Creating jobs?

I’ve said before how much I like the radio show This American Life. This week’s episode, How To Create a Job, was an interesting one. I was especially interested near the end.

Throughout the show, they look at the difficulty of actually creating jobs — new jobs, where jobs didn’t exist before. In Act Three, we see that in many cases, it’s really just a matter of shifting the jobs around. They were always there, but we’re looking at a different there, moving jobs to Phoenix or Houston, from, say, California. That might make things look better in Phoenix or Houston, but overall, the U.S. economy hasn’t been improved by creating more jobs.

But then it was the intro to Act Four: Be Cool, Stay In School that really make me sit up. Here’s Ira Glass:

OK, here’s something I didn’t know before we started working on this week’s radio show. I knew that 9% of Americans are unemployed. But college graduates: their unemployment rate is half that, 4.5%. People with PhDs, it’s even better, 2% unemployment. High school grads are right near the national average, 9.7% unemployment. And people who did not graduate high school: their unemployment rate is almost 15%.

Which means, the unemployment problem in this country is mostly a problem for the uneducated, the unskilled.

And what’s strange is that those economic development people that Adam and Julie just talked to, they are mostly focused on attracting jobs for the highly educated, for people with at least college degrees.

To finish Act Four, Adam Davidson tells us this, after saying that America is still manufacturing a lot of stuff, in a lot of factories:

But pretty much everyone in those factories needs to have some basic math proficiency. They need to be trusted with expensive, precision equipment. You’re probably not getting a factory job if you don’t have at least a high school degree and some advanced technical training. The experts call it high school plus. If you don’t have a high school degree, plus some more training, some more specialized skill, you are, increasingly, locked out of the middle class.

And that’s a lot of people: 80 million Americans over 25. That’s 40% of the adult population, are in that group.

Having some training or education after high school used to be a great way, one of the most reliable ways, to make it into the middle class. But over the next few years, more and more, it’ll be the only way.

Now, most of my readers have lots of post-high-school training. Most of you have college degrees; some have PhDs. And I know that some of you have lost jobs and have had trouble finding work in this economy. We probably already have a sense that more education correlates with lower unemployment, though that’s little consolation when you, personally, fall into the bottom of the statistics.

It’s an interesting episode; give it a listen.

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[And, by the way: Act Four talks about a program called Pathways Out Of Poverty. I don’t know about you, but I — probably though my training at IBM — make acronyms out of everything. And, well, sometimes people might want to think about that a bit before they name their organizations.]

Equal-Pay Day

Today, 12 April 2011, is Equal-Pay Day in the U.S. If you took the median-salary American man and the median-salary woman, and started paying them both on the first of 2010, today is the day when the woman will have finally earned what the man took in through 31 December, about 14 weeks ago.

Of course, it’s not that simple. You can’t just take any man and any woman and make that comparison. The figure that’s used for this is the median income: take all the men’s annual salaries, list them in order of lowest to highest, then pick the one in the middle. Do the same for women’s salaries. Compare. The median of the women’s salaries is about 78% of the median of the men’s. We could use the average (mean) instead of the median, but for these sorts of economic comparisons it’s typically the median that’s used, because it doesn’t suffer from skewing by the extremes at the edges.

The problem is that the majority of the gap comes from the fact that men and women are not equally represented in all the different jobs... and the jobs that employ primarily men just so happen to pay more than the ones that employ primarily women. I can’t imagine how that happened, but, well, there it is. Nurses earn less than doctors. Beauticians earn less than plumbers. Teachers earn less than corporate executives. And so on.

And it doesn’t stop there: what about college-educated women? What about those with PhDs? Because another fact is that more women than men are finishing college, these days, and more women than men are completing PhD programs. Doesn’t that fix it?

No. For one thing, when we look at the fields that women are getting degrees in, we find the same thing: the fields that attract women more tend to be the less lucrative ones.

But also, when we break it down by field we still find differences. In April of 2007, the American Association of University Women released a study titled Behind the Pay Gap (PDF). The study showed that female biological scientists earn 75% of what their male colleagues do. In mathematics, the figure is 76%; in psychology, 86%. Women in engineering are almost there: they earn 95% of what the men do. But less than 20% of the engineering majors are women.

