"Wilde said that most of us live lives of quiet desperation. It's a good observation, and in my opinion it's the best reason to do whatever it is we choose to do with our lives. You spend so much time on the job you hate, listening to the boss who treats you like shit, and wondering why you bother to get out of bed anymore. So if you want to spend your time writing the great American novel, building birdhouses, attending Star Trek conventions in animal-themed S&M gear, or touring the country in a van with a band no one has ever heard of to play before tiny audiences, so be it. There are always risks, ranging from simple embarrassment to bodily harm depending on the nature of your pursuits. Hell, having any pursuits at all is a risk. Why not get a second job or work harder at your first one instead of wasting your time telling jokes at the Comedy Pouch in Possum Ridge, AR or playing math rock at the 4th Street Vomit Bucket in the worst neighborhood in Newark? Well, not only are some things more important than being practical, but what could be more practical than doing whatever is necessary to make yourself feel like your life is worthwhile? It's OK to remind yourself that you're not quite as worthless as the world makes you feel, even if there are considerable risks and opportunity costs involved."

"The German one sounds a lot more ominous, though, because it's all "Nazis chaining women to their stoves," instead of the Dutch piece, which was more "look at those lucky ladies, zipping around on their bicycles on their way to flower arranging class.""

"Giving sophisticated models and fast computers to traders is like giving handguns and tequila to teenage boys. Only complete mayhem can result (and as we saw recently, complete mayhem did result) . The quants were there to make sure the guns were loaded, but also to make sure the traders didn’t shoot themselves in the foot.

Not that we were terribly appreciated. In fact, we were basically the trader’s little bitches, and any quant who’s honest with himself realizes that. In time, we quants developed knee callouses from genuflecting to service the traders, on whose profits our livelihoods depended."

"If I were a 22-year-old reading all this, the whole notion of adulthood would seem like a prison sentence worth trying to avoid. But more importantly, the entire premise upon which all this advice is based is false. 

Passion, despite how often we use the term to tout company commitment or extol romantic excitement, is often misunderstood or confused with other motivations. Many people view dreams and passion exactly as Brooks painted it: as a hopelessly idealistic, selfish, or irresponsible choice that is diametrically opposed to commitment to others, responsibility, security, or success. But I have spent the past year and a half researching a book about passion and people who follow passionate paths in life, and nothing I've found backs up that premise or belief. Indeed, I would argue that passion is one of the most important elements in any effort to improve a community, build something of value in the world, and even survive tough times or a daunting economy. The fact that it also tends to lead to a sense of fulfillment within an individual is certainly one of its benefits—but it's not the driving force that compels someone down the passion road."

"In the course of one week I spoke at length with Kelani about new media performance art happening in North Philly, had a discussion in Swahili about coworking spaces in East Africa, and met the girlfriend of my friend Elijah Dornstreich. It’s ridiculously clear that there is tremendous power in simply being in one space, coworking together–so thank you for being the flagship for this movement here in Philly."

"But no, the reason was that a self-employed independent trainer is not allowed to “work in the USA”. The government official (who was very kind to me by the way) explained that “the rules are unfortunately stacked against independent consultants”. He tried to find loopholes, but there weren’t any. It didn’t matter that I have a company and a US tax number. And so, until somebody changes the law, he said, he had to send me back home. Even if I applied for a work visa, I wouldn’t get it, he told me. Work visas are usually given to people working for bigger companies, with legal entities in the US. The easiest thing to do would be to hire an American person to give my courses in the USA."

After they wrote, they tweeted and facebooked and flogged their blogs, and because they were good, and worked hard, within a year or two, magazines asked them to affiliate (on financial terms that were insulting), but they did that, and their blogs got an audience, and then they got magazine assignments, then agents, then book deals, and now, three, four years after they began, these folks, five or six of them, are beginning to break through. They are becoming not just science writers with jobs, they are becoming THE science writers, the ones people read, and look to… they’re going places. And they’re doing it on their own terms! In their own voice, they’re free to be themselves AND they’re paid for it!

