Future of Work

“The Great Resignation” is Clickbait

Paul Millerd, author of The Pathless Path, in an interview with Sara Campbell, points out:

This might surprise you but I think the framing of “The Great Resignation” is off. It seems like a successful media narrative that has helped generate clicks but doesn’t really get to the heart of what’s happening. The “great resignation” framing suggests there is a massive exit from employment happening. It’s not clear that’s the case…… Going deeper, however, I do there is a much more interesting shift happening. Before the pandemic when I talked to people about work, there was a lot of shame attached to the conversation. Previous generations resisted these conversations forcefully. Part of this was survival — there weren’t great alternatives to traditional employment. That’s no longer the case and people are starting to wake up to it.  

This is a great interview and worth reading. This comment really resonated with me, especially as I have started

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My Reading Picks
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Future Shocked

It has been 50 years this month since Alvin and Heidi Toffler published their book, Future Shock. The Tofflers have since passed on to the next plane. However, they have left behind a work, that is amazingly prescient, especially when seen in the context of the current pandemic and its impact on society. “The future always comes too fast and in the wrong order,” he wrote in the book. I wonder what he would have thought about the present—the rapidity with which we have been thrust into the future is quite surprising and unsettling.

Millions of ordinary psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future.

Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future… [It] is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated change in society.

The Tofflers came up with terms such as information overload and prosumer. And they

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Musings, Technology
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What Work

Uber and Lyft, in response to a California court ruling that all drivers must be reclassified as employees with benefits, are threatening to quit doing business in the state. Putting the news, and the legal posturing of Uber and Lyft aside, the judgment and its possible impact on other gig-economy companies that rely on independent contractors will be a quagmire. But it raises more profound questions that go far beyond these startups, and our society. 

How should we be thinking about work? 

Why do we continue to classify work as either full-time employment or independent contractor? Why isn’t there a grey zone in between these two qualifications? Why do we assume that work should be tied to specific tasks and the amount of time spent doing that task? 

More importantly, what is work? And where is work coming from in 2020 and beyond? 

A lot of politicians and their sycophants talk about

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Technology
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7 Sins of remote meetings 

When reading Christian Heilmann’s blog this morning, I came across his list of seven sins of meetings with remote participants. It really resonated with me. I am in a remote meeting at least once — if not more than once — every day. I am a huge Zoom user. Whether it is chatting with founders or being on other conference calls, Zoom has become an indispensable tool. And at some point, I have experienced or, I confess, committed these sins:

  1. Thou shalt not forget about the agenda or deviate from it.
  2. Thou shalt not cancel meetings shortly before they start.
  3. Thou shalt not all speak at the same time.
  4. Thou shalt not keep your mic on when you are typing.
  5. Thou shalt not abandon the chat.
  6. Thou shalt not assume people can see your presentation clearly – or at all.
  7. Thou shalt not scribble on whiteboards and assume people can follow.

I would add one more, which

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Musings
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Jason Fried on the Future of Work, 13 years later

In 2006, based on the notion of seamless connectivity, portable devices and changing nature of what would drive primary economic activity, I started a sub-blog called WebWorkerDaily. It was a place to explore the idea of what is the future of work. For me, the future of work was distributed.

I was optimistic that the network would make geo-location, the idea of a fixed place as an office or the notion of a 9-to-5 workday would become moot. Turns out, the original premise of that blog was right, but I forgot my own life lesson — future either comes too soon or too late. In this case, it has come too late and we are starting to see a new level of energy being spent on thinking about the future of work.

WeWork might be a fiscal disaster and a museum-quality exhibit of greed, incompetence, and skullduggery, but let’s not

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Notes
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The Power of Distributed

Talent is evenly distributed around the globe, but opportunity is not.

Nearly 15 years ago, I would often talk to young Matt about many topics including WordPress, the changing dynamics of media and how work will change. He taught me a lot about open source software. I talked about broadband, connectivity, and connectedness. In 2004, I wrote a piece called, Escape from Silicon Valley. In that story, I looked at how broadband was inspiring founders to go “broadband” instead of going west.

I had launched a blog called WebWorkerDaily, and like many of our initial efforts (NewTeeVee and Earth2Tech), it came a little too soon to the market. I believed that the Internet’s killer app would be work and if you look around today, many find work on the Internet. Others find the demand for their skills. And hundreds of millions use the Internet to get the job done.

Matt would

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Musings
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What I Wrote in 2010: a Look Back

Over the weekend I came across the Watchdog series on Stat News, which takes a long investigative view of science, scientific claims and hype. “Periodically in this column, we’ll take a look back at claims made by scientists five years earlier to see how they hold up, and if they were off-target, explore why. Think of it as Five Year Watch,” science journalists Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky write.

What a wonderful idea, I thought. It reminded me of John Gruber’s Claim Chowder series for his Daring Fireball. Meanwhile my good friend and WordPress.com co-creator Matt Mullenweg recently wondered on his blog if there could be a site that covers “the top headlines on Techmeme 6, 12, or 18 months after they happened.” Another capital idea.

These guys have inspired me to apply the Marcus-Oransky approach to my own writing and claims I made in 2010.

Deciding to give an

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Musings
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Uber, Data Darwinism and the future of work

A year ago, I hosted a small conclave of fellow (early) explorers of the post-html Internet. And while we are not of the SnapChat generation, most of us grew up connected. There were some who helped build the gear that runs the post-1999 Internet, and some who built the space ships. A neuroscientists who studies mobile and online behaviors, a digital musican and a music enterprenuer; data nerds, visual designers and an infrastructure wizard who streams happiness one stream at a time. And then there was me, who starts the day connected and ends it connected.

Connectedness — which is state of always being connected to the Internet and thus to people, things, life, work, commerce, love, hate and anger – is the single thought that dominates my mind, and it defines how I view everything, how I evaluate everything. It is my telescope and it is my microscope. I

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My Essays
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