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$700bn delusion - Does using data to target specific audiences make advertising more effective?
$700bn delusion - Does using data to target specific audiences make advertising more effective?
Being broadly effective, but somewhat inefficient, is better than being narrowly efficient, but less effective.
Targeting can increase the scale of effects, but this study suggests that the cheaper approach of not targeting so specifically, might actually deliver a greater financial outcome
As Wiberg’s findings point out, the problem with targeting towards conversion optimisation is you are effectively advertising to many people who were already going to buy you.
If I only sell to IT decision-makers, for example, I need some targeting, as I just can’t afford to talk to random consumers. I must pay for some targeting in my media buy, in order to reach a relatively niche audience.  Targeting is no longer a nice to do, but a must have. The interesting question then becomes not should I target, but how can I target effectively?
What they found was any form of second or third-party data led segmenting and targeting of advertising does not outperform a random sample when it comes to accuracy of reaching the actual target.
Contextual ads massively outperform even first party data
We can improve the quality of our targeting much better by just buying ads that appear in the right context, than we can by using my massive first party database to drive the buy, and it’s way cheaper to do that. Putting ads in contextually relevant places beats any form of targeting to individual characteristics. Even using your own data.
The secret to effective, immediate action-based advertising, is perhaps not so much about finding the right people with the right personas and serving them a tailored customised message. It’s to be in the right places. The places where they are already engaging with your category, and then use advertising to make buying easier from that place
Even hard, sales-driving advertising isn’t the tough guy we want it to be. Advertising mostly works when it makes things easier, much more often than when it tries to persuade or invoke a reluctant action.
Thinking about advertising as an ease-making mechanism is much more likely to set us on the right path
If your ad is in the right place, you automatically get the right people, and you also get them at the right time; when they are actually more interested in what you have to sell. You also spend much less to be there than crunching all that data
#advertising#data#privacy#business#business/models#industry#tools/CRMs
·archive.is·
$700bn delusion - Does using data to target specific audiences make advertising more effective?
Shop Class as Soulcraft
Shop Class as Soulcraft

Summary: Skilled manual labor entails a systematic encounter with the material world that can enrich one's intellectual and spiritual life. The degradation of work in both blue-collar and white-collar professions is driven not just by technological progress, but by the separation of thinking from doing according to the dictates of capital. To realize the full potential of human flourishing, we must reckon with the appeal of skilled manual work and question the assumptions that shape our educational priorities and notions of a good life.

an engineering culture has developed in recent years in which the object is to “hide the works,” rendering the artifacts we use unintelligible to direct inspection. Lift the hood on some cars now (especially German ones), and the engine appears a bit like the shimmering, featureless obelisk that so enthralled the cavemen in the opening scene of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Essentially, there is another hood under the hood.
What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves installing a pre-made replacement part.
So perhaps the time is ripe for reconsideration of an ideal that has fallen out of favor: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world. Neither as workers nor as consumers are we much called upon to exercise such competence, most of us anyway, and merely to recommend its cultivation is to risk the scorn of those who take themselves to be the most hard-headed: the hard-headed economist will point out the opportunity costs of making what can be bought, and the hard-headed educator will say that it is irresponsible to educate the young for the trades, which are somehow identified as the jobs of the past.
It was an experience of agency and competence. The effects of my work were visible for all to see, so my competence was real for others as well; it had a social currency. The well-founded pride of the tradesman is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.
Skilled manual labor entails a systematic encounter with the material world, precisely the kind of encounter that gives rise to natural science. From its earliest practice, craft knowledge has entailed knowledge of the “ways” of one’s materials — that is, knowledge of their nature, acquired through disciplined perception and a systematic approach to problems.
Because craftsmanship refers to objective standards that do not issue from the self and its desires, it poses a challenge to the ethic of consumerism, as the sociologist Richard Sennett has recently argued. The craftsman is proud of what he has made, and cherishes it, while the consumer discards things that are perfectly serviceable in his restless pursuit of the new.
