Congress will likely not commence except for in case of emergency, which would require lawmakers to be present since no remote voting system yet exists or is allowed under current rules.

While employees are used to working remotely every day, working parents are learning how work remotely with kids at home following mass closures of schools and child-care providers.

[8 ± 1 R/Ra (SD)]

capacitive self-sensing has been used for closed-loop control of DE actuators (31).

capacitance can be measured transiently by applying a low-amplitude AC voltage

Soft active devices such as HASEL actuators are elastic systems that can be used near resonances to improve performance and efficiency (30)—a characteristic that could find use in legged robots that move over long distances.

referrer (note spelling)

Even one day a week out of the office might allow each employee to see their work in a new light.

In the age of innovation, when you realize that an innovative, empathetic and inclusive organization is the winning recipe, then remote work starts to look like a huge opportunity. 

Often, even with the proliferation of software in employee’s desktops, many employees still report disconnection and burnout.

remote work can present an opportunity for all of us to think about what it truly means to collaborate and how it can improve our organizations

4. Build With Not For This simple but compelling phrase sums up our approach to building technology. The concept comes from a long history of movement work, and in the civic tech space has been popularized by Laurenellen McCann, who has written extensively on the topic. To us, the ethos of “build with note for” is a reminder that the moment we are in the mindset of building something “for” our partners rather than with them, we have failed. Going back to the theme that technology is not neutral and that our values are embedded in our work, whether it’s conscious or not, building “for” inherently conjures up a feeling of saviorism, of believing we have the answers, or believing we are here to do something for someone else. Building with means constantly checking our assumptions, being open to ideas we haven’t thought of, and, most of all, results in much better work.

Get phrasebooks to start studying basic terminology. Phrasebooks are lists of expressions made for travelers to foreign countries. These lists give you an example of the sentence structure a language uses and what kind of words are useful. Find a phrasebook in the language you wish to learn and treat it as a foundation you can build upon as you learn more.

For several reasons the Simple backend shipped with Active Support only does the "simplest thing that could possibly work" for Ruby on Rails3 ... which means that it is only guaranteed to work for English and, as a side effect, languages that are very similar to English. Also, the simple backend is only capable of reading translations but cannot dynamically store them to any format.That does not mean you're stuck with these limitations, though. The Ruby I18n gem makes it very easy to exchange the Simple backend implementation with something else that fits better for your needs, by passing a backend instance to the I18n.backend= setter.

We encourage all of our team members to take the time they need to recoup and refresh as much as they need.

Other important things - if you plan to use public transport, we recommend you to buy the Half Fare card. It gives you a 50% discount on most public transport in Switzerland (it costs 185 CHF per year).

Choose health insurance (Krankenkasse) - in Switzerland you have to pay your health insurance separately (it’s not deducted from your salary). You can use the Comparis website to compare the options. You have 3 months to choose both the company and your franchise.

120,000 CHF annually according to this calculator gets you 7,746.20 CHF net per month.

If you, on the other hand, want to go the student-like route (living in Wohngemeinschaft, not eating out too much) and try to save, you can easily live on 1,500-2,000 CHF per month and save the majority of your salary.

2) Rent only a room - it might be a good option if you come without family (in Switzerland it’s called living in a Wohngemeinschaft).

There are also some general expat groups like Zurich Together

We are now cooperating with Credit Agricole Bank and Revolut - if you have already moved to Switzerland you can open a free bank account and get 100 CHF bonus - email us to get the bonus code.

Employers can, however, place a cap on vacation accrual. In other words, once employees reaches a certain number of days, they will stop accruing vacation until they use some of their vacation.

Because accrued vacation is considered earned wages, use-it-or-lose-it policies are seen as illegally withholding wages owed to employees.

Things to consider when crafting out Job Ads and descriptions

Collaboration is not consensus When collaborating it is always important to stay above radar and work transparently, but collaboration is not consensus. You don't need to ask people for their input, and they shouldn't ask you "Why didn't you ask me?" You don't have to wait for people to provide input, if you did ask them. We believe in permissionless innovation- you don't need to involve people but everyone can contribute. This is core to how we iterate, since we want smaller teams moving quickly rather than large teams achieving consensus slowly.

Someone who took the afternoon off shouldn't feel like they did something wrong. You don't have to defend how you spend your day. We trust team members to do the right thing instead of having rigid rules. Do not incite competition by proclaiming how many hours you worked yesterday. If you are working too many hours talk to your manager to discuss solutions.

they can always opt to not attend, or during a video call they can work on other things if they want

although activity was not specifically recorded [24]

Many large carnivores are ‘digestion-limited’ in that they spend more time digesting than they do searching for food [16]

as they can directly influence the daily routines and habitat selection of lower trophic levels [18].

Captive experiments have shown gastric motility in blacktip reef sharks to be positively correlated with body temperature, regardless of feeding [25].

[28]. While we certainly cannot extrapolate that result to sharks

Overall Dynamic Body Acceleration (ODBA)

Time away from work It's important to clarify that being able to work from anywhere does not replace the need to take time off of work. We recognize how crucial it is to build in time where you can mentally take a break from your work, and as a company, we encourage our team members to do that. Learn more about how time off works at GitLab.

