So conflicted about all of the rage and drama around Theranos. On the one hand, it smacks of the conventional backlash against solutions that revolutionize the way things have been done forever, and there needs to be space for innovators to work through kinks to really bring an idea to market. On the other hand, it sounds like this product does not work (or does not yet work well) and it's not the kind of solution space where errors can be brushed off lightly.
May be useful at the enterprise level/in a work context. I will be honest and admit that as an executive at a startup, I often sign up for tools that I plan to later sunset but forget about / think "Well, I might use that next month." Totally different mindset than I might apply personally.
Spot on. There's also been an increasing competitive push between universities to deliver "country club-esque" experiences to students, which further drives up cost. (Separately, let's not forget about the chaos of the educational publishing industry and the insane price points they command for modestly updated editions each year.) But I think items 1 and 2 above -- and a lack of education about what loans are and the value of a higher ed degree to the potential student -- are the true culprits here. There's a cultural expectation that all students will matriculate to college, and many high schools measure their success in terms of college attainment. Meanwhile, there's a lack of counseling/education for students, so few know that they're expected to repay loans and fewer explore the options (college and non-college) in front of them, and counselors would be working at cross-purposes with the secondary institution's goals if they advised against attending college. As demand for higher ed continues to grow, for-profit higher ed institutions continue to spring up to suck up federal loans and lower acceptance standards.
>> let's not forget about the chaos of the educational publishing industry and the insane price points they command for modestly updated editions each year.)
I had a friend of mine who I knew when I was working at Thomson Reuters back when they still had their educational publishing wing of the company. He was in sales and said educational publishing is one of the biggest rackets nobody has heard of.
He said he would do his due diligence and meet with professors and educators regularly during the year and let them know what the publishers were doing, but in the end, he said it was always a 50/50 roll of the dice if a professor or school bought the books he had been pitching them since they got the last version of the textbooks they ordered.
He said it mainly came down to name recognition, and Thomson had that - but he also said it was similar to how agents woe professional athletes. Lots of perks, free dinners and baseball tickets to the professors making the decisions. He said as a sales person, they had a "client account" card where they could wine and dine clients and had a monthly stipend between 5K-10K specifically for this purpose.
He said you'd be surprised how greedy these professors get once they know they can influence what books are going to be purchased for the following year and from what company.
>"There's also been an increasing competitive push between universities to deliver "country club-esque" experiences to students, which further drives up cost."
That was my impression of University/College. Having only experienced what was shown in movies and the media, I was under the impression that college meant getting your own "apartment with a roommate". Unfortunately, in the non-US university I attended, it meant "4x6" meter room, two beds, two cupboards, two desks, and two-roommates.
Then again, the entire year's tuition did only cost about $3500, about 9 years ago.
At least in my experience at a UC, the media portrayal was fairly accurate. It seemed like there was a never-ending onslaught of concerts, "multicultural events", sporting events, "community center" activities, safe spaces, Greek events, etcetera (all of which receive school funding in some form or another). I appreciated the occasional guest speaker, but looking around I couldn't help but notice money pouring from everywhere, namely for things that had nothing to do with academics. Far too many administrators with too much time on their hands.
This is one narrative in an overall spectrum of experiences. Important not to sidebar someone's very real experience or assume every "woman in tech" goes through the same thing, so I welcome the introduction of a new perspective that runs against the grain a bit. I wonder if this was prompted by a well-intentioned friend asking "what it's like to be a female in tech these days"? This is a question I get frequently and I'm just sort of at a loss as to what to say -- I see a lot of problems with the lack of diversity especially at the senior leadership level and have been through my fair share of negative experiences, but I've also been fortunate to have insane mentors -- male and female (well, if I'm keeping score, more male than female) -- to help me progress, learn, develop. For me, and maybe this is fraught with its own issues, I've always just sought to prove myself, demonstrate my value by working hard, and earn respect that way. Few people -- male or female -- can hold you in poor esteem if you constantly work to be an ethical, industrious team-player.