The central culprit in Braverman’s account is “scientific management,” which “enters the workplace not as the representative of science, but as the representative of management masquerading in the trappings of science.” The tenets of scientific management were given their first and frankest articulation by Frederick Winslow Taylor
Scattered craft knowledge is concentrated in the hands of the employer, then doled out again to workers in the form of minute instructions needed to perform some part of what is now a work process. This process replaces what was previously an integral activity, rooted in craft tradition and experience, animated by the worker’s own mental image of, and intention toward, the finished product. Thus, according to Taylor, “All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or lay-out department.” It is a mistake to suppose that the primary purpose of this partition is to render the work process more efficient. It may or may not result in extracting more value from a given unit of labor time. The concern is rather with labor cost. Once the cognitive aspects of the job are located in a separate management class, or better yet in a process that, once designed, requires no ongoing judgment or deliberation, skilled workers can be replaced with unskilled workers at a lower rate of pay.
the “jobs of the future” rhetoric surrounding the eagerness to end shop class and get every warm body into college, thence into a cubicle, implicitly assumes that we are heading to a “post-industrial” economy in which everyone will deal only in abstractions. Yet trafficking in abstractions is not the same as thinking. White collar professions, too, are subject to routinization and degradation, proceeding by the same process as befell manual fabrication a hundred years ago: the cognitive elements of the job are appropriated from professionals, instantiated in a system or process, and then handed back to a new class of workers — clerks — who replace the professionals. If genuine knowledge work is not growing but actually shrinking, because it is coming to be concentrated in an ever-smaller elite, this has implications for the vocational advice that students ought to receive.
The trades are then a natural home for anyone who would live by his own powers, free not only of deadening abstraction, but also of the insidious hopes and rising insecurities that seem to be endemic in our current economic life. This is the stoic ideal.
#work-life#economy#jobs#business#history#capitalism
·thenewatlantis.com·
Shop Class as Soulcraft
The Sam Altman Playbook
The Sam Altman Playbook
In order to make it all plausible, Sam uses a unique combination of charm, soft-spoken personal humility and absolute confidence in outlandish claims. He seems like such a nice guy, yet he implies, unrealistically, that the solution to AGI is within his grasp; he presents no evidence that is so, and rarely considers the many critiques of current approaches that have been raised. (Better to pretend they don’t exist.) Because he seems so nice, pushback somehow seems like bad form.Absurd, hubristic claims, often verging on the messianic, presented kindly, gently, and quietly — but never considered skeptically. That’s his M.O. Pay no attention to the assumptions behind the curtain.
Altman’s superficially compelling rhetoric tends to hide from counterarguments while ignoring alternative perspectives
#companies/OpenAI#people/CEOs#profiles#superficial#business
·garymarcus.substack.com·
The Sam Altman Playbook
Toxic Gaslighting: How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe
Toxic Gaslighting: How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe
Johnson asked Hansen to figure out whether the lab had made a mistake. Detecting trace levels of chemicals was her specialty: She had recently written a doctoral dissertation about tiny particles in the atmosphere.
Hansen didn’t want to share her results until she was certain that they were correct, so she and her team spent several weeks analyzing more blood, often in time-consuming overnight tests. All the samples appeared to be contaminated. When Hansen used a more precise method, liquid chromatography, the results left little doubt that the chemical in the Red Cross blood was PFOS. Hansen now felt obligated to update her boss. Johnson was a towering, bearded man, and she liked him: He seemed to trust her expertise, and he found something to laugh about in most conversations. But, when she shared her findings, his response was cryptic. “This changes everything,” he said. Before she could ask him what he meant, he went into his office and closed the door.
In the middle of this testing, Johnson suddenly announced that he would be taking early retirement. After he packed up his office and left, Hansen felt adrift. She was so new to corporate life that her office clothes — pleated pants and dress shirts — still felt like a costume. Johnson had always guided her research, and he hadn’t told Hansen what she should do next. She reminded herself of what he had said — that the chemical wasn’t harmful in factory workers. But she couldn’t be sure that it was harmless.
Hansen’s bosses never told her that PFOS was toxic. In the weeks after Johnson left 3M, however, she felt that she was under a new level of scrutiny. One of her superiors suggested that her equipment might be contaminated, so she cleaned the mass spectrometer and then the entire lab. Her results didn’t change. Another encouraged her to repeatedly analyze her syringes, bags and test tubes, in case they had tainted the blood. (They had not.) Her managers were less concerned about PFOS, it seemed to Hansen, than about the chance that she was wrong.
