via DesignTAXI

Elie Mystal on student loans:

Student loans haven’t made education “affordable,” they’ve made education accessible. That’s a huge difference. Once you access your education, you still have to pay for it. And if you’ve happened to access more education than you can afford, well, you’re going to have a hell of a time “accessing” other life goals: like a house, a car, or a modicum of financial security.
He calls bullshit on the ‘wise words’ from boomers with a Forbes article by Steve Odland:
Since 1982 a typical family income increased by 147%, more than inflation but significantly behind the huge increase in college costs. College costs have been rising roughly at a rate of 7% per year for decades. Since 1985, the overall consumer price index has risen 115% while the college education inflation rate has risen nearly 500%.
And then yesterday in The New York Times, Richard Pérez Peña tells us how rough it is for those special kids applying to elite colleges:
Enrollment at American colleges is sliding, but competition for spots at top universities is more cutthroat and anxiety-inducing than ever. In the just-completed admissions season, Stanford University accepted only 5 percent of applicants, a new low among the most prestigious schools, with the odds nearly as bad at its elite rivals.
The reality is college isn’t giving people the advantage it used to over people without college degrees, with our ever-shrinking job pool.
While computer automation is partly to blame, Tyler Cowen says that’s only part of the story:
Many of the new jobs today are in health care and education, where specialized training and study are required. Across the economy, a college degree is often demanded where a high school degree used to suffice. It’s now common for a fire chief to be expected to have a master’s degree, and to perform a broader variety of business-related tasks that were virtually unheard-of in earlier generations. All of these developments mean a disadvantage for people who don’t like formal education, even if they are otherwise very talented. It’s no surprise that current unemployment has been concentrated among those with lower education levels.
And:
A new paper by Alan B. Krueger, Judd Cramer and David Cho of Princeton has documented that the nation now appears to have a permanent class of long-term unemployed, who probably can’t be helped much by monetary and fiscal policy. It’s not right to describe these people as “thrown out of work by machines,” because the causes involve complex interactions of technology, education and market demand. Still, many people are finding this new world of work harder to navigate.
I am constantly reminded of these words by Charles Darwin, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

Harold Meyerson (hat tip, Bryan):

The bipartisan public policy that should raise the most suspicion is trade policy, which fostered the offshoring of more than 2 million manufacturing jobs after Congress normalized trade relations with China in 2000. But an even more fundamental factor in the declining share of working Americans is the technological automation that has eliminated millions of jobs and is poised to eliminate millions more.

The mechanization of work has already taken a toll in the nation’s ports (where cranes have reduced the longshore workforce to roughly 10 percent of its size 60 years ago), factories (where machines and computers have substituted for millions of workers), construction sites (where the prefabrication of parts has reduced the number of construction workers ) and offices (whatever became of secretaries?). And with increasing computing capacity steadily expanding the abilities of machines, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
No shit, Sherlock.

From BGR:

Apple is looking at further automating its production lines for popular devices including the iPhone, a new report from Taiwan reveals, with the company supposedly planning to automate production this year for its iPhone 6 batteries in order to “reduce its manpower demand.”
Those pesky humans trying to do ‘jobs’, so silly.

Noam Scheiber:

In talking to dozens of people around Silicon Valley over the past eight months–engineers, entrepreneurs, moneymen, uncomfortably inquisitive cosmetic surgeons–I got the distinct sense that it’s better to be perceived as naïve and immature than to have voted in the 1980s. And so it has fallen to Matarasso to make older workers look like they still belong at the office. “It’s really morphed into, ‘Hey, I’m forty years old and I have to get in front of a board of fresh-faced kids. I can’t look like I have a wife and two-point-five kids and a mortgage,’ ” he told me.
When my wife and I moved to San Francisco last April, I interviewed with a few startups and I discovered with my 14 years of experience, I was very over-qualified for what they were looking for in a designer, both in experience and salary.

The source of yesterday’s post.

BGR: WhatsApp exists thanks to Twitter and Facebook’s ignorance
Wow. Talk about a flamebait headline and a load of bullshit.
The fact that Twitter and Facebook turned down WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton in 2009 has nothing to do with ignorance. Careers are not just about talent (although talent helps). Careers are also about timing and persistence (see also: grit.
It’s also important to point out the same person can achieve—or not archieve—very different things at different companies.
Case in point: Jony Ive. He was languishing at Apple and on the verge of quitting when Steve Jobs came back and made him his right hand man in 1997 so he could help develop little dinky products like the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad.
What did Ive make at pre-Jobs Apple? The 20th Anniversary Mac. A thoughtful product for sure, but not quit in the same league as those other “i” products, is it?

