Stay Eager
Susan Sontag | Pay Transparency | Factoids | Elsewhere
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
| Susan Sontag
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Paying attention is hard work, perhaps the hardest work of all. Paying attention to other people, trends that arise from the millions of independent steps that millions take, and the thoughts and words that emerge from the soup of inchoate actions and reactions. And sometimes, it’s hard to stay eager. But let’s try.
I started a thread on Pay Transparency.
Pay Transparency
Taylor Telford reports on younger women are practicing radical pay transparency on TikTok:
While older workers may consider talking openly about money verboten, many younger workers are accustomed to seeing people online share everything about work, from daily commutes to their experiences with layoffs. For them, being candid about money seems natural and necessary, said Kristy Nguyen, 23.
“A lot of that shift has to do with the fact that we, as a younger generation, are more open on social media,” said Nguyen, who makes videos about personal finance on TikTok. “We feel like if we’re more open and vulnerable about it, it can make a difference for other people.”
This is also part of a broader shift as pay transparency laws proliferate, requiring companies to provide expected pay ranges in job postings. At least nine states, including New York and California, and several municipalities have adopted such measures, and more are scheduled to take effect next year in Minnesota and Vermont, according to Payscale, a firm that aggregates and analyzes salary data.
Meanwhile, job sites like ZipRecruiter, Indeed and LinkedIn report higher shares of postings with salary ranges, as more companies opt to be clear about salaries whether it’s required of them or not. Advocates say access to pay information empowers workers to negotiate for fairer compensation, although some companies have sought to sidestep regulations by posting jobs with unhelpfully wide salary ranges.
It’s all adding up to a “quickly evolving pay transparency revolution” that’s headed for a tipping point, according to Andrea Johnson, director of state policy and strategy at the National Women’s Law Center.
A subtle shift in the power imbalance between employers and employees but all happening outside the workplace, on TikTok.
Factoids
Happy Finns
Finland has roughly 3.5m saunas, more than one per two Finns. All government buildings have saunas. | The Economist
Perhaps that is one of the reasons that the UN -- for seven years in a row -- has declared Finland the happiest country in the world. That, and gender equality, free education, universal affordable health care, trust in government institutions, and family-centric social policies.
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Faking it.
8% | The number of workers who appear to be faking work activity on their machines, according to the latest analysis from Teramind.
A coevolutionary battle, like foxes and hares. Foxes chase hares, which evolve more speed, which leads to faster foxes. Workers respond to surveillance by using gimmicks like mouse jigglers, and so their corporate minders apply AI to discern those predictable mouse movements. Next up: increasing randomness by mouse jiggling algorithms.
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Paid family leave.
Just 27% of civilian workers in the US get paid family leave, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Just 14% percent of workers in the lowest 25% wage category get that benefit, compared to 48% of those in the top 10%. | Dense Discovery
Note that facts like this are why the U.S. has fallen 8 places to 23rd in 2024, an all-time low ranking in the annual World Happiness Report.
Jobs in June.
The economy added 206,000 jobs last month, according to fresh government data, but unemployment inched above 4% for the first time in over two years.
The June jobs report, released Friday morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed somewhat hotter hiring than the 200,000 nonfarm job gains economists had expected. That marked a slowdown since May, whose level was revised down to 218,000 from 272,000. April's job gains were also revised sharply lower, showing 111,000 fewer roles added during those prior two months than earlier thought. | NBC News
The economy is cooling, so let’s hope the Federal Reserve starts cutting the interest rate.
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Elsewhere
APIifying the organization.
In As Tech and Business overlap we need a different kind of Organization, Simone Cicero says the shape and calculus of business organizations must adapt to new imperatives, in particular the overlap between what organizational units (teams, departments, etc.) and technologies do [emphasis mine]:
Some incumbents’ solutions — particularly generalist and ubiquitous — such as Microsoft’s or Google’s, can still manage to be perceived as horizontal and provide an “operating system”, covering a significant part of the user’s workflow, many more opportunities lie in developing vertical solutions that respond to a particular Job To Be Done of the customer and can be easily integrated.
[…]
Such pressure toward modularity and multiplicity means that corporate teams and units must increasingly be understood as product units. Units should be autonomous and with an end-to-end responsibility to fill one or more user needs and be able to formulate business hypotheses and manage their P&L. As more power accrues to the uses (as we said before) it’s normal that a larger part of the organization must be customer driven and customer paid.
Over time, and also thanks to new technological enablers such as AI, we will see an ever-increasing possibility of combining and integrating distinct pieces of solutions and software. The pressure on companies to create products and services in a way that they are easily integrable and connectable through clear and simple interfaces such as “APIs” grows along with the need for simpler and new business models (e.g., monetization of on-call APIs). We wrote about these dynamics at large in our articles Designing Extendable Platforms — protocols, no-code, AI, and modularity and Towards Modular and Composable Markets.
These strong integrability related requirements will be even more vital within a single company. As the company must be able to produce different modular products and services the integrability of those will be crucial.
Every organizational group, service, or product will have its own API, it’s own identity, its own contracts with others.
This reminded me of something Margaret Wheatley wrote [emphasis mine]:
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