How Much Does Apple Pay Jony Ive?

The salary of the man who has designed every Apple product from the iMac to the Apple Watch has never been disclosed to the SEC or the press. The last time he filed an SEC Form 4 — required whenever there’s a material change in an insider’s position — was July 2009.

According to Apple, Ive is exempt from SEC rules because he’s not what the commission calls a “Section 16” employee. Despite his title — chief design officer — the company does not classify him as a director or officer of the company.

Woah.

Via Daring Fireball

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Career, Product

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Über-Greedy

Uber is going back to court next summer:

Next summer, a federal court in California will hear arguments in a lawsuit that could change Uber forever. The lawsuit challenges the way Uber and other so-called transportation network companies classify their drivers as independent contractors rather than employees. But if that case goes poorly for Uber, the ride-hailing company already has a fallback plan: the states.

State governments in Ohio and Florida are considering bills that would statutorily define Uber drivers as independent contractors and not employees entitled to certain benefits and protections, like medical insurance and wage guarantees. They join three other states — Arkansas, North Carolina, and Indiana — that have successfully passed bills classifying drivers for transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft as contractors, according to Reuters.

Uber just received another round of funding that could value it at over $64.6 billion, but they’ll not interested in having any of their actual drivers as employees, just the people behind computers in Silicon Valley.

Sounds greedy as shit to me.

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Business, Career

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“Silicon Valley Startups Aren’t Really Creating Many Jobs”

“One theory is that companies over the last 10-15 years, unlike in the ’90s, don’t need to hire as many people because the software — loosely described as machines — is doing the work,” he explained. “It’s the classic case of how many people actually work for Facebook versus its market capitalization. Another theory is that a lot of these companies get bought up or they fail — and if you fail, you can’t hire more workers.”

Economists Suggest Silicon Valley Startups Aren’t Really Creating Many Jobs

Technology is absolutely phasing out jobs permanently but you also have many companies that won’t offer to help educate and modernize employees with skill sets and tools they need to be more relevant in today’s job market.

So just learn on your own, right? Sure. For me that’s pretty easy. I can look at code and read books and pick up new technologies pretty quickly, but most people are not that adept with technology. Technology is scary to a lot of people.

I see it firsthand when I go home for the holidays and I become the ‘gadget fixer’ for everyone. I’m also the IT department for my mother-in-law, and occasionally, her boss. My wife also has an aunt who’s solution to maxing out her iPhone with thousands of photos is to just buy a new iPhone with more capacity.

I’m going off on a bit of a tangent but my point is these average, everyday people I’m describing are the same people that are susceptible to being made redundant by technology.

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Career, Finance

Focusing Your Creative Energy

“‎The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.” 

— Bruce Lee

Early in my career as a web designer I had trouble focusing. I started off projects strong, but I had trouble following through on them.

Looking back at my various failed starts and poorly executed work, I think of Cyclops from the X-Men series (Jerry Seinfeld says all we men consider ourselves low-level superheroes). Cyclops can’t control the energy beams that come out of his eyes — they’re extremely powerful, but also destructive and a waste of energy. Think of a fire hydrant without a hose attached.

Cyclops needs the help of special eyewear to harness his optical energy so that he can point it in the direction he wants, with the intensity he wants.

Creativity is the same way for me and lot of other people: our brains are inundated with tons of great ideas, but without focus they go out scatter-shot and wind up as unfinished projects, or worse yet, never make it into a sketchbook. It ends up being all wasted energy. I was never diagnosed with ADD as a child, but I feel as though I easily could have been.

Focus is still something I have to work on daily, but the good news is I’ve figured out techniques and habits over the years to channel my creative energy in one direction at a time. 

Below is a list of tools and technics I use to help me achieve focus. They can turn you into a creative Cyclops too.

Get a Notebook and Pen

A notebook and pen are essential before you even attempt to address the other sections. I don’t care if it’s Field Notes, a Moleskine, Austin Kleon’s Steal Like An Artist Journal, or a handful of loose sheets folded in half and stapled together.

Always be ready to write things down where ever you are. If your brain works like mine and you don’t write things down you will forget them. I guarantee it.

