Tag: silicon valley

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News You Can Use: 5/20/2020


Photo by Luca Florio on Unsplash

  • Tech Workers Consider Escaping Silicon Valley’s Sky-High Rents

    Christy Lake, chief people officer at San Francisco-based Twilio Inc., says several employees have already approached their managers and HR representatives to discuss plans to relocate. The cloud communications company expects more than 20% of its office-based employees will transition to working remotely in the long term. “It’s percolating big-time,” Lake says. She expects the company will have to come up with formal policies and maybe offer a relocation bonus to employees who decide to make the jump.

    But the trend raises complicated questions. If employees move to a less expensive location, should Twilio adjust their salaries accordingly? “It’s probably not great business practice to pay Bay Area comps in Michigan,” Lake says. And when it comes time to promote, would those employees have the same opportunity to advance as everybody else? “We need to think proactively,” she says.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-14/tech-workers-consider-escaping-silicon-valley-s-sky-high-rents

  • Why beef is the worst food for the climate

    My family’s trade is butchering and I have been paying attention to the meat global supply chain (it is weird when my job in supply chain and butchering connects in some way, but I always jump at the chance to make the connections). With the meat shortages, there is talk that the beef trade shouldn’t come back in the same way.
  • Hiring and Firing: How to Know When You Need to Let Someone Go

    There are two different spectrums on which people can perform their jobs — willing and able.

    When someone is able to do their job, it means they have the necessary skills, competence and expertise to perform their responsibilities.

    When someone is willing to do their job, it means that they are aligned with the company’s mission and values, and are enthusiastic about their role.

    People will fall into one of the following four categories, and if you can pinpoint where they are, you can figure out whether to let them go or give them the opportunity to improve.

    If an employee doesn’t have the skills to do the job well and they aren’t willing to get better, it’s time to let them go.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/343684

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News You Can Use: 6/20/2018

  • The Age of Tech Superheroes Must End

    Among these companies and their precursors, there are examples of smart founders who were able to use their power to help their companies grow sustainably. But they tend to be the exceptions that prove the rule. “Once a trend starts, then all founders want it, but I can count on three fingers the founders that should be in complete control of their companies with no governance or oversight,” says Sarah Cone, founder of venture capital firm Social Impact Capital.

    Fortunately, the trend isn’t really catching on outside of Silicon Valley. In 2017, just 14% of companies went public with permanently unequal voting structures, according to data from the Council of Institutional Investors.

    There are legitimate reasons—from the founder’s, if not necessarily the investor’s, perspective—why founders would want more control. Many serial entrepreneurs have had the experience of being pushed out of a previous company or forced to sell earlier than they would have liked. And for decades leading up to the previous tech-stock bubble, says Mr. Kedrosky, VCs had much more power than founders and were not afraid to use it. Even first-time founders have heard these stories, he adds.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-age-of-tech-superheroes-must-end-1528387420?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • Young Workers No Longer Get the On-the-Job Training They Need — So They’re Finding It Elsewhere

    According to Peter Capelli, director of The Wharton School’s Center for Human Resources, companies want workers they don’t have to educate, and his research has found that employers don’t train young workers like they used to.

    In 1979, per Capelli, the average young worker received 2.5 weeks of training per year. By 1995, training time fell to just 11 hours.

    More recent comparable data has been hard to find, says Capelli, but the Wharton professor says that by 2011 “only a fifth of employees reported receiving on-the-job training from their employers over the past five years.”

    Also:

    Since 2011, when Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, began to gain public attention, their popularity has grown exponentially. Last year, by one estimate, 23 million people signed up to take their first MOOC. All told, since 2011, more than 800 universities have offered over 9,000 courses to 81 million registered users, according to the same report.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/314468

  • Does your job match your personality?
  • Good News for Hustlers: Being Busy Could Actually Be Good for You

    The researchers conducted a series of eight experiments and had the participants establish the ways that they were busy, by doing things such as asking them to write down the reasons why they had such a packed schedule, or telling the undergraduates involved in the study that data found they were busier than the students at neighboring schools.

    The study looked at the ways that this feeling of busyness affected how the students made decisions about the foods they ate, whether they opted to exercise or relax and whether they chose to save money for retirement versus spending it. The researchers found that when people were influenced to see themselves as busy, it boosted their ability to have self-control.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/314673

  • Skipping Your Lunch Breaks? Even Your Boss Wants You to Go out for a Bite, a New Study Says.

    But, according to our research, bosses want their employees to get out for a break. So, there’s a real disconnect happening, because the vast majority (88 percent) of North American bosses in the study said they thought their employees would say they were encouraged to take a regular lunch break, but only 62 percent of employees actually felt encouraged.

    Takeaway: Just as great coaches recognize the need for their players to recuperate in order to perform their best, your boss likely knows that your break helps, rather than hinders, your work. But it does seem that not every boss is communicating that idea in the most effective way.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/314467

Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

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News You Can Use: 3/7/2018

  • Fake news is not the real problem

    The real problem isn’t fake news; it’s that people have given up on that search for truth. The real problem is that the engineer’s mindset, wherein one weighs the available evidence, and accept and incorporate new evidence even if it contradicts what you previously believed, has never been more rare. (I’m not pretending it was ever remotely universal; I’m just saying that there was enough of it, barely, for democracy to work more-or-less as intended.)

