15 programming languages you need to know in 2015

If you’re a programmer, these are good times. Jobs in the segment are projected to grow 8% over the next seven years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you’re a hotshot coder, you can make up to $300 an hour or more.

Those at the high end of the pay scale have mastered the languages that are most in demand. Which are those? We asked Doug Winnie, director of content for online learning platform Lynda. Here’s his assessment:

1. Java

Image: Mashable Composite/Wikimedia

Java is one of the most popular languages for building back-ends for modern enterprise-web applications. With Java and frameworks based on it, web developers can build scalable web apps for a variety of users. Java is also the main language used to develop native Android apps for smartphones and tablets.

2. JavaScript

Every modern website uses JavaScript. It’s the go-to language if you want to create interactivity for your site, or build user interfaces with one of the dozens of popular JavaScript frameworks.

3.C#

C# is the primary language for developing on Microsoft platforms and services. Whether you’re building modern web applications using Azure and .NET, apps for Windows devices or powerful desktop apps for your business, C# is the quickest way to harness all that Microsoft has to offer. Want to play, as well? The popular Unity game development engine also uses C# as one of its primary languages.

4. PHP

Building a web app that needs to work with data? PHP, along with databases like MySQL, are essential tools for building modern web applications. PHP powers a majority of today’s data-driven websites, and is the foundation technology for powerful content management systems, like WordPress, which you can extend to make your site more powerful.

5. C++

Want to get a little lower level with your programming? When you need to connect directly to hardware to get the most out of your processing power, C++ is the perfect choice for developing powerful desktop software, hardware-accelerated games and memory-intensive apps on desktops, consoles and mobile devices.

6. Python

Python can almost do it all. Web apps, user interfaces, data analysis, statistics — whatever your problem, there’s likely a framework for it in Python. Most recently, Python has been used as a key tool for data scientists to sift through giant data sets for any industry.

7. C

Image: Mashable Composite/Wikimedia Commons

Why is the C language still popular? Size. C is small, fast and powerful. If you’re building software for embedded systems, working with system kernels or just want to squeeze every last drop of the resources you have at hand, C is lean, mean and ready to scream.

 8. SQL

Data is massive, it’s everywhere and it’s complex. SQL gives you the ability to find the exact information you want in a fast, repeatable and reliable way. Using SQL, you can easily query and extract meaningful data from large, complex databases.

9.Ruby

Want to kickstart your project in record time, or prototype a new idea for your next big web app? Ruby (and Ruby on Rails) can get you there quickly. The Ruby language is straightforward to learn and incredibly powerful, plus it powers tons of popular web apps around the globe.

10. Objective-C

Image: Mashable Composite/Wikmedia Commons

If you’re interested in making an app for iOS, you’ll need to know Objective-C. While last year’s hype centered on Apple’s new language Swift, Objective-C is still the foundational language if you want to build apps for the Apple ecosystem. With Objective-C and XCode, the official software development tool from Apple, you’ll be in the App Store in no time.

11. Perl

Is Perl esoteric? Yes. Is it confusing? Yes. Is it a super powerful language, and a key component of anyone’s cyber security arsenal? Also true. Perl has powered the web since its early beginnings, and is still considered a key tool for any IT professional.

12 .NET

Although not a language in itself, .NET is a key Microsoft platform for cloud, service and app development that gets more advanced and valuable with each release. Due to the recent open-sourcing efforts of Microsoft, .NET is now coming to Google and Apple platforms. As a result, you can use .NET today with a variety of programming languages to build apps that easily support multiple platforms.

13. Visual Basic

Visual Basic is the language that gets business done. A key language of the .NET platform, it enables you to build applications to support your business, and automate powerful Office applications like Excel to accomplish super-human feats of computation, as well as streamline your most common tasks.

14. R

R is powering the revolution of big data, and is a must-know language in 2015 for anyone in need of serious data analysis. From science and business to entertainment and social media, R is the language to learn for statistical analysis across nearly every field of interest.

15. Swift

Not even a year old, the Swift programming language has captured the eyes and keyboards of developers worldwide as a new, fast and easy way to develop for Apple’s Mac and iOS operating systems. Swift’s broad power and friendly syntax makes it possible for anyone with a Mac to build the next killer app for iOS or Mac OS X.

via 15 programming languages you need to know in 2015.

15 programming languages you need to know in 2015

Restless At Work? LinkedIn Can Guess What You"ll Do Next

A generation ago, if you felt restless in your job and weren’t sure what to do next, you could ask your boss or friends for advice — or you could visit the local fortune-teller. Now however, an intriguing new LinkedIn tool provides some pretty good guesses about what you’ll do next.

LinkedIn’s data-visualization team has created a giant sphere that’s speckled with nearly 300 types of jobs, ranging from actors to firefighters, insurance agents and Oracle database administrators. Click on any one of those categories — and an animated version of connect-the-dots will spring forth, showing you the most common career moves of people in those fields. This link will let you test the system yourself.

To create these forecasts, LinkedIn research consultant Sohan Murthy explained in a blog post, the company’s data scientists culled through the career histories of more than 300 million people with LinkedIn profiles. Researchers focused on cases where people switched to at least a slightly different category, instead of simply moving up the ladder in their chosen specialty. LinkedIn’s analysts also discarded cases involving people who had switched careers multiple times, or whose current careers straddle multiple categories.

Many of the career paths are exactly what you’d expect. Financial consultants tend to become accountants and data analysts. Psychologists end up as social workers or university professors. And when today’s job becomes unbearable,  just about everybody is willing to give sales a try.

But in an intriguing number of cases, LinkedIn’s mapping system unearthed job hops that are far from obvious. Among them:

• Soldiers and military officers, when they transition to civilian life, may pick new jobs as diverse as corporate strategists, business owners or police officers.


• Geologists sometimes end up as information-technology support specialists or environmental specialists.


• Pharmacists cross over to the other side of the counter and become medical representatives.


• People who start out as political staffers can end up as everything from lawyers and judges to public-relations offices.

Another oddity: fields that offer very little mobility. As LinkedIn’s Murthy points out, people who become web developers, paralegals or physicians have hardly any common career options beyond staying in their current field. Bad news? Not necessarily.

In Murthy’s words, “this is a classic sign of specialization,” and that’s nothing to weep about. If demand for these skills stays strong, and the work is enjoyable, people in such aspects of law, tech and health care may never feel the urge to switch.

via Restless At Work? LinkedIn Can Guess What You’ll Do Next.

Restless At Work? LinkedIn Can Guess What You"ll Do Next

Don"t Rely On Salary Data To Pick A Programming Language To Learn

You can get paid a lot of money to code COBOL, but that’s probably a career-limiting choice. The less popular a language, the more an employer will be likely to pay. It’s a simple matter of supply and demand—or, as MongoDB’s Kelly Stirman defines it, “revenue potential and adoption [are] inversely proportional.”

Which is why Quartz’s list of the “most valuable programming skills to have on a resume” is wrong-headed and deceiving. Which programming language is “best” depends on a host of factors, perhaps the least important of which is how much that skill will pay you today.

Popularity Contests

After all, the best programming language may well be the one that is most likely to help you consistently find a job, not necessarily the one that pays best.

