Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
A Starbucks barista’s job is more than just serving coffee. She also needs to be polite, even friendly, to the customers. If she does her job correctly, then maybe the customer will walk away feeling like the barista was actually happy to serve him—that it was not only her job, but a genuine pleasure. In…
$8,000 each month with another $3,000 for housing. Welcome to the life of a Silicon Valley intern. Six-figure salaries. Flexible hours. Luxury housing. Ah, the life of an intern. This past weekend, high school senior Tiffany Zhong, the chief product officer of the app Glimpse and one of the tech industry’s “55 Unknown Rock Stars”…
Remember how workers were supposed to retire and open up higher positions and jobs for young people to move in to? That’s not happening because retirement is basically dead! Instead we’ll get grayternships, where older workers who would normally have retired now will get transformed in to bankers who I AM SURE will do trustworthy…
Average wages stagnate after 35. (bigstockphoto) Ah, your 20s: A decade of self discovery, smartphone dating and shopping for IKEA coffee tables — right? A new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York sends a more sobering message to millennials: Your first 10 years in the labor market likely shape your lifetime earning…
U.S. productivity falls in fourth quarter; labor costs rise Workers prepare outgoing shipments at an Amazon Fulfillment Center, ahead of the Christmas rush, in Tracy, California, November 30, 2014. Credit: Reuters/Noah Berger WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. nonfarm productivity braked more sharply than expected in the fourth quarter, while unit labor costs rebounded after falling…
WOODINVILLE, Wash.—Five years ago, Quadrant Homes churned out starter houses in the Seattle area with an average sales price of $269,000 and the marketing slogan, “More House, Less Money.” But facing a debt-burdened middle class and rising land prices, Quadrant has since exchanged entry-level buyers for customers free of credit worries and ready to splurge….
The UK is becoming a nation of grafters. With living standards at their lowest in a decade and real-term wages falling 8 per cent since the financial crisis, more people are cramming extra work into evenings, weekends and even their lunch hours to supplement their main incomes. Officially, the average number of hours Britons work each week…
The two hundred and twenty million dollars in venture capital given to Instacart, a grocery delivery service that deploys human servants to retrieve goods from the shelves of existing grocery stores, seems less like an investment in the validity of its specific idea—which is stupid and unsustainable for reasons so blatant that they are not…
I’ve given a lot of thought to this as I’ve pondered what happened to me and why, because in some ways Mayer does have a point: learning to say no is an important part of professional growth (also personal, but that’s another article). Would I have flamed out quite as spectacularly if I’d made sure…
On Wednesday, October 8th, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Integrity Staffing Solutions v. Busk. The case pits warehouse workers Jesse Busk and Laurie Castro against their former employer. The issue at hand is time: Should minutes spent waiting to be screened at the end of the workday—Integrity manages warehouses that…