    No longer. The engineer’s mindset has been replaced by the lawyer’s mindset, wherein you pick a side in advance of getting any evidence, and then do absolutely everything you can to belittle, dismiss, and ignore any opposing data, while trumping up every scrap that might support your own side as if it were written on stone tables brought down from the mountain by Moses. I mean no disrespect to the legal profession: some of my favorite people are lawyers, including the one I married. The legal approach is an excellent means of getting to the truth of hard and confrontational matters —

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/18/fake-news-is-not-the-real-problem/?ncid=rss

  • Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

    Preethi Kasireddy said she wasn’t surprised when she heard the news that Mr. Thiel is moving to Los Angeles from San Francisco. Ms. Kasireddy, a 27-year-old startup entrepreneur, said she made the same move last November because, like Mr. Thiel, she felt surrounded by people who shared identical beliefs, particularly about how to build a successful company.

    Sometimes Silicon Valley venture-capital investors and startup founders “have a certain way of thinking, and if you don’t fit into that way of thinking you’re not in the cool club,” said Ms. Kasireddy, who declined to state her political beliefs but said they didn’t influence her decision to move. She also said she realized many of the resources she needed to build her next project—a blockchain startup—didn’t require her to be in Silicon Valley.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/like-peter-thiel-others-feel-alienated-by-silicon-valley-groupthink-1518962400

  • It’s not you. Phones are designed to be addicting
  • Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs

    The rise of China as an AI superpower isn’t a big deal just for China. The competition between the US and China has sparked intense advances in AI that will be impossible to stop anywhere. The change will be massive, and not all of it good. Inequality will widen. As my Uber driver in Cambridge has already intuited, AI will displace a large number of jobs, which will cause social discontent. Consider the progress of Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo software, which beat the best human players of the board game Go in early 2016. It was subsequently bested by AlphaGo Zero, introduced in 2017, which learned by playing games against itself and within 40 days was superior to all the earlier versions. Now imagine those improvements transferring to areas like customer service, telemarketing, assembly lines, reception desks, truck driving, and other routine blue-collar and white-­collar work. It will soon be obvious that half of our job tasks can be done better at almost no cost by AI and robots. This will be the fastest transition humankind has experienced, and we’re not ready for it.

    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610298/tech-companies-should-stop-pretending-ai-wont-destroy-jobs/

  • Is Creating Your Own Podcast Actually Worth It?

    “You’re going to be terrible at a lot of things for years until you’re successful,” said Keith Kingbay, co-host of “New Player Has Joined,” a show where celebrities reminisce about the videogames they love. “People probably aren’t going to listen to your podcast initially. But if you like it and you keep putting it out, people will find it.”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-creating-your-own-podcast-actually-worth-it-1519320018

Photo: Kleiton Silva

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News You Can Use: 11/22/2017

  • For Tech’s Deepest Problems, Women Are The Canary In The Data Mine

    The book proposes this simple but radical solution: Women should not try to adapt to the male-centric corporate world, instead women should “lean out” and create their own companies. “I’ve figured out a way to create safe space for myself in tech,” wrote Shevinsky.

    In a recent conversation, we discussed how the culture of overwork contributes to the problem of misogyny in many companies, and about how the singular focus on growth and profit drowns out ethical concerns that in the long run ultimately ruins companies. We also spoke about how feminism has said all it can, and yet things don’t seem to be getting better. And we discussed how a hostile workplace for women often indicates that a company has other ethical issues as well.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40494460/for-techs-biggest-problems-women-are-the-canary-in-the-data-mine

  • The Surprising Thing I Gained When I Switched to a Remote Workforce

    One way that businesses are trying to stem employee turnover and are working to improve employee well-being is embracing the paradigm shift to a telecommuting workforce, aka “working from home.” A 2014 PGi survey of 1,000 workers found that 80 percent of their employers offered a telecommuting option, and about half of these employees exercised this option at least once a week. The millennial generation is all about this lifestyle, where 68 percent of millennials are more interested in a position that involves working from home and 64 percent would like the opportunity to work remotely.

    Also:

    One of the aspects of telecommuting that I didn’t think of when we first started was the increase in quality hires I was able to make. Before the switch, we were pigeonholed into hiring from the localities surrounding our business, or hiring someone who was willing to make the long commute every day — something that weighs heavily on even the best of employees.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/304422

  • A pro wrestler’s guide to confidence
  • It’s Time to Tax Companies for Using Our Personal Data

    The data tax could be a minor cost, less than 1 percent of the revenue companies earn from selling our personal data, spread out over an entire industry. Individually, no company’s bottom line would substantially suffer; collectively, the tax would pull money back to the public, from an industry profiting from material and labor that is, at its very core, our own.

    This idea is not new. It is, essentially, a sales tax, among the oldest taxes that exist, but it hasn’t been done because assigning a fixed monetary value to our data can be very difficult. For a lot of internet businesses, our personal data either primarily flows through the business or remains locked within.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/14/business/dealbook/taxing-companies-for-using-our-personal-data.html

  • The Washington Post Is A Software Company Now

    Since 2014, a new Post operation now called Arc Publishing has offered the publishing system the company originally used for WashingtonPost.com as a service. That allows other news organizations to use the Post’s tools for writers and editors. Arc also shoulders the responsibility of ensuring that readers get a snappy, reliable experience when they visit a site on a PC or mobile device. It’s like a high-end version of Squarespace or WordPress.com, tailored to solve the content problems of a particular industry.

    By offloading the creation of publishing tools and the hosting of sites, media companies can concentrate on the journalism itself rather than the technical requirements of getting it in front of readers. Scot Gillespie, the Washington Post’s chief technology officer, says that Arc’s value proposition is “let us run the CMS [content management system] for you, the creation of circulation. You focus on differentiation.”

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40495770/the-washington-post-is-a-software-company-now

Photo: Felix Russell-Saw