Baby Steps

In the movie What About Bob? (YouTube), Bob Wiley (played by Bill Murray) has his first appointment with his new psychiatrist, Dr. Leo Marvin (played by Richard Dreyfus). Bob has a multi-phobic personality and gets anxiety attacks all the time, every day. Doctor Marvin suggests Bob read his book, Baby Steps, which advises people make small, reasonable goals for themselves in the pursuit of their bigger goals. He tells Bob, “For instance, when you leave this office, don’t think about everything you have to do in order to get out of the building, just think to what you must do to get out of this room, and when you get to the hall, deal with that hall…”

We can apply this thinking directly to projects. Break them down from macro to micro. If you have to design a website, don’t think about designing the whole website.

Write down the baby steps:

  1. Capture Client Goals
  2. Request Content/Assets
  3. Create Site Map
  4. Wireframe Key Pages
  5. Design Key Pages 6. …etc.

If you ever reach an step that seems daunting, break that step down into sub-steps.

All I can say about Baby Steps is mash potatoes and gravy.

Checklists

Checklists are very closely related to Baby Steps.

I use checklists specifically for client deliverables and requests. As soon as I complete a request from the client I check that item off my list.

I could write another whole post just on checklist methodologies. You can have project checklists, daily checklists, checklists for your checklists. The checklists are endless.

I recommend reading The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande for a thorough understanding of the power of checklists.

Repeat It In An Email

Whenever I reach a milestone or deadline on a project I email the client (and any other relevant people like project managers, team members) and in the email, I echo back their list of requests I captured.

I do this for two reasons:

  1. it lets the client see you’re listening to them (clients usually don’t notice when you’re paying attention to them, but they hate when you don’t listen to them)

  2. it helps me be sure I didn’t miss anything on my checklist

Tell Siri to Remind You

Most of you have a portable computer on you at any moment. Use it. Maybe you’re at lunch away from your desk and you get a great idea for your project. As soon as you get that idea, pull out your phone and ask Siri or Google Now, “In 15 minutes remind me to change landing page hierarchy based on Jen’s idea…”

Steve Jobs liked to say the computer is “a bicycle for the mind.” I love this phrase. I love it so much I created a Kickstarter project around it. I love it because it’s true. Amplify your mental abilities and creativity with your mobile devices. 

These devices are literally waiting to help you accomplish more.

Now Go Cyclops the Hell Out of Some Projects

I’m going to stop here before I list more tips for creative focus. I think this is a good foundation of ideas you can start applying to your you work right now.

They’re open to changing as needed to match your particular workflow.

If there’s anything you should take away from this it’s the importance of defining your goals and objectives and then breaking them down into manageable, actionable pieces.

You have the creative energy, now unleash it with focus.

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Career, Pyschology

Amabots

Wow, Amazon sounds like a great place to work:

Company veterans often say the genius of Amazon is the way it drives them to drive themselves. “If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot,” said one employee, using a term that means you have become at one with the system.

And:

Some veterans interviewed said they were protected from pressures by nurturing bosses or worked in relatively slow divisions. But many others said the culture stoked their willingness to erode work-life boundaries, castigate themselves for shortcomings (being “vocally self-critical” is included in the description of the leadership principles) and try to impress a company that can often feel like an insatiable taskmaster. Even many Amazonians who have worked on Wall Street and at start-ups say the workloads at the new South Lake Union campus can be extreme: marathon conference calls on Easter Sunday and Thanksgiving, criticism from bosses for spotty Internet access on vacation, and hours spent working at home most nights or weekends.

“One time I didn’t sleep for four days straight,” said Dina Vaccari, who joined in 2008 to sell Amazon gift cards to other companies and once used her own money, without asking for approval, to pay a freelancer in India to enter data so she could get more done. “These businesses were my babies, and I did whatever I could to make them successful.”

Since the article came out, CEO Jeff Bezos has refuted many of the claims in the article.

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Business, Career

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“Writing is rarely considered a serious occupation. Why?”

Each camp has a point, and the existence of both indicates that there’s something deeper at work here, something intrinsic to the value of writing itself. The main reason writing gets contrasted with a “real job” is that writers do very often have outside sources of income, which is not unrelated to the ubiquity of unpaid gigs. It’s led to the assumption that self-proclaimed writers are either nighttime hobbyists, independently wealthy, or unemployed people who’ve landed on a good euphemism. The greater danger comes from the myth that published writers actually are living off their writing—or, more accurately, off the bylined writing you know about. And the first use of that hashtag contributes to the myth: It makes frank discussion of what writing pays (or doesn’t) even more taboo than is already the case. It isn’t a pernicious stereotype that “writer” is rarely a job in the way that “lawyer” or “garbage-collector” are. It’s the truth. And it’s not useful for the handful of writers living entirely off their creative output to pretend as if this is the normal state of affairs.

