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Bakeoff! A Gladwell article from back in September on a project that used different team methodologies to attempt to create the perfect cookie: an open source approach, an approach based on extreme programming, and a traditional hierarchical team. You may be surprised which team won.
Surowiecki on the differences between Europeans and Americans when it comes to work. “But since more people work in America, and since they work so many more hours, Americans create more wealth. In effect, Americans trade their productivity for more money, while Europeans trade it for more leisure.”
Stupid phrase that I’m sure will catch on because the TV and print media that propagates such things is brainless: Cyber Monday. “The Monday after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, when online retailers reportedly experience a surge in purchases” because everyone is back at their speedy internet connections (sans family) at work.
Update: “Cyber Monday” was created by shop.org, an organization of online retailers, as a marketing promotion. It’s only the 12th biggest online shopping day of the year. (thx randy and minuk)
Restaurant critic Alison Arnett on how her job works, including how she stays so thin when she eats for a living, her best meal, and the reviewing process.
What do you do when you have a 9-to-5 job and you need to prepare for an upcoming climb by spending weeks at high altitudes? You put your office desk into an altitude chamber.
Clive Thompson on Life Hackers in the NY Times. I’d informally heard about the benefit of larger screens on productivity (I feel more productive with a larger screen), but this article describes some study results: “On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly.”
Malcolm Gladwell’s description of how Harvard decides on who to admit strikes me as similar to how many companies in the tech/web industry hire employees. “Subjectivity in the admissions process is not just an occasion for discrimination; it is also, in better times, the only means available for giving us the social outcome we want. The strategy of discretion that Yale had once used to exclude Jews was soon being used to include people like Levi Jackson.”
The Onion: Project Manager Leaves Suicide PowerPoint Presentation. “We all got Ron’s message loud and clear when that JPEG of his wife wipe-transitioned to a photo of her tombstone”. (via mathowie)
As part of the conference within a conference for students, Michael Bierut listed 20 courses he did not take in design school (I think I got all of them):
Semiotics
Contemporary Performance Art
Traffic Engineering
The Changing Global Financial Marketplace
Urban planning
Sex Education
Early Childhood Development
Economics of Commerical Aviation
Biography as History
Introduction to Horticulture
Sports Marketing in Modern Media
Modern Architecture
The 1960s: Culture and Conflict
20th Century American Theater
Philanthropy and Social Progress
Fashion Merchandising
Studies in Popular Culture
Building Systems Engineering
Geopolitics, Military Conflict, and the Cultural Divide
Political Science: Electoral Politics and the Crisis of Democracy
His point was that design is just one part of the job. In order to do great work, you need to know what your client does. How do you design for new moms if you don’t know anything about raising children? Not very well, that’s how. When I was a designer, my approach was to treat the client’s knowledge of their business as my biggest asset…the more I could get them to tell me about what their product or service did and the people it served (and then talk to those people, etc.), the better it was for the finished product. Clients who didn’t have time to talk, weren’t genuinely engaged in their company’s business, or who I couldn’t get to open up usually didn’t get my best work.
Bierut’s other main point is, wow, look at all this cool stuff you get to learn about as a designer. If you’re a curious person, you could do worse than to choose design as a profession.
Dan Barber on the embraced chaos of working in David Bouley’s kitchen. Barber, who runs the excellent Blue Hill, contributed this essay to the new book, Don’t Try This at Home (eGullet chatter).
Does the Shitty Tipper Database seem wrong to anyone else? I’m all for underpaid service staff venting and attempting to raise public awareness about bad tipping (which, in the absence of poor service, amounts to an unjust pay-cut determined completely by some random idiot customer). But since when is anything under 17% considered shitty? $0 on a $125 bill, that’s shitty. 15% (on the pre-tax amount, I might add) is still the industry standard, no matter how much it sucks to get exactly the minimum for adequate service.
More importantly, what gives these people the right to take someone’s full name off of a credit card (procured on the job, BTW) and put it up on the web because of some completely subjective gauge of service provided? If I’m eating somewhere, my expectation is that my credit card is being used only for payment and not for any personal use by the employees of the restaurant. If I don’t leave someone what they think was deserved, they should catch me on the way out and ask me about it. Perhaps I forgot or miscalculated. Or maybe the service was a bit off in my mind. If I left no tip, I probably talked to the manager about why I did so and they’ll be hearing about it from them. But to be all passive aggressive and get my name from my CC and post it on some internet message board…that suggests to me that maybe they didn’t deserve a good tip in the first place.
How to find your dream job. Advice from four people, including chef Tom Colicchio, on finding that once-in-a-lifetime job.
It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur. Hardware is cheap, software is cheap, labor is cheap, and advertising is cheap.
What’s the deal with unusual job interviews?. And more importantly, how do you deal with them?
Malcolm Gladwell talks about his work space. He does most of his writing on his laptop while sitting on sofas and in coffeeshops and restaurants.
Keeping tabs on Martha Stewart on parole. Is attending a dinner party “essential employment”?
Michael Lewis is one of my favorite authors. He’s not the smartest or the most clever writer but he weaves deceptively simple stories into larger statements on society and humanity with a skill possessed by very few people doing creative work in any field. I haven’t gotten around to reading Moneyball yet, but Liar’s Poker is probably his strongest work. It’s as hard to put down as any fiction. Great book.
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