It's not always about gender

In my stream last night, I saw that Gay Kawasaki had reposted a listicle from Cristina Cordova about how to attract more women to startups. I agree with most of the post in that you need to clean up bro culture in the workplace, for civility and for clarity in job titles and postings, but I'm not sure you need to do it on account of my fragile lady parts.

First of all, suggesting that Team Lady is the only group of people who would be upset by bro culture overlooks a significant group of people who dislike aspects of that culture and don't think it is good for business.

1. We love your cultural symbols--especially when I don't have to think about what they mean. Oh, god, the ninja thing. This is a bit like talking about how your Jedi mind tricks worked and meaning it. This is about what we believe an icon is and not what it actually represents--and how little it has common with the job you have to do. These job titles don't make sense on your resume, so if your startup fails and you need to look for a paying job with another company everybody in their HR thinks you ran an anime club for three years.
   
   And while we are misappropriating cultural icons, why can't we use [code] slinger, gangster, naut or crusader? Because they sound silly and childish and only the Japan of our imagination is cool enough to rate a job title. Cordova does point out that some startups use rockstar and hacker, but again, we use them because we don't have to think about what the term really represents, and she doesn't mention how those titles undermine the credibility of your employees when they are engaged in the work of growing, marketing, representing or selling your startup.


2. Alcohol makes the money come round. Recently, I toured a startup facility with a friend of mine who abstains from drinking alcohol for religious reasons. As the guide spent five minutes expressing how much business got done in the tavern below the startup space, my friend just put her hand over her eyes and tried to block him out. His argument was that if you don't drink, there was no reason for the other people in the space to talk to you and give you advice and assistance. And the space was awesome. I wanted to bring my sleeping bag to work and fuel my enterprise with the coffee from the excellent coffee shop below that he failed to mention on his tour, except as another tenant in the building. The insistence that alcohol lubricates business persists in many industries, not just in coding, and that the cool and knowledgeable drink beer and lots of it, is a myth that we perpetuate, as in the Hipper Crowd of Shushers.
   
   Reliance on alcohol to facilitate business cuts out a whole group of people who don't want to mix alcohol with work and who might make stupid decisions if they did mix alcohol with work. It's like we're back in high school, all being pressured by the cool kids to drink. And if you did give in to their pressure, let's remember how that turned out. Now imagine it posted to YouTube while you are trying to get VC funding.


3. Lets have a discussion about how jerks are replaceable. At one of my interviews, I had a grilling from the IT team leader who used a common programming term incorrectly. I corrected her, but SHE quickly established that her usage was correct. I let it go and got the job, but she continued to bring it into the conversation for two weeks after my hire until our supervisor told her to let it go. My point is, jerk is genderless and not limited to coders. Maybe we should talk about how these people strain the workplace, as well as misrepresent us to clients. Hire well is good advice for all hires, regardless of gender, and maybe your college roommate who joined the startup in its first week is not as good at their job as you think.


4. She doesn't talk about the roles that women will be hired for. This is one issue where there appears to be a workplace gender divide. I have suggested that the post focuses on hiring women coders, but women do play other roles that a startup needs to thrive and they are not treated as if they understand the arcane mysteries of technology, as in this ad from Samsung.
   
   
   
   Ah, the ladies, bringing down the code bros with their insistence on not spending money on two kegerators. And not being smart enough to recognize the redundancy reducing technology the bros are using to mock them with. 

Though they could have trotted out the silverback stereotype, the middle aged, suited dude who refers to all of the code bros in the diminutive, as in Danny or Jimmy, and who hasn't updated his technological know how since teletype. But there are no old people in startups anyway.

So yes, I admit that gender does play a role; however, there are some areas, such as alcohol and protecting crappy employees, that should be discussed without gender, since some arguments that use gender fairness as their rationale put women in the position of being the angel in the workplace.

What is Meetup?

This summary is from an in-house presentation that I delivered in early March 2013.

Meetup is an online social networking tool that is meant to connect people in the same geographic region who have the same interests to form a group online and then use calendaring and map software to meet In Real Life.

In fact, to form a meetup group, you must agree to meet in person.

Signing up for Meetup

You can sign in to Meetup using your email address and a password or you can connect with your Facebook account. Connecting with your Facebook account means you can immediately invite your Facebook friends to your Meetup groups. You can also see what groups your Facebook friends are a member of.

However, Meetup is useful for “out of network” matchmaking; for example, if you are the only person in your Facebook network who owns their own business, your Facebook friends are not the people who can help you write a business plan or get answers to your questions about VC funds. You can use Meetup to break into networks that are currently closed to you.

What does it cost?

Meetup is free for regular members, but there is a fee to form Meetup groups. Organizers can only run three Meetup groups at one time.