The other argument for why there’s a pay gap is that women and men make different decisions about their lives. Women choose motherhood, a bigger hit against career advancement and salary opportunities than fatherhood. More women work part time. And so on.

The AAUW study looked at that. They controlled for those decisions, and they compared men and women who really could be reasonably compared. They looked at people in the same fields, at the same schools, with the same grades. They considered those of the same race, the same socio-economic status, the same family situations. They didn’t just compare apples to apples; they compared, as economist Heather Boushey puts it, Granny Smith apples to Granny Smith apples.

And they found that even in that case, there’s an unexplained pay gap of 5% the year after college, which increases to 12% ten years later. From the study:

The pay gap between female and male college graduates cannot be fully accounted for by factors known to affect wages, such as experience (including work hours), training, education, and personal characteristics. Gender pay discrimination can be overt or it can be subtle. It is difficult to document because someone’s gender is usually easily identified by name, voice, or appearance. The only way to discover discrimination is to eliminate the other possible explanations. In this analysis the portion of the pay gap that remains unexplained after all other factors are taken into account is 5 percent one year after graduation and 12 percent 10 years after graduation. These unexplained gaps are evidence of discrimination, which remains a serious problem for women in the work force.

It has gotten better: if today the general pay gap is about 20%, 15 years ago it was 25%, and 30 years ago, 35%. The improvement is good news.

But the speed of the improvement is not. The disparity of pay between male-dominated fields and female-dominated ones is not. The gap in pay between highly trained men and women in the same field is not. And that unexplained 5-to-12 percent is certainly not.

Let’s keep pushing that date back, and look for the year when equal-pay day is December 31^st.

Taking anti-spam work personally

Via Brent, comes the AP story of a man who quit his job, went to law school, and now sues spammers:

Eight years ago, Balsam was working as a marketer when he received one too many e-mail pitches to enlarge his breasts.

Enraged, he launched a Web site called Danhatesspam.com, quit a career in marketing to go to law school and is making a decent living suing companies who flood his e-mail inboxes with offers of cheap drugs, free sex and unbelievable vacations.

I feel like I’m doing a little bit of good cleaning up the Internet, Balsam said.

As Brent says, Go! Go! Go!

As for me, I say it’s too bad I didn’t have the confidence to do something like that when I left IBM.

If someone is worth recommending...

...then it’s worth writing a good recommendation.

And here I don’t just mean a positive recommendation, though that, too, of course. I mean that you should spend some time writing it well. And I mean that you should check it for spelling, punctuation, grammar, and style.

For a case in point, look at this actual recommendation I got last year, for a graduate student we were considering:

[Name] is viewed in the technical and executive community as some one, who using her teachnical ability, and ability to understand the root cause of seemingly dirrerent positions teken by various inter related groups, is able synthesize a solution that enhances the design and makes various party comfortable.

That’s a copy-and-paste job, with the candidate’s name removed; all errors were in the original.

As it happens, and as you might guess, the author of that recommendation is not a native English speaker. Even so,

1. his spoken English is not that bad, so this is just carelessness, and
2. he could have — should have — had a native speaker check it.

So let’s correct what’s written, and have another look:

[Name] is viewed in the technical and executive communities as someone who, using her technical ability and her ability to understand the root cause of seemingly different positions taken by various interrelated groups, is able to synthesize a solution that enhances the design and makes various parties comfortable.

OK, now that the writing is tolerable... what does it say?

I certainly haven’t a clue. And that’s it, in its entirety.

A recommendation is meant to tell the reader — me, in this case — why he would want to give the candidate a position. What does she bring to my organization, my program, my project? What specific skills does she have that would benefit me? What do you know about her that you can tell me, that will make me jump out of my seat? Tell me one or two things that she’s succeeded in that are relevant to me.

But the example here is completely generic. It says nothing about what the writer knows about the candidate (just some vague thing about how she’s viewed in the community). It says nothing about what she’s done. It says nothing about how her skills match what I’m looking for. She has technical ability? In what areas? What has she accomplished with it?

It describes, in a bizarrely complex clause, some knack she has for understanding people’s ideas... but, again, it’s vague about it, and doesn’t say more.

And, in the end, what’s the only thing the author tells me she’s done? It says that she can “enhance the design” (of what?) and “make various parties comfortable.” What parties would that be? And comfortable? That’s like when your parents used to say that the friend of a friend whom your parents were trying to fix you up with was “very nice.”