"To summarize: trading practical work for high-level positions is prestigious, but it may make you dumber, alienated and unhappy. Back when I was a graduate student, we used to joke about the accident. The accident is what happens to successful professors: they suddenly become uninteresting, pompous, and… frankly… a tad stupid."

"I'm not an economist, but we've got five applicants for every single job opening. If you tell me that the best response to that situation is to lay off hundreds of thousands of teachers, I will not accept that this means that you're smarter and more expert than I am. I will instead conclude -- regardless of your prestige or position or years of study -- that you're a moral imbecile. And knowing what I know about your inability to make moral judgments I will have no reason to trust you to make complicated macroeconomic ones."

"The Open Enterprise is a new organizational design. Unlike organizations using traditional management structures, Open Enterprises replace the command and control hierarchy with a meritocracy based on collaboration and open participation.

Organizations that adopt this new organizational structure can make decisions faster and respond quicker to their markets. They look more like living dynamic networks, and less like pyramids. People working in these organizations will have (and feel) more ownership. They’re more engaged in their work, and have the freedom to work on what they want, when they want to. Most importantly this model enables people to once again bring their full humanity – values, beliefs and passions – to the workplace, removing disconnect between organizational and personal values"

"What is the primary difference? Ultimately it comes down to the question of "exit". As a founder, I have no interest in exit or liquidity. I am in business to run a business, not to run away from it. Or as Warren Buffet puts it: Our favorite holding period is forever."

"But even if we substantially improve education, it won't fully solve the problem. There will still be a need for quality jobs that are not all that dependent upon knowledge based skills. However, it's harder to imagine an emerging set of industries that will provide the large number of quality jobs that we need to replace those lost from industries in decline."

"This would seem to argue that some old patterns endure, and that’s true. But think of the twists suggested by this new premium on human basics. Suppose you decided that you could get all the face-to-face you needed two days a week. Would that influence where you lived? Would the mountains or the shore start looking good to you? Suppose you decided that you could get all the face-to-face you needed three days a month. Would the Caribbean start looking good to you?"

"I envision a future in which programmers are the conscious repositories of a body of knowledge. A future in which they regain their craft, instead of tweaking frameworks they don't understand. A future, eventually, in which programmers say "no" to demands at odds with their ethics.

It is crucial to create ways, spaces and formats for programmers to share their knowledge with other programmers. It is vital we keep this knowledge (especially verbalized knowledge) among programmers and out of salespeople's hands. And it is urgent the IT crowd recognize software making as a craft, instead of a commodity."

"All rolled into one big ball, the biggest thing to take away from this post is to find the job that will make you happy. These are all just things that I have that make me happy, so maybe they’ll help you find that great place to work. Because of all these reasons and probably some others I’ll think of after publishing this post, thoughtbot has my heart. Barring anything very unexpected, and until I’ve gotten sick of design, you’ll find me here at my desk inside thoughtbot HQ. I can only hope you have the same luxury or soon find a place that makes you just as happy."

"And what of these lists? They’re long, you never get to the end of them, and half the time the tasks on the list never get done. While it feels good to check items off the list, it feels horrible having items that never get checked off. This is all useless spending of mental energy, because none of it gets you anywhere.
The only thing that matters is the actual doing."

"What makes you think that once we write that text we “simply have to write because we’re writers,” that we’ll be compelled to put it somewhere where you can read it?"

"In the last two months, involuntary part-time employment has increased by 738,000. See Table A-8. This implies that either (1) more people who were already employed have been reduced to part-time status or (2) part-time positions are being added to payrolls."

"Instead, this effort is about competition. It is to build new social and economic systems that can compete with the current political and economic monopolies and if successful, force them to compete in order to stay relevant. It's about building something new from the ground up, a start-up culture of independence and sanity, that attracts better participants and delivers more results than any other alternative.

