It’s been over 80 degrees in SF, so I’ve spent two full days creating any and all excuses to go to the beach. Here’s some of the things I’ve been consuming this week:
“Exit Interview” by Kristi Coulter is the story of her 12 year career at Amazon in various executive roles. It’s the first book I have read that exactly describes the exhilaration and horror that comes from working in a high growth tech company. The “Jeff Meetings” feel so real. Her desire to envelop people with her “force field of earnest competence” is altogether too familiar. All that said, I found this part of the NYT Book Review to be a personal attack: “Some readers…who have spent their lives as ambitious people-pleasers, will see themselves reflected in Coulter’s narrative and feel validated by it.” Regardless, the review was a rave and the book is amazing. She’s hilarious and warm, and I gobbled up this entire book in one gulp while sitting on Ocean Beach.
Businessweek: The Lament of a New Grad Engineer.
This post was hilarious, and the perfect fodder for next week’s discussion.
“I also remember the time when I invited a date to visit the Google office after I started working there. I thought it'd be a fun and interesting experience because I could show her the company's perks, but she turned me down because she had already been there on other dates.”
This Twitter post from a Delicious Taco really moved me. I can’t write anything about work that’s as good as this.
Matt Levine’s burn to Michael Lewis amidst the FTX disaster: “Lewis had a front row seat, from which he could apparently see nothing.” FTX is so interesting to me because it’s this powerful example of selective moral disengagement in the exercise of moral agency!
This NYT article about the ABSURD cost of childcare in NYC. $70k a year for a nanny! Is having children just cost prohibitive at this point? How do people handle this? My friend Jackie in the UK was telling me that she pays her nanny ~40k GBP plus health benefits and pension. The cost of childcare (and the opportunity cost of spending time with your child) really makes you a vocateur…
I absolutely adore Studs Terkel’s book, “Working”, about the daily lives of Americans and how they find their jobs. Studs is a poet and it shows. A brief excerpt from his intro:
This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence—to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us. The scars, psychic as well as physical, brought home to the suppér table and the TV set, may have touched, malignantly, the soul of our society. More or less. (“More or less,” that most ambiguous of phrases, pervades many of the conversations that comprise this book, reflecting, perhaps, an ambiguity of attitude toward The Job. Something more than Orwellian acceptance, something less than Luddite sabotage. Often the two impulses are fused in the same person.) It is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying. Perhaps immortality, too, is part of the quest. To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book.
Nicholas Bloom’s analysis in the Economist about the future of remote work: he’s incredibly bullish. He ack’s the blowback from executives, but states that there are some meaningful cohort effects (young startups are remote!) and mentions research indicates that hybrid work leads to higher productivity. He doesn’t actually account for any of the second order effects that we’re seeing in SF (empty offices and downtowns, dying small businesses that cater to office workers.)
Buffet’s take on AI and labor from 2017
“What do you think about the implications of artificial intelligence on Berkshire’s businesses, beyond autonomous driving and GEICO, which you’ve talked about already? In your conversations with Bill Gates, have you thought through which other businesses will be most impacted? And do you think Berkshire’s current businesses will have a significantly — will have significantly more or less employees a decade from now as a function of artificial intelligence?”
Velocity cures all ills: “Are you sure you have a people problem? It might actually be a business problem…”
Commander Biden, the dog, keeps biting people. He’s bored! He’s a vocateur working dog! Working dogs want to work, guys. (He’s a good baby.)
A bonus… last but not least, I moved back to SF last week, but am really going to miss NYC (I specifically miss this rat.)