Hansen doubted herself. She was 28 and had only recently earned her Ph.D. But she continued her experiments, if only to respond to the questions of her managers. 3M bought three additional mass spectrometers, which each cost more than a car, and Hansen used them to test more blood samples. In late 1997, her new boss, Bacon, even had her fly out to the company that manufactured the machines, so that she could repeat her tests there. She studied the blood of hundreds of people from more than a dozen blood banks in various states. Each sample contained PFOS. The chemical seemed to be everywhere.
After the war, 3M hired some Manhattan Project chemists and began mass-producing chains of carbon atoms bonded to fluorine atoms. The resulting chemicals proved to be astonishingly versatile, in part because they resist oil, water and heat. They are also incredibly long-lasting, earning them the moniker “forever chemicals.”
One afternoon in 1998, a trim 3M epidemiologist named Geary Olsen arrived with several vials of blood and asked her to test them. The next morning, she read the results to him and several colleagues — positive for PFOS. As Hansen remembers it, Olsen looked triumphant. “Those samples came from my horse,” he said — and his horse certainly wasn’t eating at McDonald’s or trotting on Scotchgarded carpets. Hansen felt that he was trying to humiliate her. (Olsen did not respond to requests for comment.) What Hansen wanted to know was how PFOS was making its way into animals.
PFOS, a man-made chemical produced by her employer, really was in human blood, practically everywhere. Hansen’s team found it in Swedish blood samples from 1957 and 1971. After that, her lab analyzed blood that had been collected before 3M created PFOS. It tested negative. Apparently, fluorochemicals had entered human blood after the company started selling products that contained them. They had leached out of 3M’s sprays, coatings and factories — and into all of us.
Almost as soon as Hansen placed her first transparency on the projector, the attendees began interrogating her: Why did she do this research? Who directed her to do it? Whom did she inform of the results? The executives seemed to view her diligence as a betrayal: Her data could be damaging to the company. She remembers defending herself, mentioning Newmark’s similar work in the ’70s and trying, unsuccessfully, to direct the conversation back to her research. While the executives talked over her, Hansen noticed that DeSimone’s eyes had closed and that his chin was resting on his dress shirt. The CEO appeared to have fallen asleep. (DeSimone died in 2017. A company spokesperson did not answer my questions about the meeting.)
In 2002, when 3M announced that it would be replacing PFOS with another fluorochemical, PFBS, Hansen knew that it, too, would remain in the environment indefinitely. Still, she decided not to involve herself. She skipped over articles about the chemicals in scientific journals and newspapers, where they were starting to be linked to possible developmental, immune system and liver problems.
In the 2016 book “Secrecy at Work,” two management theorists, Jana Costas and Christopher Grey, argue that there is nothing inherently wrong or harmful about keeping secrets. Trade secrets, for example, are protected by federal and state law on the grounds that they promote innovation and contribute to the economy. The authors draw on a large body of sociological research to illustrate the many ways that information can be concealed. An organization can compartmentalize a secret by slicing it into smaller components, preventing any one person from piecing together the whole. Managers who don’t want to disclose sensitive information may employ “stone-faced silence.” Secret-keepers can form a kind of tribe, dependent on one another’s continued discretion; in this way, even the existence of a secret can be kept secret. Such techniques become pernicious, Costas and Grey write, when a company keeps a dark secret, a secret about wrongdoing.
Hansen’s superiors had given her the same explanation that they gave journalists, she finally said — that factory workers were fine, so people with lower levels would be, too. Her specialty was the detection of chemicals, not their harms. “You’ve got literally the medical director of 3M saying, ‘We studied this, there are no effects,’” she told me. “I wasn’t about to challenge that.” Her income had helped to support a family of five. Perhaps, I wondered aloud, she hadn’t really wanted to know whether her company was poisoning the public.