All Work and No Pay, Phoebe Maltz Bovy

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Career

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Design, Don’t Develop

Jesse Weaver says we don’t need more designers who can code:

Saying designers should code creates a sense that we should all be pushing commits to production environments. Or that design teams and development teams are somehow destined to merge into one team of superhuman, full-stack internet monsters.

Let’s get real here. Design and development (both front end and back end) are highly specialized professions. Each takes years and countless hours to master. To expect that someone is going to become an expert in more than one is foolhardy.

Here’s what we really need: designers who can design the hell out of things and developers who can develop the hell out of things. And we need them all to work together seamlessly.

This requires one key element: empathy.

What we should be saying is that we need more designers who know about code.

A-FUCKING-MEN.

Ten years ago I had decent front-end development chops, but I eventually came to terms with the fact that I was not a developer and would never be one. I’m a designer (who happens to have an aptitude for technical things).

I know about conditionals and loops and arrays and variable typing, but I use it to talk with developers, not to write my own code.

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Career

Robots Will Absolutely Drink All of Our Milkshakes

NYTimes: New Research Says Robots Are Unlikely to Eat Our Jobs:

The McKinsey study analyzes and forecasts the potential impact of so-called digital talent platforms. The report looks at three types of such platforms: job-finding and employee-seeking websites (such as Monster.com and LinkedIn); marketplaces for services (Uber and Upwork, for example); and data-driven talent discovery tools (like Evolv and Knack).

By 2025, McKinsey estimates, these digital talent platforms could add $2.7 trillion a year to global gross domestic product, which would be the equivalent of adding another Britain to the world economy. And the digital tools, the report states, could benefit as many as 540 million people in various ways, including better matches of their skills with jobs, higher wages and shorter stints of unemployment.

Bull-fucking-shit.

I was going to say ‘read between the lines’, but you don’t even need to.

This article is highlighting the macro-economic benefits to companies, not how much people are likely to make (or not make).

I’d like to invite any of the heads of these companies to see how much they can make on these marketplace and talent discovery websites where it’s usually a race to the bottom. Who can do my job the cheapest? Any takers?!

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Business, Career

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Behind every great fortune, is a great crime.

City Paper has an eye-opening inside look at how much you make being an Uber driver in Philly.

So many choice nuggets, here are just a few:

So it’s no wonder the taxi industry is having so much trouble competing with Uber — taxi companies have to pay to maintain, acquire and insure all the cars in a taxi fleet. Uber’s drivers shoulder that burden themselves, with expenses eating around 20 percent of total gross fares. And Uber’s gross fares, according to a Business Insider tipster, are expected to hit $10 billion in 2015.

And:

Driving for UberX isn’t the worst-paying job I’ve ever had. I made less scooping ice cream as a 15-year-old, if you don’t adjust for inflation. If I worked 10 hours a day, six days a week with one week off, I’d net almost $30,000 a year before taxes.

Uber, you know, a company “valued” at 50 billion dollars.

What did Chris Rock say? Behind every great fortune, is a great crime?

via Daring Fireball

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Career, Finance

Origin Stories

Illustrator Jon Contino was interviewed by The Great Discontent:

I started freelancing immediately after college. When you leave school, you’re conceited. I saw other people who were making money and I thought, “I’m better than those guys and I’ll make twice as much as them.” I tried the freelance thing, but I couldn’t get it together–I had no clients and no money. I ended up taking a job at a local agency that served only financial advisors and every client wanted the same thing done in the same way. It was very limiting and I was out of there after two months. The next job I took was for a print broker that did design on the side. Everyone who worked there was a designer, but the majority of their money was made from designing and printing club fliers, so it wasn’t the exact position I was looking for. I also took on some pet projects and got a taste of doing some cool stuff and actually making money. About a year after that, I decided to open up my own studio and try my hand at it because I was done working for someone else.

I love origin stories.

Contino is one of my favorite illustrators, but even guys at the top of their game like him had to start somewhere.

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Career

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