Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #130
One of the richest men in the world started out working at McDonald's but that's not the underdog story you might think it is.
This week, I was reading one of the many newsletters I subscribe to keep up with my various interests as well as find exciting things to share, and I came across a description of Jeff Bezos that read something like “A man who started working at McDonald’s and wound up one of the richest people alive.”
This is the start of a great story. It’s the classic American tale of someone pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and working hard to go from nothing to building spaceships!
It’s also not that simple.
Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. Each week, I’ll share information about careers and workplace culture, mental health in the workplace, talent development, and important information about privacy, security, and legal tech.
You can find out all about me here - Mike McBride Online.
It is true that Jeff Bezos once worked at McDonald’s. He was 16. Like many of us born in the sixties and seventies, he had a fast-food job to make money as a teenager. I had one. I also worked one summer on a farm picking corn. That didn’t make me a migrant worker.
Unlike many of us, he went on to attend Princeton. He also had parents with the means to invest a few hundred thousand dollars to help him get started with Amazon.
Was he smart as a whip, talented, and did he work hard to be successful? Absolutely. Many people are intelligent, talented, and hard-working, and no one is writing about their successes. They didn’t have the resources that Jeff Bezos started with. They couldn’t dream of paying for Princeton; thus, they didn’t get an Ivy League education or connections. They don’t have family money to help them start a new business.
Let’s not skip those parts of the story. Let’s not forget those parts of the story when the next media outlet decides to put out an article on the morning habits of Jeff Bezos and how we all could be successful if we stuck to those same habits.
We don’t have what he started with. Stop using people with things most of us cannot access as examples young people should follow without explaining their advantages, and maybe stop advocating for policies that assume anyone could do what Jeff did because he did not rise from poverty-level work to create Amazon. Stop expecting poor people to do what he did not.
Careers and the Workplace
If you’ve not read Ed Zitron’s takes on what is wrong with the technology industry, you can get an excellent overview in the first episode of his new podcast. Pay special attention to how much money CEOs and shareholders make while laying off tens of thousands of workers.
I saw several different takes on recent data about returning to the office. If you’re a CEO looking to get everyone back in person, you may not like this:
CEOs Are Using Return To Office Mandates To Mask Poor Management
RTO doesn’t improve company value, but does make employees miserable: Study
Did all of us getting paid an annual salary enjoy the extra day of unpaid labor yesterday?
Training and Development
Being a remote worker creates specific challenges when it comes to learning and development. It’s not impossible, but you must be more deliberate about developing your people when they aren’t sitting right there. I’d argue we should have been more deliberate even when we were in the same office, but I digress. This article has some decent advice on how to think about getting your remote team up to speed.
Investing in the Development of Young, Remote Employees
Mental Health in the Workplace
When you're young and not on the standard education/career path due to mental health, there's no career history or learned skills to fall back on. I think many employers would view you as unemployable in our current environment. I'm not saying that should be how it is, but it is likely the way it is. My story illustrates the path out of that, but it also contains some privilege. I was able to go to therapy. My family gave me a place to live while I wasn't working. I had access to learning tools. I had to work hard to create opportunities to learn new skills, but I also found myself in places where I could do that. I had help.
Tech workers spend a lot of time with technology, but do we spend that time mindfully? - Can Mindfulness Protect Worker Well-Being In A Digital Workplace?
Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech
Let’s talk about AI. In the race to embrace AI, there are some things we might want to stop and consider:
Bruce Schneier has some thoughts about how Americans have treated “frontiers” in the past. Things like just taking what you want and ignoring rules in the name of “progress.” - How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI.
One of those things that AI tech is going to keep taking? - Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret.
An area of the internet that is making changes to account for fake AI trash? - AI Junk Already Ruining Dating Apps? - Tinder is already moving to using video selfies to verify that you’re real instead of a bunch of AI photos, but I feel like that’s a short-term solution, right? How hard is it going to be to create AI video selfies?
In the Rundown newsletter yesterday, there was also this tidbit about Klarna:
Klarna estimates the assistant will drive $40M in additional profit in 2024.
The chatbot finished the equivalent work of 700 full-time employees.
The average time to resolution dropped from 11 minutes to 2 minutes, with the bot available 24/7 and able to converse in over 35 languages.
The Swedish firm laid off 700 employees in 2022 and said it will no longer be hiring new staff outside of engineering due to AI.
All of this is to say that technology companies are spending trillions of dollars on AI tools with almost no regulations and very little consideration for the actual damage that may be caused by it. Employment and labor concerns are high on that list, but there are also real concerns about fraud, deep fakes, and environmental issues as well.
Is there already too much money tied up in AI to slow the train down? I doubt it will be slowed, and we’ll deal with the consequences for generations.
Conversely:
In non-AI news:
This is a scary read - How your sensitive data can be sold after a data broker goes bankrupt
This Was Entirely Predictable - Hackers Tricking People Into Facial Scans
The risk level is outrageous. As Techdirt points out, the more we require facial scanning across wide swaths of the internet, the fewer people will question it. And thus, they'll get fooled into providing it to someone they shouldn't be.
Craig Ball on search - Lessons from Lousy Lexical Search (and Tips to Do Better)
Five Great Reads on Cyber, Data, and Legal Discovery for February 2024
That’s all, folks. If you found something interesting in this week’s newsletter, please share it with your friends. It’s the best way to help support the effort I put in each week to share this with you.