Jim Johnson, who is now an 81-year-old widower, lives with several dogs in a pale-yellow house in North Dakota. When I first called him, he said that he had begun researching PFOS in the ’70s. “I did a lot of the very original work on it,” he told me. He said that when he saw the chemical’s structure he understood “within 20 minutes” that it would not break down in nature. Shortly thereafter, one of his experiments revealed that PFOS was binding to proteins in the body, causing the chemical to accumulate over time. He told me that he also looked for PFOS in an informal test of blood from the general population, around the late ’70s, and was not surprised when he found it there.
Johnson said that he eventually tired of arguing with the few colleagues with whom he could speak openly about PFOS. “It was time,” he said. So he hired an outside lab to look for the chemical in the blood of 3M workers, knowing that it would also test blood bank samples for comparison — the first domino in a chain that would ultimately take the compound off the market. Oddly, he compared the head of the lab to a vending machine. “He gave me what I paid for,” Johnson said. “I knew what would happen.” Then Johnson tasked Hansen with something that he had long avoided: going beyond his initial experiments and meticulously documenting the chemical’s ubiquity. While Hansen took the heat, he took early retirement. Johnson described Hansen as though she were a vending machine, too. “She did what she was supposed to do with the tools I left her,” he said.
I pointed out that Hansen had suffered professionally and personally, and that she now feels those experiences tainted her career. “I didn’t say I was a nice guy,” Johnson replied, and laughed. After four hours, we were nearing the bottom of our bottomless coffees.
Average levels of PFOS are falling, but nearly all people have at least one forever chemical in their blood, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “When you have a contaminated site, you can clean it up,” Elsie Sunderland, an environmental chemist at Harvard University, told me. “When you ubiquitously introduce a toxicant at a global scale, so that it’s detectable in everyone ... we’re reducing public health on an incredibly large scale.” Once everyone’s blood is contaminated, there is no control group with which to compare, making it difficult to establish responsibility.
At least 45% of U.S. tap water is estimated to contain one or more forever chemicals, and one drinking water expert told me that the cost of removing them all would likely reach $100 billion.
n 2022, 3M said that it would stop making PFAS and would “work to discontinue the use of PFAS across its product portfolio,” by the end of 2025 — a pledge that it called “another example of how we are positioning 3M for continued sustainable growth.” But it acknowledged that more than 16,000 of its products still contained PFAS.
#environment#sustainability#expose#profile#business#ethics#science#science/materials#health/forever chemicals
·propublica.org·
Toxic Gaslighting: How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe
the rogue investor's guide to venture
the rogue investor's guide to venture
Many people try out careers in venture and then wind up leaving after a year when it stops feeling novel and starts feeling like they’re floating in lonely limbo without any markers of success. That’s because the craft of venture is not for people who derive their satisfaction from external indicators of progress — it’s for people who find the development of their relationships and refinement of their internal model of the world to be motivation enough to keep going.
If you derive satisfaction from refining a craft, don’t go into venture yet.
Here are five individual investor archetypes I’ve noticed can produce outsized returns in the early-stage venture game:Philosopher: hangs one’s reputation on their predictions about the futureHustler: simply outwork everyone else and are great at networkingHawk: most competitive, gets a thrill out of the fight to win a deal Friend: confidante and coach to founders, often founders’ first callCelebrity: a person widely respected for their work/knowledge/skill
A good archetype for you is whichever one you can sustain the longest. A great archetype for you is one that no one else is doing and you have some sort of signal works.
Some good advice I got: build your fund’s structure and strategy around allowing yourself to invest in whichever way you most enjoy and are naturally good at (admittedly, it will probably get harder and harder to stick to this as your fund scales).
Examples: if you like being a friend to founders and want your fund to function as Switzerland (i.e. not compete with anyone), write small checks. If you like to fight and are naturally hawkish, it might make sense to set yourself up to try to lead rounds. If complex problems and futuristic theories are what get you excited, investing in series A companies that fit into where you see the world going could be quite gratifying. If for some reason you love living in spreadsheets, consider growth investing (and don’t follow literally any of my advice).