Yes, my sister did this -- she was a bright college grad and went through an associate program. Gave her a ton of exposure and helped her then find her niche and accelerate quickly. Let's be honest, know one in college knows what the ins and outs of "marketing" or "customer success" or "operations" looks like; my sister was surprised to find herself really interested in the niche field of fraud for a big travel booking company, and now she's able to parlay that expertise to get a higher salary and better job title elsewhere.
^^ Great advice. I had a college student ask me for input on this very question this morning and my response was not to stress too much about finding "the best, most ultimate company ever to work for," but to find a position where you can learn a lot and develop skills you know you need from people willing to invest time in you. (As an aside, something like 70% of people say the most stressful part of their job is their boss. So if there are ways to screen for working with someone who is willing to take the time to cultivate you, amazing.) I think it's tough, especially for the generation of students graduating from college right now (millennials coached to believe they need to have a HUGE impact wherever they go and to believe that their contributions are insanely important), to understand that a first job is just a first step and is not career-defining, in my opinion. You can work somewhere, get some good experience, and then leverage that to get a job you're really excited about.
Agreed. My other issue is that people (this author included) tend to misread Sheryl Sandberg's message as prescriptive; I read "Lean In" as a set of interesting insights and observations from a woman who has succeeded in spite of challenging gender dynamics, but who makes clear that her path need not be the norm for everyone. (In fact, it cannot be the norm for everyone owing to several privileged circumstances in her life.) I know that the bombastic pitch of this article is intentional and possibly necessary in order to generate attention, but it was a major turn off for me.
Was just having this conversation -- is there any precedent for offering different teams and/or differing levels of tenure different vacation packages? My husband used to work at Groupon and said it was really challenging to give all entry-level sales people unlimited vacation because they tended to abuse it. However, unlimited vacation may work well for more tenured positions or even for different types of teams (engineering / design?) We thought this might be too tricky to administrate / unfair, but it does seem that it can be a useful and underabused perk for some and a disaster for others.
In big companies, doing it by tenure with the company is common. A typical schedule is something like: start at 2 weeks/yr, and get an extra week/yr for every 5 years you stay with the company, topping out at 6 weeks/yr. That model has run into trouble as people change jobs more, and is uncommon in the Valley where people change jobs even more than that. Some companies have ditched it, while others will negotiate giving you credit for past jobs, e.g. I believe if Exxon hires you away from a 20-year career with BP, they'll often give you equivalent seniority at Exxon for benefits purposes.
It's definitely done. A traditional method is that the longer you've been at a place, the more vacation you earn. Another technique I've seen is to have a divide, eg "VP and above get an extra 5 days per year."
Facebook, Google, etc commonly use the contractor technique, where anyone you want to work for you but not give benefits becomes an independent contractor, or works for a vendor. Eg, the cooks in the Facebook kitchens.
Yeah - I've seen tiered vacation days based on seniority, but I'm wondering specifically about giving some folks unlimited and others a prescribed number of days. That seems to straddle an almost philosophical issue.
If it's possible to abuse it then it's not really unlimited. Why not just decide what is appropriate and put it in the contract, so everyone agrees how much vacation they can take?
Also there's no reason everyone has to receive the same amount. Indeed that would be very unusual.
This was a great point: "There’s more demand for product-focused programmers than there is for programmers focused on hard technical problems." A very talented programmer from Dropbox once told me that if I wanted to attract top engineering talent, I needed to be able to show the engineer "a problem that no one else has solved yet." This totally changed the way I wrote my job descriptions and conducted interviews. Led to great outcomes, too.
Care to explain a little? Did your friend mean that talented engineers like working on novel problems and companies facing hard problems are thus more attractive?
I read jenshoop to mean: when recruiting, describe in some technical depth, the difficult, unique problems your company is solving to build its product(s).
I used to balk at anything on the "best-sellers' list," assuming the majority would be poorly-written beach read material, but I realized that there can be compelling reasons to read beyond the literary merit of a particular work. Pop literature can help us understand and analyze the culture we're living in, tap into the zeitgeist, participate proactively. It can lead to moments of cognitive dissonance, for sure, but that's healthy.