By that metric, Redmonk’s quarterly list of popular programming languages (culled from matching data from GitHub and Stack Overflow) may be a better place to start when figuring out which language to learn next:

Source: Redmonk

In this ranking, Java and JavaScript remain neck-and-neck for the top spot, with Google’s Go language rocketing up the charts to #21. So is one more important than the other?

Maybe.

As Pivotal’s chief scientist Milind Bhandarkar stresses:

Bhandarkar is correct, but while there may not be an objective way to evaluate the importance of programming languages across the industry, there is absolutely a subjective way for each developer to determine the best language for her. Namely, pick the language that matches where you see the future going.

Defining The Future

So, for example, cloud expert Simon Wardley notes, “If the Internet is the operating system then JavaScript is its language.”

And if you believe cloud is the future, well, Go should be high on your list, as it’s the “most interesting [language] in the cloud era” because it “solve[s] hard problems easily,” according to Red Hat’s Paul Lundin.

Mobile? Hard to argue against learning Swift (Apple) or Java (Android).

And if you don’t trust your own judgment, programming language popularity rankings like the one Redmonk assembles can provide a cheat sheet on the future. Just watch for big spikes in popularity like we’ve seen with Go.

Or look for relative popularity with employers, not ranked by salary but instead by volume of jobs. By that metric Ruby is waning, Python is relatively constant and Go is exploding, according to Indeed.com data. But if you really want to see hyper-growth, Node.js may best them all:

Source: Indeed.com

The Web, presumed dead, seems to be doing quite well.

Getting Paid To Code What You Love

Not that developers must always choose between future relevance and present salary. Quartz’s list sports a number of languages that both pay well and are popular, like JavaScript and Python (an excellent all-around language that doubles as a Big Data heavyweight):

Source: Quartz

Indeed, it’s unlikely that learning any programming language could be considered a bad investment these days, what with developers becoming market makers. Enterprises are falling all over themselves to hire and motivate developers, a trend that won’t diminish anytime soon.

With this in mind, do what you love. And code in the language that best expresses the future you most want to see. There’s never been a better time to be a developers, whatever the programming language you choose.

via Don’t Rely On Salary Data To Pick A Programming Language To Learn – ReadWrite.

Don"t Rely On Salary Data To Pick A Programming Language To Learn

2015 technology predictions for CIOs

As we approach 2015, we asked a few Enterpriser IT executives what they see on the near horizon: trends, watch-outs, and best practices that will make their lives better – and more interesting – in the coming months. Here’s what they had to say:

1. Mobile exploits will rise sharply

“I think whether it’s next year or next week, we are due a major round of weaknesses and security breaches in the mobile space. At the moment, from what I’ve seen in the past and the development cycles of these things, the opportunity for the bad guys to create havoc in the mobile space has barely started.” – Cliff Tamplin, Consultant and Former Vice President of Technology Support & Risk Management, Hyatt Hotels Corporation

2. Docker will live up to the hype

“Docker will largely avoid the ‘trough of disillusionment’ and continue its growth as a cloud-enabling technology.” – Lee Congdon, CIO, Red Hat

3. SaaS and cloud growth will continue to spiral upward

“I see a continued migration to SaaS and cloud technologies that were previously considered premise-only concepts. I think that prices for cloud technologies will continue to drop as well. Amazon Web Services will see increased competition from Google and Microsoft, which will cause prices to drop, and price is one of the last barriers for traditional colocation-focused companies. – Aaron Stibel, Executive Vice President of Technology, Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp

4. Execs will schedule more time for work (not meetings)

“In the spirit of leading by example, one thing I plan to do in 2015 is leave my schedule open for at least 50 percent of the time. I’ve noticed that even if a meeting scheduled for an hour is over in 30 minutes, it will still stretch to take all of the hour. I think that’s waste, because most of these things can be done by email. Leaving my schedule open will allow people to walk into my office, talk to me, tell me what they are thinking, share their ideas, and have productive conversations. I plan to make it a point to leave my door open when my schedule is open, too, to create an environment where you can stop by and talk about ideas.” – Venki Rao, CIO, GE Digital Energy

5. Streaming video chips away at traditional TV

“Video streaming over the Internet will continue to make gains against the more traditional television business model in the United States.” – Lee Congdon, CIO, Red Hat

6. Higher digitization will move into every corner of life

“Think screens and sensors on mobile devices and on wearables, so the sensors in your clothes are starting to report into your Fitbit or whatever you own. This will drive interest around personal analytics and allow you to start drawing conclusions about the effects of an extra hour of sleep on your ability to keep off weight, and so on. I’m curious whether this will be a slow progression or whether it’s going to feel so far away and then suddenly cross over a tipping point. Sensors and beacons in retail are still far from common adoption, for example, but you have certain retailers trying things out, and I know there’s much more to come in that area.” –  Peter Buonora, Enterprise Architect, BJ’s Wholesale Club

7. Goodbye laptops, hello mobile devices

“The long-term decline of the laptop computer will continue as more applications move to the cloud and mobile devices.” – Lee Congdon, CIO, Red Hat

8. The customer will be king (even in IT)

“One thing I see becoming prevalent in leadership is to make customer service everyone’s job. In the past you could say we have a customer service team, we have a marketing team, we have a commercial team, and it’s their job. Right now, it’s everybody’s job. So no matter who does what, the customer comes first.  And your job is to service your customers.” – Venki Rao, CIO, GE Digital Energy

9. Cross-platform development will become the norm

“I can’t say I think the web per se is going to go away, but I would see a lot more cross-platform development, where all the things blend together. There are many new development tools out there, including some that enable you to develop once and deploy across iOS, Android, NativeWeb, everything else. So this blurring of the interface will continue to run the gamut.” – Cliff Tamplin, Consultant and Former Vice President of Technology Support & Risk Management, Hyatt Hotels Corporation

via 2015 technology predictions for CIOs | The Enterprisers Project.

2015 technology predictions for CIOs

Nike just lost its CIO because of Portland

The popular television show Portlandia depicts the city of Portland, Oregon as a hipster haven of indie book shops and artisanal coffee, but for many, those quirks can’t compare to the buzzing activity of bigger cities.

As it turns out, that was the simple problem for Nike’s young star CIO Anthony Watson.

When news broke Wednesday evening that the 38-year-old executive had left the company after only 10 months in the position, news outlets were puzzled. Nike would only say, through a company statement, “Anthony Watson has left Nike Inc. for personal reasons.”

Late Wednesday night, in three posts on Twitter, Watson said the same, in a bit warmer fashion, while refusing to get specific. “Thank you for all the enquiries,” he tweeted. “Today I left Nike for personal reasons. There is honestly nothing ‘mysterious’ about my departure… Nike is a great company, with amazing people. It’s just my personal circumstances changed… My leaving has nothing to do with Nike or any vendor. I wish Nike every success for the future. It’s a wonderful company.”

Now, a source close to the situation has told Fortune the precise reason for Watson’s departure: though he was happy with his job, he was unhappy with the social scene (or lack thereof) in Portland. “As a single gay guy from London,” the source says, Watson “underestimated what it would be like. It was a culture shock. And there’s no point in having a great job if you feel unhappy with your surroundings.” The decision to leave the shoe giant crystalized for Watson while home in London with his family over the Thanksgiving break.

