Where Did All the Good Jobs Go?

Seth Godin: The computer, the network and the economy:

When a pre-employed person says, “I don’t know how to code and I’m not interested in selling,” we need to pause for a moment and think about what we built school for. When he continues, “I don’t really have anything interesting to say, and I’m not committed to making a particular change in the world, but I’m pretty good at following instructions,” we’re on the edge of a seismic shift in our culture. And not a positive one.

No, the good jobs aren’t coming back. But yes, there’s a whole host of a new kind of good job, one that feels fundamentally different from the old days. It doesn’t look like a job used to look, but it’s the chance of lifetime if we can shift gears fast enough.

You don’t have to like this shift, but ignoring it, yelling about it, cutting ourselves off from it is a recipe for a downward spiral. It’s an opportunity if we let it be one.

The mutants will survive.

“polishing them until they work”

Seth Godin on software (and everything else in life):

The reason it’s so difficult to test and improve is that it requires you to acknowledge that your original plan wasn’t perfect. And to have the humility and care to go ahead and fix it.

Making shit work is the easy part.

Making sure it doesn’t break is the hard part.

Link Drop – 21 Jan

Categories:

Links

Hard Work First

Seth Godin:

The Wright Brothers decided to solve the hardest problem of flight first.

It’s so tempting to work on the fun, the urgent or even the controversial parts of a problem.

There are really good reasons to do the hard part first, though. In addition to not wasting time in meetings about logos, you’ll end up getting the rest of your design right if you do the easy parts last.

This is great advice for planning Kickstarter projects and avoiding the potential pitfalls associated with them.

Categories:

Process

“The narrative is a bug, not a feature.”

One reason we easily dismiss the astonishing things computers can do is that we know that they don’t carry around a narrative, a play by play, the noise in their head that’s actually (in our view) ‘intelligence.’

It turns out, though, that the narrative is a bug, not a feature. That narrative doesn’t help us perform better, it actually makes us less intelligent. Any athlete or world-class performer (in debate, dance or dungeonmastering) will tell you that they do their best work when they are so engaged that the narrative disappears.

Seth Godin

Categories:

Technology