In many ways, the job of the writer and the job of a VC are quite similar, in that they both ask you to produce an original end product (in the writer’s case, articulated ideas and stories; in the investor’s case, a differentiated portfolio with outsized financial returns) without much of a map for how you get there. The reason professional writers complain about writing so much is that it’s really difficult to wrangle your brain into producing uniquely interesting thoughts all the time, and highly frustrating when you consider it your job to do so. Making good investment decisions is similar; just with the added element of also being highly social. Taking the quality of your self talk seriously seems superfluous but is an investment that will result in better decisions.
A lot of the game of investing is won by getting people to think of you — a sign that you’ve built the kind of moat we call a strong brand. Remember: a fund is just a pile of money with a person on top to sell it. As an investor, putting down stakes in the ground about what you invest in saves you a lot of time in the long run because it allows people to self-select for fit
I’ve been surprised by how much it’s benefited my fund to make Moth’s brand (i.e. what I invest in and look for) difficult to summarize in a sentence. For small early-stage generalist funds like my own, quality matters much more than quantity. Quality deals almost always come from trusted sources who resonate with my taste, not from a list of random companies for which I have no context.
A brand is a promise to show up in the same way time and time again. Good brands are built on being decent and principled with all of the people you interact with.
Lastly and of utmost importance: remember that fear of failure fades into the background if you focus on leaving everyone you encounter along the way better than you found them.
#vc#craftsmanship#startups#business#advice#funding#branding#brand strategy#ambition
·mothfund.substack.com·
the rogue investor's guide to venture
the earnest ambitious kid's guide to investors
the earnest ambitious kid's guide to investors
  1. Fundraising is brain damage, so spend as little time doing it as possible
  2. Create an alter ego who you don for fundraising purposes
  3. Don’t spend a lot of time with VCs if you don’t need VC $
  4. Only talk to investors with decision-making power, preferably angels
  5. You know more about your business & domain than 90% of investors
  6. Momentum matters and sequencing is smart
  7. People don’t belong on pedestals
  8. Beware of intellectual dementors and clout demons
  9. People will help you if you ask for what you want clearly and concisely
VCs need to believe that your company could be a billion-dollar business and generally lack imagination — you need to paint a vivid picture of this path for them, starting with the striking protagonist character you play in your company’s story.Your alter ego should never lie, but it should be completely comfortable showing the fullest expression of your ambition to people who probably intimidate you. Fundraising is a snap judgment game — most VCs are trying to pattern-match you to a founder archetype who already won. They index primarily on IQ, self-belief, experience, and personability (in that order). A general rule of thumb is that to be taken seriously in SV, male founders would benefit from acting warmer, while female founders are taken more seriously when they act colder. Both benefit from acting a little entitled.
a VC’s job is to make a diversified portfolio of bets — you are only one. Most founders find being around VCs distracting and draining because they feel pressure to perform the role of ‘impressive person.’ If you can’t immediately capture value from your performance… why waste your energy?
don’t expect the average investor to provide much value beyond money and connections. This makes the 10% of investors who can be legitimately useful to your business worth their weight in gold. Develop litmus tests to identify the valuable ones quickly and avoid wasting your time trying to convince nonbelievers.
our goal here is to spend as little time fundraising as possible — which requires being strategic about the order in which you talk to investors and how you talk about where things stand as you progress through the raise. The combined force of controlling those two variables are what “generates momentum” during your fundraise process.
Make a list of all the investors you know and can get introduced to, ordering them by the ones you most want on board to the ones you couldn’t care less aboutTalk first to a few low-stakes investors at the bottom of your list to practice your pitch and identify common investor questions and critiques you’re going to getIf available to you, next get a few investors who already wanted to give you money on board so you have a dollar amount you can say you’ve raisedWork your way up your investor list, talking to the investors you most-want-on-board-but-still-need-to-convince last (this optimizes your odds they say yes)
This all goes by much faster if you court investors similarly to how hot girls treat their many potential suitors. If your raise is already a little taken and you exude an air that you don’t need them, mimetically-minded investors become much more interested.
If you’re anything like me, you will worry intensely about not making a fool of yourself. It will probably go ok, but not as amazing or illuminating as you’d hoped. You might leave and feel a deep sense of lostness set in. This is all very normal. In time you will see them in increasing clarity, often noticing the differences between your and their values and why you would not enjoy living their life at all.
the people on pedestals probably hate being there. It’s lonely, hard to trust that the intentions of the new people around you are pure, and you often feel like you’re constantly letting people down. In the end, idolization hurts everyone involved.