The young executive, who is openly gay and actively involved in GLAAD, came to Nike NKE 0.19% in April of this year from Barclays, where he was CIO of Europe, Middle East, and its global operations. There, he helped make the bank more nimble from a tech standpoint. Under his guidance it put out a number of new mobile apps.

In 2013 Watson became the first non-U.S. citizen to join the board of GLAAD. His new role at Nike also made him one of the first openly gay C-suite executives at a Fortune 500 company. Last fall, Watson landed at no. 19 on the Fortune 40 Under 40 list.

In Oregon, he dove in right away and helped the sports apparel giant sign a big deal with Juniper Networks as a new network vendor. He leaves after the completion of a new five-year road map for I.T. strategy at the $27.8 billion-in-sales behemoth.

In an internal Nike memo obtained by Fortune, COO Eric Sprunk explained Watson’s departure to employees: “Anthony Watson is leaving Nike for personal reasons. During his time at Nike, Anthony worked on a vision and five-year strategy to reset Technology as a critical platform for Nike’s growth. I’d like to personally thank Anthony for his contributions… While we work to identify Anthony’s replacement, I will step in immediately to lead the Tech organization. I am confident we will continue to deliver high impact results and appreciate your support during this transition.”

via Nike just lost its CIO because of Portland.

Nike just lost its CIO because of Portland

INFOGRAPHIC: It"s Not Easy To Be A CIO

The demand for chief information officers has risen in the past two decade. The amount of data on the Internet is increasing exponentially, and with the rise of cloud computing, the role of the CIO will continue to change. Wikibon put together an infographic showing what we can expect in the coming years:

via INFOGRAPHIC: It’s Not Easy To Be A CIO – Business Insider.

INFOGRAPHIC: It"s Not Easy To Be A CIO

Why CEOs and Other Top Execs Need CIOs, and the IT Team

As a customer-focused business leader, you may not like IT. You may even think everyone in the IT department is socially awkward because they spend more time interacting with computers than people.

But whether you like it or not, if you want to close sales you’re going to have to invite IT to your business meetings.

Perish the thought that anyone from IT will sit in on a sales call. However, it’s important to sit down with your IT team and listen to what each person has to say about the state of your technology. Otherwise, there’s a pretty good chance you won’t have to worry about sales calls.

There won’t be too many of them.

Embrace IT

Maybe your company has already bridged the divide between IT and the business units. After all, the most successful businesses are those where both the businesses and IT work toward the same goals.

However, anecdotal evidence suggests there is still a long way to go in most companies. The business units and IT invite each other to strategic planning meetings, even when technology is an integral part of pending purchasing decisions.

A recent report from Gartner looks at this issue in detail. It found that while IT is more and more a key component of all business initiatives, CIOs must work with business executives and the CFO to ensure the critical contribution of IT is incorporated early in planning and budget processes.

Traditionally, this has not been the case, according to the report, How CIOs Influence Decisions When Every Budget Is an IT Budget. Cassio Dreyfuss, research vice president at Gartner and co-author of the report, explained:

In the past, the use of IT to support the business came almost as an afterthought, long after the business strategy and strategic initiatives for the coming period had been designed and sanctioned by top management. Over time, IT has graduated from being a support tool to being a business enabling and a business creation tool. Under that much broader and inclusive perspective, it makes more sense to talk about IT-related expenditures in each and every business initiative and respective budget. In this way, the CIO is challenged to adopt a higher profile and actively engage in opportunities to influence IT decisions in business budgets.”

IT Budget Decisions

Each company has its own process for IT budget decisions. These generally depend on external variables (the business environment) and internal variables (the company culture and style).

The CIO has unique contributions to IT budget decisions in all organizations. However, CIOs must understand the business challenges and work styles of the organization to make their points successfully. “The road toward a digital future requires transformational action from IT through disruptive innovation while continuing to run business as usual at the expected level of excellence. IT must therefore operate at high-performance levels in two modes,” Dreyfuss said.

Those two modes include:

• Enterprise-strength IT: An IT department that is responsible for delivering efficient IT services across the enterprise


• Opportunistic IT: This is an IT department that is ready and capable of reacting to new business models and opportunities immediately

Either way, IT should have five principal inputs into IT spending, as follows:

1. Solution Brokers

CIO’s should be playing the role of solution brokers in each business area that relies on technology. That means they should bring IT solutions form one area of the business to another, as appropriate, and also be developing specific solutions for specific business objectives or problems.

Because IT managers have — or should have — a view of all the IT solutions available across the enterprise, they can also help integrate, coordinate and align IT with business objectives. The enterprise that leaves IT out of this process risks misaligning technology and business.

2. Supporting Corporate Strategy

IT departments should also be in position to support the wider corporate strategy as defined by the enterprise leaders. This means that IT development will correspond with corporate guidelines and strategies and follow a coordinated and integrated IT development process that ends up as part off the corporate strategic planning.

During the development of this IT strategy, business units, top management and IT should agree on IT funding priorities. The ideal situation is for these decisions to be made by a committee consisting of business and IT leaders. Gartner’s strategic planning approach also places “support the business” IT budget to fund its operations plan.

3. Dynamic Collaboration

Many business initiatives take place in very challenging environments that require immediate responses to a particular set of problems. To manage these problems and to ensure successful outcomes, resources across the enterprise need to be mobilized to achieve these outcomes.

CIOs and IT leaders have a special and dual role here. They will shape each initiative according to the IT resources available and decide how each initiative should connect with core enterprise applications.

4. Opportunistic actions

The CIOs role here is to focus on each specific initiative depending on the situation and the response required by a given business or business area. They have key roles here in ensuring that targets and objectives are met on time and as rapidly as possible. CIOs must also be involved in making core applications available according to how initiatives develop.

5. Unique IT Roles

There are a number of things IT brings to the corporate table that no one else can bring. They include:

• Information architecture: They know what data is available in the organization and where it is located


• Business process networks: Deep knowledge of business process across the entire enterprise and how they meet enterprise goals


• Operations infrastructure: Mastery of all the processes that deliver necessary information to those that need it


• Technology scenario: Comprehensive perspective on the technology scenario and possibilities to achieve business goals

CIOs Future Role

IT plays an important role in any organization. In fact, it could be argued that the role of the CIO has never been more important. But it seems many CIOs are aware of this: 75 percent of respondents to a recent Gartner survey on the future of the CIO stated that they need to adapt their leadership style in the next three years to changing enterprise realities.

The survey entitled Flipping to Digital Leadership: The 2015 CIO Agenda (not yet available to public), included responses from 2,810 CIOs, representing more than $397 billion in CIO IT budgets in 84 countries.

It also shows that most enterprises are aware that digitalization is no longer a sideshow — it has moved to center stage and is changing the whole game. However, this is an opportunity for CIOs to seize or lose the advantage to other departments.

via Why CEOs and Other Top Execs Need CIOs – and the IT Team.

Why CEOs and Other Top Execs Need CIOs, and the IT Team

Why Superstars Struggle to Bond with Their Teams

From the moment you start each workday, you’re subject to two basic human impulses: to excel and to conform.

If people in your immediate environment are amazing performers, you might be able to do both at once: By excelling, you fit the norm of your spectacular coworkers. But that’s rare. I’m pretty sure that in most work environments, as soon as you excel, you stop conforming. If you choose a high-performance path, you separate yourself from your coworkers. You’re not quite one of the bunch anymore. No matter how proud you are of your achievements, tell me it doesn’t hurt when you see your old group of friends coming back from a lunch that you somehow hadn’t known about.