Jordan Price loves Apple and landed a job there, but his experience was shitty:

I tried to tough it out and look at the bright side of things. I was working at Apple with world-class designers on a world-class product. My coworkers had super sharp eyes for design, better than I had ever encountered before. I loved the attention to detail that Apple put into its design process. Every single pixel, screen, feature, and interaction is considered and then reconsidered. The food in the cafe was great, and I liked my new iPad Air. But the jokes, insults, and negativity from my boss started distracting me from getting work done. My coworkers that stood their ground and set boundaries seemed to end up on a shit list of sorts and were out of the inner circle of people that kissed the producer’s ass. I started to become one of those people that desperately wanted Friday evening to arrive, and I dreaded Sunday nights. Few of my friends or family wanted to hear that working at Apple actually wasn’t so great. They loved to say, “Just do it for your resume.” or “You have to be the bigger man.” or “You just started. You can’t leave yet.”
As Price points out, he was a contractor, not a full-time employee. They shouldnt, but sometimes contractors have a shittier experience than salaried employees. Sometimes they have a better experience. Sometimes salaried employees who aren’t in the inner “cool” circle have a shittier experience than those inside the circle.
Your perception of a company all depends on who you are and what you do in relation to that company.
I had a great experience at the last company I worked at. I look back happily at the 5.5 years I worked there. It wasn’t sunshine and rainbows every single day, but shit, that’s why it’s called work.
Once while I was still working there I decided to look it up on Glassdoor.com and see what people were (anonymously) saying about it. What i found was a huge discrepancy between reviews. Generally speaking, the lower someone was in the pecking order, the more negative their comments and perception were for their company. Given I was an associate creative director and part of management, the negative comments were foreign to my experience.
This is why I think sometimes it’s better for designers to work at smaller companies earlier in their career and move to bigger companies as they gain experience and grow their portfolios. Junior-level designers typically end up doing a lot more production (read: non-creative) work at large companies than at smaller companies.
Sometimes you work with assholes. Sometimes you’re an asshole. Sometimes you join a company on the downslope and people are leaving in droves and everything sucks and you find out from the people leaving that last year was the awesome year where management flew everyone out to the headquarters and paid for open bars and hotel rooms and gave away prizes.
It all depends. Everyone’s perspective is different.
The older I get the more a realize, even if you do land a job at a truly great company, there are very few jobs that are as glamorous or cool as they look. Once you get an inside peek at a company or an industry and you see how the sausage gets made, your perspective changes. There were tons of design agencies in New York City I wanted to work at when I began my career but then I worked for a few years and I found out that beneath the amazing website, portfolio and client list a lot of places were chop shops with a designers being worked like dogs and not staying for more than a few months (no, it ain’t working in a coal mine, but you can get burnt out staring at a computer screen for 18 hours a day).
When my wife and I moved to San Francisco last year, she immediately thought I was dying to work for Apple, given our proximity to Cupertino. I told her no, I’d rather enjoy Apple from a distance. Using an iPad and being one of the many Apple teams responsible for designing, marketing and producing an iPad are two completely different things.
Apple is full of incredibly creative people, but Apple is also a machine. A huge, well-oiled, multi-billion dollar machine. Some people are driving the machine and many others are cogs inside the machine being driven.
Does Apple suck to work for? Sure, probably.
Is Apple great to work for? Sure, probably.
Now give me back my iPad, I have some reading to do.

At WSJ.com, Craig Karmin on the future of checking into hotels:

Guests arriving at the Aloft Hotel in Manhattan or one in Silicon Valley will soon be able to do something hotels have dreamed about offering for years: walk past the check-in desk and enter their rooms by using a smartphone as a room key.
Sounds great, right? Why do I need to talk to this human being, when I know how to get to the elevator and find my room myself?
Seems everything is more efficient when us humans stay out of the way.
Daily Exhaust contributor Bryan pointed out to me that at some point in the future we’re going to have to pay people to be unemployed because there’s not going to be any jobs left.
We love how computers make things easier.
We have to be careful what we wish for.

via Bombtune

I’m not 25 years old anymore. I’m 36 and I don’t do freelance design projects anymore, I do projects for myself.
I’ll always give advice to friends and family when they ask for it (I’m not a complete asshole) but if what they need requires more than four hours of my time I kindly refuse to do it.
I’m at the point in my life where I’m doing things for my wife and I, and staying up all night after a day at the office to work on someone’s restaurant menu or website is not what I want to be doing. In 2012 I successfully funded a Kickstarter project which, coincidentally, kickstarted my re-entry into the world of print design and screen printing. That’s the shit I want to be working on when the weekend rolls around. You can see what I’m working on at The Combustion Chamber.
So I approach freelance project requests like The Wolf in Pulp Fiction: Call me if you’re in a pinch and you need to get out of that pinch.

I love reading Jean-Louis Gassée. He has a remarkable ability to beautifully and concisely explain things in the world of technology (he probably could do it with any subject).
His latest post is about Microsoft’s CEO search, now that Ballmer is out:

For a large, established company, having to use an executive recruiter to find its next CEO carries a profoundly bad aroma. It means that the directors failed at one of their most important duties: succession planning. Behind this first failure, a second one lurks: The Board probably gave the previous CEO free rein to promote and fire subordinates in a way that prevented successors from emerging.
I still contend it’s going to get worse for Microsoft before it gets better.

Monday I started my new job as visual design director at RadiumOne.
I’ll be focused on design for all mobile applications and websites.
It should be a lot of fun.

Tim Kreider on being asked to work for free:

People who would consider it a bizarre breach of conduct to expect anyone to give them a haircut or a can of soda at no cost will ask you, with a straight face and a clear conscience, whether you wouldn’t be willing to write an essay or draw an illustration for them for nothing. They often start by telling you how much they admire your work, although not enough, evidently, to pay one cent for it. “Unfortunately we don’t have the budget to offer compensation to our contributors…” is how the pertinent line usually starts. But just as often, they simply omit any mention of payment.
Reminds me of Harlan Ellison’s strong opinions on this topic.