When we hear a person’s words, we also try to imagine why they’re saying them. Most of us suck at this.
Economics used to operate under the belief that people are rational actors. Behavioral economists came along and said that’s crazy—there’s no such thing as a rational actor. People make decisions for all kinds of irrational reasons. It turns out the same thing is true when we listen.
Your degree doesn’t chain you to a field for the rest of your career. Here’s how to use what you’ve already learned to try something else.
To graduate on time, you probably needed to declare your major by your sophomore year. But by the time graduation rolls around, it wouldn’t be surprising if your career ambitions have shifted to something outside of your major. Perhaps an internship didn’t turn out how you expected, or certain courses dampened your passion for the occupation you thought you wanted to pursue. So, now you’re in a tough spot, where your degree doesn’t quite line up with what it is you want to do.
It’s fine to be a creature of habit, as long as you know when it’s time to kick a few habits and pick up some new ones.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a total creature of habit. I love predictability and stability. They help me to feel focused, organized, and on top of things.
You’ve definitely heard of cognitive bias by now, but you might still be surprised how deep it can run.
You probably don’t need a reminder of how much bad hires can hurt—but here’s one anyway: Some research suggests that each bad hire leaves employers with a monetized loss of over $50,000 in productivity. It’s also been estimated that replacing bad hires—especially those with specialized skills—can cost companies several times workers’ annual salaries.
This week’s top stories may help you prepare for the next decade’s workforce, rethink your standing desk, and harness your career envy.
This week we learned what we still don’t know about standing desks and productivity, which fields have the most optimistic workers, and why unpaid internships’ legality is still an open question.
Before they can take over bigger chunks of the workforce, robots may need to learn to make small talk. Few of us seem willing to let them.
The risk that your job will be automated out of existence depends, of course, on the job you do. For many, that’s already happened—typically in roles and industries where the name of the game is eliminating human error and improving efficiency.
James Everingham’s passion for physics predated his management role at Instagram. Here’s how he’s brought one to bear on the other.
I didn’t intend to go into computer science, and I definitely didn’t expect to become a manager. Instead, I started out thinking I’d be a laboratory scientist. In college, this led me to astronomy and physics, which prompted me to start writing software. And while these leaps felt intuitive, the subsequent shift into leading teams did not. In fact, I disliked my early engineering management job at Oracle so much that I took a less senior role at Netscape, just to start coding again.
A vision of transportation infrastructure that adds to a city instead of filling it with noise and pollution.
Los Angeles is known for its freeways, and that’s not a good thing. But while some cities are starting to tear sections of highway down—reconnecting neighborhoods and rebuilding pedestrian culture—that tends to happen in places where the roads are underused. In L.A., where freeways aren’t likely to disappear anytime soon, one team of architects thinks that a redesign could change how highways serve the city.
One button press turns a building model into a virtual world.
While trying to design a set of high-end homes, Frank Wolbertus and his colleagues at TBI-KennisLab had an idea.
Like the wage and leadership gap, the patent gap highlights the lack of resources women have once they’re in the workplace.
Another day, another sobering statistic about the gender gap in the workplace.
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