What was I supposed to do with that recommendation? What I did was discard it. And then I sent email to some contacts of my own, who could give me some real recommendations about that candidate.

Not everyone is going to go through the trouble. If you’re applying for something and most of your recommendations are like that, your application will most likely go into the trash.

If you’re writing a recommendation, take the time to write one that will truly reflect well on the applicant, and that will be useful to the people making the evaluation. Say specific things, and make the personal connection — how you know the applicant and what you have seen that impresses you. Why would you hire her? Tell me that.

And if you wouldn’t hire her — if you’re writing a recommendation pro forma because you didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings by saying no — then, by &deity, don’t write it! Say no, please. Because a recommendation like this is worse than none at all, so in the process of not hurting her feelings, you’re hurting her chances.

If you’re soliciting recommendations, you’re in a tougher situation. You need to pick three or four people you can trust to do it right. Use your sense in making that selection. Maybe you can find a way to see some recommendations they’ve written in the past. Maybe you just have a gut feeling that they’d write good ones. Choose carefully. Then discuss with them what you want them to highlight, and what you think you’d like them to say.

They need to write it in their own words, and it has to be an honest recommendation, but that doesn’t mean you can’t help them craft it. Remind them of your most relevant skills. Remind them of the times you’ve worked together successfully, and point out the key elements of that success, and the value of it. Then let them go off and write.

And remember that each recommendation needs to be custom-written for the position you’re looking for. You may want different people writing references, depending upon where you’re applying. Does this or that professor have a close relationship with the school or company you’re hoping to go to? Pick the one who does, and take advantage of those connections. A recommendation means more if the reader knows and trusts the person making it. Don’t just use the same people and don’t try to recycle their recommendations. Even if this position may be similar to another, it probably won’t be exactly the same.

Finally, if your thesis advisor or previous employer isn’t one of those you’re getting a recommendation from, be prepared to explain why, in a positive way (don’t say why you didn’t get along, but say why the recommendations you did get are more relevant). The question might not come up... but if it does, you’ll need a good answer at the ready.

A tale of two Steves

Early in my time at IBM, the group I was working in added two new members — both, as it happens, called Steve. One, we were told, had a fairly senior position, a higher rank than our manager, though in the technical track, and would be the most senior member of our team. The other was at a lower level, only a little above me in the hierarchy.

They were to arrive on the same day, and I was to present my part of the project to them. I felt uneasy about that. Not because I had any problem with public speaking or giving a technical presentation about my work, but because I worried that my little presentation about my petty project couldn’t keep the senior Steve interested.

When the day came and we all met in a conference room, I went to the blackboard — yes, chalk and blackboards, then, and overhead projectors with transparencies — and started my talk. I tried to make it interesting, and Steve T. stayed alert and asked lots of questions. He seemed to be getting it, and that was heartening. But, as I’d expected, Steve G. was all but nodding off. He sat wordlessly, holding his head up with his hand and looking quite bored.

No matter: as I said, I’d expected that. I was just finishing my first year there, right out of college, so it didn’t surprise me that what I had to tell them couldn’t hold the interest of someone with 15 years or more of experience.

But then I found that I’d mis-read the whole thing. It was Steve T. who had the experience and the senior position. He’d moved ahead by being alert and inquisitive, by taking everything in and analyzing it, by understanding every part of a project, even those parts that had been assigned to junior programmers fresh out of school. His experience had taught him to learn from everyone.

Steve G. wasn’t as young as I, and had been with the company for a number of years, but still held a junior position and probably always would. As I worked with him over the next months, I could see that. His carefree approach was reflected in his work. By not paying attention to all the details, he lacked the overall vision that would get him more responsible, more influential positions.

That was an important lesson to learn early on; the two Steves taught me something that I’ve relied on ever since.

¿Cómo se llama usted?

Some weeks ago, U.S. News & World Report columnist Liz Wolgemuth wrote about whether having an unusual name can affect your career prospects:

While a bizarre first name rarely says much about the individual who carries it—serving instead to lay the parents out like an open book—will Zuma, Apple, or Kyd have trouble being taken seriously in the working world?

