Don’t mess with Dara’s payday.

This past Monday, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi penned an op-ed piece in The New York Times, saying gig workers deserve better in response to California’s new law, Assembly Bill 5, requiring companies like Lyft and Uber to classify their drivers as full-time employees:

Why not just treat drivers as employees? Some of our critics argue that doing so would make drivers’ problems vanish overnight. It may seem like a reasonable assumption, but it’s one that I think ignores a stark reality: Uber would only have full-time jobs for a small fraction of our current drivers and only be able to operate in many fewer cities than today. Rides would be more expensive, which would significantly reduce the number of rides people could take and, in turn, the number of drivers needed to provide those trips. Uber would not be as widely available to riders, and drivers would lose the flexibility they have today if they became employees.

So Uber’s business model can’t support drivers-as-employees. Boohoo.

Let’s be clear though: Uber was not established to provide a flexible lifestyle for drivers.

So what is Khosrowshahi proposing?

I’m proposing that gig economy companies be required to establish benefits funds which give workers cash that they can use for the benefits they want, like health insurance or paid time off. Independent workers in any state that passes this law could take money out for every hour of work they put in. All gig companies would be required to participate, so that workers can build up benefits even if they switch between apps.

Let’s not forget the terms under which Khosrowshahi was hired after Travis Kalanick was forced to resign as Uber’s CEO in 2017:

Dara Khosrowshahi could get a huge payday — totaling more than $100 million according to a source — if Uber’s IPO valuation hits $120 billion and stays at that level for 90 consecutive days.

The Uber CEO will also get the payout for selling the company for $120 billion, according to a disclosure the company’s its S-1 documents.

Having a bunch of fairly paid employee drivers at Uber could take a serious bite out of that $100 million carrot.

Categories:

Business, Career

“the first at a major tech company to unionize”

The Verge: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize:

Kickstarter employees voted to unionize today with 46 people voting for the union and 37 against. The decision makes Kickstarter employees the first at a major tech company to unionize. The employees are represented by the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU), and the unit is made up of 85 engineers, directors, analysts, designers, coordinators, and customer support specialists.

Mike Monteiro has also been an advocate of organizing unions, specifically for designers.

Categories:

Career

The Age of Productivity

AgencySpy: A Survey Reveals That Agencies Are Getting Through Less Than 2 Hours of Deep Work per Day:

According to research from Float (a work planning platform … nifty that they did this research to sell a few subscriptions), agency people are getting less than two hours of what’s called “deep work” done per day. Defined, “deep work” is what it sounds like, focusing on work without interruption.

Over 100 respondents from around the world weighed in on the issues they face in getting any work done. Almost 60% claimed that they get two hours or less of uninterrupted work done per day, while 27% noted that they can get four hours of quiet work time. It also seems that larger agencies (with 50+ employees) bear the brunt of interruptions, with over 60% saying that they get through two hours or less of meaningful work. Smaller agencies (less than 30 employees) appear to be able to make it through four hours.

Those “innovative” open-floor plans are the best.

“I don’t have a plan.”

A few weeks ago an interesting question popped up over at Designer News aimed at designers who are 40-plus:

how are you approaching your next career steps to make it all the way to the retirement age (not as a goal, but as an age marker)? Especially if you are currently not in the director/leadership role working in the agency, in-house, or in-house tech. Are you actively trying to get into the management roles (not just a project lead, but leading a larger team of people or business) or are feeling good continuing on the IC (individual contributor) level? Have you felt the push to advance up the corporate ladder?

In comments some people admit they don’t aspire to manage or lead and don’t have retirement plans. While I can understand not everyone is built to be a manager, not planning for retirement is bad. Very bad.

It can seem far, far away when you’re in your 20s and 30s, but retirement is right around the corner. As a 42-year-old designer, I feel the gap shortening every day.

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Career

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Failure Résumé

Tim Herrera recommends keeping a failure résumé:

Keeping a failure résumé — or Anti-Portfolio or CV of Failures or whatever you’d like to call it — is simple: When you fail, write it down. But instead of focusing on how that failure makes you feel, take the time to step back and analyze the practical, operational reasons that you failed. Did you wait until the last minute to work on it? Were you too casual in your preparation? Were you simply out of your depth?

