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Career | Featured

Why “It’s Just the way Work is” Doesn’t Cut It, Employees Didn’t Create The Busyness Mess
ByMike McBride August 16, 2021August 26, 2021 Reading Time: 3 minutes

Putting this on individual employees is a cop-out. Saying this isn’t anyone’s fault is a cop-out. This obsession with busyness is a direct result of poor management. There was no mass movement of employees who decided that appearing busy was more important than getting real work done, they simply responded to incentives, and the incentives have favored people who don’t make time to be productive, but are also quick to respond, no matter how unproductive it made them, and until recently, were also the ones sitting at their desks for long hours. People who tried to avoid this, and unplug from work? Yeah right, again, this wasn’t something employees just decided to do on their own. They responded to poor management.

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Career

Quick Thought – Meetings that Could Have Been an Email
ByMike McBride August 14, 2021August 12, 2022 Reading Time: 2 minutes

Yesterday I attended a meeting that lasted 3 minutes.

At the time I was happy to have not wasted any more time in a meeting than was absolutely necessary and get 27 minutes back of my day.

So, good for us for not wasting time and filling the half-hour time slot.

On the other hand, if ever there was a meeting that could have been an email, this was it.

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Links

Linked: AI Wrote Better Phishing Emails Than Humans in a Recent Test
ByMike McBride August 10, 2021August 9, 2021 Reading Time: 1 minute

But seriously, we need to stop telling people that one of the signs of a phishing email is poor writing, or the generic text because that is going away fast. The tools used to create the message are getting better and better.

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Career | LawFirms

Are Your Long and Late Hours Actually Making you Less Effective?
ByMike McBride August 9, 2021August 8, 2021 Reading Time: 1 minute

Look at it this way, if you’re a client of one of these companies, who do you want doing your work, the associate who hasn’t slept more than 4 hours a night in weeks, or someone who’s actually rested? Who is going to do a better job for you? Who is going to be most cognitively effective?

Why do we keep grinding away at the expense of our own cognitive abilities then?

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Security | Tech

Apple’s Image Scanning Tool is, Well, Complicated
ByMike McBride August 7, 2021August 8, 2021 Reading Time: 3 minutes

At first blush, the idea of scanning images synced up to iCloud for child sexual abuse materials against the hash list of known CSAM images seems like a good idea. As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse myself, I want tech companies to takes some initiative to deal with this issue. They also want to scan images on kids’ phones using AI to see if kids are getting into any trouble with sending or receiving sexual material. Again, that sounds like a good thing. But, as the EFF points out, this all requires a backdoor, and backdoors, once created, almost never remain used for just one purpose.

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Career | Links

Linked: 10 million American workers are considering freelancing amid the ‘Great Resignation’
ByMike McBride August 5, 2021August 5, 2021 Reading Time: 2 minutes

You know, I think there is one thing that prevents this from being an even higher number. Health insurance.

If you’re young, looking for flexibility, and not really finding it, working freelance might look like a pretty attractive option. But, your health insurance costs might be pretty manageable, especially if you’re in relatively good health. Those of us who are older, or have some health issues that cause the price of getting a health insurance policy on our own to be rather high, might have a more difficult time making this decision.

I have had conversations privately, so some people already know this, but while I’m not necessarily for, or against, Universal Health Care, (I think it’s a really complicated issue that we refuse to talk honestly about, from both sides) if the US ever gets to that point, I will be planning my exit from Corporate America the next day.

Read More Linked: 10 million American workers are considering freelancing amid the ‘Great Resignation’