Liz cites blogs that raise the question, and asks, “Would you mind letting Sage Moonblood manage your money?” Her advice on the issue mirrors the Internet philosophy of being conservative with what you give and liberal in what you accept:

If you’re a parent, consider the professional ramifications of your child’s name. But if you’re an employer, focus on performance.

Commenter #2, a man who is himself named Sebastianalexander, says that an unusual name is, indeed a problem — and he speaks from personal experience. But he opened his comment with this:

While we all strive to be nonjudgemental and open minded, based on name alone would you hire Shaquinella Jackson or Jane Goldstein as your defense lawyer? It’s a silent decision we all make quite often and we do what we honestly know is best.

My response to that, which I gave in the comments there and have meant to blog about here since, is that I don’t judge people on their names alone. Sure, I’ll note an unusual name, a “strange” name, and will sometimes shake my head in wonder. But when it comes to choosing someone to hire or befriend, no, I won’t consider that as a factor. I mentioned that when I talked about what I look at in résumés.

I do wonder why parents give their children names that they’ll have to spend their lives repeating (“Sorry, I didn’t get that... what did you say your name was?”), spelling, and explaining. And, as Liz says, some names certainly appear to assume that their owners will go into entertainment, rather than, say, law or medicine. Still, as Liz’s commenter #1 points out, we may soon have a president called Barack. And if you’re looking in the phone book for a defense attorney, you’re more likely to see “Jackson and Goldstein, LLP”, and not see the given names at all.

But, here, let’s have a quiz. Suppose you were looking for that defense attorney, or someone to get financial advice from, or otherwise just someone to trust. Decide something from the names before you look at the links... and then think about whether anything changes afterward. Would you put your trust in Epatha, or Lynette?

You can’t judge people by their names.

What do you expect of Tawanna Smith, and of Angela Reddock?

You can’t make assumptions based on people's names.

Résumé “headlines”

Someone sent me this résumé advice as a curiosity, and curious I found it, indeed:

Instead of putting your name and objective at the top of your resume, try this technique. Make a single sentence headline about yourself that is so intriguing or funny or descriptive or unique or creative that it breaks through the clutter and gets read.

On the surface, it sounds like reasonable advice, but for two snags. I should start by noting that interviewing prospective hires is a small part of my job, and not something I’m doing all the time. Perhaps someone who does it constantly would have a different view. Or perhaps the view would be different for someone in another industry.

So, that said, the first snag is that I don’t start by looking at the applicant’s name, or other such information that’s likely to be heading the résumé. That’s not the most important stuff on there, and I also wouldn’t want to take even the small risk that things like the name or address would prompt me to pre-judge the applicant.

No, the first thing I look at is what your goals are and what you’ve done already. And for those, I don’t need nor want something cute or catchy, but something clear and concise, something that really tells me why you’re here and what you want to do, and what skills and experience you bring with you. I will say that this should certainly be “unique”; it’s of no use to say, “This is a great company, and I’d really like to work here.”

The next thing I’ll do is go to Google and see what I can find about you, so make sure there’s something out there that shows off your professional credentials. I’ll look over some of your publications, and I’ll note where they were published, how mature the work was, and how clearly it was communicated.

The rest of it — education, references, name, hobbies, or “headline” — comes later, and means far less. References, in particular, are things I usually find pretty useless. You have to have them, of course, but unless you’ve specifically picked references I’m likely to know personally or professionally (if you’ve really done a good job putting your résumé together, you have, but I rarely see that), I’ll have to go looking for references on my own, anyway, and that’ll wait until I’ve already decided that you’ve made the first cut.

The other snag is the list of examples of “creative” headlines, which includes these:

I married the prettiest girl in my small town high school, proof positive I can sell myself; just think what I can do for the widgets of ABC.

Voted “most likely to succeed,” when I should have been voted “most likely to help ABC develop killer products.”

I was MVP for a state championship team in high school, voted on by my peers.

If I saw these, my response would be, “WTF?” I’d think of the first two as negative points, attempts to be cutesy at the expense of real substance. For the third, I would wonder why you thought that mattered at all. Even the best of the suggestions would be no better than neutral for me.

Again, maybe that’s because I don’t do this day in and day out, and my eyes are not just glazed over by one more résumé.