Beware of intellectual dementors and clout demonsIntellectual dementors will try to eat your ideas and interestingness — not necessarily to copy you, but to wring your brain dry to amass knowledge themselves. They often play mini IQ games/tests of will in conversation and masquerade as investors while never actually investing. Clout demons are similar, but view people less as brains and more as stepping stones towards supreme social status. The power move to protect yourself from both is to simply abstain from playing their games — give as little info on yourself and your ideas as possible and reflect their questions directly back at them.
People will help you if you ask for what you want clearly and concisely
Knowing what you want requires a lot of upfront soul-searching, followed by strategic and long-term thinking once you’ve committed to a thing (I can’t really demystify this more). Once you’re all in, I highly recommend diligently keeping a list somewhere of the top three things you currently need help with so when people ask, you’re ready.
You don’t want to make people feel like you’re using them but you do want to use your social capital for things you care about. General rule of thumb: ask for things either 1) after a positive interaction or 2) completely out of the blue with a concisely written and compelling email/text. Tone matters because you don’t want to sound desperate and you do want to show you know how to play the game (write like the founder you most admire talks).
once we’ve taken action on behalf of something, our brain assigns more value to said thing. Tim Keller: “The feeling of love follows the action of love.” Love is a strong word here, but the point stands — help people help you. Startups are long-term games, so it only makes sense to do them with people you truly want to be around for a very long time.
#ambition#advice#finance#startups#guides#hiring#business#relationships#pseudo#interviews#vc#funding
·mothfund.substack.com·
the earnest ambitious kid's guide to investors
One weird trick for fixing Hollywood
One weird trick for fixing Hollywood
A view of the challenges facing Hollywood, acknowledging the profound shifts in consumer behavior and media consumption driven by new technologies. The rise of smartphones and mobile entertainment apps has disrupted the traditional movie-going habits of the public, with people now less inclined to see films simply because they are playing. Free or low-paid labor on social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok is effectively competing with and undercutting the unionized Hollywood workforce.
the smartphone, and a host of software technologies built on it,3 have birthed what is essentially a parallel, non-union, motion-picture industry consisting of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, and their many other social-video rivals, all of which rely on the free or barely compensated labor product of people acting as de facto writers, directors, producers, actors, and crew. Even if they’d never see it this way, YouTubers and TikTokers are effectively competing with Hollywood over the idle hours of consumers everywhere; more to the point, they’re doing what any non-union workforce does in an insufficiently organized industry: driving down labor compensation.
Almost no one I know has work; most people’s agents and managers have more or less told them there won’t be jobs until 2025. An executive recently told a friend that the only things getting made this year are “ultra premium limiteds,” which sounds like a kind of tampon but actually just means “six-episode miniseries that an A-List star wants to do.”
YouTubers’ lack of collective bargaining power isn’t just bad for me and other guild members; it’s bad for the YouTubers themselves. Ask any professional or semi-professional streamer what they think of the platform and you’ll hear a litany of complaints about its opacity and inconsistency
#hollywood#entertainment#filmmaking#social media#storytelling#trends#business#youtube#tiktok#platforms#consumer behavior#jobs/creative-industry
·maxread.substack.com·
One weird trick for fixing Hollywood
The most hated workplace software on the planet
The most hated workplace software on the planet
LinkedIn, Reddit, and Blind abound with enraged job applicants and employees sharing tales of how difficult it is to book paid leave, how Kafkaesque it is to file an expense, how nerve-racking it is to close out a project. "I simply hate Workday. Fuck them and those who insist on using it for recruitment," one Reddit user wrote. "Everything is non-intuitive, so even the simplest tasks leave me scratching my head," wrote another. "Keeping notes on index cards would be more effective." Every HR professional and hiring manager I spoke with — whose lives are supposedly made easier by Workday — described Workday with a sense of cosmic exasperation.
If candidates hate Workday, if employees hate Workday, if HR people and managers processing and assessing those candidates and employees through Workday hate Workday — if Workday is the most annoying part of so many workers' workdays — how is Workday everywhere? How did a software provider so widely loathed become a mainstay of the modern workplace?