We have a "no ask, must tell" time off policy

If you plan to be out of the office for more than 48 hours, update your GitLab.com status with your out of office dates by clicking on your profile picture and selecting "Edit Status." For Example: 'OOO Back on 2018-06-28.' Don't forget to change it back upon your return, and be aware that this information is publicly accessible.

Don't let burnout creep up on you. Working remotely can allow us to create bad habits, such as working straight through lunch to get something finished. Once in a while this feels good, perhaps to check that nagging task or big project off the list, but don't let this become a bad habit. Before long, you'll begin to feel the effects on your body and see it in your work.

When you recognize symptoms of burnout in others, help them to get out the "Burnout trap". Don't just tell people to take a break, but help them arrange things so they can take a break. Ask why they feel they can't take a break (there are almost certainly real, concrete reasons) and then ask permission to get busy putting things in place that will overcome those barriers. People might be trapped by their own fatigue, being too worn out to find the creative solutions needed to take a break.

The second-guessing and doubts are justified, because indeed, that can happen. For hobbyist levels of creative ambition, a steady paycheck job that you’re not too ambitious about, with free evenings and weekends, is a much better setup.But if you’re serious, and want to take your passion mission places, the indie life situation is definitely a far better environment for it, once you do the things necessary to make it work. It won’t happen magically.The making-it-work goes both ways. The passion mission has to inject soul into the money-making activity, and the money-making activity has to be artfully arranged around the core creative disciplines of the passion mission. Either both are sustainable long-term, or neither is.

Find a results-oriented job if you’re fiercely independent and opinionated. Climb the ladder in a big corporation if you’re highly diplomatic or a crowd-pleaser.

So if you’re a highly competent and aggressive individual, it’s best you find yourself a job in a startup, be an entrepreneur, or work in a company that needs turning around.

competency doesn’t factor as much as likability in most corporate promotions, especially when the ship is smooth sailing.

“In practice people gravitate to, hire and promote individuals they like to be around, not people who demand accountability.”

Dr. Peter advises creative incompetence — pretending to be incompetent but doing it in an area or manner where it doesn’t actually impair your work.

Dr. Peter also surmised that “super competent” people tend to “disrupt the hierarchy.” I suppose that’s a nice way of saying you’ve made your boss look bad by being more capable.In such situations, you’ll probably find yourself deliberately suppressed or edged out sooner or later — for some stupid reason or blame pushing.

Dr. Peter also had another interesting theory about getting promoted. He considered working hard and improving your skill sets not as effective as something called pull promotion. That’s when you get promoted — faster than usual — when a mentor or patron pulls you up.No wonder there’s so much butt kissing in the corporate world. They must have read Dr. Peter’s research from the ‘60s.

I do think when a lot of managers realized they’ve hit their peak or comfort level, they then start to focus on playing politics instead of delivering results to hold onto their position. These are also the kind of managers who would only hire people less capable than them, for fear of being replaced.

happy to PR given consensus

Your idea should stem from solving someone’s problem. Ideally, your own problem. It’s important that you choose an idea which interests you. Interest is key to fuelling motivation which is crucial when making a web app. It takes effort building web apps and it’s important you have fun during the process.

In distance education teaching is hardly ever an individual act, but a collaborative process joining together theexpertise of a number of specialists in design teams and delivery networks. The typical model is that of the courseteam of content experts, instructional designers and media specialists

Your answer to, “how did my time off balance get this way?” Chronologically track and understand adjustments to employee time off. Plus, your team can easily view their own PTO changes right from their Gusto accounts

Work never ends. No matter how much you get done there will always be more. I see a lot of colleagues burn out because they think their extra effort will be noticed. Most managers appriciate it but do not promote their employees.

Pay for each job is still set through a black-box algorithm

Under the pay model the company employed from 2017 until the fall of 2019, each dollar of customer tip did not raise workers’ earnings by a dollar

Through a process called rehashing, rbenv maintains shims

When People Work Together

The two things I really like about working for smaller places or starting a company is you get very direct access to users and customers and their problems, which means you can actually have empathy for what's actually going on with them, and then you can directly solve it. That cycle is so powerful, the sooner you learn how to make that cycle happen in your career, the better off you'll be. If you can make software and make software for other people, the outcome truly is hundreds of millions of dollars worth of value if you get it right. That's where I'm here to try and encourage you to do. I'm not really saying that you shouldn't go work at a big tech company. I am saying you should probably leave before it makes you soft. 

Don't focus too much on the salary. It's just one tiny part of the whole package.Your dev job pays your rent, food and savings. I assume that most dev jobs do this quite well.Beyond this, the main goal of a job is to increase your future market value, your professional network and to have fun. So. basically it's about how much you are worth in your next job and that you enjoy your time.A high salary doesn't help you if you do stuff which doesn't matter in a few years.

