Though Intel forecasts flat sales in 2019, people inside the company said this week’s layoffs don’t appear to be strictly a cost-cutting move. Rather, they said the cuts appeared to reflect a broad change in the way Intel is approaching its internal technical systems… Intel will now consolidate operations under a single contractor, the Indian technology giant Infosys.
Intel is laying off hundreds of their IT staff, according to the Oregonian. Unless you or a friend or family member is immediately affected, you’ve probably scrolled right past the news. That’s no shame on you; stories of layoffs are a dime a dozen in our newsfeeds. It’s easy to scroll right on past.
One of the things that sort of keeps us up at night is if you think about the way that we check that our current systems are fair in, say, criminal justice is that we have a system of appeals. We have a system of rulings. You actually have a thing called due process, which means you can check the evidence that’s being brought against you. You can say, “Hey, this is incorrect.” You can change the data. You can say, “Hey, you’ve got the wrong information about me.”
This is actually not how AI works right now. In many cases, decisions are gonna be made about you. You’re not even aware that an AI system is working in the background. Let’s take HR for a classic case in point right now. Now, many of you have probably tried sending CVs and résumés in to get a job. What you may not know is that in many cases, companies are using AI systems to scan those résumés, to decide whether or not you’re worthy of an interview, and that’s fine until you start hearing about Amazon’s system, where they took two years to design, essentially, an AI automatic résumé scanner. – How will AI change your life? AI Now Institute founders Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker explain.
Everyone who works on AI products needs to understand the ethical implications of their work. AI engineers and product managers need to understand their product’s impact on users. Business leaders and engineers need to bring in diverse voices and specialties to help ensure their product doesn’t have negative implications. Human resources leads need to hire interdisciplinary workers, who connect the dots between design, engineering, and business performance.
All of this is of course easier said than done. Judging by the many, many, many fails in AI product development, we aren’t even close to that point inside of AI organizations. These “fails” have a tremendous impact on people’s lives.
Ethics is a loaded term and businesses aren’t quite sure what ethics and AI even looks like. Just look at the recent dissolving of Google’s AI ethics board. While many questioned who got to be on that board, many others questioned exactly how an ethics board translates into ethical business practices and products.
Thankfully there are several individuals and organizations working at the intersection of AI and ethics. My personal favorite is the AI Now Institute. I could have pulled so many other impactful quotes from their recent interview on the Recode Decode podcast. Have a listen to that episode to get your head around the many challenges of AI and ethics. And if you’re really into AI and ethics, check out this list of people to follow on Twitter.
Now that my first book on the future of work is moving forward, I’m turning my research towards AI and ethics, specifically how organizations train talent to reduce bias in AI products. So expect more of this type of content in the coming months.
I’m also speaking at Portland’s Machine Learning for All conference on how to have curious conversations. I’ll be teaching software and machine learning engineers how to hone their soft skills to build connections and work interdisciplinary to ensure they’re bringing the right voices into their work.
Last year I MC’d the Women in Travel conference. I told an audience full of 400+ influencers that my goal was to be a guest on a podcast. And Lisette Austin, aka Jet Set Lisette, delivered. She asked me to join her podcast, The Globe Trotter Lounge, to talk about global careers.
It was a delightful conversation full of fun. I’m thrilled how it turned out. In the episode I share all kinds of advice on global careers, the future of work, and why travelers are in the best position to navigate our new world of work.
I honestly could talk to Lisette for hours because she has such a fabulous perspective on all things travel (plus she loves languages too!). Subscribe and listen to her other podcast and episodes while you’re visiting.
Update March 2020: I wrote the book! It’s published and lovely! Check it out here.
I just learned how to write a first draft of a book. I’m fresh off of four months of nearly daily writing to wrangle 60,427 words into a first draft. Actually I topped out around 68,000 but chopped it down before handing it over to a developmental editor who will cut it down even more. My first draft is quite the beast.
Wrangling your ideas and thoughts into a coherent narrative isn’t easy. It doesn’t come naturally to most. The funny thing about writing a book is that you don’t need to be good at writing to write a book. Instead, you need to be good at discipline. You need to commit to writing until it’s all out of your head and fight the feeling of quitting because your words look so awkward outside of your head. You also have to slay the procrastination monster on the regular.
I’ve spent the last four months learning how to write a first draft. I learned how to manage the logistics of writing at volume. I learned how to build an outline, find a pace that worked for me, and manage my writing time. Most importantly, I learned how overcome doubt.
Writing a book is a BFD and it’s pretty overwhelming at the start. So I started the process by breaking it down into manageable parts. I’ve conquered the first part: writing a first draft.
Here’s what worked to get me there and what might work for you if you’re trying to write your first draft.