So do any of my readers interview job candidates regularly? Do any of you have comments that agree or differ? Would the catchy headlines truly catch your eye and make you look further, saving this applicant from being stacked on the endless heap?

Work-life balance

A recent conversation about “work-life balance”, along with various reports of examples of difficulties in that area, and a recent presentation by a Human Resources manager have made me think a lot, lately, about the issue. The HR manager, in particular, triggered some thoughts with a statement that there really is no such thing as “work-life balance”, that it’s a myth.

Is it a myth?

Of course it’s not. Work-life balance certainly does exist, but here’s the thing: you choose the balance. And every choice you make has effects, benefits, drawbacks, and consequences.

If you want to be a corporate executive, you need to put the time and work in to achieve that. Most likely, that time and work will take away from other parts of your life, from time you could spend with your family and friends, from vacations and weekend time and other leisure activities, from work you might have put toward writing a novel. If you aren’t willing to give up those things, you have that choice, at least in most jobs. But that will delay or derail your moving up at the office, and you’ll certainly find yourself off the fast track. Many people finish their careers without having progressed to senior positions in their companies.

And that’s OK. It’s the choice they made.

It’s their work-life balance.

A year or so ago, a colleague of mine, a female middle-manager, posed a work-life balance question that she looked at as a women’s issue, as something facing a mother:

My husband has to be at work early, and he gets home early, so he has responsibility for the kids in the afternoons, and I get them to school in the mornings. That means that I can’t leave for work until after 8. What do I do when some VP decides that he needs me in a 7:30 meeting?

There were few suggestions for her, really. But I looked at it differently: the problem is neither new, nor related to women or motherhood. Watch movies or television from the ’50s and ’60s, and you’ll see plenty of plots involving fathers who had to miss their kids’ ball games, school plays, and music recitals because they had to work long hours or go on a business trip.

The difference between then and now is that women now have to deal with those issues too. Forgetting, for now, about the very real problems of artificial limitations placed on women; of gender imbalances, roles, and stereotypes; of unequal pay for women, still on the order of 75% of what men get, overall... forgetting, for now, about those things, the fact remains that the positive changes for women in the workforce have the consequence of saddling women, as well as men, with these age-old work-life balance problems.

We want to “have it all,” we do. But we can’t; none of us, not men and not women, can have it all. The best we can do is to optimize what we have based on the priorities we set. We each have to create our own balance.

Big news: don't be stupid

What must it be like to have to be a hack writer[1][2] for a bad magazine? I’ve never been a fan of U.S. News and World Report, but sometimes I wonder why they bother at all.

[Update 1, 14 Apr, 1 pm: In the comments, Mark takes me to task for being self-indulgent and critical. He's right. I apologize for denigrating the work of someone who's seriously trying to write helpful material... and who has a paying gig of it, to boot. I didn't mean to be nasty, but I was anyway.]

A friend sent me a column from last month by Liz Wolgemuth. Following the popular theme of “lists”, she gives us five ways you can get fired for computer/Internet use. Allow me to paraphrase:

1. Violate your terms of employment by letting your Internet use conflict with your job. Alternatively, say bad things about your company or co-workers on the Internet.
2. Waste time on the computer instead of getting work done.
3. Surf porn.
4. Post embarrassing photos of your co-workers or bosses.
5. Use inappropriate language or topics in email from your work address.

Now, I know that no one could figure any of that out for himself, right? Well, the whole list can be summarized by the phrase that Ms Wolgemuth quotes from Heather Armstrong, who “lost her job a year after beginning the blog for writing entries that involved colleagues.” The advice?: “Be ye not so stupid.”

The problem with articles like this and lists like this is that they ignore the real problem of unreasonable employers and irrational disciplinary action. Anyone can read the list in this column and say, “Well, duh.” But where’s the advice about dealing with the boss who’s afraid of those blog things, and is willing to sack people prophylactically, even when they maintain appropriate work/life boundaries?

When I was 15, I unloaded trucks in a retail-store warehouse over the summer. The warehouse manager had a strict philosophy: “The less we talk, the more we work.” And he enforced that very simply: if he saw your work slow down in the morning, he had you assigned to one of the more unpleasant jobs in the warehouse that afternoon. You figured it out right away.

And if you didn’t figure it out, you were gone; there were plenty of people who needed the job, waiting to replace you.

