Archive for the 'Careers' Category

Monday Links: April 21st, 2008

Published by Taylor on April 20, 2008 in Careers, Design, Energy, Environment, Google, Monday Links, Politics, Space and Sustainability. View Comments

Another week closer to Spring…or so we hope.  This week’s links are very heavy on environmental stories.  I apologize for the one-dimensionality, but Jarred has some Web 2.0 stuff planned for this week to even things out a bit.  Links:

  • Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. offers three major environmental policies for the next president: a carbon cap-and-trade system (wisely endorsed by Senators Obama, Clinton, and McCain); smart grids and modernizing energy delivery infrastructure; and drastic improvements in energy efficiency for buildings and machines.  Sounds like a start [Hat Tip: Grist].
  • Treehugger features stories on space debris (click through to see the image…pretty unbelievable) and the “Pacific trash vortex“–an area twice the size of Texas in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that’s entirely covered in garbage (more here).  Further proof of the attitude that out of sight is out of mind…until our children grow up, anyway.
  • The latest version of Google Earth includes a feature that shows users when a satellite image was taken; this is enormously important for conservation efforts aimed at tracking land and water conditions over time.  Also helpful for spies.

You could train a recent college graduate to do your job well in a few days or less – This demonstrates you do not need any experience or knowledge learned over time to complete your tasks, which implies busy work or menial duties.

  • The New Yorker featured a really fascinating article on something I rarely give a second thought: elevators.  The story includes an account of the horrific experience of a guy trapped in an elevator for 41 hours.  The time-lapse video of his ordeal makes me think I’ll be taking the stairs for a few weeks.
  • I keep procrastinating on a green architecture post; in the meantime, this is one of the coolest green building concepts I’ve seen recently: urban skyscraper farming, courtesy of the Dwell Magazine blog.  Check out this design, and follow the link for details:

dwell city farm

  • I’m giving Jarred this raw meat themed iPod case for his birthday, just to send Ashish (and Steve Jobs, for that matter) over the edge.  Fortunately for you, Ashish, it’s way too expensive for a gag gift.

Enjoy those links while I go read the NY Times magazine “green issue.” More to come….

The Liberal Arts Graduate in a Specialized World

Published by Taylor on April 15, 2008 in Careers and Education. View Comments

specialistJarred and I really don’t intend to focus this blog on career changes any more than the environmental, technological, political and social changes that share this space. But if you’ve been reading lately, you can tell that career and life decisions weigh heavily on the minds of your trusted bloggers as we contemplate the close of our first year in the wild blue yonder.

As a proud graduate of a venerable basketball academic-powerhouse liberal arts school, I’ve heard all the jokes and all the criticism of non-technical or “practical” education: that art history majors make for enlightening bar tenders (and little else); that English majors are destined for grueling lives in middle management; or that the only reason to major in sociology is if you dream of teaching…sociology. Har har, we get it. I’ll admit that there are times when I start to wonder whether what I assume to be my most desirable skills, finely tuned in a liberal arts pressure-cooker (critical thinking and analysis; writing; articulating ideas; synthesizing information; approaching issues with a multi-disciplinary perspective) are not enough for careers or jobs I might enjoy. I, like many people I know, have tried my damnedest to be as well rounded as possible…could it be that I’ve missed the boat on something even more valuable: specialization?

Fortunately, I’m not the only one worrying about this; most fortunately, other bloggers on this theme are smarter and wiser than I am. On her excellent blog Twenty Set, Monica O’Brien feels my pain:

[C]ompanies say they want well-rounded employees, but here’s a secret that might better your career: what companies really want are employees who can bring a broad perspective to one area of expertise.

What’s the difference? Well-rounded employees dip their toes into everything, but don’t ever jump in. They are easy to replace, because they haven’t developed expertise in one area. They are the employees who support top performers rather than become them. They are the employees who get described as “Jack of all trades, master of none.”

Having a broad perspective is much different than being well-rounded. Employees with broad perspectives have one area of expertise, but continue their education in other disciplines to gain new concepts, which get applied in their daily work. These employees are the innovators, the top performers, the “big picture” people who get promoted to high-level positions in their industry. They are the inspired ones who strive for constant improvement of processes; who get paid for their ideas rather than their grunt work.

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Blogging and Work-Life Balance in a Digital World

Published by Taylor on April 9, 2008 in Blogging, Careers, Culture, Health and Sociology. View Comments

blogstressA recent NY Times article is (predictably) getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere.  The article uses the deaths of two bloggers (and a heart attack suffered by a third) to wonder aloud whether blogging as a profession carries inherent stress that causes folks to blog themselves to death:

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

John Batelle wonders what the fuss is about: after all, in any profession there will be those who unfortunately work themselves to the brink of personal collapse.  Just because blogging is a relatively new profession doesn’t mean that we should be any more shocked than we are are by, say, a lawyer who works him or herself to death.  But in a comment on Batelle’s post,  reader JG offers a  great and thoughtful response (I encourage you to read the whole thing; emphasis mine):

Even people who work themselves to death in their offices, late into the night, eating bad take-out, had [sic] to leave their offices at some point. In order to go home, they have to walk outside, catch some fresh air, walk up or down a couple of stairs to get to the subway. That travel period gives them a modicum of real contact with real people. A nod. Maybe sometimes even a smile. An eye-flick of recognition from the newspaper vendor on the corner. Those small things are sustaining, life-affirming, human. And those things, no matter how small, do help reduce stress.

The internet changes that. Again, this is what we have to admit to ourselves that we believe. The internet makes things different. Yes, we’d like all of it to be different-better. But sometimes it is different-worse. And one way it could very well be different-worse is that blogging for a living, from home, means you lose all those little moments of human contact, of a little bit of exercise, of a little bit of fresh air.

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