Category / Podcasts

by Nicolle

Basecamp perks are next level

My fav podcast, Gameplan, is back at it again with a fab episode on employee benefits. In Your Company Could Be Tricking You with Perks, the hosts speak with CEO and Founder of Basecamp Jason Friend to get his take on employee perks. In this episode you can forget ping pong tables and unlimited vacation, because Basecamp is killing it with employee perks that encourage employees to get out of the office and have a life.

“I don’t like benefits that encourage people to stay at work. Many companies have a lot of perks that are about keeping you in the office. It’s actually kind of a subversive effect. They’ll have an on-staff chef and they’ll make dinner for people. That to me, you shouldn’t be eating dinner at work. That’s the wrong place to eat dinner. So we do stuff that’s go home and do stuff.”

Among the many many many perks they offer:

  • Charity match
  • $100/month for massages offsite
  • Fresh fruits and veggie CSA share at home
  • Pay for hobbies that aren’t related to your job

On top of that, they offer summer hours: a 4 day, 32 hour work week. And they do it without reducing pay.

It’s worth listening to the whole episode to hear more about Jason’s take on what it means to be an employee, not offering equity, and not using perks as a recruiting tool.

The biggest perk according to Jason: having your full work day for yourself without coworkers “stealing” time.

Swoon.

by Nicolle

Working abroad: not just for the elite

One of my fav podcasts, Game Plan, just did a show on living and working abroad. Their guest, Suketu Mehta, discusses his op-ed in the New York Times, Go East, Young American, and why more Americans should consider the expat option.

“You can have a car, an apartment, and live a middle class life if you are entirely unskilled. I see lots of American security personnel and fire fighters in the countries I go to around the world. It’s still mostly for the elite, but there’s more and more of these non-elite jobs that are opening up for Americans and Americans are going abroad to take them because they’re drying up in America itself.”

During the interview, Suketu covers a range of expat topics, from quality of life (i.e. not being an American workaholic), affordable healthcare, lower salaries and the unfavorable U.S. expat tax policy.

I spent the majority of my twenties finding ways to live abroad. The expat life was the reason I chose to do my graduate program abroad (that and it was cheaper and more international than anything I would get in the U.S.). I’m stateside now but I’m still dreaming about it. Podcasts like this are fabulously motivating.

 

by Nicolle

Soft skills are anything but soft

“If there’s one lesson you can take away from the work I’ve done recently on social skills is that you need to have both types of skills. The thing about being a good conversationalist is that lots of people are. So that alone won’t get you anywhere. What you need is to be well-rounded, I don’t mean that in a loose way but in a rigorous way. Try to be good at two things, especially two things that are not that closely related to each other. Two things that it’s uncommon to be good at together. One of them is that most people are really good coders or programmers, a lot of them might be not so socially skilled. So if you can do both those things you’re going to be incredibly valuable because you have an unusual combination of skills and you’re hard to replace. So if you got good technical skills and soft skills you’re like gold to employer. So seek out opportunities to be good at unusual combination of things.”

– David Demming, Professor of Education and Economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, giving advice to employees on the role of soft skills in the future of work, on the Future of Work Podcast episode, The Future of Education, Skills, and the Economy.

There’s much to dive into in this podcast: the unbundling of higher education, the role of soft skills with AI technology and who is responsible for teaching those skills, income inequality, and a discussion on what we actually mean when we refer to the skills gap.

I’m also on a mission to reframe soft skills. Soft skills are power skills. If you can build relationships, influence, and communicate your ideas in a powerful narrative with impact, those are power skills. There’s nothing soft about those skills.

by Nicolle

Travel, feminism, gender identity, and the romance of Venice

Radiolab has truly outdone itself this time. While Radiolab consistently brings a good story game, right up there with This American Life and Snap Judgement, they wooed me so hard this week with the episode, The Gondolier.

This episode is a story of identity wrapped in a story of journalistic inquiry wrapped in an Italian travelogue. The storytelling is pure enjoyment and the sound production makes it a party for your ears.

Listen here.

by Nicolle

How Artificial Intelligence will change the world

“Many people I know which are older than I am usually talk about having one job, and one job for life. However, almost everybody who is the age of my students are talking about having multiple jobs. I will be a consultant here, a consultant there, I will work with this company for three days and so on.” Maja Pantic, professor of affective and behavioral computing at Imperial College London,

The Guardian Science podcast hosted a live event on How Artificial Intelligence will change the world featuring a panel of leading scientists and a robot ethicist. The podcast is worth listening to in full, especially as they go in depth to talk about the different between narrow and general AI and the implications of general AI.

Like most panels on the future of AI, the discussion changes to jobs and how artificial intelligence will affect them.

Maja Pantic, professor of affective and behavioral computing at Imperial College London:

“The assembly jobs, those are already taken by robots, industry robots [that perform] very simple techniques. However, I believe the Fourth Industrial Revolution is about to come or is coming each day closer. It’s because of how the whole world is moving. There are a couple of things that are important. So one is digitization. Many people I know which are older than I am usually talk about having one job, and one job for life. However, almost everybody who is the age of my students are talking about having multiple jobs. I will be a consultant here, a consultant there, I will work with this company for three days and so on. So it will be the way we do the jobs. Because we have the internet and we can have a lot of different jobs and doing these pieces and giving our expertise as needed. A lot of jobs will be a symbiosis between machines and humans. Doctors already do that.”

Alan Winfield, professor of robot ethics at UWE, Bristol:

“It’s pretty clear that when a job is threatened, even by change, it doesn’t even have to be threatened by going out of existence, just by change, and it’s a job that has a great deal of political or social voice, there is going to be a lot of grumbling heard. Any routine job that you can give a crisp problem definition of, that is somewhat threatened. It may take a long while to before you get there but that’s why I have the best, safest job ever: philosopher. Nobody has a clue what it is, not even philosophers! But in general this is true for many of jobs. Many jobs have some weird core where it’s slightly ill defined what’s going on. But then you have the routine parts and they can be automated. Whether we want to automate them or not depends on how we want to style the job.”

Maja again, this time on the tech industry’s poaching of the brightest minds on AI:

“All these PhD students which they took and all these post-docs which they took, were educated by us, by public money. So it’s absolutely not true that the innovation is theirs and that it can remain in private domain. This is absolutely outrageous that we currently have Google, Amazon, and Facebook, like five companies that are taking absolutely everybody in academia, the  phd’s and post-docs. Because we don’t have the next generation. Who will actually educate those people who need reeducation? Who will educate our kids? I think this is outrageous that they will also – because they bought all these really smart guys, they will actually own the innovation.”

Thought parking:

  • Career education is stuck in the one job for life mentality.
  • I wonder how different generations will adapt to jobs that are a symbiosis between human and machine. I’ve had plenty of managers who can’t grasp PowerPoint and CRMs. How do managers plan for that symbiosis now?
  • Job styling seems like it could be a job in it’s own right – an ethnographer who observes the day to day work of employees, conducts interviews with those who do the tasks, and develops recommendations on how automation can improve job categories.
  • I’ve read plenty of articles about tech companies poaching from academia. I always thought of it in positive terms – the researchers are going to make so much more money and see their impact so much quicker – yet never considered the implications for future generations. Each time tech poaches from academia there are fewer people to teach, mentor, engage, and contribute to the higher education communities.