I was thinking about this while reading research on the psychological and social effects not of being a high performer but of experiencing an extraordinary event, because the two situations share a few things in common. When something exciting and unusual happens to us, even if it’s random, we’ve excelled, in a way. We’re special. We no longer conform.

The research, by Gus Cooney and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard and Timothy D. Wilson of the University of Virginia, shows that after we go through an extraordinary experience, we assume that we’ll really enjoy telling the tale. But when we try, we often don’t feel so good about it. We feel separate. We sense that the group resents our excellent adventure. The study focused on experiences that are really only slightly extraordinary, such as watching an interesting video, but the results are pretty clear: A special experience distances us from other people, and the responses we see in our peers makes us feel excluded.

Jaclyn M. Jensen, an assistant professor in the Richard H. Driehaus College of Business at DePaul University, has put a different lens on what divides us from our coworkers and why. Along with Pankaj C. Patel of Ball State University and Jana L. Raver of Queen’s University in Canada, Jensen studied a large Midwestern field office of a U.S. financial services firm, using surveys to find out what was going on among coworkers — in the workrooms, during team meetings, in the lunchroom, and on email.

The researchers found that even in a collegial, well-behaved workplace, not only are you perceived as different if you’re a high performer; you’re also sometimes victimized. High-performing employees in this environment scored 3.37 on a 1-to-5 scale of victimization frequency, with 1 representing “never” and 5 representing “once a week or more.” They scored significantly higher on this measure of being victimized than average and poorly performing workers.

Mostly, the victimization was subtle, which is understandable, given the risks of being called out as a bully. So instead of being overtly nasty, people avoid you or withhold resources. Or they schedule important meetings when you happen to be out of town.

It probably goes without saying that there’s no rational logic to the victimization of high performers. After all, if you’re a high performer, by definition you have an outsized impact on the organization, and you help make the workgroup shine. Your victimizers’ incentive pay is probably even based (at least in part) on your achievements.

Still, what’s rational about human behavior? As Jensen pointed out to me, human beings have a pronounced tendency to punish those who violate unspoken norms. Average performers worry that you’re making them look bad. If they can bring you down a notch, they can alleviate (or at least they think they can alleviate) their negative feelings by reminding you what an “acceptable” level of performance looks like.

But one of the more interesting aspects of Jensen’s research is that the covert victimization is spotty — it doesn’t apply to all high performers. Certain achievers are spared the worst of the victimization. These are what Jensen and her colleagues call “benevolent” high performers.

Benevolent high performers are sensitive to what’s fair for other people; they put others’ needs ahead of their own. They’re cooperative, even altruistic at times.

OK, no great news there. But the reality is that high performers too often slip into what Jensen would call “non-benevolence” without even realizing it. They start to feel entitled to their hard-won authority. Sometimes they step on or manipulate others, telling themselves that all’s fair in pursuit of the greater good. Pretty soon they’re consistently putting their own needs first. To measure this, the researchers used the surveys to place employees along a continuum of behavior, with “entitled” at one end and “benevolent” at the other. Here “entitled” means having “low equity sensitivity” — a poor sense of what’s fair to others. (As you can see from the chart, low achievers are victimized too, but the researchers found that there’s a different rationale: Weak performers are punished for jeopardizing their coworkers’ success. Benevolence doesn’t help them much.)

So if you’re a high performer who’s being excluded or cold-shouldered, maybe it’s not so much your excellence that your coworkers are reacting to but your creeping non-benevolence. If they’re not looping you into lunch invites, maybe it’s because they’re starting to sense that you’re putting your own needs ahead of theirs.

If that’s the case, you know what to do. Jensen’s research shows that practicing thoughtfulness and cooperativeness really does work to defuse your colleagues’ impulse to take you down.

Cooney et al frame the issue as black and white. They write that there’s a basic conflict between our desires to “do what other people have not yet done and to be just like everyone else,” so that if we satisfy our impulse to stand out, we can’t conform any longer, and failure to conform leads to feelings of exclusion.

Jensen’s view suggests a different way of looking at it: Even if your high performance puts you on another plane, separating you from your old bunch, that nonconformity doesn’t have to come with the punishments of rejection or sniping. If you make an effort to be altruistic, the group will reward you. If not with lunch invitations, then at least with acceptance —  a kind of benevolence of its own.

via Why Superstars Struggle to Bond with Their Teams – Andrew O’Connell – Harvard Business Review.

Why Superstars Struggle to Bond with Their Teams

6 Mistakes You May Be Making on LinkedIn

It’s a valuable networking tool, helping professionals connect for jobs and advice. But many LinkedIn members aren’t taking full advantage of the networking features of the site. When used to its fullest, LinkedIn can be an even more powerful social media tool than Facebook and Twitter.

Setting up your LinkedIn profile is only the beginning. Here are a few mistakes you may be making on LinkedIn that could cost you important business connections. By knowing about these mistakes, you can make your profile more powerful and reach more of your industry peers on the site.

Not Completing Your Profile

When LinkedIn members look at your profile, what do they see? Is your entire career outlined in your profile or just your current position? Do you have a current photo that would help your peers locate you at a networking event or conference? Your LinkedIn profile should give a full overview of your experience, including as much background as possible. A position you held early in your career could connect you with a colleague from those days who could benefit your business now.

Failing to Join Groups

LinkedIn offers Groups as a way for members to find other people within their industries or areas of interests. These groups are a great way to share ideas and troubleshoot issues, but at their core, they offer a way to network with other business owners. LinkedIn occasionally suggests groups you may like, but you can also browse the directory or search for a group using the search box at the top of each page.

Not Endorsing Others

Endorsements are an easy way to let your colleagues know you support them. You simply endorse other professionals for specific skills you know they have under the Skills & Endorsements section of each person’s profile. Not only will that person be notified of your endorsement, your picture and name will appear next to that skill under the person’s profile as having endorsed him. You can also write recommendations for colleagues who have worked with you in the past.

Failure to Connect

You can create a LinkedIn profile, but without connections you’re missing out on the “networking” part of the site. Start by connecting with people who are in your professional circles and expand from there, adding past colleagues, others within your industry, and people you meet while networking in groups on the site. You’ll see your connections’ updates on your newsfeed and be alerted when they change jobs or celebrate a work anniversary. Be sure to congratulate them when you see these items to keep your name fresh on their minds.

All Take, No Give

As with other social media sites, one of the top mistakes professionals make is in only posting when they need something. If you’re inactive most of the time, only using the site to ask a colleague for a favor or to market something, you’ll likely be disappointed by the results. Make an effort to interact by posting links to useful articles and commenting on other people’s posts on your newsfeed. Then when you do post about your exciting new product or upcoming event, you’ll find that others are more willing to support you.

Unprofessionalism

While it may be a social networking site, it’s important to remember at all times that LinkedIn is a professional social networking site. Your profile picture should capture your spirit while still being professional, whether it’s a shot of you at your favorite coffee shop or a standard business headshot. Every word on your profile should be grammatically correct and typo-free, even if it means asking a friend or colleague to proofread it. Most importantly, when you post status updates or comment in groups, every post should represent your brand in the best light possible. Resist the urge to engage in arguments with those who are inciting drama by always keeping in mind that others could be judging you by your comments.