The start-ups these entrepreneurs are building work within the current system and against it, growing in power with each cycle of innovation. They compete against each other to provide the best possible results, yet connect on a level that allows them to accelerate faster than if they were alone. "

"I am confident that the Scrum Alliance sees the need for developer improvement, and that they are working toward making their members aware of the need. I am confident that they are working to provide resources that Scrum teams can use to begin to build the skills that they need. And I’m dedicated to influencing them in the right direction, and to bringing as many people into the situation to help accomplish that.

In the end, what I care about is software development, as narrow and geeky as that might be. I care about other people finding the joy in the craft that I’ve found, and that means they have to discover the joy of life-long learning. I think this Scrum Alliance effort can help with that, and I think that “certification” has little or nothing to do with it. What counts will be what we tell the people who show up."

“… these spaces have been shown to make significant contributions to the energy and robustness of the local entrepreneurial environment, and have become an increasingly common way for cities to promote themselves as supportive of the new breed of entrepreneurial venture.”

"The students were aware that they’re stepping into an uncertain world but they didn’t seem to grasp the finer points of the media business. Looking at the journalism department’s website later, I could see why. The curriculum lists 29 courses in the journalism program, and not a single one is about the economics of publishing or how to sustain a career as a journalist.

This university is failing it students. I suspect that so are a lot of others."

"Several alert readers sent me links to this article from the New York Times. It's a weirdly chipper "pick up some money in your spare time by adjuncting!" piece, written for (and apparently by) people who aren't terribly conversant in higher ed.

Depending on your angle to the universe, it could be read as refreshing, bizarre, or deeply offensive. (I fall into the 'bizarre' camp, with sympathies for the 'deeply offensive.')"

"Western executives (think CEO) may be having difficulty grasping the changes that Hagel describes because they run counter to cultural trends emerging among this generation of transnational elites ( not just big business). Increasingly, formerly quasi-meritocratic and democratic Western elites in their late thirties to early sixties are quietly embracing oligarchic social stratification and use political or institutional power to “lock in” the comparative advantages they currently enjoy by crafting double standards through opaque, unaccountable authorities issuing complex and contradictory regulations, special exemptions and insulating ( isolating) themselves socially and physically from the rest of society. It’s a careerism on steroids reminiscient of the corrupt nomenklatura of the late Soviet period."

"Last month 52,000 temps were added, greater than the number of new workers in any other category. Not even health care and government, stalwarts through the long recession, did better.

“Sometimes we’re asked by a company to bring back ex-employees as temps,” said Joanie Ruge, a senior vice president of Adecco. Some are even ex-employees who have been laid off. “That does happen,” she said."

"Email has become more like a habitat than an application. It is used for a wide range of tasks such as information management and for coordination and collaboration in organizations. Our research shows that email is the place in which a great deal of work is received and delegated and is a growing portal for access to online publications and information services. Indeed, users have been seen to co-opt email as a personal information management (PIM) tool. This follows from what we have found to be a common tendency of knowledge workers, which is to embed personal information management directly into their favorite workspaces. In this article, we explore further these new and unanticipated uses that are made of email, and suggest potential design ideas to support them better. We present the findings from four months of fieldwork conducted at three companies."

"Let’s make the other deliverable explicit: the team, and it’s growing capability.

I’m increasingly interested in the effect that social objects have on the way we work. There’s a growing body of research that demonstrates the ways in which our environment affects our behaviour[1]. The scrum picture has become a social object around which groups form - you see it in books, presentations, printed and stuck on walls, even (here at the Munich Scrum Gathering) on tattoos (the stick-on variety, though I wonder if any of the diehards has gone as far as making it permanent…). I worry about what happens when we surround ourselves with process pictures which (1) don’t include people, and (2) only tell half the story. As soon as we regard ourselves as “means” to some other group’s “ends”, or even worse to some process’s, we are disempowering ourselves (thanks to Ari Tikka in his Scan-Agile 2009 presentation for pointing this out)."

