In all the talk about eliminating Section 230, I think this gets lost, and I’m glad Jessi is writing about. “Our reliance on the Internet, especially during the pandemic, is evidence that Section 230 continues to work as intended, despite its age. To set an expiration on the law is to accept that maybe we’ve…
If you use this plugin, or really any plugin, keep ’em up to date! “Hackers are actively exploiting a vulnerability that allows them to execute commands and malicious scripts on Websites running File Manager, a WordPress plugin with more than 700,000 active installations, researchers said on Tuesday. Word of the attacks came a few hours…
I’ve worked for remote teams for a few years now, and I can honestly say that this is true. What’s more, every time I read someone complain about how remote working isn’t working for the organization, as you read the details it almost always is really a failure to do this: “A recent MIT survey…
And this really brings me back to my point, that we do a poor job of truly understanding science, statistics and cause and effect. We believe that algorithms have all been well-thought out, and produce a “true” result, even when they are trying to predict something as unpredictable as what traffic will look like 20 years from now. We assume social science studies are giving us the “right” answer for how to educate people, or train them for the best outcomes, without considering what we are teaching them about the larger world. We assume that we can tweak one belief, or one thing, without human beings reacting to those changes in unpredictable ways, all the while thinking our one change will cause the reaction we DO predict.
We assume a lot that should never be assumed. We over-simplify a world that actually has more influences than we can possibly account for, and assume that what is really a small statistical difference represents a universal truth.
It doesn’t. There are no simple answers. It takes hard work, hard discussions, and lots of listening to figure out the best way forward. Don’t wait for AI to tell you what to do, it may be missing quite a bit.
Most of these sound awful, and the ones that are “not so voluntary” attempts to make sure workers are engaged sound even worse.
Actually, I suspect they are doing a lot more harm to engagement than good.
There are ways to network during this time. They’re different, they’re a little more work, and they take some getting used to. But they don’t need to be ridiculous, and they definitely don’t need to be forced.
In fact, this is a great time to simply send someone a note asking for 15-30 minutes of their time. Most of us are pretty open to doing exactly that with coworkers or peers in our industry. I’d be happy to find some time to have a conversation with you about my industry, or mental health, or blogging. Or even to just have a coffee or beer with virtually. We don’t even need to be on our webcams if you don’t want.
See, isn’t that better than having 50 people on mute while the CEO talks, or getting randomly matched with coworkers?
Ugh, the introvert in me shudders to think about some of these. Please, don’t. Just ask someone to get a coffee like we used to.
Thanks to a mention in a recent newsletter from Manager Tools, I found this story about the Choluteca bridge in Honduras, and even though this happened in 1998, it felt like a 2020 thing, right? The designers of the new Choluteca Bridge tried their best to build a state-of-the-art structure that withstood a category 5…