One of the more clever aspects of the agent is how it can verify a user's identity (or more precisely, possession of a private key) without revealing that private key to anybody.

provides a peek behind the ‘magic curtain’ at what is going on for a curious reader

afternoons are spent reading/researching/online classes.This has really helped me avoid burn out. I go into the weekend less exhausted and more motivated to return on Monday and implement new stuff. It has also helped generate some inspiration for weekend/personal projects.

We want to learn, but we worry that we might not like what we learn. Or that learning will cost us too much. Or that we will have to give up cherished ideas.

Talented people flock to employers that promise to invest in their development whether they will stay at the company or not.

“NextNow Collaboratory is an interesting example of a new kind of collective intelligence: an Internet-enabled, portable social network, easily transferable from one social cause to another.”

I also recently took about 10 months off of work, specifically to focus on learning. It was incredible, and I don’t regret it financially. I would often get up at 6 in the morning or even earlier (which I never do) just from excitement about what I was going to learn about and accomplish in the day. Spending my time focused Only on what I was most interested in was incredibly rewarding.

For now, that will have to be my justification. I’m not ready to give up writing. I’m not ready to take up some high-paid job that I’d hate in order to reduce the world’s suffering. Maybe that will change. For now, call me Net-Positive Man.

ΛLIΛ

I'm working for myself right now, but if one day I needed to go get a full-time job again, I would almost certainly not go to big tech again. I'd rather get paid a fifth of what I was doing, but do something that leaves me with some energy after I put in a day's work

Second, in my experience working with ex-FAANG - these engineers, while they all tend to be very smart, tend to be borderline junior engineers in the real world. They simply don't know how to build or operate something without the luxury of the mature tooling that exists at FAANG. You may be in for a reality shock when you leave the FAANG bubble

more money comes at the cost of very high expectations and brutal deadlines

There is no reason material-ui can't create a better abstraction on top of the one provided by React itself though.

almost no organizations today support maker schedules

In our experience, the best way to prevent a useless meeting is to write up our goals and thoughts first. Despite working in the same office, our team at Nuclino has converted nearly all of our meetings into asynchronously written reports.

The most straightforward way to address this is to build a team knowledge base. Not only does that minimize the number of repetitive questions bounced around the office, it allows new team members to basically onboard themselves.

it's a matter of culture. None of these rules would work if the management fails to see that makers need to follow a different schedule

People think it’s efficient to distribute information all at the same time to a bunch of people around a room. But it’s actually a lot less efficient than distributing it asynchronously by writing it up and sending it out and letting people absorb it when they’re ready to so it doesn’t break their days into smaller bits.”

It doesn't mean that we ignore all messages and only look up from our work when something is on fire – but the general expectation is that it's okay to not be immediately available to your teammates when you are focusing on your work

Office hours are chunks of time that makers set aside for meetings, while the rest of the time they are free to go into a Do Not Disturb mode

context switching between communication and creative work only kills the quality of both

managers fail to see and address this problem is that they are used to looking at communication and assume it's a good thing. Because they see activity

Immediate response becomes the implicit expectation, with barely any barriers or restrictions in place

since most powerful people operate on the manager schedule, they're in a position to force everyone to adapt to their schedule

Working in an open office renders us even more vulnerable

A study conducted by Gloria Marks, a Professor of Informatics at the University of California, revealed that it takes us an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to refocus on a task after an interruption, and even when we do, we experience a decrease in productivity

For managers, interruptions in the form of meetings, phone calls, and Slack notifications are normal. For someone on the maker schedule, however, even the slightest distraction can have a disruptive effect

I had to upgrade my other project from Webpack 2 / Angular 5 to Webpack 4/Angular 7 and it was a complete nightmare! I lost a ton of hours and can't really justify charging my client for the weeks worth of time to figure it out.

The value of uninterrupted time to devote to development is hard to overstate, and if I continue I won’t have that. So I couldn’t expect to be nearly as productive, which makes the whole thing less attractive — I’m one of those people who derives a lot of enjoyment from making tangible progress.