 In this case, if we formed a Career Knowledge Group for campus, but offered a variety of events, this is one Meetup. If we formed a Career Knowledge Group for Arts, Engineering and Education, and each with a separate group of members, we could not add a Science Meetup group without paying for an additional administrator account.

Since there are fees for Meetup groups, some organizers do ask members to pay a small fee when they attend their first meetup. Other Meetup groups are sponsored by groups or business organizations, which can offer some ad space for the sponsors on the Meetup group page.

What groups are on Meetup?

Groups are usually formed around hobbies, such as knitting and movie watching, while others are for educational, such as learn Spanish, and business purposes, such as the Startup Edmonton Meetup.

Some Meetups are even combinations of hobbies, businesses and education: for example, I belong to a vegetarian and gardening meetup which includes a potluck event to meet people and usually a presentation from a local entrepreneur, such as making straw bale homes.

Career services can make use of the educational and entrepreneurial meetups, but since we can also encourage people who are planning to relocate from or to Edmonton, to use Meetup to build a local community to alleviate homesickness.

Open and Closed Groups

Some groups are open meaning that you don’t have to be a member to see upcoming events, while others are closed and events are accessible to members only. Some closed groups only require a request to the organizers to join, while others will ask you to email the organizer with a sort of, why should you let me in to your Meetup group message. Some groups will allow you to remain a member even if you never attend a meetup, while others will kick out people who fail to show up to even one meeting, or who RSVP but fail to show up. All of these rules will depend on the organizer(s).

What does a group page look like? 

• Business Link Alberta 
• Conversational English, Vancouver Group 
• Vancouver Real Estate Investors Foreclosure Insider Club - this Meetup is sponsored, so you can see what a sponsored Meetup group could look like

What does the user dashboard look like? 

• There is a stream of events, including a list of Facebook friends that are on Meetup, as well as information about who has RSVPd to Meetups the user currently belongs to. 
• There is a calendar, which can include suggestions for Meetups that the user may not have registered for or if they are not yet a member of, though they all relate to the user’s interests 
• An editable list of user interests so the user can search for new Meetups.

Why Meetup? 

Meetup combines several familiar tools in one place, so people familiar with all of these tools do not have to learn new skills to use Meetup:

• Mapping Event planning, including RSVPs and group management 
• Calendars, which includes notifications of new meetups, importing calendars to existing services, such as Google calendar 
• Group formation and forums, as well as commenting on events and attendance monitoring 
• Tagging and categorization 
• Review services because attendees can add a review to an event after they have attended 

Facebook uses some of these services, but Meetup encourages out of network connections and socializing outside of Meetup. Meetup offers some solution for event management, though they have not currently worked out the ticketing and event payment process, should a fee by required by the event organizer.

Privacy Law in 60 Seconds Promo Video from the Authors

As a promo for his new book, with co-author Paul Schwartz, Daniel Soslove has put together a 60 second debrief on the main issues around privacy law--and to encourage you to read the book to get the full story.



I really learned a lot from The Future of Reputation, so I am looking forward to this book--in a sort of, wow, homework kind of way.

Daniel Pink's New Book To Sell is Human

Yahoo! says no more working from home: Is this really about telecommuting?

Yahoo! has said no more working from home, "all hands on deck" and suggests that if you can't interact with other people, you can't innovate.

I find this interesting since, I would argue, that inspiration was private, but now our new keyword is innovation, which requires a team. Can you really only come up with new ideas in a group--or are we really arguing that the execution of ideas requires a team effort that has to happen over coffee (and not over Skype)? What do you think?

Can I take a nap during the day?

Office Team completed a survey of HR managers to find the most unusual and unacceptable questions asked by prospective employees during interviews. Asking about nap time, if you can get your birthday off, and what the job is for, are interview no-nos.

I'm not shocked by any of them, but I think some people with interview anxiety may want to know that at least one of their competitors will ask these gems--and not be informed in advance about how grown ups take care of these issues.

As an aside, I don't think the "help me find an apartment" one is a bad one: they may have misunderstood what "relocation assistance" meant in the job posting.

Maybe you should make yourself less anonymous on LinkedIn

This video from Business Insider, How to see who's viewed your profile on LinkedIn, explains how to make your profile anonymous to people whose profiles you have checked on LinkedIn. Personally, unless you are engaged in some sort of corporate intelligence investigation, I think you should be as open as possible (within the confines of LinkedIn).

Generation Jobless tonight on CBC Doc Zone

Generation Jobless talks about youth unemployment in Canada and it will be airing on Doc Zone this evening. I'm looking forward to viewing the documentary, but I'm also going to bear in mind some of the concerns expressed by the Globe and Mail's TV critic, John Doyle.

