Shared Links (weekly) Dec 1, 2024
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Linked – Why Workplace Well-Being Programs Don’t Achieve Better Outcomes
Well-being programs place the responsibility for managing employee mental health in the hands of the employees, who have no power to change the things causing the problem.
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Linked – You Can’t Make Friends With The Rockstars
That seems to be what happens in the tech journalism space. We have a list of people who’ve created successful companies and made a ton of money doing it, and everyone is supposed to assume that they are so bright they can do it over and over again. Then we are surprised when Elon buys Twitter and runs it into the ground or when Meta can’t find a market for the Metaverse. Microsoft spends billions upon billions of dollars on AI without any hope of making a profit for years while conducting rounds of layoffs to offset those costs. We assume they know what they’re doing because they’ve succeeded in other markets before, and the press doesn’t challenge them when they say provably false things.
It’s the Halo Effect. We assume that successful people are smart and kind and live healthy lives, especially if they are white men. When they contradict this picture we’ve painted, we loathe to admit it, let alone call it out in an interview. It’s more cognitively comfortable for us to continue believing they are competent and will figure it out.
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Nike’s new CEO seems like the career ladder is still intact, but even his story shows us it’s not.
I wish him well, but let’s not pretend like this story of going from an internship to running the company is possible. It wasn’t technically possible for him either.
If Hill had not left, it’s entirely possible he would have been laid off in July, like many other senior leaders at Nike.
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Linked – As If the Job Market Wasn’t Bad Enough, Intuit Makes Things Exponentially Worse
Most managers and even former peers are under strict orders never to say anything, positive or negative, when contacted as a reference for a former coworker.
To paraphrase, HR and legal folks know that if the former employee doesn’t get that position, everything they say will be used against them in a future legal claim that they harmed the job prospects of a former employee unfairly.
So it was somewhat shocking to see the CEO of Intuit not only say this but put it in writing:
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Linked – Junior tech workers can’t find jobs. Are coding boot camps in trouble?
The job market for people who can write code has fallen apart. Partly because of AI and partly because companies over-invested in engineers and tools that never could be as successful as they thought. (Remember when we were all going to be hanging out in the metaverse?) Of course, the people running these companies weren’t held accountable for those choices, but I’m past hoping that will ever happen.
So, now the mantra will be “learn AI,” at least until that market isn’t everything companies are currently promising and we go through this whole thing again.
It’s best not to get comfortable with anything in the current tech marketplace. The skills in high demand today won’t be those in high demand five years from now. If you’re entering college and embarking on a technology major, the tech will be changed by the time you graduate.