Talespin, a VR/AR/AI company is bringing soft skills training to organizations using VR and AI. Call it a Choose Your Own Virtual Reality Management Adventure, these training tools help managers and leadership develop the soft skills they need to perform in complex organizations.
Employers are in a desperate search for employees with soft skills. As we retreat more into our digital spaces we are collectively losing the ability to have conversations with one another. The result is that our relationships, collaboration, and creativity suffer in the workplace. Soft skills are all about people: how to work with, talk to, learn from, give feedback to, negotiate with, listen to, create with, people.
Enter more tech to solve the problem.
My first reaction was this: shouldn’t people learn people skills through interaction with… people? Why are we outsourcing people skills to the virtual machines? How do fake humans teach humans how to be more human?
Also this tech is an indirect threat to my own work. I teach people and organizations how to build soft skills. From relationship building to negotiation to how to have curious conversations, I help people build their soft skills. So yeah, maybe I felt a bit threatened when I first saw it.
Then I stepped back. And I looked closer. And I saw the truly wild stuff going on with this tech. From the article:
“The great thing about VR is you can do something that’s rare in nature, and give people extra repetitions,” Bailenson says. “The cool part of using computer graphics for this, virtual humans, is you can go through as the manager and have this difficult conversation—then you can relive the experience from the point of view of the employee, get to hear your voice coming out of an avatar you’ve chosen to look like you. Now that you’ve got this newly emotionally understood information from being on the receiving end of this bad news, you get to repeat it and do it again.” – Boss Acting Nicer Recently? You May Have VR to Thank
Honestly, I can think of at least five managers from my past who could have used training like this. A lot of HR Tech companies are developing AI that will make your manager worse. Talespin is using AI and VR in an attempt to make them better.
People still need to practice building soft skills outside of a VR experience, so my work isn’t going away any time soon. But it’s wild to see this type of training applied using new technology. In the future I’d love to see research around how this emotional impact from virtual reality scenarios changes in managers for the better.
I’m also stoked for all the potential types of jobs emerging tech creates. As a creative who runs in HR circles (and worked in HR), I find the HR industry borderline stifling for creative types. Seeing a creative HR product that aims to improve the lives of employees is a welcome surprise.
I’m also curious about employees in this field. I’m curious who writes the scripts, how they work with designers, how the characters are modeled. After all, it’s real humans who build the fake humans who teach humans how to be more human.
I’m curious what type of employees they hire. What skills and backgrounds make up their teams? What type of employees succeed at their company? (Update: it looks like men. More than 90% of their 40+ employees on LinkedIn are men… that’s obviously a problem, especially when it comes to scenarios navigating inclusion in the workplace)
I’m fresh off a much needed vacation. I road tripped down Highway 1 and I binged some seriously good podcasts.
My two favs:
Heaven’s Gate: A deep look into the lives and leaders of Heaven’s Gate, the cult that made international headlines in the late 90s when 39 members killed themselves to board a UFO in the heavens. This isn’t a salacious look – it’s an examination of the members, families affected, reasons for joining, lives of the leaders, and the cultural context surrounding the cult. What I really loved is the examination of how we other people. It’s easy to say, holy shit all those people were crazy, but like anything in life, it’s a lot more complicated than that. On top of that, the host, Glen Washington, shares his experience growing up in a doomsday religion.
At 10 episodes, it’s an ideal road trip podcast.
Bubble: I don’t normally listen to fiction podcasts but made an exception for this one after reading about it on the Atlantic’s Top 50 Podcasts of 2018. They had me with the show description:
“The rules of the show are this: You either live a protected life somewhere like Fairhaven—a so-called deliberate community reminiscent of Portland, Oregon, that is encased in a literal bubble—or in the monster-infested brush beyond. The story follows mismatched roommates living in a dodgy part of town. Morgan kills monsters; Annie then sells the creatures’ blood on the black market to get people high.”
Click to download, please. It didn’t disappoint. The show is so damn funny, ridiculous, and spot on with it’s cultural critique that I’m recommending it to everyone. With 8 episodes, it’ll transport you to familiar-yet-not-quite world, keeping you distracted from traffic or any of the bored bits on a road trip.
I just fell in love with the Women Who Code job board. They’re making job hunting slightly easier by including two pieces of critical content alongside their job postings.
The first is an overview of the interview process, providing much needed transparency into a stressful process.
Transparency ftw
The second piece of content is an interactive list of company benefits that actually matter to me. I look at hundreds of jobs a month. I rarely see such forward thinking filters.
Benefit search
Talk about the future of work is dominated by robots taking our jobs. While that type of content makes for good metrics, the robot narrative ignores how organizations are evolving into better places of work. Organizations are finally shedding outdated Baby Boomer models of work. They’re open to experimenting with new ways of work and management.