"Now, as Jonathan Kohl would point out, many people marching behind the Agile banner do the same: they use Agile as another club with which to beat people. I’m less worried about Agile, though, because its base rhetoric is more explicitly humanist. Lean is more likely to be an attractive nuisance because the idea of driving out waste appeals to executives who find it less work to remove waste than to convert it into value—executives who get license to act sociopathic because they have a fiduciary duty to treat business as a machine for maximizing shareholder value, externalities be damned. I worry about Lean in a business culture where we are trained out of empathy for Lear, damned fool though he surely is."

"[Update: I should have added that perhaps the Chamber fully understands the difference between free markets and competitive markets, and simply wants to preserve the "freedom" to take advantage of customers.]"

""Just yesterday, somebody asked me about my last temp job," Braxton said. "It ended in May, but I told them it ended in June. See, after it ended, I took about a month off and just kind of dicked around, traveling around Europe until my money ran out. I knew not to mention that to people who won't be able to do anything like that until they're 65.""

"And so as the acting class is going on I just realized I just knew more about cinema than the other people in the class. I cared about cinema and they cared about themselves. But two, was actually at a certain point I just realized that I loved movies too much to simply appear in them. I wanted the movies to be my movies."

"Just remember: they will continue to say what we are doing here, online, is illegitimate, immoral, and irrelevant."

"By the employment-to-population ratio metric, the recession is now twice as deep as any post-1960 recession. At 59.2%, the employment-to-population ratio stands 4.1 percentage points below its December 2006 cyclical high--and 5.5 percentage points below its April 2000 alltime high."

"Here’s the summary. The market for seed capital is clearly broken. Most individual angels will only do about 1 deal per year, which means their portfolios lose money 40% of the time due to insufficient diversification. Even premier angel groups like the Band of Angels say they only do about 8 deals per year. Our math says you need to do 125 to achieve good diversification. On the other side of the table, only 14% of entrepreneurs who want angel funding will find it. Those that do will spend about 6 months looking for money instead of building their businesses."

Trends in non-employer and small business firms, establishments and companies from 1997-2006, United States. Note the rates at which nonemployer and <20 employee firms are growing, compared to larger firms over the same period.

"By taking a relaxing and regenerative break at least every 90 minutes, you increase your capacity to do more work. Just like your muscles need to relax after they tense up, you need to relax after short bursts of focused work. Obviously you don’t want to only take breaks. There needs to be a balance and a blend of relaxation and focused effort. But it’s amazing how many people forget the relaxation aspect."

"I write for free because there seems to me to be no meaningful relationship between whether a publication pays me and whether it’s worthwhile for me to write for them. I’ve been skillfully edited and I’ve been allowed to babble on painfully unchecked by paying and non-paying publications alike. I’ve garnered indirect material benefit from paying and non-paying publications alike. I’m not suggesting that anyone follow my example or positing that I know what The Future of Journalism entails, but I do know, barring catastrophe, what my particular future is: I am going to keep getting paid to write when I can and writing for free when I can’t. If/when this situation becomes untenable for me as a way of actually making my living, I’ll start making more of my money with my non-writing endeavors. People have been doing exactly that, and writing sad essays about the injustice of having to do exactly that, for much longer than the Internet has been around."

'"What is it that identifies humans? The use of tools. For that reason, perhaps engineering is the most human of studies. ... Maybe we should teach engineering as a liberal art, and maybe a piece of every literate person's experience should be to create a useful artifact that improves life, including something as important as communication."'

"I am interested in simple but robust computer vision and information visualization techniques that support interactive analysis of human behavior in multi-stream video. My advisor is Dr. Gregory Abowd."

