jenshoop

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.

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.

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.

Spot on lackbeard ^^

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.

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.

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.

Agreed. This article had a distasteful smugness to it. The author was more keen on bravado-ing his own (self-appointed) business acumen than exploring why Mayer's strategies did not work. Come to think of it, the author was really calling out Mayer for not having the guts to go all in (personality attack) vs. examining how/why her strategies did or did not work.

In addition to this -- I'm not sure I understand why the primary discourse around this text is whether or not it conforms to a particular literary movement/genre's specifications. Those are all constructs that help us historically situate texts within a broader context; what is the goal of this exercise/conversation?

This is super powerful, @magic_man, in terms of orienting the field around designing solutions that meet users where they are (vs. approaching design from a "remediation" vantage point). I previously worked for a non-profit working to build the financial capability of low-income youth here in America. We discovered that 85% of youth have mobile phones, though a much smaller percentage belong to families that are connected to the financial mainstream (many use fringe banking services). This was a critical insight for us; it led us to design a smartphone application that issued teens digital challenges designed to build financial health. Platform decision-making is paramount.

Agreed. There was a crazy study that showed that 75% of American workers identify their boss as the worst and most stressful part of their job and that 60% of US workers would take a new boss over a pay raise.

But you're at such a disadvantage when interviewing -- how do you vet your potential manager? And when your financial welfare is on the line, would you really pass up an opportunity on this count alone?