To Raise Productivity, Let More Employees Work from Home The study: Nicholas Bloom and graduate student James Liang, who is also a cofounder of the Chinese travel website Ctrip, gave the staff at Ctrip’s call center the opportunity to volunteer to work from home for nine months. Half the volunteers were allowed to telecommute; the rest remained in the office as a control group. Survey responses and performance data collected at the conclusion of the study revealed that, in comparison with the employees who came into the office, the at-home workers were not only happier and less likely to quit but also more productive. The challenge: Should more of us be doing our jobs in our pajamas? Bloom: The results we saw at Ctrip blew me away. HBR: And how much did Ctrip save on furniture and space? It estimated that it saved $1,900 per employee for the nine months. Lower attrition rates make sense—working from home gives you more flexibility if you have kids and so forth—but how do you explain the productivity increases? It’s not so simple. Absolutely.
the supervillain’s guide to saving the internet I have been something of a critic of our professional online writing industry for some time, and I have never been shy about criticizing the people who work in it. Chief among my complains is that online writing is a culture that thinks it isn’t one — that is, our class of online writing professionals think of themselves as representing a diverse range of opinions and ideologies, but subtle social and professional pressures among them tends to produce provincialism and conformity. The hardest thing is getting most people who write for a living online to acknowledge the ways in which advancement in that domain tends to require adhering to unspoken but powerful social codes. Yet despite this criticism I am increasingly sympathetic to this group, in general, as I think they are in a no-win industry at the moment. The world of online writing is broken in a way that is very public and well-acknowledged. I get bothered by all the garbage that gets pumped out every day. Nobody wants this.
Hiring the Other Half Back Disclosure: I am a co-founder at OnboardIQ, a dashboard built for operations teams to screen and scale workforces “You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone / For the times, they are a-changing” - Bob Dylan Many of us work in tech and product, and aren’t aware of ongoing changes in the growing labor marketplace. I thought I’d objectively share a bit on what our team at OnboardIQ has learned from working with and building software for the modern workforce. Labor is following the path of cloud computing. 34-36% of the American workforce now consists of freelancers, including temps, moonlighters and independent contractors, and expected to hit 40% by 2020 (McKinsey, Intuit). Service providers have the power. The workforce is now truly independent and company-agnostic. Labor is matching skillsets with services. New challenges from the shifting labor marketplace. These problems are not limited in scope to the on-demand economy affect all parties. Sourcing Screening Management Reality:
"Information asymmetry" cuts both ways They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work. – A Soviet-era political joke according to Wikipedia, though I've only seen it in an English text describing the C++ object model Having been born in the USSR, #talkpay – people disclosing their compensation on May 1 - put a series of smiles on my face, expressing emotions that I myself don't quite understand. The numbers certainly left me pleased with the state of the oppressed proletariat (web designers, computer programmers, etc.) in the rotting capitalist society. I do hope that the $125K/year proletarian will not feel resentment towards the $128K/year guy in the next cubicle. "Hope", yes; "count on" – no, which is why I won't be tweeting about my compensation. So, yeah, a series of smiles and a range of emotions. Compensation negotiations are presently like a stock exchange where only your counterparty can see the ticker and order book. Which is probably very true and relevant, but it cuts both ways. #talkpay…
The Housing Bubble and the Lesser Depression: Either the Very Sharp Dean Baker or I Am Hopelessly… — Bull Market The Housing Bubble and the Lesser Depression: Either the Very Sharp Dean Baker or I Am Hopelessly Confused Over at Equitable Growth: And, of course, I think that it is him… Dean maintains and has long maintained that the financial crisis was froth that had little impact on the overall economy: Dean Baker: The Simple Reason for the Long Downturn: Housing Bubble Burst: “Many economists and business writers view the duration and severity of the downturn as… …[having] something to do with the financial crisis… looming as a dark cloud hanging over the head of an otherwise healthy economy. Fortunately, for arithmetic fans the story was never very difficult. I agree that the vanishing of $8 trillion of housing equity pushed private consumption down by an annual amount of $400 billion after the bubble burst. But. There are other things going on as well. The first $250 billion of the fall in construction spending had no net effect on the level of economic activity.
A Cynic’s Guide To Fintech — Bull Market A Cynic’s Guide To Fintech Several business models that are bound to fail — and a few that might have a chance A pal working in and around the VC industry asked me the other week what I thought about financial technology, or as the unlovely abbreviation has it, “fintech”. Fintech business model #1. There are a lot of people out there who have expertise in data science, and who think that the incumbents in the industry don’t have sophisticated risk-based pricing because their technological skills aren’t up to the task of identifying risks. This is not true. There are two reasons why fine-grained risk based pricing has been such a catalogue of failure. And the second is that the customers get to make decisions too. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s been tried a lot of times, by very clever people, and it’s worked precisely once — Direct Line car insurance, and they were attacking a much less competitive industry than anything that exists today. Viability rating — (2/5)
Join the Engineering Leisure Class When you want to make something new, there are three strategies Work within an existing organization: Whether it’s a government agency, a non-profit, or a corporation, working within an existing organization can give you the resources to attempt something big. The limitations of this strategy are that (1) you can only pursue projects that fit the organization’s strategic goals and (2) as organizations get larger, they develop inertia that makes it hard to gather support for your idea — especially if it’s crazy.Form a startup: This is the glorious way to bring something new into the world. If you have the right team, enough passion, and enough luck, you can change the world. Let’s add a fourth strategy Work on your idea full time without pay: This strategy has all the benefits of a side project but allows you to focus on your work without having to sacrifice family, friends, or health. Engineers are wealthy even if they don’t know it My experience leaving paid work
Our economies are messed up. And the cause is the Internet. — Bull Market Imagine that someone told you that three of the biggest stories of the past few years — the financial crisis, exploding economic inequality, and the National Security Agency spy scandal — weren’t actually different stories at all. Different in detail, yes, but essentially identical in their deeper cause. The cause, they go on to say, wasn’t greed or fear or the age of terrorism or anything else linked to human fallibility, but technology — specifically, computation and its networked manifestation, the Internet. Sound crazy? Well, it doesn’t if you hear out Jaron Lanier’s full argument. Lanier is a Silicon Valley guru and one of the pioneers of virtual reality technology; he’s helped build today’s technological reality and is anything but a Luddite about technology and its potential for helping people. Let’s take things in turn. I’ve never thought about the financial crisis as being primarily a consequence of technology. As a writer, Lanier builds his works out of near aphorisms: OK.