Currently, this video is only available for viewing in Canada.

 

Putting Tumblr in your Reader

Yesterday, I delivered a presentation to my colleagues on Twitter, Tumblr and Prezi. The presentation introduced the service and what they did and how we can use them.

However, I didn't really talk about how to keep track of them or how to keep them organized after you subscribe. For now, I'm going to focus on Tumblr blogs and managing them with Google Reader, since you can use a similar method for Prezi and Twitter (which is still doable in an RSS Reader, but a teeny bit of a pain to configure). This is not the only method, but our office uses Gmail, so we have Reader enabled. This is a simple method to use to keep track of Tumblr feeds without signing up for Tumblr.

Sign in to your Goggle account and activate Reader from the More menu if you have not yet turned on Reader. This RSS reader will be associated with your Gmail account, and you can use it to monitor news, Tumblr feeds, Twitter feeds, and searches that you monitor as RSS feeds.

To put a Tumblr feed in your Reader, you need to get the RSS feed for the Tumblr. For this demonstration, I got the RSS feed from the Tumblr Dead Man Talking (thanks to Science On! for putting together the listing of science Tumblrs).

Click on the RSS feed button and the RSS feed page will appear. Don't worry about the streams of code: you just need to copy the feed address from the address bar in your browser, as shown below.

Copy this feed (select it and CTRL + C), and return to Reader. Once you are in the Reader dashboard, click on the Subscribe button. The add feed field will appear. Paste your feed into this field and click the Add button.

Once you have clicked the Add button, your feed will appear in the Subscriptions block of Reader. You are now subscribed to the Tumblr feed, so you can access it from Reader, with all of your other feeds, without signing up for a Tumblr account.

You can also create a folder so you can organize all of your feeds by topic. Click on the subscription that you would like to organize--in this case Dead Men Talking, since there is no folder that it belongs to. A menu will appear when you activate the arrow next to the feed. From this menu, select New Folder.

A window will appear with a message that says, What would you like to call this new folder. In this case, I want to keep all of my "science" feeds together--not necessarily my Tumblrs, since I will probably also subscribe to the relevant feeds from Nature, Science Magazine, PopSci Science feed and CBC Technology and Science feed, but I can add those and other feeds later to this folder.


You can see that the feed is now in the appropriate folder. When I add new feeds, I can click on the arrow next to the feed and move it into the appropriate folder.

The numbers next to the bolded folders tell you how many new or unread items are available in the folder.

You can also reassign a feed to a different folder by activating the menu through the arrow next to the feed, or you can perform a mass reorganization by activating the arrow menu next to Subscription and selecting Manage Subscriptions.

You can then change folders, rename feeds and mass reassign feeds to folders from the Subscription management dashboard. Once you are finished, select Back to Google Reader to return to your subscribed feeds.

This method will work with any properly formatted RSS feeds, including Tumblrs, and is a way to follow feeds and keep them organized without subscribing to Tumblr.

The Untouchables from PBS' Frontline

If you missed it, you can watch it on the PBS website. It does make the DoJ look like the big loser though.

Watch Alarm Bells In The Housing Market on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Number of working poor families increases

According to a report from the Working Poor Families Project, the number of working poor families has increased by 200,000 between 2010 and 2011. The report cites such issues as low wage, temporary work, and workers that hold a series of such jobs, and a lack of education--the gap between people who didn't complete high school and those who completed a bachelor's degree is staggering--to prepare people for higher paying jobs.

In 2011, the mean annual earnings for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher were $69,387, compared with $20,936 among those who dropped out of high school (p.4).

Other effects noted by the report includes the very high cost of housing for a working poor family, as well as the cost of transportation to work and the cost of child care.

In 2011, 61 percent of low-income working families had a high housing cost burden—defined as spending more than 33 percent of household income on housing costs such as mortgage or rent payments, utilities, and other expenses. For working families below the official poverty threshold, 81 percent had high housing cost burdens.

The report also includes a breakdown by state for working poor families in the thousands.

Do you share the name of an [in]famous criminal?

Here's another reason why it is a good idea to verify by actually meeting with someone--or adding more descriptors to the search than their name--before Googling them: do they share the same name as a criminal?

Just this past week, police in BC alerted the public about a young woman who had been released from prison but who may still pose a threat to people and animals. Now, another young woman, from the same community, has come forward to say, we share the same name, but its not me. I would like to say that it was foresight on the part of this young woman, but more likely she got scared into making the announcement when she was almost arrested on the SkyTrain.

I'm wondering if you did an ego search on yourself and found that you had an evil twin by name, if you should add this info to your application, just so people don't jump to conclusions.