Mike McBride Online

Career

What’s Your Definition of What a Job Should Be?
ByMike McBride January 6, 2022January 13, 2022 Reading Time: 3 minutes

That’s it. I know there are some who will tell you that they are passionate about their work, and they “never work a day in my life”. Good for them, but we have to start admitting that is a very small, select, group of people in a very small, select number of jobs. There are not billions of jobs out there like that for everyone to just go get. There are not even millions of them. Maybe I’m not going to change the world by doing just interesting work with people I don’t hate. That’s OK because I have the time to change the world in my own little way when I’m not working instead.

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Career

We Should Stop Equating Being Busy With Being Important
ByMike McBride January 5, 2022January 5, 2022 Reading Time: 2 minutes

It grabbed my attention because it’s something I hear quite often, often in combination with the other, more obvious, “complaint” about working long hours.

And yes, the word complaint is in quotes because we all know that when we mention the hours or the back-to-back meetings, we complain about it, but we are really bragging about how busy we are for one simple reason. Busy people are in demand, they are important.

But, are they really?

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Career | Links

Linked: More women than men feel uncomfortably cold at the office, and it’s impacting their work performance
ByMike McBride December 30, 2021December 30, 2021 Reading Time: 1 minute

Look, work from home eliminates this. So it’s clearly a diversity “plus” to let people work at a temperature they control and are most comfortable with, right? “Temperature discomfort is one of the most common sources of complaint within office environments. In particular, research suggests that excessively cold office temperatures are a frequent issue. Notably,…

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Links | SocialNetworking | Tech

Linked: The Third Web
ByMike McBride December 29, 2021December 29, 2021 Reading Time: 2 minutes

Here’s the thing. I’ve been around the internet, and the Web, a long time. Long enough to remember when HTML was going to “democratize” publishing and when blogging was going to “democratize journalism” and when social media was going to be the thing that finally “democratized” the Web and gave everyone a voice.

None of that proved to be true. Each and every iteration of Internet technology eventually wound up with a couple of big winners, and some sort of monopoly.

What is it about Web3 that makes people think this will end any differently?

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Career

Linked: Most Managers Don’t Listen Well
ByMike McBride December 27, 2021December 26, 2021 Reading Time: 1 minute

If you aren’t even trying to listen during difficult conversations how will employees ever truly feel valued?

This does explain some of the disconnects around managers wanting to return to the office when employees don’t, or managers feeling like they’ve made the effort to support employee mental health when employees don’t agree. In order to understand that what you’re doing isn’t working, you have to actually ask people.

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Links | Security

Linked: Large-scale phishing study shows who bites the bait more often
ByMike McBride December 23, 2021December 23, 2021 Reading Time: 2 minutes

They had some interesting findings on gender (doesn’t matter) and age (young and older employees seemed more likely), but this is one that I think impacts a lot of what we do when it comes to protecting against phishing:

“An interesting finding in the ETH study is that employees who are continuously exposed to phishing eventually fall for it, as 32.1% of the study participants clicked on at least one dangerous link or attachment.”

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