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” —Albert Einstein

Categories:

Career

Restaurant as Workspace

Nellie Bowles looks into the rise of restaurants in big cities being converted into co-working spacing during off-hours:

The company that laid the extension cords and power strips across Elite Cafe’s copper tables is called Spacious. Since it was started two years ago, Spacious has converted 25 upscale restaurants in New York and San Francisco into weekday work spaces. Membership, which allows entry into any location, is $99 a month for a year, or $129 by the month. With $9 million in venture capital it received in May, Spacious plans to expand this year to up to 100 spaces. A restaurant makes for the perfect conversion, the Spacious team argues. Bars become standing desks. Booths become conference rooms. The lighting tends to be nicer, less harsh and fluorescent, than an office, and the music makes for a nice ambience.

Originally, the founders of Spacious thought they would have to sell restaurateurs on the idea. Instead, restaurants, struggling to pay rent and wages and frustrated with disappointing lunch traffic, are coming to them, eager to strike deals for a slice of the membership dues. Only 5 percent have made the cut to become Spacious spaces, said the company, which is unprofitable.

It’s interesting to see businesses adapting to the changes in industries and technologies. The idea of using restaurant space when meals aren’t being served makes a lot of sense, but I wonder if this business model is a solution or a band-aid.

This article reminds me of a book on my to-read list, Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.

Categories:

Business, Career

Cartoonist Rob Rogers fired for skewering Trump

Cartoonist Rob Rogers was fired over a cartoon he made where he skewered Trump:

Things really changed for me in March, when management decided that my cartoons about the president were “too angry” and said I was “obsessed with Trump.” This about a president who has declared the free press one of the greatest threats to our country.

Not every idea I have works. Every year, a few of my cartoons get killed. But suddenly, in a three-month period, 19 cartoons or proposals were rejected. Six were spiked in a single week — one after it was already placed on the page, an image depicting a Klansman in a doctor’s office asking: “Could it be the Ambien?”

It’s shameful. According to Michael Moore this is the cartoon he was fired for:

Conservatives are worried liberals are trying to take away their guns, meanwhile, I’m worried about conservatives taking away our First Amendment rights. It’s bullshit.

“Only after experimenting with that joke 25 more times, she said, would she know if it works.”

The Strategic Mind of Ali Wong:

So perhaps it’s no surprise that anxiety about success is also a theme of her new work. This is part of the reason she returned to the stage early this year, five weeks after giving birth, against the advice of her doctor. She’s terrified of becoming unfunny. “I’ve seen it happen to people who got famous and seduced by it,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s work ethic or if they’re delusional because the audience loves them so much.”

Two months after giving birth she slipped out of the house and drove to the Upright Citizens Brigade here to make an unannounced appearance, walking onstage in sweatpants and a puffy jacket to roaring applause. She told a new joke about #MeToo and got a laugh, though she wasn’t sure she could trust it. U.C.B. crowds are notoriously generous. Only after experimenting with that joke 25 more times, she said, would she know if it works.

I’m always interested to hear the creative habits of successful artists, because the successful ones always have creative habits. If you don’t know what creative habits are, they’re goals with work ethic applied to them.

If you’re into this topic check out The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp.

Categories:

Career, Process

Overworking in the Age of Technology

Silicon Valley would be wise to follow China’s lead:

These topics are absent in China’s technology companies, where the pace of work is furious. Here, top managers show up for work at about 8am and frequently don’t leave until 10pm. Most of them will do this six days a week — and there are plenty of examples of people who do this for seven. Engineers have slightly different habits: they will appear about 10am and leave at midnight. Beyond the week-long breaks for Chinese new year and the October national holiday, most will just steal an additional handful of vacation days. Some technology companies also provide a rental subsidy to employees who choose to live close to corporate HQ.

In California, this sort of pace might be common for the first couple of years of a company, but then it will slow. In China, by contrast, it is quite usual for the management of 10 and 15-year-old companies to have working dinners followed by two or three meetings. If a Chinese company schedules tasks for the weekend, nobody complains about missing a Little League game or skipping a basketball outing with friends. Little wonder it is a common sight at a Chinese company to see many people with their heads resting on their desks taking a nap in the early afternoon.