It’s no different in the Internet world, though it’s that much easier to get sidetracked, easier to run afoul of unwritten (and often unspoken) rules. You just have to feel things out and get an understanding of what’s acceptable and what’s not. And you have to use common sense, and be not stupid. We don’t need a list to tell us that.

[From a more recent column, we learn that people who wear sexy clothing to the office are distracting. Yow! Who knew?]
 
 

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Update 2, 14 Apr, 7 pm: Ms Wolgemuth has read this and posted a follow-up today, addressing my concern about dealing with the blog-terrified boss. She quotes from Alexandra Levit:

If your boss is threatened by the Internet (I think these types are increasingly rare), then you should still, in the interest of full disclosure, let him/her know that you have a blog, social media profile, etc. and assure him/her that you don’t intend to discuss the company or work matters on there. Your boss doesn’t really have the right to ask you to shut your site down if you keep your word on that.

That’s good advice.

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[1] From dictionary.com:

—noun

1. a person, as an artist or writer, who exploits, for money, his or her creative ability or training in the production of dull, unimaginative, and trite work; one who produces banal and mediocre work in the hope of gaining commercial success in the arts: As a painter, he was little more than a hack.

[2] OK, but at least I’m a hack writer for my own magaz blog. And I’m not being paid for it.

Every small victory...

Women are still behind men in what they get paid for the same work. The average working woman still gets paid less than 80% of what the average working man does. But not at Wimbledon, not any more:

It has been a long time coming — 39 years, to be exact — but women’s tennis players will receive equal prize money to the men at Wimbledon this year. Under increasing pressure from women’s stars like Venus Williams and Maria Sharapova and from society at large, the club announced on Thursday that it would put an end to a practice that had proved ever more divisive.

OK, now that Wimbledon's done it, we need others to follow. Like, oh, say, Wal*Mart?

Leadership

A few years ago I was discussing insane CEO salaries with a colleague.[1] I wondered why it could possibly be necessary to pay them so much. Does the CEO really make that much difference? If they paid me 10% of what they pay the CEO, wouldn't the company run about as well? I mean, the CEO doesn't do it him/her/itself — there's a whole organization going about its business, and I could just step in and say, “Yes, carry on as you have been, you're all doing a fine job,” and then collect my million or two while I handle the job mechanically.

My colleague said, “So what you're asking is whether leadership works. It does.” And, indeed, there's been a lot written about that, about effective (and ineffective) leadership. And I've been a manager, and I know that one's leadership style can affect things. But it's hard to get one's head around how much of a difference it can make, really. And then, two summers ago, I got a first-hand example.

Two summers ago, I enrolled in a one-day class at the Culinary Institute of America, what we locally call “The CIA” with a nudge and a wink. The class was about cooking with garlic. It started with a lecture about garlic (details about the plant, the different kinds of garlic, things to do and not to do when cooking with it), after which the instructor presented the menu — everything from appetizer to dessert made with garlic — and we split into groups and went into the kitchen to cook.

As the chef was going over the menu, two women sitting near me said they wanted to do the garlic sausage. So did I, so I suggested joining them, and we had our team — the guy sitting behind them joined us also, later. The chef started going around the room asking teams which dish they wanted to sign up for, and as he hit the first team I heard others talking about the sausage. So as soon as the first team had signed up for their stuff, I just piped up and said, “Jane and Sally and I will do the sausage.” That worked fine, and the other group in the back renegotiated amongst themselves.

After we got the “intro to the kitchen” briefing we were left with our pile of ingredients and our recipe, and we were set to make our sausage. And there we were, the four of us, standing there. Looking at the meat and the garlic and the casings, and so on. Standing. And looking.

And then I said, “OK, I'll chop the garlic. Jane, why don't you [do this], and Sally, you [do that]? And Bill, would you [do the other thing]?” As I picked up the knife to start my task, the others all instantly went about theirs, happy that someone had taken the initiative and gotten us started. It hadn't been a question of what to do — we all knew that, and we had ingredients and a recipe staring back at us. It had been a question of organization. Who would do what, what would get done first, how would we go about it? It had been a question of leadership.

