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.
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.
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.
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.
Stop trying to become the morning person you aren’t and do this instead.
Crack-of-dawn conference calls, breakfast meetings, or even the fact that the office coffee maker is always turned off by noon are just a few examples of how the work world really is designed for early risers. You know the type—those perky folks who leap out of bed with the sun and begin winding down as evening falls.
This collaborative whiteboarding app tries to digitize the fun, chaotic physicality of brainstorming, while making it accessible to anyone.
International design firm Ideo popularized the designer brainstorming session: Just lock a team of creatives up in a conference room with some Sharpies and multi-colored Post-its, and don’t let them leave until a brilliant idea strikes. But this brainstorming method doesn’t work well when your team is spread around the globe. Now Mural, an alumni of Ideo’s startup-in-residence program, is trying to bring what goes on inside Ideo’s conference rooms to the cloud.
Culture
Art
Politics
History
Race
Community
Faith