Un 7-Eleven de la ciudad de Brisbane deberá pagar casi 200.000 dólares de multa por aprovecharse de sus trabajadores extranjeros y crear registros falsos para encubrir estas acciones ilegales. Este caso se suma a la serie de escándalos de explotación que afectan a esta franquicia, seis de ellas en la capital de Queensland. Updated Updated 05/06/2018 By R.O. Share Share on Facebook Share on Twitter  Un Tribunal del Circuito Federal multó a Avinash Pratap Singh, gerente y dueño parcial de una gasolinera 7-Eleven en East Brisbane, con 32.130 dólares y a la empresa que dirige S & A Enterprises con otros160.650 dólares tras una investigación realizada en 2015 por la Defensoría de Empleo Justo (Fair Work Ombudsman).Los inspectores de la Defensoría hallaron que los empleados, todos ellos jóvenes estudiantes provenientes de la India, recibieron 5,593 dólares menos en total por los períodos en que trabajaron en la gasolinera en 2014.Singh y su empresa admitieron que pagaron a sus empleados 14,14 por hora, que está por debajo del salario mínimo legal, y que además no les dieron a estos jóvenes el dinero que les correspondía por horas extras trabajadas ni por las jornadas durante los fines de semana y los días festivos.A otro empleado de la gasolinera se le pagó un 25 por ciento menos de lo que le correspondía (4,439 dólares) por los cinco meses que trabajó, mientras que a otro joven se le dio 1,154 dólares menos durante las siete semanas que estuvo empleado en ese lugar (41 por ciento menos(.Singh y S & A Enterprises también proporcionaron datos falsos a la oficina central de 7-Eleven sobre los salarios, según un comunicado de la Defensoría de Empleo Justo.El juez Angelo Vasta indicó que la entrada de datos falsos sobre las horas y los salarios dados a los empleados de esa gasolinera en el sistema de pagos “crearon registros en los que parece que los empleados recibieron las tasas de salarios fijados por los laudos actuales, incluyendo las tasas de recargo y las pagas por horas extraordinarias de trabajo, las cuales no tienen relación con las horas de trabajo o las tasas reales por hora (que se les pagó)”.El juez además obligó a los responsables a pagar a la Defensoría 2,247 por los costes legales.

Mr Chang admitted his company had paid flat hourly rates as low as $13 an hour. 7-Eleven investigation 7-Eleven playing 'statistical tricks' in worker compensation scheme'He made me scared': 7-Eleven worker speaks of intimidationExploitation integral to 7-Eleven business model: insider7-Eleven staff work twice as long at half pay rate7-Eleven business model rips off workers, former ACCC boss saysConvenience store empire 'built on something not much different from slavery' This resulted in significant underpayment of the minimum hourly rate, casual loadings and penalty rates for shift and weekend work that employees were owed under the General Retail Award 2010.Judge Michael Jarrett found Mr Chang knew the relevant Award that applied but had "established a business model that relied upon a deliberate disregard of the employees' workplace entitlements and a course of conduct designed to conceal that deliberate disregard".Judge Jarrett found no evidence the company's contraventions were motivated by poor cash flow.He said "rather, it seems, the company's profit has been enhanced by the underpayments concerned".The FWO confirmed all underpayments had been rectified."Businesses should be in no doubt that lawful obligations to pay minimum wage rates, keep appropriate employment records and issue pay slips apply to all employers in Australia and they are not negotiable," Fair Work Ombudsman Natalie James said."The deliberate nature of the underpayments and the lengths that Mr Chang went to in order to hide his conduct from us and from the 7-Eleven head office is of grave concern."Mr Chang was fully aware of his lawful obligations and chose to manipulate the system in order to undercut the entitlements of vulnerable workers. "We are pleased that the court has seen fit to penalise such blatant conduct and hope that this serves as a warning that such behaviour will be penalised."Mr Chang and his company sold the 7-Eleven franchise in late-2016 and the franchise is now operated by an entity unrelated to these contraventions.The FWO said it had taken legal action against nine 7-Eleven operators since 2009, and that cases against three operators were still before the courts.7-Eleven's Australian head office has since commented on the court decision."7-Eleven welcomes the Fair Work Ombudsman's actions pursuing these wage underpayment claims dating back to 2013-14," a company spokesperson said."The Franchisee concerned is no longer part of our store network."We have introduced comprehensive reforms to ensure our Franchised store network operates at the highest standards we expect, and will take action where those standards are not being met."

