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Hive mind: Does your company re-train people to teach them new skills? What about mindset skills, such as problem-solving and critical thinking? What's worked -- and what doesn't?
I'm writing an article on how to do effectively re-train workers, and I'd like to hear from you (particularly if you have a management or HR background). I might like to quote you, but I certainly would like your input even if that isn't possible.
Companies have always needed to ensure their employee learn new tools (such as replacing OldProgrammingLanguage with NewLanguage) or entirely new skill sets (e.g. for those whose jobs are replaced by automation). But the rate at which old skills perish and new ones have to be learned is increasing.
If we assume that technology changes jobs rather than destroys them, what does that mean for companies in practice?
I was inspired to write this article after reading about “the work skills of tomorrow" https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/top-10-work-skills-of-tomorrow-how-long-it-takes-to-learn-them in which critical thinking and problem-solving top the list of skills employers believe will grow in prominence. But that made me wonder: How the heck do you teach soft skills? This isn’t like telling someone, “Take a course in data analytics.” What, if anything, can you do to improve a worker's agility in learning new things, or to become a better problem-solver?
So: What has been your experience? What worked, what failed, what advice would you offer someone (particularly in larger organizations) who wants to take care of their people and move the company forward?
Note that I'm thinking less in terms of training an individual with a new skill (PhotoShop) than skills for a different career (a move to the Accounting department). And please leave out the "I trained myself!" stories; they're a tangent that doesn't help me. And yes, I know plenty of companies just lay people off rather than retrain them; we can leave those out of the discussion, too. This is meant to be a useful how-to to guide companies that want to do it right, so I am interested in practical advice.
We can take this to a private discussion if that's easier.
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Every year, I donate a modest sum to combat climate change. Since my employer matches my donations up to a certain amount, I try to maximize their contribution.
This year, most of my donations have gone to the following two orgs:
Are there any projects/causes/orgs you are very keen on donating to? Are there any that we should look out for?
Edit: Please feel free to list technical projects, Kickstarters, Patreons, etc.
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We've all been in situations before where we're the odd one out: everyone's using a new app you had never heard of, everyone is wearing the same color for an event, etc. An often refrain in such situations is "Well I didn't get the memo". So I'm curious, what memos have you missed?
An example for me: I suddenly have started seeing lots of people using this substack website, which seems kind of like a Medium alternative. No clue where this came from or how it got big - I totally missed the memo on Substack.
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After many years I recently started reading comics again, both Marvel and DC. I don’t have a tablet and reading on my iPhone 5 would be cumbersome. Besides, print is durable, looks really good—in my view better than any screen. I’m also fighting against a screen addiction by engaging in more non-digital activities.
There’s a newsstand close to where iI live that still sells comics, but they do not carry many titles.
Today I went to the doctor that is close to a large mall. After I went (against better judgement, I know...) straight to one of the few remaining large bookstores in the town only to find out that the entire magazines section was wiped out. They now only sell a few overpriced hardcover comic books.
I was giving up hope when I found a little kiosk with all sorts of cool stuff, inclusive a generous assortment of all kinds of comics. I bought a volume with stories of the Hulk, Dr. Strange, and Namor. It’s supposed to be fun. I already bought some stuff online, but I made a decision to support that mall kiosk as much as I can.
Now tell me about you! Do you buy comics at all? How?
Preceded by this post for all countries, this post for poor countries and this post for (overtly) authoritarian countries.
I'm Brazilian so I get to correct pretty silly stuff:
Brazil is a big place and the climate isn't homogeneous.
People like soccer here and many love it (some are reactionary and fight over games, as always) but it's not as all consuming as some people seem to think.
No, we aren't all extroverts, party animals, social butterflies, whatever, although I do feel the "Overton window" here on social things is more extraverted than in the US/West (and Japan and South Korea) in general.
We don't all listen to samba. While people here most often listen to pagode, sertanejo and Funk (moderately controversial music genre, though not really for substantive reasons) which are generally (keyword, obviously many songs in these genres are serious) lighthearted/for entertainment, we listen to serious or relaxed music too, mainly in rap, because we are normal.