This is a saying in systems thinking: The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID), not what it fails to do. And the reality is that what Workday — and its many despised competitors — does for organizations is far more important than the anguish it causes everyone else.
In 1988, PeopleSoft, backed by IBM, built the first fully fledged Human Resources Information System. In 2004, Oracle acquired PeopleSoft for $10.3 billion. One of its founders, David Duffield, then started a new company that upgraded PeopleSoft's model to near limitless cloud-based storage — giving birth to Workday, the intractable nepo baby of HR software.
Workday is indifferent to our suffering in a job hunt, because we aren't Workday's clients, companies are. And these companies — from AT&T to Bank of America to Teladoc — have little incentive to care about your application experience, because if you didn't get the job, you're not their responsibility. For a company hiring and onboarding on a global scale, it is simply easier to screen fewer candidates if the result is still a single hire.
A search on a job board can return hundreds of listings for in-house Workday consultants: IT and engineering professionals hired to fix the software promising to fix processes.
For recruiters, Workday also lacks basic user-interface flexibility. When you promise ease-of-use and simplicity, you must deliver on the most basic user interactions. And yet: Sometimes searching for a candidate, or locating a candidate's status feels impossible. This happens outside of recruiting, too, where locating or attaching a boss's email to approve an expense sheet is complicated by the process, not streamlined. Bureaucratic hell is always about one person's ease coming at the cost of someone else's frustration, time wasted, and busy work. Workday makes no exceptions.
Workday touts its ability to track employee performance by collecting data and marking results, but it is employees who must spend time inputting this data. A creative director at a Fortune 500 company told me how in less than two years his company went "from annual reviews to twice-annual reviews to quarterly reviews to quarterly reviews plus separate twice-annual reviews." At each interval higher-ups pressed HR for more data, because they wanted what they'd paid for with Workday: more work product. With a press of a button, HR could provide that, but the entire company suffered thousands more hours of busy work. Automation made it too easy to do too much. (Workday's "customers choose the frequency at which they conduct reviews, not Workday," said the spokesperson.)
At the scale of a large company, this is simply too much work to expect a few people to do and far too user-specific to expect automation to handle well. It's why Workday can be the worst while still allowing that Paychex is the worst, Paycom is the worst, Paycor is the worst, and Dayforce is the worst. "HR software sucking" is a big tent.
Workday finds itself between enshittification steps two and three. The platform once made things faster, simpler for workers. But today it abuses workers by cutting corners on job-application and reimbursement procedures. In the process, it provides the value of a one-stop HR shop to its paying customers. It seems it's only a matter of time before Workday and its competitors try to split the difference and cut those same corners with the accounts that pay their bills.
Workday reveals what's important to the people who run Fortune 500 companies: easily and conveniently distributing busy work across large workforces. This is done with the arbitrary and perfunctory performance of work tasks (like excessive reviews) and with the throttling of momentum by making finance and HR tasks difficult. If your expenses and reimbursements are difficult to file, that's OK, because the people above you don't actually care if you get reimbursed. If it takes applicants 128% longer to apply, the people who implemented Workday don't really care. Throttling applicants is perhaps not intentional, but it's good for the company.
#work/productivity#reviews#bureaucracy#burnout#jobs#tech#software#business#ux#history#data structures
·businessinsider.com·
The most hated workplace software on the planet
‘To the Future’: Saudi Arabia Spends Big to Become an A.I. Superpower
‘To the Future’: Saudi Arabia Spends Big to Become an A.I. Superpower
Saudi Arabia's ambitious efforts to become a global leader in artificial intelligence and technology, driven by the kingdom's "Vision 2030" plan to diversify its oil-dependent economy. Backed by vast oil wealth, Saudi Arabia is investing billions of dollars to attract global tech companies and talent, creating a new tech hub in the desert outside Riyadh. However, the kingdom's authoritarian government and human rights record have raised concerns about its growing technological influence, placing it at the center of an escalating geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China as both superpowers seek to shape the future of critical technologies.
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·nytimes.com·
‘To the Future’: Saudi Arabia Spends Big to Become an A.I. Superpower