The penalties are the result of a legal action by the Fair Work Ombudsman after its investigation found that 21 employees across the two stores had been underpaid a total of $31,507.27 over a 12-month period. Viplus Pty Ltd, which operated a store in Adelaide Street until July 2017, was penalised $88,140, while Vipper Pty Ltd, which operated a store in George Street until May 2017, was penalised $68,262. Penalties totalling $36,559 were also handed down against Jason Yuan, a director of both companies. The stores were two of 20 7-Eleven outlets targeted for surprise night-time visits by the Fair Work Ombudsman as part of a tri-State operation in September 2014. The Fair Work Ombudsman has taken legal action against 11 7-Eleven operators since 2009. In this matter, inspectors found that the workers at both stores were paid flat rates for all hours worked, save for public holidays where they received an additional $20 per hour in cash.  Given the 24 hour, seven-day nature of the businesses, this resulted in significant underpayments of Saturday and public holiday penalty rates, overtime rates and shift work rates stipulated by the General Retail Industry Award 2010. Two workers at the Adelaide Street store were also found to have been paid at the incorrect classification. Individual underpayments ranged from $98.36 to $5080.16. They have all now been rectified The respondents were also penalised for failing to meet record-keeping and payslip requirements, including by failing to include information in respect of cash payments made to some of the employees. In her judgment, Judge Mercuri noted that the underpayments were “substantial”, particularly given the low-skilled nature of the work and the vulnerability of the workers due to their age and, in some cases, their visa status. “Given that many of the employees of both Viplus and Vipper were in Australia on various visas, with many being young workers, the impact of the underpayments was significant for each of the affected employees,” Judge Mercuri said. In determining the penalties, Judge Mercuri also pointed out that Mr Yuan had been running the stores for over twelve years, had a background in finance, banking and project management and had access to significant training and support from the 7‑Eleven head office. In addition, her Honour noted the Fair Work Ombudsman had previously issued Vipper and Mr Yuan with a letter of caution in 2013 after an investigation found that workers at the Adelaide Street store were not being paid applicable weekend and public holiday penalty rates. At the time, the Fair Work Ombudsman advised Mr Yuan about his obligations to pay penalty rates as stipulated under the Award. Judge Mercuri found this “continued failure to ensure compliance with the Award following the issuing of a letter of caution to Vipper Pty Ltd” to be a relevant factor in determining the penalties for Vipper and Mr Yuan. Acting Fair Work Ombudsman Kristen Hannah says that the regulator takes a particularly dim view of employers who continue to breach workplace laws after being explicitly advised of their obligations. “Employers must recognise that significant consequences will follow when they knowingly flout the law,” Ms Hannah says. “There is no excuse for continued non-compliance by a business when it has been placed on notice and we will not hesitate to pursue serious enforcement action when this occurs. “We have no patience for business operators who fail to respect the law and ignore our advice, and the penalties handed down in this case reflect the seriousness with which such matters will be dealt.” Ms Hannah says that the Fair Work Ombudsman takes the exploitation of young workers and visa holders particularly seriously. “We know that these cohorts face specific vulnerabilities in the workplace due to a lack of awareness of workplace laws and a reluctance to speak up if something is wrong,” Ms Hannah says. “There is no place for the deliberate exploitation of vulnerable workers in Australian workplaces.” Ms Hannah says the commencement of the Fair Work Amendment (Protecting Vulnerable Workers) Act 2017 has increased the maximum penalties for employers who knowingly exploit workers. “Businesses should be aware that serious breaches of workplace laws have increased ten-fold and can now attract penalties of up to $630,000 per contravention for companies and $126,000 for an individual,” Ms Hannah says. 7-Eleven entered into a Proactive Compliance Deed with the Fair Work Ombudsman in late 2016, committing to a range of measures designed to ensure all its workers receive their lawful entitlements through strong accountability for all operators across its franchise network and supervision by the Fair Work Ombudsman. Employers and employees seeking assistance can visit www.fairwork.gov.au or call the Fair Work Infoline on 13 13 94. An interpreter service is available on 13 14 50. Information on the website can be translated into 40 languages other than English. NOTE: Vipper Pty Ltd and Viplus Pty Ltd no longer own or operate the Adelaide Street or George Street 7-Eleven stores in Brisbane. The Fair Work Ombudsman makes no allegations against the current operators.

For the uninitiated, Granny Smith was Maria Ann Smith, a resident of the area who in 1868 "accidentally" grew the first batch of green apples that now bear her name.

Each year the winner is crowned with great fanfare at Eastwood Shopping Centre, which is owned by Yuhu Group, the company founded by billionaire property developer and political donor Huang Xiangmo.

Labor councillors are suspicious about Mr Booth's pageant. In 2014, then councillor George Simon - now assistant general secretary of NSW Labor - called for the "archaic" event to be killed off.

At first blush

70% async using Twist, Github, Paper25% sync using something like Zoom, Appear.in, or Google Meet5% physical meetings, e.g., annual company or team retreats

According to the Harvard Business Review article “Collaborative Overload”, the time employees spend on collaboration has increased by 50% over the past two decades. Researchers found it was not uncommon for workers to spend a full 80% of their workdays communicating with colleagues in the form of email (on which workers’ spend an average of six hours a day); meetings (which fill up 15 percent of a company’s time, on average); and more recently instant messaging apps (the average Slack user sends an average of 200 messages a day, though 1,000-message power users are “not the exception”)

we think the async culture is one of the core reasons why most of the people we’ve hired at Doist the past 5 years have stayed with us. Our employee retention is 90%+ — much higher than the overall tech industry. For example, even a company like Google — with its legendary campuses full of perks from free meals to free haircuts — has a median tenure of just 1.1 years. Freedom to work from anywhere at any time beats fun vanity perks any day, and it costs our company $0 to provide

Discriminative models try to draw boundaries in the data space, while generative models try to model how data is placed throughout the space.

I'm working full time on Material-UI since 2019. I was working on it during my free time before that. I hope that I can leverage my full-time involvement in the library to make it really awesome. You are right, the project is well-funded. We hope we can fund the time of more than 1 person full time in the future, with the current growth rate, it should soon be possible. We have 3 people working part-time on the project (Matt, Sebastian and Josh), plus the community behind us (+1,000 code contributors).

That is approximately $10,739 per person.

ObamaCare, is the product of a Conservative Think-Tank. 60% of citizens get private insurance from their employers, 15% receive Medicare (65 and older), and the federal gov’t funds Medicaid for low-income families (the allocation to this fund has been declining).

Switzerland has mandatory health insurance that covers all residents.

France has a mandatory health insurance system that covers 75% of health care spending.

Canada pays for services provided by a private delivery system. The gov’t pays for 70% of the care.