I honestly can't really think of any misconceptions that aren't half-beaten to death about here.
If my title was a bit confusing, here's some examples of such trips:
I hope you get the idea. It doesn't have to be a complete end to end trip, so even one which covers a large part of the country's area should be fine. Please describe your experiences if you have experienced one :)
I apologise if this does not meet the quality mark for the website, this is my first try at posting here ;-;
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Tl;dr typical news sources tend to prioritize political and governmental events and the things that surround them, like economics and social issues, even if they cover everything, and by covering everything they probably stretch themselves thinly among what they don't prioritize. (At least that's how it feels.)
A few examples of what I'm thinking of are:
Foreign Affairs, who focus specifically on geopolitics
The Scientific American, which focuses specifically on... science.
Aeon, which seems to focus on "the humanities". (vaaague.)
So... what are your examples of news sources/publications like this that you follow?
So a few weeks back someone posted an article here about Super Recognizers. These are people that can instantly remember 80% of a persons face and can identify that face easily later on. It talked about how these people are getting hired by police departments across the world.
It caught my attention because my wife has always been freakishly good at facial recognition and recall. Well, she took the test, which led to another test, and today she received her official invitation to join Super Recognizers International!
This is a big deal because her company is about to go under and she has been considering leaving lately. This will open up doors for her to find work she can do from home on a flexible schedule. Thanks @skybrain for posting that article and thank you to the Tildes community for being here!
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Most California voters received their ballots this week, and as usual there are a bunch of propositions to vote on that we’ve barely heard of because nearly all election discussion is about national issues. So, what are you using to study up?
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Anything goes for this one: they can be general or specific, regional or global, IRL or digital, big or small, significant or insignificant. Pretty much any shared norm anywhere is fair game.
State what the current social norm is (and if it's specific to certain regions, cultures, or environments), why you want it to be different, and how you would improve it if you had the power to do so.
This will be a noisy thread. Please use the ignore feature if you do not want to see it in your feed.
Watch on YouTube
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Debate starts ~90 minutes from the time of this posting.
Info from The Washington Post:
Location: The University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Moderator: Susan Page, Washington bureau chief, USA Today
Details: The debate will be 90 minutes long and have no commercial breaks. It will be divided into nine segments of 10 minutes each that the moderator gets to choose.
I'm interested in hearing your stories.
And of course, feel free to share anything else not asked in these questions.
If you personally have not had it but someone close to you has, feel free to share your experiences with that as well.
META: If this topic is better served in ~health.coronavirus feel free to move it!
Whether it's thinking about a videogame, fantasizing your future, a new workout, pondering existence, etc. What do you spend your free time thinking about?
I like to spend a lot of my free time defining what a human is and what it means to be one, and I always enjoy watching as my ideas progress over time. So what is something you muse about in your free time? What do you like to sporadically think about and what questions do you often return to?
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A lot of things we live with have significant technical debt because they were designed and implemented without modern knowledge and understanding.
Knowing what we know now, in the present moment, what would you be interested in fundamentally redesigning if you could?
This does NOT have to be technology related, by the way, though it certainly can (anyone want to talk about redesigning usernames and passwords -- please?). It can pretty much be anything: NASCAR races, art criticism, specific social norms, sunglasses, etc.
In your explanation, don't just share what you're interested in tearing down, but how you would rebuild it for the better. What improvements would your methods bring to the table?
I really don’t have much to say, that’s 100% an honest question about something I truly fail to understand. I’m not opposed to having children if it seems right for some reason, but this is not a dream or project of mine. When I ask people about it, I get vague answers or stuff I cannot relate to at all. And some people seem to want to get married and have children just because they think they’re supposed to.
I’m really not in a position to judge, but I will probably politely ask further questions for my own education.
If that’s a sensitive topic for you and you don’t wish to indulge my curiosity, maybe this post is not for you! Everything surrounding parenthood tends to generate gratuitous animosity, so please be patient with my earnest ignorance.
