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The very first installment of this column opened with a reminiscence about the magic of conference calls, followed by one of my key rules of management: Most video conferences should be phone calls, and most phone calls should be emails. I’m no longer a manager, and in fact no longer have a real job at all, but being mostly unemployed has only strengthened my commitment to this philosophy.
In my old life, an average day consisted of somewhere on the order of seven to 10 Zoom meetings. By evening, I was routinely too exhausted to hold a normal conversation with my spouse, much less join the many invites for online drinks and rounds of trivia and birthday parties and so forth that became the norm during the pandemic. Zoom fatigue is real, and companies and managers need to do a much better job of preventing video chats from monopolizing employees’ work lives. These days, I have maybe one video mee
Hey folks. The hackers at DarkSide didnât
mean to shut down our gas pipeline and trigger a panic. Theyâre a
business, darn it. Helped by the US Congress, which refuses to mandate tough security standards.
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The Plain View
If there is one word for Christopher Stringerâs 22-year career at Apple, it might be âunsung.â Though his name is on around 1,400 patents, the Australian-born and UK-raised designer was seldom heard of outside Cupertino. The one exception occurred not at a keynote appearance, but at a trial where he testified about a complicated patent dispute between his employer and Samsung.
Need help navigating the always on, always remote life? Ask OOO at mail@wired.com.
One thing you realize after a couple of stints as a workplace advice columnist is that nobody or at least nobody in the type of “creative class” careers that often lead people to confuse a job with a religious calling feels confident about where they are in their career. Middle managers wonder if they should be senior managers, while senior managers fret over when they’ll be sent back down. Junior employees worry about whether they’re progressing fast enough or if they’re progressing too fast and will be forced to manage. People who have changed roles many times (hi!) are anxious about people seeing them as flighty job hoppers; those who have stayed in one place for a long time are anxious about people treating them as a piece of furniture bolted to the floor.