Fuck the editor who wrote the title of this article, and fuck Michael Moritz for writing the article.

Silicon Valley or anywhere else in the first world would be wise to not follow China’s lead. The whole (empty) promise of computers and the Internet was that we would be able to work remotely! And work more efficiently! Oh joy of joys!

It’s a cliché but it’s true: the goal is to work smarter, not longer. It’s also true that humans fill their work week to the allotted number of hours. If we worked four 8-hour days per week (32 hours) instead of five 8-hour weeks (40 hours) the vast majority of people at desk jobs would get just as much work done.

America would be wise to follow the lead of a country where tech companies installed safety nets to save people trying to commit suicide by jumping out of windows? This is a load of shit.

Categories:

Career, Humanity

Holden Shuts Down

Australia Mourns the End of Its Car Manufacturing Industry:

Kane Butterfield started working for Holden at 19 in a small South Australian town built around making the distinctly Australian cars.

But on Friday, after 17 years with the company at its Adelaide auto plant, he and hundreds of other employees bid it farewell, as the factory officially closed, putting an end to car manufacturing in Australia.

“I think it’s pretty tragic really that we’ve let go of one of the best cars around the world,” Mr. Butterfield, 37, told a crowd of reporters gathered outside Australia’s last functioning car factory.

Business people love to talk about innovation and “disrupting” but you don’t hear them talk much about the working class employees getting “disrupted” out the doors of their companies.

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Business, Career

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A Price Worth Paying

A product manager and Kalanick apologist is leaving Uber:

Chris Saad, a product manager of Uber’s developer platform, is leaving the company after close to two years, sources tell Recode.

Saad, who worked on creating technology tools for developers looking to integrate Uber services, has been vocal about his disappointment with former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s forced resignation.

“Travis embodied (and in some cases taught) me these things,” he wrote in a Facebook post in the hours after Kalanick’s resignation. “There wasn’t a moment or a minuscule detail that he noticed that he didn’t immediately spring into action to help me solve — with that wry smile and enthusiastic glint in his eye. The cost of losing him as Uber’s CEO will be incalculable.”

If there’s a huge cost because of Kalanick’s ouster, so be it.

When Kalanick was CEO of Uber they used their technology to evade law enforcement, maintained a hostile, sexist work environment filled with sexual harassment cases, and didn’t (and still don’t) want to pay their drivers as employees.

Categories:

Career

Dickheads in Tech

The latest dickeads-in-tech news comes from Google this week:

Alphabet Inc.’s Google has fired an employee who wrote an internal memo blasting the web company’s diversity policies, creating a firestorm across Silicon Valley.

James Damore, the Google engineer who wrote the note, confirmed his dismissal in an email, saying that he had been fired for “perpetuating gender stereotypes.” He said he’s “currently exploring all possible legal remedies.”

The imbroglio at Google is the latest in a long string of incidents concerning gender bias and diversity in the tech enclave. Uber Technologies Inc. Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick lost his job in June amid scandals over sexual harassment, discrimination and an aggressive culture. Ellen Pao’s gender-discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 2015 also brought the issue to light, and more women are speaking up to say they’ve been sidelined in the male-dominated industry, especially in engineering roles.

It’s good Sundar Pichai fired Damore. Too often we see tech companies remain quiet (at least publically) on these issues and when you remain quiet or don’t take action, it sends a message to the rest of the company that sexual harassment and discrimination is okay. It establishes entitlement. It’s not unlike a parent establishing behavior patterns for their children.

We need not look any further than the President of the United States. We’ve heard him on tape brag about his celebrity status allowing him to grab women by the pussy.

It’s no surprise then to find out Fox News is a close ally of Trump. It also shouldn’t be a surprise to find out the former CEO of Fox News, Roger Ailes, sexually harassment women at the company. This week Fox News suspended Eric Bolling for sending dick pics to female coworkers and of course we can’t forget Bill O’Reilly’s sexual harassment charges and the women to whom he gave millions to so they would remain quiet.

I’ve heard people talk about wanting to “empower” their employees to do great things and establish a great culture at their company, but these things have to be implemented through actions at the top of the company.

It’s only through actions at the top that culture and behavior patterns can cascade down throughout the rest of the company, it can never happen the other way around.