"Teasley's current research focuses on the social and cognitive processes in collaboration. She researches technology use to support key aspects of collaboration for both co-located groups and distributed groups. She has extensive experience assessing work practices and user needs, and designing, implementing, and evaluating technology use. She has conducted her work in schools, Fortune 500 companies, and with the biomedical community where she has helped to support the scientific activity in several distributed research centers. She is also involved in the development and evaluation of collaborative tools for academic research and teaching in higher education. "

"I study the building of bridges, wikis in organizations, and interventions with newly hired employees in order to understand how distributed work gets done and how social computing technologies are engaged in that work. I'm especially interested in learning that takes place when people work together. I aim to contribute new ways of thinking about distributed work, learning in collaboration, and the roles of social computing in both. "

"The fires of the amateur’s enthusiasm are worth stoking; and the heat that they give is not false. Yet they also ought to be more than flashes, and they must absolutely be more than the inverse reflections of the newspaper’s dying embers."

"What’s the gap between dreams being fantasy and reality? Obviously, it’s a matter of action. But, what makes the free man take action where the cubicle citizen recoils? This is the question that has been burning in my mind for some time. This mindset makes the difference between success and near certain failure."

"An early and prominent employee of Google, Georges Harik, recently made the assertion that pairs working together in startups are 20 times more productive than individuals working alone. The author has also personally experienced the boost of what is here termed pairwork in a university setting during the startup phase of several educational and interdisciplinary initiatives. The paper briefly explores pairwork in the history of technology and constructs both qualitative and little quantitative models of pairwork. The quantitative model under reasonable assumptions easily recovers Harik’s 20x boost. The paper also briefly examines the author’s recent experiences with pairwork in four interdisciplinary and educational initiatives."

"In recent research experiments, Derek Rucker and Adam Galinsky, found that people who felt powerless were willing to pay more money for luxury or status items than people who’d been conditioned to feel more powerful and in control."

"But if an entire team walks, that’s much more like an addict’s “hitting bottom”. The consequences are going to be huge because any new team would have to learn the system from scratch. (Though I suppose management could delude themselves into thinking they have the project documentation to make that tractable.) And the departure of any series of employees [or, in the case of an addict, friends] is easy to rationalize: “he’s just a malcontent [no fun any more since he got married]”. But when *everyone* rejects you at once…"

"Working in an collaborative environment that simultaneously supports business, technology, creativity, and performance give rise to new concepts. Below we list of some of the ideas we use in our work--terms you may hear or things you may experience if you become a member and spend some time in this unique environment."

"This the right thing to do not only because it is a more realistic assessment of an academic’s worth. It’s also the right thing to do because it helps to build the value of the network. If knowledge and expertise are becoming properties of the network, it is the social responsibility of our institutions to encourage the enhancement of that network."

"Here’s the idea: A mobile, outdoor co-working space. That’s pretty much it."

"I also am still unable to shake the sense that I am somehow responsible for my failure, that it was about something lacking in my character or skills, rather than about the market and the odds. If only... I had published more. If only... I had taken that job instead of that other one. If only... I was better at writing cover letters. If only... my interests were more marketable. If only, if only, if only.

I feel like I was crippled, and that I still struggle with the effects of that now.

What kills me, particularly, is that the experience of that career trauma is what has made it so challenging to move on. In some essential way I feel damaged, and it carries over into all of my subsequent efforts to remake myself and my career. An unfriendly market becomes a personal career failure becomes a personal failure, period."

"The key, then, is to have good jobs waiting for workers when they are displaced due to inevitable (and desirable) technological change or to jobs moving overseas, jobs that are every bit as good or better than the jobs they left. That is where we are falling short. "

"When occupations contract, the average age of workers in those occupations tends to rise, Autor says. "Young people don't want to stake their futures in shrinking fields. Meanwhile, older workers have an incentive to stick around as they have skills and knowledge specific to these jobs.""

"If there is one conclusion to be drawn from the life of Leonardo, it is that procrastination reveals the things at which we are most gifted — the things we truly want to do. Procrastination is a calling away from something that we do against our desires toward something that we do for pleasure, in that joyful state of self-forgetful inspiration that we call genius."