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My personal favourites are wallhaven for desktop wallpapers and Walli for mobile ones. I also like Wallpaper Flare for desktop and sometimes Unsplash for both desktop and mobile.
Is there any psychological thing behind it. if you are a changer why do you change your picture so often ? and what do you think about people who don't change it at all ?, and if you are constant why ? and what do you think about people who change it ?
it's not that important I know, but it has been in my head for long time not. why people change their prof pic, computer/phone background so often than others ?
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I read the Wikipedia article about "gaslighting" and know it comes from a 1944 film of the same name in which an abusive husband gradually dims the gaslights at home – while denying doing so – to drive his wife mad.
Yet whenever I see the term used (which happens a lot, lately) I can't make the connection. It seems people use it for the simple act of lying or denying something, which to me is mostly just... lying, not "gaslighting". Any kind of stupid, misguided act is getting the sinister "gaslighting" stamp as if it some 5d chess move when it simply looks like incompetence. The core principle of it seems to revolve around having a plan to psychologically manipulate someone but I mostly don't see the plan nor the actual goal. If anything untruthful you say about an important topic is "gaslighting", then the term doesn't seem to have a lot of value on its own. Wikipedia actually mentions "unconscious" gaslighting which seems to contradict its purpose of actually wanting to manipulate someone.
So, given its popularity, I'm curious if there might be a (succinct) definition of the term that helps me understand it properly? Do you think it's just a trendy term to throw at politicians doing shit you don't like? Am I missing an important detail?
About 15 years ago, I was impressed by a TV commercial. In a Bank of America ad about their investments in crappy neighborhoods (they didn’t phrase it that way), the spokesperson said the bank knew they’d succeeded, “when the flowerboxes begin showing up on front porches.”
Teams have the same sort of indirect indications, too, for good or ill. I’m writing an article about such non-obvious metrics that managers can use to judge whether a team is healthy.
One example is self-organizing get-togethers. It’s one thing for a manager to create team-building exercises. But when the team members arrange for such gatherings themselves — and it includes the whole team, not merely a clique — you know you have an actual team, not a bunch of employees working on the same tasks. (A negative “flower box indicator” of a project cancellation is when the company no longer refills the snack bar; but in this article I want to keep things positive.)
For managers and other leaders: What have you recognized as “flowerbox indicator”? I want to give examples that managers can use to recognize and celebrate success.
(We can have a great conversation here, but I do need to quote people by name, company, title if I use the input in the article.)
Admittedly this would be better under the panel setting of Kfwyre here but alas, I'm asking this question because I don't know about what happens to people under racism and organizing a discussion for people grouped by a plight you don't know about and have never experienced is probably a bad idea. Also IIRC "race" isn't really scientific. And please, correct me if needed. I know nothing about this.
Either way, this is a pretty open-ended thread, the only 2 requirements I can imagine are the one in the title and that you state what 'race'/ethnicity you are and where you are (i.e black, US or Black, South Africa or Roma, most European countries and especially Balkan ones).
In this thread, @viridian said this:
Twitter, in my limited usage, has a completely different problem. It actively encourages you, by rule of the 280 character limit, to strip away all nuance and conversational tone. You can avoid this of course, but the UI ensures that you then suffer the consequences of having to
split up your posts into multiple tweets, which is bad by design in every single way for the user. Replies become distributed to different tweets, and thus inaccessible without a series of 2*(# of tweets) clicks. Everything about the design is just begging you to
box in the entirety of your thoughts to 280 character blocks, which I think is the single largest issue the platform has when it comes to encouraging thoughtful engagement. Twitter actives fights nuance and explanation, and so the platforms users follow the bad behavior
patterns Twitter encourages.
Completely agree, it is a bit of a feedback loop. You do have to say though that even the fact it's no longer at the original 140 characters is a concession to the fact that the kind of discourse that now happens on there rather than what it was intended for. I imagine designing something to handle both types of usage well while maintaining the platform's identity can't be easy.