A minor case, to be sure. No doubt, if no one had said anything, someone would have started a task soon enough, and we'd have gotten ourselves rolling anyway. But having someone in charge, even in such an informal way, did help the process. It got us going quickly. It kept us focused and gave us direction. It even provided a place to go for decisions: at one point, one of the women (I forget whether it was Jane or Sally, but those aren't their real names anyway) came to me and said, “Why don't we divide the meat in two, and spice them differently?” “That sounds like a great idea to me! What do the rest of you think?”, I said. The rest agreed too, and we actually wound up doing three flavours. But as the self-appointed “manager”, I was where she went with her suggestion.

How does that relate to the original question? In the class, we had no organization but in a company with a new CEO the rest of the organization is still in place and working. Nevertheless, there'll be a time when assignments have to be given, new direction needs to be set, decisions must be made, for which the existing organization isn't set up. Yes, it can run for a while on the status quo. Eventually, though, CEO Leiba would have to stop playing World of Warcraft and start earning his two million.

And that's when we'd find out why they're better off paying ten times as much to someone who knows what she's doing.
 

Oh, and everyone loved the sausage. Everyone loved pretty much everything, in fact, except that the garlic fudge was pretty odd and didn't set right.
 

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[1] I meant for “insane”, here, to modify “salaries”, not “CEO”. Stop that!

Careers

It's seven months, to the day, until my 30th anniversary with my company. I came here at age 20, fresh out of college, with a mixture of idealism and awe. The idealism and awe soon gave way to day-to-day routine (though, truly, I still have some of both even today), and over the years I've built up some thoughts that I'd like to give out as a couple of pieces of career advice, should any of my readers be early in their careers, or know someone who is and might want to read this.

You are in control of your career.

I learned early in my career that ultimately, whatever work you're doing, your job is really to make your boss happy. That doesn't mean you should shine her shoes, unless, of course, you're employed as a shoe-shiner. It means you should be keenly aware of how your boss is being evaluated, and make sure your work is aligned with that.

At the same time, though, consider this: I spent the first years of my career doing what I was told. I worked on the projects to which I was assigned, and didn't steer my career myself. I was happy with that, and I did well, but after fifteen years I saw people who'd been around for less time than I progressing faster, and I realized that doing what I was told wasn't the only way to handle my assignments.

Companies need journeymen, who do good work but don't question and don't lead. But they also need and reward those who take responsibility and lead, and the extent to which you have a choice of which of those to be is greater than you may think. Look for, ask for, volunteer for assignments that will challenge you and that will put you in a visible position. Find assignments that will make a real difference to the company. If you succeed in these you'll be more valuable to the company, and you'll have more similar opportunities, and faster advancement.

There's a risk, of course. If you take on a difficult assignment and fail, it might stall your career — don't expect that your bosses will understand that it was a tough assignment and it's no surprise that you failed. They might, but don't expect it, and certainly don't look for it more than once.

Despite the risk, though, if you're looking for career advancement it's worth it. As you become known for being dependable in difficult situations, and for taking on and completing challenging projects, you increase not only your pay and position title, but also your influence and your job security. People pay attention to what you say, and actively ask for your opinion and involvement. It's a lot more work, but it's also a lot more rewarding.

Be respectful of and polite to the people you work with.

I actually do like most of the people I know at my company, I really do. And so it's not especially hard to be polite and respectful to them: to the people down the hall, the people over in the other building, the people 'round the world. But, even in the best of families, there are conflicts, and I see people, all the time, dealing with conflicts in ways that I consider... um... suboptimal.

We will disagree, both professionally and personally, over time; after nearly 30 years in the company, you can imagine that I've butted heads with many. And in my foolish youth (I am now in my wise youth stage; I'll let you know when I've reached middle age) I know I didn't always handle things in the best possible way. Surely I still err, now and again. But I make every effort to resolve conflicts sensibly and professionally, and to retain social and professional relationships whenever I can.

This is important because, as I have also seen through the years, you will encounter these people again. You will find yourself working, a few years from now, with that pain in the bum that you told off last week. And s/he will remember you. People you used to work alongside will eventually be in your management chain. Someone you had trouble getting along with back then will tomorrow be someone you have to go to for funding. Do not burn your bridges. It's better for you, and better for your company, if you treat everyone as though s/he might some day be your boss. This doesn't compromise you or your integrity, it doesn't crush your individuality, it doesn't make you someone you're not. It makes you a person deserving of respect as well.