Countries that Provide Universal Healthcare 32 out of 33 developed countries in the world have universal health care.

To him it was chiefly the diurnal and annual variations of the temperature that were lessened by this circumstance.

Except when work-for-hire rules apply. The author's employer owns work(s

Known Assailants Stalking the white working class from within

This is spot on. An idea on its own does nothing. Execution and actually doing the hard work are the most important thing in any creative endeavour.

not-yetness is the space that allows for emergence

process and product

10 Ways To Innovate And Impress At Work

The fact that many of them are working long hours at outside jobs only exacerbates the problem.

Almost every social network of note had an early signature proof of work hurdle. For Facebook it was posting some witty text-based status update. For Instagram, it was posting an interesting square photo. For Vine, an entertaining 6-second video. For Twitter, it was writing an amusing bit of text of 140 characters or fewer. Pinterest? Pinning a compelling photo. You can likely derive the proof of work for other networks like Quora and Reddit and Twitch and so on. Successful social networks don't pose trick questions at the start, it’s usually clear what they want from you.

“Those who can stick to a 996 schedule are those who have found their passion beyond monetary gains,” Ma wrote.

When Instagram found out that users missed out on 70% of the posts on their feed, they announced a new algorithm. An algorithm that promised to let you see the posts that you care about the most. But the workings of the algorithm remained a burning question until recently when the Facebook-owned company revealed how does the Instagram algorithm work. When the Instagram feed was tweaked from chronological to algorithmic, people anticipated a drop in engagement levels. However, people have now started seeing 90% of their feed since the algorithm was instituted. Read on to find out everything you need to know about the Instagram feed algorithm.

it is not because you mm! but because you will.

It also provides the interviewer with an opportunity to feel smart and validate that “they’ve still got it” and that they aren’t themselves an imposter, by critically examining the work of an outsider who wants in.

Reviving Work Ethic in America

the stuff that wouldn’t make my job easier or my work better

For Fasting and Football, a Dedicated Game Plan

The Next Target

The urgency of time may make it too onerous forthe extra effort of articulating actions as they are beingperformed, yet most emergency response requires somecommunication.

Explicitly articulated narratives mayalso make clearer that multiple sequences of actions maybe occurring simultaneously, thus resolving role conflictsby allowing multiple ways to accomplish a task

Experimentation, the third affordance, refers to theuse of technology to encourage participants to try outnovel ideas.

Recombinability refers to forms of technology-enabled action where individual contributors build oneach others’ contributions.

Reviewability refers to the enactment of technology-enabled new forms of working in which participantsare better able to view and manage the content offront and back narratives over time (West and Lakhani2008). By allowing participants to easily and collab-oratively review a range of ideas, technology-affordedreviewability helps the community respond to tensionsin disembodied ideas, because the reviews can provideimportant contextual information for building on others’ideas.

Technology platforms used by OCs can providea number of affordances for knowledge collabora-tion, three of which we mention here: reviewability,recombinability, and experimentation. These affordancesevolve as new participants provide new ways to use thetechnologies, new social norms are developed around thetechnology affordances, and new needs for fresh affor-dances are identified.

Given the fluid nature of OCsand their rapidly evolving technology platforms, and inline with calls to avoid dualistic thinking about tech-nology (Leonardi and Barley 2008, Markus and Silver2008, Orlikowski and Scott 2008), we suggest technol-ogy affordance as a generative response, one that viewstechnology, action, and roles as emergent, inseparable,and coevolving. Technology affordances offer a relationalperspective on human action, where neither the technol-ogy nor the actor is dominant in the sense that the tech-nology does not define what is possible for the actor todo, nor is the actor free from the limitations of the tech-nological environment. Instead, possibilities for actionemerge from the reciprocal interaction between actor andartifact (Gibson 1979, Zammuto et al. 2007). Thus, anaffordance perspective focuses on the organizing actionsthat are afforded by technology artifacts.

third response to manage tensions is to promoteknowledge collaboration by enacting dynamic bound-aries. In social sciences, although boundaries divide anddisintegrate collectives, they also coordinate and inte-grate social action (Bowker and Star 1999, Lamont andMolnár 2002). Fluidity brings the need for flexible andpermeable boundaries, but it is not only the propertiesof the boundaries but also their dynamicity that helpmanage tensions.

We have observed in OCs that no single narrative isable to keep participants informed about the current stateof the OC with respect to each tension. These commu-nities seem to develop two different types of narratives.Borrowing from Goffman (1959), we label the two nar-ratives the “front” and the “back” narratives.

