Are coders worth it? We call ourselves web developers, software engineers, builders, entrepreneurs, innovators. We’re celebrated, we capture a lot of wealth and attention and talent. We’ve become a vortex on a par with Wall Street for precocious college grads. But we’re not making the self-driving car. We’re not making a smarter pill bottle. Most of what we’re doing, in fact, is putting boxes on a page. Users put words and pictures into one box; we store that stuff in a database; and then out it comes into another box.
posted by shivohum
on Jun 7, 2013 -
169 comments
Clinical psychologist Meg Jay has a
bold message for twentysomethings: Contrary to popular belief, your 20s are not a throwaway decade. In this provocative talk, Jay says that just because marriage, work and kids are happening later in life, doesn’t mean you can’t start planning now. She gives 3 pieces of advice for how twentysomethings can re-claim adulthood in the defining decade of their lives.
(copied from
description on TED website).
[more inside]
posted by myriad gantry
on May 17, 2013 -
124 comments
Female executives at Twitter, Yahoo and Google
discuss work/life balance at the top of the tech industry, how women should negotiate at work, and whether women view job satisfaction differently than their male colleagues.
[more inside]
posted by Catseye
on Oct 6, 2012 -
57 comments
How to Stay Stuck in the Wrong Career (PDF) (
non-PDF version requires free registration):
Conventional career change methods...are all part of what I call the “plan and implement” model of change. It goes like this: First, determine with as much clarity and certainty as possible what you really want to do. Next, use that knowledge to identify jobs or fields in which your passions can be coupled with your skills and experience. Seek advice from the people who know you best and from professionals in tune with the market. Then simply implement the resulting action steps. Change is seen as a one-shot deal: The plan-and-implement approach cautions us against making a move before we know exactly where we are going. It all sounds reasonable, and it is a reassuring way to proceed. Yet my research suggests that proceeding this way will lead to the most disastrous of results, which is to say no result. (by
Herminia Ibarra, who expands on these ideas in her book
Working Identity)
posted by shivohum
on Oct 4, 2012 -
13 comments
To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated. From
How to do what you love, by
essayist (and programmer, and entrepreneur)
Paul Graham.
posted by shivohum
on Feb 20, 2012 -
39 comments
The End of Men , in The Atlantic. An article about the rise of women (now over 50% of the U.S. workforce), and implications of the attendant changes for both women and men.
[more inside]
posted by marble
on Jun 10, 2010 -
161 comments
The child you saved by adopting him
might just save you in return. A quiet first-person story of how a married guy became a single dad to an adopted son - the wife moved on, but the boy remained. (SLYahooV)
posted by micketymoc
on Aug 31, 2009 -
5 comments
The "Revolution" that isn't. The idea that well-educated women are leaving their careers behind and choosing to stay at home is a recurring story- notably in "
The Opt Out Revolution", Lisa Belkin's 2003 essay in the New York Times. A
closer examination [.pdf, long] challenges the idea that women are returning home as a matter of biological "pull" rather than a workplace "push", and argues that how the media portrays the personal decisions of a few obfuscates the real social needs of most American working families. In 2007, the United States is one of the
few countries in the world without paid maternity leave.
posted by ambrosia
on Mar 16, 2007 -
55 comments
Meet 42 casualties of the current Administration --they didn't die in Iraq, or New Orleans, but were
beleaguered administrators, managers, and career civil servants who quit their posts in protest or were defamed, threatened, fired, forced out, demoted, or driven to retire by Bush administration strong-arming. From Bunny Greenhouse to Richard Clarke to General Zinni to lesser-known folks like James Zahn, who
was prohibited on no fewer than 11 occasions from publicizing his research on the potential hazards to human health posed by airborne bacteria resulting from farm wastes. A very wide-ranging list, covering everything from Public Health to War to Terror and Torture to Education to...
posted by amberglow
on Oct 16, 2005 -
28 comments
Please help me, I'm falling I nearly cried into my breakfast when I read this article - because I thought it was about me. The usual path after university is into a well paid job and a fulfilling future. But a growing number are leaving university, even with high marks, with little idea of how life works and what to do next. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
posted by feelinglistless
on Aug 26, 2001 -
63 comments