I teach people how to find remote jobs. Each week I round up the most interesting remote jobs that I find online. I’m constantly running into companies that are changing the status quo. Many of them offer benefits like this:
Benefits at GlitchGlitch’s inclusion statement
I’ve got a massive crush on Glitch, the company whose benefits are listed above. They get it.
Companies like Glitch are the future of work. They’re also what we miss when we only talk about robots in the future of work.
When job boards like Women Who Code include searchable filters like parental leave, 100% work from home, and unconscious bias training, they signal that workers have a choice. Workers can choose to work for old school companies that preach meritocracy but believe work only happens between 9-5. Or they can find an innovative company that believes in lifting up underrepresented voices, flexible work, and supporting parents in the workplace.
The majority of career services professionals hate resume reviews. They can’t say this out right of course. Career services leadership and university administration expects their department to function as a resume review service. I know this because it was common knowledge when I worked in career services. Full confession, I also hated resume reviews when I was an MBA career coach.
Career services leadership has access to an easy to solution that will put an end to resume reviews: Teach students how to use new resume platforms that use artificial intelligence to review and score resumes.
Share it with your students or adopt the process in your own department. Then think of all the things career services could do if you didn’t have resume reviews. And while you’re questioning resumes reviews, start questioning all the things career services is doing that need to change.
Spend any time in future of work or higher education circles, and you’ll notice how often people throw around the term lifelong learning. It’s incredibly in fashion to tell people how they’ll need to become lifelong learners. Beyond that though aren’t a lot of resources on how people should make this shift.
Degreed is out to change that. This interview with the founder of Degreed is an inside look at the challenges and opportunities of cultivating life long learning among employees.
I really appreciated this podcast episode, especially where they talk about learning to learn and creating a learning environment in the workplace. Plus I learned about an entire new category of YouTube videos: bad corporate training.
If you spend any time in future of work circles or higher education, you’ll like this perspective.
Note: I wanted to title this post What We’re Missing When We Only Talk About Robots as the Future of Work. The future of work is filled with new ways of working that challenge traditional career paths and organizational structures. I’m going to spend more time writing about these organizations just as soon as I finish up the first draft of my book and my life returns to semi-normal.
I’m crushing on a small company called The Pudding. They’re a journalism meets data engineering company. As they describe it, their work “explain(s) ideas debated in culture with visual essays.” And they do wild reporting, like The World Through the Eyes of the US and Music Borders, an interactive map of the top songs in the world in May 2018 (including audio!).
Their company culture is what really wooed me. Here’s how they put it:
We’re six full-time journalist-engineers who operate as a collective rather than hierarchical team.
I love that there’s no corporate fluff here. They continue:
Much of our work is done autonomously, with individuals choosing their essays and owning the whole story, from research to code. Each team member can do every step: research and reporting, data analysis, design, writing, and code.
Hot damn. They paint a picture of an organization where people own their own projects, collaborate, and bring a seriously impressive set of hybrid skills with them.
The description continues:
So we experiment, a lot. The creative process feels more like workshopping a movie script than critiquing a bar chart. Consequently, many of our ideas are killed during production, but we wouldn’t have it any other way! It means we’re trying unproven, never-done-before things.
I’ve worked in creative jobs and non creative ones. The ability to workshop an idea and get feedback is an important skill that’s rarely mastered outside of creative teams. Companies frequently talk about the need for collaboration skills. Yet it’s hard to pin down exactly what they mean. Then you see it laid out like this and you instantly recognize it. Work at this company and you’ll collaborate to create impressive pieces of work.
But here’s what really got me: transparency.
They’re transparent about how they make money and how much they pay people.
From The Pudding website:
Our primary revenue sources are 1) essay sponsors and 2) white-labeled content. Sponsorship is akin to what you might find on a podcast…”this article was made possible by Blue Apron.”
Now take a look at their salaries:
TITLE
COMPENSATION
Intern
Not currently offering internships (follow our socials for updates)
Jr. Journalist-Engineer
$70k
Journalist-Engineer
$82k
Sr. Journalist-Engineer
$100k
Editor
$115k
Could you imagine your company doing this? Could you imagine how it might change your company culture if the place you worked embraced transparency around spending, budgets, and salaries?
More organizations should follow this lead. With this level of detail you know what you’re going to get as an employee. If you’re reading this and thinking, I don’t want to work in a place like this, good. At least you know. It’s usually quite difficult to figure out what a place is really like without talking to someone.
The Pudding puts it all on the table.
The future of work needs more transparency. The Pudding is setting the example.
I leave you with the number one song in Iceland from May 2018.