LinkedIn is an important networking tool for every professional. The site has many tools designed to help you connect with those you’ve worked with in the past and suggesting those you can work with in the future. When used correctly, it can help you bring in new business and get the support you need as you grow your company.

via 6 Mistakes You May Be Making on LinkedIn | Inc.com.

6 Mistakes You May Be Making on LinkedIn

The Intriguing Truth About Your Dream Job

Did you know that working for Zappos, a company on the GameChangers 500 list of the world’s top purpose-driven companies, is so desirable that it’s actually harder to get a job there than it is to be admitted to Harvard?

It’s true. In 2013, 25,000 people applied for jobs with Zappos, and they only hired 250.

That means that 99% of people who applied didn’t get the job.

So, what makes these types of companies so darn desirable? (Because there are thousands more out there.)

And how do you get the attention of a company like this and get the job?

Here’s The Scoop

One reason why people love these types of organizations is that they take empowering their employees and creating a phenomenal workplace to the NEXT LEVEL.

Zappos

Employees at Zappos enjoying “Customer Service Week” with a Slime Fight!

Another reason is that we’re bored out of our minds – and want to do something that excites us.

In other words, we’ll watch Office Space, get fired up about finding a job we love, and research some companies we find on Monster.com or Craigslist…

And then make one small change to our resume or cover letter and fire it off to as many companies as we can find.

Here’s the problem with that approach. You saw the stats – Zappos only hired 1% of applicants, and you can bet other Game Changing organizations like them have similar numbers.

Many people continue to suffer in their miserable jobs while getting more and more frustrated about being the 99% who don’t get the results they desire.

How To Get Your Dream Job

The good news? I’m not going to let that happen to you. If you’re reading this article, it means you CAN do it – and believe me, it is possible to get your dream job.

1. STOP Scanning Job Boards

A friend of mine calls this the ‘Monster Effect.’ It’s when you scan huge job boards hoping to find something that jumps out at you…

And then submit your resume to any position that looks moderately interesting. Guess what?

1 moderately interesting position + 1 moderately interesting company = 1 BORING JOB.

Here’s what you do instead. Flip your job seeking process around by using the 2nd tip…

2. Have FUN Discovering Your Dream Job

The root problem most people experience in their careers is that they aren’t inspired by their work. They aren’t fulfilled.

And the best way to solve that problem is by focusing on enjoying the process of finding your dream job.

Think about the best things that have happened in your life.

Maybe sparking that flame with your spouse…

Or achieving some milestone growing up.

Were you ever in a place of desperation and unhappiness when those things happened? Probably not. You were likely in a positive state… maybe even feeling invincible.

The intriguing truth of it all is that the best things happen when you’re already in a good place.

So, one of these evenings… turn on some music, crack open a bottle of wine, and have some fun reflecting on and researching your ultimate dream job.

Then jump into tip #3

3. Use Modern Job Seeking Strategies

It’s simple. If you want the kind of job we’re talking about here – with insanely desirable companies like Zappos…

Where you wake up excited to go to work – not knowing if there’s going to be a slime fight or a laser tag party that day…

It’s likely not going to be at the kind of place that will hire you with a traditional resume alone. Zappos sure won’t.

You need to make a real impression on them by doing something creative and unique that showcases what you bring to the table.

You need to really love their organization, mission, and culture – otherwise you just won’t make the cut.

YouTube videos, websites, and mailing physical packages with a unique presentation are some great ways to stand out.

Every company will be unique, so there’s no “1 size fits all” approach here. Remember, be creative, authentic, and unique – and show them how you can add value to their organization.

That’s how you’ll get your dream job.

via The Intriguing Truth About Your Dream Job | CAREEREALISM.

The Intriguing Truth About Your Dream Job

Want A Job In The Future? Go Into Health Care

At a time of widespread unemployment, one part of the economy has consistently provided jobs: health care. In the past decade, the industry added 2.6 million positions, according to a report last year from the Brookings Institution. That’s a growth rate of 22.7%, compared to just 2.1% for all other sectors.

What’s more, health care jobs are widely distributed. Every community in the country added clinics and hospitals and the employment that goes with them. In some places, health care now accounts for 20% of all economic activity. Estimates show health spending making up a fifth of the entire economy by 2021.

So, if you’re worried about finding a job in the future, health care may be a safer bet than most. Certainly the government thinks so, too. These charts, created by Chris Walker at Mic.com, use data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of jobs requiring an associate degree, nursing will continue to be the most job-rich option, they show. By 2022, there will be more than 2.3 million positions.

The BLS expects a 21.5% rise in “health care practitioners and technical occupations,” a 28% jump in “health care support occupations,” and 23% growth in “other health care support occupations,” including “massage therapists” (22.6%) and “dental assistants” (24.5%).

It also forecasts plenty of employment for general managers, elementary teachers, and software developers. Other types of workers will be less in demand, however. The biggest projected falls will be in “farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers” (-19.3% by 2022), “postmasters and mail superintendents” (-24.2%), “reporters and correspondents” (-13.8%), “embalmers” (-15%), and “meter readers, utilities” (-19.2%).

Better a career in medicine than the postal service.

via Want A Job In The Future? Go Into Health Care | Co.Exist | ideas + impact.

Want A Job In The Future? Go Into Health Care

How Negative Online Company Reviews Can Impact Your Business And Recruiting

Job candidates have never been in a better position to research potential employers, and employees have never been more empowered to spill it all when it comes to reviewing their current workplace. Sites like Glassdoor, Vault and CareerLeak give interview candidates and employees the unprecedented opportunity to share the inside scoop on what it’s really like to interview or work at a particular workplace; and this is leaving many employers feeling more than a little uncomfortable at the prospect of receiving public negative reviews.

One recent example of a company getting blasted on Glassdoor is Technorati.com, after a recent decision by its CEO to close its contributed content program in an effort to re-brand. According to multiple reviews on Glassdoor, many long-time contributors to Technorati.com were abruptly terminated, without thanks, respect, or appreciation. Many reviews from these employees and contributors reference Technorati’s CEO as the reason the company is “a sinking ship” and “taking a rapid nose dive.”

So, how does this sort of feedback affect future recruiting and business growth? According to research into consumers’ use of online reviews, 88% of people have been influenced by an online customer service review. And while the research into how online company reviews impact employee job decisions doesn’t reveal quite the same degree of influence, we do know that a significant number of job seekers rely on these sites when evaluating a potential workplace.

In one study, for instance, out of 4,633 random job seekers surveyed, 48% had used Glassdoor at some point in their job search. The study also found that 60% of job seekers would not apply to a company with a one-star rating (on a five-point scale). This suggests that many job seekers do seem to use workplace review sites, and negative reviews can dissuade them from applying to a particular company. 

How to Deal with Negative Reviews

If you’re an employer who has received negative online reviews, you’re likely to feel powerless; there aren’t a lot of options to defend yourself. There are steps you can take, however, to salvage your reputation and get the ball swinging back in your court. Here’s how.

