antitrust goes back to its roots.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/technology/tech-giants-antitrust-law.html
- GDPR Has Been a Boon for Google and Facebook
The rules have also made it harder for third parties to collect lucrative personal information like location data in Europe to target ads. This gives the tech giants another advantage: They have direct relationships with consumers that use their products, allowing them to ask for consent directly from a much larger pool of individuals.
“GDPR has tended to hand power to the big platforms because they have the ability to collect and process the data,” says Mark Read, CEO of advertising giant WPP PLC. It has “entrenched the interests of the incumbent, and made it harder for smaller ad-tech companies, who ironically tend to be European.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/gdpr-has-been-a-boon-for-google-and-facebook-11560789219
- Why a great education means engaging with controversy
- How 13 Became the Internet’s Age of Adulthood
In his initial bill, then-Rep. Markey said a child was someone under 16. But there was pushback from e-commerce companies about cutting off their access to this lucrative market. Those companies found an unlikely ally in civil liberties groups.
The fear: Requiring teens to obtain parental permission might curtail their ability to access information about birth control and abortion, or resources for getting help in abusive situations, according to Kathryn Montgomery, who ran the Center for Media Education, the group that had nudged the FTC to investigate kids’ sites in the first place. “I agreed that those were concerns,” she said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-13-became-the-internets-age-of-adulthood-11560850201
News You Can Use: 10/3/2018
- You’re Probably Not Even Thinking About One of Social Media’s Biggest Dangers
When people start sharing information with the public, it can open up doors for the information to be used against them. Details like full name, date of birth, hometown and even school locations and dates of graduation can become dangerous in the wrong hands. Social media platforms typically require your name and your date of birth, but most platforms will give you the option to not make the information shareable.
Beyond basic information, be careful about what you post. Of course, you should not share your debit/credit card and social security numbers with people online, but images can be dangerous, too. A few examples would be things like posting a picture of your new car and not covering your license plate number or sharing event details that contain your home address.
- More tech companies drop college degree requirement
“In 2017, IBM’s vice president of talent, Joanna Daley told CNBC Make It that about 15 percent of her company’s U.S. hires don’t have a four-year degree. She said that instead of looking exclusively at candidates who went to college, IBM now looks at candidates who have hands-on experience via a coding boot camp or an industry-related vocational class,” according to this CNBC article.
Now, Apple, Google and EY are joining the ranks of companies that don’t require a degree, according to a list from Glassdoor.com.
- Career advice from the “Edison of medicine”
- LinkedIn’s Co-Founder Warns of Perils in Regulating Big Tech
If Facebook was restricted and slowed down, maybe what we’d all have is [China’s] WeChat. So, instead of having Facebook as our platform, which is a thing we can evolve in, it’s actually in fact a Chinese company that’s doing it. It’s like simply saying, “Oh, we’re a monopoly in the whole world, and we’re gonna slow down our industry as a way of [solving tech problems],” but that is not a very rational policy.
Tech needs to do a much better job being transparent. But I prefer a pattern where the government says, “We want you to show you’re having the following improving impact on society. If you’re doing that, we don’t need regulation.”
- Elon Musk is sad and disappointed by the SEC’s fraud charges
Reached for comment, a Tesla spokesperson sent the following statement from Musk:
“This unjustified action by the SEC leaves me deeply saddened and disappointed. I have always taken action in the best interests of truth, transparency and investors. Integrity is the most important value in my life and the facts will show I never compromised this in any way.”
Later, Tesla sent a second statement, this one a joint statement from the company and board of directors:
“Tesla and the board of directors are fully confident in Elon, his integrity, and his leadership of the company, which has resulted in the most successful US auto company in over a century. Our focus remains on the continued ramp of Model 3 production and delivering for our customers, shareholders and employees.”
https://www.fastcompany.com/90243445/read-the-secs-full-fraud-complaint-against-tesla-ceo-elon-musk
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