(Okay, this one was said by @culturedleftfoot.)
It's certainly not an easy problem to solve, it may even be impossible. That said though, maybe a 280 character mass social media platform is just destined to be a net negative for society.
And it reminded me of this comment I wrote a while ago:
To be fair it the term 'social media' is pretty useless when it comes to describing a site's purpose. In twitter, for example, you have celebrities rambling about random aspects of their lives, politicians delivering serious to obviously canned responses to serious or made-up problems, anime artists sharing their work, YouTubers sharing sneak peeks for future videos or shilling out, all in the same platform, which is disponible in 33 languages across every continent except Sub-Saharan Africa. (which was started specifically as a SMS & microblogging site, hence the word limit). Not many 'social media platforms' actually have their intended purpose be their sole purpose, which can backfire intensely. Social media platforms might have decided to recommend people with similar opinions to you as an unintended consequence in order to find people with similar hobbies to you, rather than to create an echo chamber of radicals and stifle communication between different political beliefs.
(Not that the fact that's a real possibility excuses them from not doing anything to combat it once they realized that was one of the side effects of their decision for most or all of my lifetime.)
One of the IMO most underrated problems with the state of social media today is that social media platforms are used in far too many ways for any one site to be designed around.
YouTube for example is used as a meme-consumption feed, source of education, video-game feed, ASMR feed, news feed, music feed, child cartoon feed and more.
And since YouTube was designed mostly for video sharing, things like the comment section were of secondary importance and areas like educational or political content are greatly harmed by that since the YouTube comment section is basically impervious to serious discussion. The algorithm also appears to be basically universal for all these vastly different types of content. This also hurts educational and political channels (unless they somehow accommodate to that, usually by lying ala PragerU) but also animation channels.
Another example would be Facebook which originally (supposedly?) started off as a platform for connecting with people, apparently limited to universities initially. Now it's used for sharing memes, news, personal life updates and more, things which are fundamentally quite different from one another and probably shouldn't be under the same site, since the things important when it comes to spreading a news article are wildly different from those when spreading a meme (format?). (Or management, obviously.)
IMO, decentralizing social media along these lines into say news sharing platforms, meme-sharing platforms, image-sharing platforms, educational platforms, social platforms (where you go to make friends, which is what social media billed itself as early on IIRC) is IMO one of the more interesting but underlooked options and in some senses is looked on into with places like Instagram and pinterest (although obviously if these sites aren't regulated to provide privacy it's all smoke and mirrors and given this requires government action I don't blame people for ignoring this all that much).
So does anyone else have any more thoughts?
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With age, I found that many things that seemed boring and pointless became interesting and purposeful. Did that happen with you? What is something you used to hate, but now enjoy as an adult?
I listen to quite a few, from ones related to my industry to ones related to my hobbies, to some just related to history or storytelling. Most of my choices have been at the recommendation of others, so I'm looking to add some to this week's lineup.
If you don't know of a good recommendation, what podcasts do you have queued up for this week?
I’m pretty sure every dog owner thinks their dog is the best most unique dog in the world, and the same is true about cat owners, snake owners, etc!
So make your best case: why is your animal companion the coolest in the whole world?
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I've been thinking about note-taking a lot recently. I'm not a particularly great note-taker myself, though I do use a calendar and a to-do list. My SO is a habitual digital note-taker, but also a hand-written journaller too. I do neither of these things (and don't feel the worse for the lack), but I am curious about how my fellow tilderen feel towards notes in general, and journalling to a lesser extent.
Are you a note-taker? If not, why not? If so, how does it add value to your life? Do you prefer a digital or a pen-and-paper notebook, or even a hybrid approach? And do you have a system?
I don't mean an issue where you're maybe ambivalent or undecided beforehand, or if you've willingly made an /r/changemyview type of post. I mean an instance where you already have your own stance and come face-to-face with an opposite, more convincing and/or more factual viewpoint that compels you to change your perspective.