1.   Ask your current employees and interview candidates to leave reviews

Since disgruntled employees are much more likely to leave reviews, actively requesting reviews company wide may help by increasing your overall ratio of positive to negative reviews. You may want to include links to the review site in your employee newsletters, verbally ask job applicants to leave a review following an interview, or periodically have managers remind employees of the opportunity they have to give feedback to management.

 2.   Respond to all reviews – positive or negative

Review sites give employers the opportunity to respond to reviews, and the value of this opportunity shouldn’t be underestimated. No one wants negative reviews, but the more optimistic among us believe these can be harnessed for good – if dealt with properly.

If you receive a negative review, respond as quickly as you can. Job seekers will not only be reading the reviews, they’ll be looking to see how businesses respond to these reviews. Responding promptly and politely will show you care about the opinions of your employees; and this can go a long way to minimizing the impact of a negative review.

 3.   Take the issue offline, and leave a brief update once the issue is resolved.

As much as possible, try not to engage in discussions of details; the last thing you want is to air your dirty laundry online, or get into a “he said, she said” situation. Respond in a non-defensive way that shows you’re listening, and whenever possible, take the conversation offline as quickly as possible.

For instance, rather than specifically addressing negative remarks, you could say, “Thank you for your valuable feedback. I would love the opportunity to talk with you about your experience in detail. Please contact me at your earliest convenience.” Where possible, having someone directly involved in the situation respond is preferable to having a customer service agent respond.

Once an issue is resolved, it’s always a good idea to ‘put a cap’ on the discussion. For instance, “It was great speaking with you, and I’m glad we could resolve this issue.”

4. Request that defamatory reviews be removed

If a review is defamatory or you suspect it’s been left by a troll, you do have some recourse. While you can’t delete a review, you can sometimes request that the post be reviewed by a member of the publisher’s team. From what I can tell, the burden of proof is then on the reviewer to show that the review is in fact legitimate.

Looking for more help with managing your online reputation? See my article, Your Guide to Online Reputation Management.

Limitations of Company Review Sites

While company review sites are an excellent tool for getting insider data like salary reports and for getting a feel for the general landscape of a workplace, job seekers should be aware of the potential limitations of these sites.

1. Negativity Bias. Our brains are wired to be more sensitive to negative news – in this case negative reviews – than to positive ones. It takes many more positive reviews to outweigh the effect of negative ones; and this means that even though a company may have an overall positive employee satisfaction rating, negative reviews are more likely to influence us.

In fact, some researchers estimate that (at least in marriage) it takes five positive interactions to make up for 1 negative one; and if we put this in the context of online job reviews, five positive reviews to make up for one negative one. And given that unhappy employees are far more likely to leave reviews, these review sites are likely disproportionately slanted toward the negative. Which leads us to point number two:

 2. Inaccurate Data. Research carried out by employee survey company Workplace Dynamics set out to determine how accurate Glassdoor reviews were for evaluating workplace satisfaction. They compared results from detailed surveys they had done with 406 companies to the corresponding Glassdoor ratings. The plan was to test the accuracy of the Glassdoor employee satisfaction scores with the much larger sample they had collected. The results? Almost no consistency between the two sources. They write: “We found that there was virtually no correlation—the overall Glassdoor star rating was a very poor indicator of what it is really like to work at a company.”

They pinpointed two main reasons for this: The number of reviews on Glassdoor only accounted for a very small percentage of total employees, and the reviews were disproportionately from “grumpy” employees. In fact, they found that unhappy employees were five to eight times more likely to leave a review on Glassdoor than happy ones.

Final Thoughts

Company review sites do help provide some important insights into company culture and employee satisfaction. For this reason, it’s critical that employers take negative reviews seriously, and respond to them in way that showcases their commitment to employee satisfaction and a positive work environment. While the ratings aren’t necessarily an accurate representation of overall job satisfaction, individual reviews  – and perhaps more importantly, employer responses to these reviews – do hold weight when it comes to evaluating potential employers.

via How Negative Online Company Reviews Can Impact Your Business And Recruiting.

How Negative Online Company Reviews Can Impact Your Business And Recruiting

3 Ways to Tell Employees They"re Getting Paid More Than They Think

One of the main perks of having a job is having steady health insurance. And yet only 70 percent of small businesses report offering health insurance to their employees.

That’s a rising figure (up from 66 percent in 2009), but it means that three of every 10 small-business employees still don’t have employer-sponsored health insurance.

If your company does provide health care as a way to communicate that you care about employees’ well-being and help retain top talent, your stellar benefits package won’t have as great an impact if employees don’t understand just how much you’re contributing toward their benefits.

A benefits package is certainly part of compensation–just as much as a paycheck is–but Millennials tend to value the extra zeros at the end of a paycheck, not the health insurance they use to visit the dentist twice a year. On the other hand, older employees who have been in the work force for several decades may take benefits for granted, because the rising costs of health care have been virtually invisible to them.

Health is an intangible value, and it can be difficult to get your employees to understand how much they’re actually being paid.

Here are a few ways to communicate the value of your company’s benefit package and help employees get more out of it:

1. Have an open discussion about health care

No, you don’t have to tag along to the doctor with your employees. But if your company values transparency, health insurance should be an open discussion, along with your financials and sales figures.

Show your employees that premiums have been on the rise, and give them an open forum to request and receive feedback on their health care.

2. Put it on their paychecks

Whether your employees have a $500 deductible or a $5,000 deductible, let them know how much the company is contributing to health care. Try including both the monthly cost for the employee and the company on employee paychecks so there’s no uncertainty about what you’re providing.

3. Make information accessible with tech

If you’re an old-school company that stores all of its health care info in a binder on your HR person’s desk, it’s time to get real. No one reads that.

Instead, give employees online tools they can use to navigate the health care system effectively. Concierge services like Health Advocate provide cost-comparison tools, information, and help locating the best prices for medical procedures in your area. If employees can use their benefits to the best of their ability, they’ll value them–and your company–more.

As a leader, you know that employee benefits are the second-largest expense on the annual budget. But if your employees don’t know how much you’re spending on their behalf, your company won’t reap the full benefits of providing health care.

If you want to show employees how much they’re really being paid, start an open discussion about the cost of health care. It will show employees how much you value them and make them value your contribution even more.

via 3 Ways to Tell Employees They’re Getting Paid More Than They Think | Inc.com.

3 Ways to Tell Employees They"re Getting Paid More Than They Think

The academic perks of data visualization for MBAs

Data science and data visualization are starting to make an impact in academia, and the University of Virginia’s (UVA) Darden School of Business provides a worthy use case with its application of products from Tableau Software, Inc., putting them to work in multiple classes and projects. Former student and current LinkedIn Manager of Business Operations Analytics Andrew Kritzer was the one who piloted the use of Tableau at UVA. In an interview for theCUBE earlier this week at the annual Tableau Conference, he discussed how students can incorporate Tableau into their classrooms.

Kritzer rolled out three projects in bringing Tableau to UVA. In partnership with an MBA professor, he introduced Tableau to his classmates and coordinated a visualization challenge that offered an award to the team that told the best data-driven story using one dashboard. In the second year of his MBA program and as president of the Darden Technology Club, Kritzer worked with Tableau to hold workshops on best practices. He also conducted an independent study for the business analytics concentration, where he collaborated with San Fransico-based video advertising startup Vungle, who relies on Tableau to identify trends, monitor performance and present results.