Based on our collective research on to date, we haveidentified that as tensions ebb and flow, OCs use (or,more precisely, participants engage in) any of the fourtypes of responses that seem to help the OC be gen-erative. The first generative response is labeledEngen-dering Roles in the Moment. In this response, membersenact specific roles that help turn the potentially negativeconsequences of a tension into positive consequences.The second generative response is labeledChannelingParticipation. In this response, members create a nar-rative that helps keep fluid participants informed ofthe state of the knowledge, with this narrative havinga necessary duality between a front narrative for gen-eral public consumption and a back narrative to airthe differences and emotions created by the tensions.The third generative response is labeledDynamicallyChanging Boundaries. In this response, OCs changetheir boundaries in ways that discourage or encouragecertain resources into and out of the communities at cer-tain times, depending on the nature of the tension. Thefourth generative response is labeledEvolving Technol-ogy Affordances. In this response, OCs iteratively evolvetheir technologies in use in ways that are embedded by,and become embedded into, iteratively enhanced socialnorms. These iterations help the OC to socially and tech-nically automate responses to tensions so that the com-munity does not unravel.

Tension 5: Positive and Negative Consequences ofTemporary ConvergenceThe classic models of knowledge collaboration in groupsgive particular weight to the need for convergence. Con-vergence around a single goal, direction, criterion, pro-cess, or solution helps counterbalance the forces ofdivergence, allowing diverse ideas to be framed, ana-lyzed, and coalesced into a single solution (Couger 1996,Isaksen and Treffinger 1985, Osborn 1953, Woodmanet al. 1993). In fluid OCs, convergence is still likelyto exist during knowledge collaboration, but the conver-gence is likely to be temporary and incomplete, oftenimplicit, and is situated among subsets of actors in thecommunity rather than the entire community.

ension 2: Positive and Negative Consequencesof TimeA second tension is between the positive and negativeconsequences of the time that people spend contribut-ing to the OC. Knowledge collaboration requires thatindividuals spend time contributing to the OC’s virtualworkspace (Fleming and Waguespack 2007, Lakhani andvon Hippel 2003, Rafaeli and Ariel 2008). Time has apositive consequence for knowledge collaboration. Themore time people spend evolving others’ contributedideas and responding to others’ comments on thoseideas, the more the ideas can evolve

We argue that it is the fluidity, the tensions that flu-idity creates, and the dynamics in how the OC respondsto these tensions that make knowledge collaboration inOCs fundamentally different from knowledge collabora-tion in teams or other traditional organization structures.

As fluctuations in resource endowments arise overtime because of the fluidity in the OC, these fluctua-tions in resources create fluctuations in tensions, makingsimple structural tactics for managing tensions such ascross-functional teams or divergent opinions (Sheremata2000) inadequate for fostering knowledge collaboration.As complex as these tension fluctuations are for the com-munity, it is precisely these tensions that provide thecatalyst for knowledge collaboration. Communities thatthen respond to these tensions generatively (rather thanin restrictive ways) will be able to realize this potential.Thus, it is not the simple presence of resources that fos-ter knowledge collaboration, but rather the presence ofongoing dynamic tensions within the OC that spur thecollaboration. We describe these tensions in the follow-ing section

Fluidity requires us to look at the dynamics—i.e., thecontinuous and rapid changes in resources—rather thanthe presence or the structural form of the resources.Resources may flow from outside the OC (e.g., pas-sion) or be internally generated (e.g., convergence), sub-sequently influencing and influenced by action (Feldman2004). Resources come with the baggage of having bothpositive and negative consequences for knowledge col-laboration, creating a tension within the community inhow to manage the positive and negative consequencesin a manner similar to the one faced by ambidextrousorganizations (O’Reilly and Tushman 2004).

However, failure to examine the critical roleof even the inactive participants in the functioning of thecommunity is to ignore that passive (and invisible) par-ticipation may be a step toward greater participation, aswhen individuals use passivity as a way to learn aboutthe collective in a form of peripheral legitimate partici-pation (Lave and Wenger 1991, Yeow et al. 2006).

Fluidity recognizes the highly flexible or permeableboundaries of OCs, where it is hard to figure out whois in the community and who is outside (Preece et al.2004) at any point in time, let alone over time. Theyare adaptive in that they change as the attention, actions,and interests of the collective of participants change overtime. Many individuals in an OC are at various stagesof exit and entry that change fluidly over time.

We argue that fluid-ity is a fundamental characteristic of OCs that makesknowledge collaboration in such settings possible. Assimply depicted in Figure 1, we envision OCs as fluidorganizational objects that are simultaneously morphingand yet retaining a recognizable shape (de Laet and Mol2000, Law 2002, Mol and Law 1994).

a growing consensus on factors that moti-vate people to make contributions to these communities,including motivational factors based on self-interest (e.g.,Lakhani and von Hippel 2003, Lerner and Tirole 2002,von Hippel and von Krogh 2003), identity (Bagozzi andDholakia 2006, Blanchard and Markus 2004, Ma andAgarwal 2007, Ren et al. 2007, Stewart and Gosain2006), social capital (Nambisan and Baron 2010; Waskoand Faraj 2000, 2005; Wasko et al. 2009), and socialexchange (Faraj and Johnson 2011).

For instance, knowledge collaboration in OCscan occur without the structural mechanisms tradition-ally associated with knowledge collaboration in orga-nizational teams: stable membership, convergence afterdivergence, repeated people-to-people interactions, goal-sharing, and feelings of interdependence among groupmembers (Boland et al. 1994, Carlile 2002, Dougherty1992, Schrage 1995, Tsoukas 2009).