I'd like to think I'm more open-minded than the norm, and I can't recall it ever happening to me... which is not to say it's definitely never happened, but you'd think it'd have made an impact worth remembering. And frankly, if it actually has never happened, well, what's the freaking point of discussing anything?
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With the ever-growing stream of acquisitions and mergers, it got me thinking: Why do we permit companies to do this?
What would the harm be in banning this practice? If a company is becomes insolvent, release all of it's IP to the public domain, dissolve all patents/trademarks, and sell off physical assets to pay debtors (first of which should be former employees IMO, but that's a separate discussion).
Edit: I think my original intention of the post to kick off some interesting discussion has worked. Thank you to all current and future posters!
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Here is a place to post about extreme weather events or just what it’s like where you are.
I don’t even know where to start. I realize it’s not meant to be a coherent piece of text, but rather a (fortunately short) stream of related thoughts.
I could talk about when an ambulance took me to the hospital because I was so drunk I couldn’t even move.
I could talk about how with other friends I bullied people for no justifiable reason.
I could talk about how I can’t stop watching porn, and consequently how my sexual tastes diverged from the normal, making me guilty of engaging in and craving illegal content.
I could talk about how I wasted literally years trying to finish a bachelor degree, to the point where I am now lying to my family and friends about exams.
I could talk about the many other stupid things I did, some of which while being recorded by people who aren’t even friends any more and who could easily ruin my life by sending them out (not that they have a reason to do so, but nothing can change the fact that I am powerless).
I could talk about how I wish suicide was an option, but since it’s not, the best alternative is sleeping while enjoying dreams. Too bad you can’t sleep forever.
The list could probably go on.
I can’t seem to spend a day without dwelling on at least one of these (and other) burdens; be it a memory, a negative feeling, an evil thought, an action, or a combination thereof.
When I think about the past, I feel overwhelmed by nothing but regret. When I think about the present, I’m filled with guilt. When I think about the future, I feel fear (of life, of ageing, of death).
No one can object to the intrinsic meaninglessness of life, unless you take into account religion (which I do not) or subjective purpose (which I could consider, but it’s impossible to consistently focus on that when you are reminded everyday of the underlying nonsense of life while fantasizing about suicide).
I often ask myself If I’m being truly honest with myself or if I’m semi-unconsciously sabotaging my existence just because playing the role of the victim is admittedly easier than fighting for your life.
I am ultimately confused by the reason why I am the way I am: is it because of my past (wrongdoing)? Is it because I suffer from a mental disease? Is it because I suffer from a physical disease? Is it because that’s simply how (evil) I am? I have so many questions and so little answers.
If I see myself in someone's child here then I'm deleting this thread, no questions asked /s
You should probably say/indicate your and your children's age and sex (can be plural, obviously.)
You can follow the Q&A format below but you don't have to.
A few questions that come to (my very uninitiated) mind are:
(i.e you're @aphoenix not hetero and a parent didn't want to go through fkin birthing people an adoptive parent, for example)
Do you follow what they're doing on the Internet or how much they use it? How much?
Do you encourage them to have a good diet? How much?
Do you encourage them to do more chores? How much?
When you do this, how cooperative are they? If they aren't, what do you do to convince them?
More personal questions below. (You can avoid these, I probably would too tbh)
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I'm having a hard time with this.
I stopped listening to some bands because of what they did, do or not do.
The guy from Inquisition turned out a pedophile.
Mgla, while not a nazi band per se, are at least nazi sympathizers. So i stopped listening.
Vektor: the guy is a wife beater, but there are is some controversy.
And i absolutely loved these bands. While i can find similar bands, it's not the same.
But what i am doing not listening to it? I'm the one not listening to it and that's it. I will never give them money (i threw my Mgla shirt away) because i obtain the music by another means.
I am not helping with their popularity because i'm the only one in my circle that listens to these subgenres of metal and i mostly do it alone.
So... what's the point of depriving myself of music that i like? They are the ones who suck, not me! But at the same time i feel bad listening.
What are your thoughts on this?