For college students interested in incorporating Tableau into projects on business operations, Kritzer recommends going to a local business and asking for information regarding points of sale or periods of time. Also, let the business know that you won’t share any of its information without permission.

Regardless of the industry, gathering information on your own is a key skill that students need to learn for the future, and Tableau is a great tool to use in order to do that. “Get the information you need to make the decisions, and you’ll be the one making them eventually,” Kritzer advised.

via The academic perks of data visualization for MBAs | #data14 | SiliconANGLE.

The academic perks of data visualization for MBAs

Sometimes, Employees Are Right to Worry About Taking Vacation

According to one study, 13% of managers are less likely to promote workers who take all of their vacation time; according to another, employees who take less than their full vacations earn 2.8% more in the subsequent year than their peers who took all of their allotted days, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Thus it’s not surprising that 15% of U.S. employees who are entitled to paid vacation time haven’t used any of it in the past year.

via Sometimes, Employees Are Right to Worry About Taking Vacation – Andrew O’Connell – Harvard Business Review.

Sometimes, Employees Are Right to Worry About Taking Vacation

The Career Myth That Is Hurting Millennials

The interpretation of Joseph Campbell’s infamous line “follow your bliss” has set us down a path that is leading us astray. The line has become deeply etched into the collective unconscious of the millennial generation who in throngs are casting aside the lineal, corporate-ladder-climbing career path paved by the boomers, in favor of a dream where work, purpose and money can exist together.

The interpretation of this new “do what you love” career mantra that appears in every third social media post, highway billboards, living room posters and even resume cover letters, however, is not exactly what Campbell may have intended. Websites like Fast Company, and millennial idols like Steve Jobs present a highly appetizing image of a life that has it all: changing the world with meaningful work and filling our own lives with everything we desire. And while the glossy images of total satisfaction do represent real people, who have done or are doing real work, we may just have to reconsider the implications of this modern myth, and its misinterpretations to figure out exactly how to get there ourselves.

The misunderstanding of “bliss” is that is means “happiness.” But happiness is fleeting, and cannot be achieved by finding that one catch-all job. If life is a wheel, bliss and meaning would be the center, still and unmoving, while most of us, as Campbell explains, chase fulfillment and happiness on the periphery. Chasing quick fulfillment on this spinning wheel has us in a dizzying pursuit, while true bliss resides in the centered hub of meaning.

Growing up on a steady diet of instant gratification, we are looking for that one “meaningful job” directly out of college that will provide everything – happiness, purpose and money. Today, our career search has molded itself around this pursuit of quick fulfillment.

I see the result of this every day running a recruiting firm that works with these “do good” companies people are applying for. The companies with purpose in their mission – think Warby Parker and GOOD Magazine – and the ones that are heralded as doing good work are getting thousands of applications, but they still can’t find anyone to hire with the skills they need. That’s because the path to fulfillment and meaning isn’t that simple.

The pursuit of happiness doesn’t lie in the focus on “making a difference” at work, but rather in learning a real skill and applying it to one specific industry that is being rebuilt. Following this latter path will take longer, and be more complicated, but it will lead you to meaning, purpose and money that is sustained.

The good news is that we now exist in a world where, unlike ever before, the possibility of finding these industries with meaningful work is very real. We are living in a gold rush era of opportunity as every industry from air conditioning to automobiles is being rebuilt in ways that do good. This rebuilding is being funded by the companies that have entrenched positions in the status quo such as Coca Cola investing in Honest Tea or Waste Management funding the start up Recycle Bank.

The path to bliss is really what Campbell describes in the less quoted part of his writing as the dark forest, through which heroes carve their own path. Bliss is not a single job title, a golden apple that has been strewn along the way, but a long journey: your life’s work.

There are real steps that you can take today to begin this work. I have spent the last three years collecting and curating a list of 50 of these strategies. We have tested them with over 3,000 young people in person and now we are giving them away for free.

Welcome to the gold rush: here is your shovel.

via The Career Myth That Is Hurting Millennials | LinkedIn.

The Career Myth That Is Hurting Millennials

7 Ways You Can Impact Company Culture

It’s widely known that people quit bosses, not jobs. Usually when the boss sucks, the culture sucks too. Part of the problem is the idea that company culture is determined at the top and works its way down: 59 percent of employees think the CEO and other top leaders are responsible for changing culture. That leaves 41 percent that feel differently, and I wish we could get that number to 100 percent. Employees can impact culture

Company culture can be vague to pin down and define, but for the most part, it’s your company’s unique behavior, beliefs, attitude and nature. It’s also a vibe, a mojo, a mission, a passion and a way to communicate. It’s simply about the people, and people are complex. While it would be nice if companies put as much thought into establishing culture as they do designing business strategy and product planning, the truth is that it usually doesn’t happen that way.

So what if your boss is a nightmare, the culture is toxic and you’re about to start singing, “take this job and shove it”? Or maybe it’s not that bad but is getting there. Do you just give up and quit? Well, if you love what you do, the industry you’re in, the people you work with or if there’s any other reason to have hope, then it is likely worth an attempt to make things better.

Here are seven things you can try to make a meaningful impact and turn things around:

1. Own your own role. First, take a good look in the mirror and ask yourself, “Am I part of the problem?” Be honest because in most cases, there are at least a few things you can personally change. Make a list–maybe it’s longer than you thought! Your personal attitude, the effort you put into making positive contributions to the culture and how you communicate with others are a few things to consider.

2. Use your influence to make things better. The true leaders at a company aren’t always the boss. Natural leaders set an example that people want to follow, so if that’s you, be a good one! If you understand the vision, use your influence to help others better support the vision. It’s amazing what a group can accomplish with a shared mission. It’s contagious. Influence your sphere–and hopefully it will trickle out from you to your team, your department and ultimately throughout the company.

3. Be open, transparent and fair. I have little patience for petty, backbiting office politics and social positioning, but it is inevitable that there will be people at a company who behave as if they’re still in high school. Let’s help them change. Let’s be open, transparent and fair, and people will reciprocate even if it takes them a while. It’s incredibly refreshing when you’re free to say or do what’s best for the company–even if that means making some mistakes–rather than feel like you always have to CYA.

4. Educate and train your boss. Dogs sometimes find it easy to train their owners . . . maybe we can train our bosses. I’m not saying we’re dogs, but you know what I mean. You’ll find a million supporting articles online to change culture. Check out the slideshares from Hubspot and Netflix, or the Valve Employee Handbook. That should spark a few ideas. Share what you learn and what you’re reading. Maybe help the boss think it’s his idea.

5. Take measurements. I like measuring things, but measuring culture can be tough! This may just be a feeling you get when you walk into the office or when you know your coworkers are happy. Less whining or grumbling. Many times, teams will be much more focused and productive. And frankly, everyone will work harder. Yes, we are happiest when we’re focused and working hard. If the boss sees this impact–if he has any leadership capacity whatsoever–he should jump on the culture wagon ASAP.

6. Talk to HR. Give HR a shot. If anybody should know the mission and vision of the company, it’s HR. Go ask questions, find out what HR thinks about culture and how it’s communicated to employees. Sometimes HR forgets, and you might be a helpful reminder.

7. Be patient. Everyone loves an easy answer, but great culture requires great effort and time to get just right. And frankly it’s never perfect, but we should always be working on incremental improvement. There is a reason patience is a virtue.