"“We have no words to waste on you.... We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain.”

If your only experience of Jack London is Call of the Wild and White Fang, do yourself a favor and read The Iron Heel or The Abyss. "

"You can talk about professions being demoralized, in both senses of the word. Medicine is a deeply moral profession, but have the incentives (and disincentives) of the medical-industrial complex been chipping away at that foundation?

Banking once had a moral dimension. Is that even detectable anymore? Are there bankers at Citigroup who still see themselves fundamentally as stewards? Or is that species extinct?"

"Another common thread in the grad students’ stories was dissuasion, both passive and active, from engagement with the digital. From bureaucratic hassles to tepid advising to being actually barred from computing facilities built for faculty (think about that for a moment; it’s appalling on so very many levels), the message goes out loud and clear: technology is a toy, it’s a diversion, it’s fine for the classroom, but it’s not how you do your work."

"But alas, it does not. In fact and here is the crucial point, tenure doesn’t enable academic freedom, there is no such thing as academic freedom, what tenure does is farm the decision of academic freedom out to other bodies. A majority of institutions make tenure decisions based on publishing record, in other words forces outside the institution which are making market decisions based on what can be profitably sold as an intellectual commodity (usually in book form) are deciding what academics can and cannot say."

"Fortunately, we are not yet “perfected” consumers but if we are not vigilant, our attention span will continue to shrink, and those available conveniences that help us force more and more material through our tiny pinhole of focus will proliferate. (Just as road-building worsens traffic problems, media-management and organization tools tend to exacerbate our attention problems. Hence, I spend as much time editing metadata as I do concentrating on music I’m listening to.)"

"The second thing you need to do is push your uncertainty threshold.
We all have a certain limit, or threshold, for the amount of uncertainty we can handle. For some of us, we have such a low limit, we’re afraid of even simple things, like talking to a stranger. We can’t predict what the person we’ll say, so we can’t tolerate the uncertainty. This is on the lower end of the spectrum. The higher end of the scale might be not being able to quit your job and follow your passion. There’s no way you can foresee what will happen, so you let uncertainty keep you from taking action."

"Well, my dear little children, I’ve got bad news for you. It is your precious context that is holding you back. It is your C-level Exeuctives and high-level managers who can’t delegate real responsibility and authority to their people. It is your product people who are too busy to explain what really needs to be done. It is your facilities people who can’t make a workspace fit to work in. It is your programmers who won’t learn the techniques necessary to succeed. It is your managers and product owners who keep increasing pressure until any focus on quality is driven out of the project."

"At the same time as questions of labor were disappearing, economics began to elevate the status of investors' financial claims, insisting that owners of this form of property had rights equal to those of owners of real goods, such as land or factories. Even something as ephemeral as "good will" became recognized as property."

Shorter form: DO NOT BECOME A GRADUATE STUDENT AND EXPECT A LIFE. EVER, ANYWHERE, NO MATTER WHAT YOU THINK, YOU'RE NOT THINKING ENOUGH.

"Elected officials don’t run our government. Government employees do. Every citizen interested in changing our country must understand this."

"The Big Dream is about pushing yourself. Identifying places where your reach exceeds your grasp and then committing to tackle those things."

"people living for revenge get to walk slow-motion in front of more explosions that heartless plutocrats do"

True for nearly every discipline beside "painting" as well. Including the ones where one may be "more successful". I know a lot of useless computer scientists, for example.

...which are all one thing: MORE DIVERSITY NEEDED ON ALL FRONTS. That's it.

"The old school thinking is about individual productivity: but the social revolution has moved past that into network productivity, which entails connectedness and social meaning. The personal hit on productivity is real, but it's not a cost: it's an inve

"there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man developed a machine to do his work he began to starve"

"Effectiveness uses time to avoid doing only what you have done before, in favor of working out how to do something better."