Knowledge collaboration is defined broadly as thesharing, transfer, accumulation, transformation, andcocreation of knowledge. In an OC, knowledge collab-oration involves individual acts of offering knowledgeto others as well as adding to, recombining, modify-ing, and integrating knowledge that others have con-tributed. Knowledge collaboration is a critical elementof the sustainability of OCs as individuals share andcombine their knowledge in ways that benefit them per-sonally, while contributing to the community’s greaterworth (Blanchard and Markus 2004, Jeppesen andFredericksen 2006, Murray and O’Mahoney 2007, vonHippel and von Krogh 2006, Wasko and Faraj 2000).

Online communities (OCs) are open collectives of dis-persed individuals with members who are not necessarilyknown or identifiable and who share common inter-ests, and these communities attend to both their indi-vidual and their collective welfare (Sproull and Arriaga2007).

The situated and emergent nature of coordinationdoes not imply that practices are completely uniqueand novel. On the one hand, they vary accordingto the logic of the situation and the actors present.On the other hand, as seen in our categorizationof dialogic coordination, they follow a recognizablelogic and are only partially improvised. This tensionbetween familiarity and uniqueness of response is atthe core of a practice view of work (Orlikowski 2002).

Recently, Brown and Duguid (2001, p. 208) sug-gested that coordination of organizational knowledgeis likely to be more challenging than coordination ofroutine work, principally because the “elements to becoordinated are not just individuals but communitiesand the practices they foster.” As we found in ourinvestigation of coordination at the boundary, signif-icant epistemic differences exist and must be recog-nized. As the dialogic practices enacted in responseto problematic trajectories show, the epistemic dif-ferences reflect different perspectives or prioritiesand cannot be bridged through better knowledge

nature point to the limitations of a structuralist viewof coordination. In the same way that an organi-zational routine may unfold differently each timebecause it cannot be fully specified (Feldman andPentland 2003), coordination will vary each time.Independent of embraced rules and programs, therewill always be an element of bricolage reflecting thenecessity of patching together working solutions withthe knowledge and resources at hand (Weick 1993).Actors and the generative schemes that propel theiractions under pressure make up an important com-ponent of coordination’s modus operandi (Bourdieu1990, Emirbayer and Mische 1998).

These practices are highly situated, emer-gent, and contextualized and thus cannot be prespec-ified the way traditional coordination mechanismscan be. Thus, recent efforts based on an information-processing view to develop typologies of coordina-tion mechanisms (e.g., Malone et al. 1999) may be tooformal to allow organizations to mount an effectiveresponse to events characterized by urgency, novelty,surprise, and different interpretations.

Our findings also point to a broader divide in coor-dination research. Much of the power of traditionalcoordination models resides in their information-processing basis and their focus on the design issuessurrounding work unit differentiation and integra-tion. This design-centric view with its emphasis onrules,structures,andmodalitiesofcoordinationislessuseful for studying knowledge work.

Boundarywork requires the ability to see perspectives devel-oped by people immersed in a different commu-nity of knowing (Boland and Tenkasi 1995, Star andGriesemer 1989). Often, particular disciplinary focilead to differences in opinion regarding what stepsto take next in treating the patient.

The termdialogic—as opposed to monologic—recognizes dif-ferences and emphasizes the existence of epistemicboundaries, different understandings of events, andthe existence of boundary objects (e.g., the diagnosisor the treatment plan). A dialogic approach to coordi-nation is the recognition that action, communication,and cognition are essentially relational and highlysituated. We use the concept of trajectory (Bourdieu1990, Strauss 1993) to recognize that treatment pro-gressions are not always linear or positive.

A dialogic coordination practice differs from moregeneral expertise coordination processes in that itis highly situated in the specifics of the unfoldingevent, is urgent and high-staked, and occurs at theboundary between communities of practice. Becausecognition is distributed, responsibility is shared, andepistemic differences are present, interactions can becontentious and conflict laden.

xpertisecoordination refers to processes that manage knowl-edge and skill interdependencies

we describe two categories ofcoordination practices that ensure effective work out-comes. The first category, which we callexpertise coor-dination practices, represents processes that make itpossible to manage knowledge and skill interdepen-dencies. These processes bring about fast response,superior reconfiguration, efficient knowledge shar-ing, and expertise vetting. Second, because of therapidlyunfoldingtempooftreatmentandthestochas-tic nature of the treatment trajectory,dialogic coordina-tion practicesare used as contextually and temporallysituated responses to occasional trajectory deviation,errors, and general threats to the patient. These dia-logic coordination practices are crucial for ensuringeffective coordination but often require contentiousinteractions across communities of practice. Figure 1presents a coordination-focused model of patienttreatment and describes the circumstances underwhich dialogic coordination practices are called for.

We found that coordination in a trauma settingentails two specific practices.

Based on a practice view, we suggest the followingdefinition ofcoordination: a temporally unfolding andcontextualized process of input regulation and inter-action articulation to realize a collective performance.