The purposeful and deliberate action of working on culture is one of the best things you and your company can do. So don’t quit just yet. Figure out what you can do today, don’t bite off more than you can chew, then sit back and watch as things get better.

via 7 Ways You Can Impact Company Culture | Inc.com.

7 Ways You Can Impact Company Culture

How tech companies compare in employee diversity

From Apple to Google, we ranked 14 tech companies from most diverse to least

Silicon Valley companies like Google, Apple and Facebook may be innovative, but they sure aren’t when it comes to making their workplaces diverse.

Criticized for their hiring practices, tech companies started publishing employee demographic data over the past few months. It only confirmed what many people had suspected: White and Asian men dominate. Everyone else – women, blacks and Hispanics – are severely lacking.

In many cases, the companies issued a sort of apology in tandem with their diversity reports. “As CEO, I’m not satisfied with the numbers on this page,” Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote in a blog post online. “Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity,” Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president of people operations, said.

At least 14 tech companies have released data. In an effort to provide further clarity, Fortune has ranked them in individual categories and then again overall, using a point system. Here’s how they compare:

Gender diversity (overall)

Analee Kasudia/Fortune

From most diverse to least: Pandora (51% male, 49% female), Indiegogo (55% male, 45% female), eBay (58% male, 42% female), Pinterest (60% male, 40% female), LinkedIn (61% male, 39% female), Yahoo (62% male, 37% female), Hewlett-Packard (67% male, 33% female), Apple (70% male, 30% female), Facebook (69% male, 31% female), Google (70% male, 30% female), Twitter (70% male, 30% female), Microsoft (72% male, 28% female), Cisco (77% male, 23% female), Intel (77% male, 23% female).

Gender diversity (leadership only)

Analee Kasudia/Fortune

From most diverse to least: Indiegogo (57% male, 43% female), Apple (72% male, 28% female), eBay (72% male, 28% female), Hewlett-Packard (72% male, 28% female), LinkedIn (75% male, 25% female), Facebook (77% male, 23% female), Yahoo (77% male, 23% female), Google (79% male, 21% female), Intel (79% male, 21% female), Twitter (79% male, 21% female), Pinterest (81% male, 19% female), Cisco (81% male, 19% female).

Gender diversity (technical workers only)

From most diverse to least: Indiegogo (67% male, 33% female), eBay (76% male, 24% female), Pinterest (79% male, 21% female), Apple (80% male, 20% female), Pandora (82.1% male, 17.9% female), LinkedIn (83% male, 17% female), Google (83% male, 17% female), Yahoo (85% male, 15% female, 1% other/undisclosed), Facebook (85% male, 15% female), Twitter (90% male, 10% female).

Data for Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel were unavailable.

Ethnic diversity (overall)

Analee Kasudia/Fortune

From most diverse to least: Apple, LinkedIn, Intel, Google, eBay, Twitter, Facebook, Cisco, Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard, Pandora, Indiegogo.

Ethnic diversity (leadership only)

Analee Kasudia/Fortune

From most diverse to least: Apple, LinkedIn, Intel, Google, eBay, Twitter, Facebook, Cisco, Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard, Pandora, Indiegogo.

Overall rankings

To calculate how the 14 tech companies fared overall, Fortune assigned points based on how they ranked in five categories: Overall gender diversity, overall ethnic diversity, gender diversity of the leadership team, ethnic diversity of the leadership team and gender diversity among technical workers. Companies that failed to report data in a particular category were given last place points for that category. Here’s how they stacked up, at least by Fortune’s measure:

1. LinkedIn

2. Apple

3. eBay

4. Indiegogo & Yahoo (tied)

6. Pinterest

7. Pandora

8. Facebook

9. Intel & Google (tied)

11. Twitter

12. Cisco

13. Hewlett-Packard

14. Microsoft

via How tech companies compare in employee diversity.

How tech companies compare in employee diversity

Hackerspaces Help Techies Turn Ideas into Reality

Inside a nondescript garage-like workshop nestled between restaurants, a flower shop and jewelry stores along Main Street, ideas are taking shape.

At HeatSync Labs, the tables are littered with computer chips, pens, pads and tools while the room is abuzz with the chatter of would-be inventors hoping to change the world–or just make cool things. They are part of a growing global movement of so-called hackerspaces.

“It’s all about sharing what we know with one another,” said Mitch Altman, 57, founder of a similar setup in San Francisco called Noisebridge. “It’s centered around community and education and a place where people do what they love doing and hopefully make a living from it.”

The idea began to take shape in the U.S. after Altman and other Americans attended a 2007 computing conference in Germany where panelists spoke of their ownhackerspaces. Altman returned home, met with fellow tinkerers, rented a space for Noisebridge the next year.

“I didn’t want it to end,” he said.

At the same time, similar workshops were opening up across the country–NYC Resistor in New York, Hack DC in Washington, and The Hacktory in Philadelphia–while dozens more have popped up since. More than 1,600 are now operating around the world, according to hackerspaces.org, a website dedicated to the effort.

At HeatSync, which opened in 2009, Larry Campbell, 49, is working on a nuclear fusion chamber, while Ryan McDermott, 27, tinkers with an electric keyboard programmed to make the colors dance on an LED strip in preparation for Nevada’s annual Burning Man alternative arts festival.

Campbell, a network engineer, hopes his device will “change the universe” by turning hydrogen atoms into helium.

McDermott, who works in information technology, has more modest plans for his keyboard.

“Anybody that I’ve shown this thing immediately wants to play with it and touch it and make the colors dance and things like that,” McDermott said. “That’s the fun thing for me: getting people’s reaction out of it.”

While many projects in hackerspaces are done as hobbies or just for the challenge, some have been turned into multimillion-dollar products. The MakerBot, for example, was created by a tinkerer at NYC Resistor and is now one of the most well-known 3D printers on the market.

And while hackerspaces have been quick to spread, each has sprouted locally with its own unique flavor.

HeatSync, for instance, gives members 24/7 access to the facility for paying dues that help cover the costs for rent and tools. For non-paying members of the public, HeatSync opens its doors for three hours every weekday, from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., during which they can work on projects and share ideas.

“Anybody can get their foot in the door,” said HeatSync co-founder Jacob Rosenthal, 33. “It’s their job to make it work for them but (we) give you a time to meet the people and to get access to some of the tools and to show people your project and get people excited about what you do.”

Jeremy Leung, 30, an IT security consultant and another co-founder of HeatSync, said those involved in the movement also are working to dispel the myth that hackers are, well, hackers who are an ominous security threat to credit card data and computer systems worldwide.

In reality, those involved in the movement say it has a much more productive mission: to improve existing technology and in some cases create new ideas.

“Hacker had become this muddied term in the media,” Leung said, describing the origins of the word as merely “someone that takes a technology and they learn so much about it that they’re able to take it past what the initial idea was.”

Campbell hopes to do just that with his nuclear fusion chamber. When he fires it up, nobody will be able to change those helium atoms back into hydrogen.

“All of a sudden, something’s irrevocably different,” Campbell said. “And that’s kind of cool.”

via Hackerspaces Help Techies Turn Ideas into Reality | Inc.com.

Hackerspaces Help Techies Turn Ideas into Reality