Jamie Hodari makes the point that the recent blowback against office spaces (and open office plans) might be slightly overblown. She asks, Is Working Remotely Sapping Your Creativity?

A creative work life requires social relationships and serendipitous interactions. It requires contending with ideas you don’t agree with. It requires getting up and moving around. As a result, it’s becoming increasingly clear that for many people, working at an office isn’t a relic of a pre-digital age, but a vital element in reaching their creative potential.

Bumping into coworkers, chatting in hallways, sitting down over lunch, a day at the office results in dozens of interactions everyday. The result, shown both anecdotally and in statistics, is more creativity and greater effectiveness. For instance, in one study tracking the behaviors of a sales team of a pharmaceutical company, “when a salesperson increased interactions with coworkers on other teams … by 10%, his or her sales also grew by 10%.” Cross-functional, seemingly spontaneous interaction facilitated greater effectiveness on the part of workers–something that would not have been possible had sales representatives been working from their homes.

Good thoughts from Martin Eriksson on how the PM is not The Boss. From Product Management is a Team Sport:

The bottom line is that everyone in the company owns the product, and its success or failure lie in the hands of everyone who touches it. A product manager’s job is to lead the team to tackle the product challenges together, to get the best out of everyone on the team when building the product, and to provide a gentle hand to keep it all consistent and going in the right direction.

I’ve been thinking about the topic of my latest A List Apart column for a while, but I was just too scared to write it. I mean, what right do I have to talk about work and privilege? But I ran the idea by my amazing editor, and since she was really supportive and enthusiastic about it, I went for it.

So I wrote Why?:

Why we work—and what kind of work we do—is a function of our privilege and our history as much as it is a function of our choices and our dedication.

I hope you enjoy reading it, and take something from it. This one took a while to get right.

In The Machines Are Coming, Zeynep Tufekci talks about the kind of tasks that are being automated by machines:

Today, machines can process regular spoken language and not only recognize human faces, but also read their expressions. They can classify personality types, and have started being able to carry out conversations with appropriate emotional tenor.

Machines are getting better than humans at figuring out who to hire, who’s in a mood to pay a little more for that sweater, and who needs a coupon to nudge them toward a sale. In applications around the world, software is being used to predict whether people are lying, how they feel and whom they’ll vote for.

This is not a new topic. Back in 2012, Kevin Kelly proclaimed in Better Than Human: Why Robots Will — And Must — Take Our Jobs:

It may be hard to believe, but before the end of this century, 70 percent of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation.

At the end of last year Claire Cain Miller wrote for the New York Times that As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up:

Although fears that technology will displace jobs are at least as old as the Luddites, there are signs that this time may really be different. The technological breakthroughs of recent years — allowing machines to mimic the human mind — are enabling machines to do knowledge jobs and service jobs, in addition to factory and clerical work.

Who knows if this fear is going to turn into reality or not — there are lots of counter-arguments as well (For example, Nicholas Carr has a really interesting historical perspective in Should the Laborer Fear Machines?).

Still, I find the discussion fascinating — especially as it relates to the balance of power in workplaces. Tufekci continues:

Machines aren’t used because they perform some tasks that much better than humans, but because, in many cases, they do a “good enough” job while also being cheaper, more predictable and easier to control than quirky, pesky humans. Technology in the workplace is as much about power and control as it is about productivity and efficiency. […]

This is the way technology is being used in many workplaces: to reduce the power of humans, and employers’ dependency on them, whether by replacing, displacing or surveilling them.

Maybe that’s the real cause for concern here. Not that jobs might go away (although that’s certainly worrisome too), but that power will continue to shift to employers and away from employees.

Elea Chang takes on the “full-stack employee” idea in a great critique called The Full-Stack Employee and The Glorification of Generalization:

Hidden inside that “full-stack employee” manifesto is the idea that tech equals work and work equals life. Despite all the talk of learning and growing, the full-stack employee is primarily focused on conquering domains within the tech industry. But there have always been ways to impact the world outside the workplace. Unfortunately, the continuous pursuit of professional skillsets tends to diminish the boundaries between work and everything else, leaving you with less and less time to actually grow as a human being.

I’m very much in agreement with this. Many companies still go out of their way to reward people who work extra long hours, even if that comes at the expense of time spent with family (or, as Elea points out, volunteering outside of work).

Two recent articles made me think again about how weird journalism and publishing has become because of the internet and social media. In Instagram’s TMZ Jenna Wortham describes a very successful celebrity gossip “site” (what should we call these things now?) that exists primarily on Instagram:

Angie explained to me that Instagram perfectly suited her vision for The Shade Room: image-centric and interactive. For her purposes, Instagram was the equivalent of WordPress. When she started the feed a year ago, her goal was to accumulate 10,000 followers in the first year. She accomplished that in only two weeks. Angie started by posting about people at the bottom of the celebrity hierarchy (minor reality stars, mostly) and worked her way up to bigger names, building her loyalties slowly. Eventually, readers started sending her tips and videos via Instagram’s direct-messaging feature. Now, The Shade Room has more than half a million followers on Instagram alone.

Of course, this “business” is one decision by Instagram away from total collapse, but for now it’s an amazing success story.

The second article continues the media’s fascination with Buzzfeed. From Adrienne LaFrance and Robinson Meyer long and very interesting The Eternal Return of BuzzFeed:

BuzzFeed is a successful company. And it is not only that: BuzzFeed is the rare example of a news organization that changes the way the news industry works. While it may not turn the largest profits or get the biggest scoops, it is shaping how other organizations sell ads, hire employees, and approach their work. BuzzFeed is the most influential news organization in America today because the Internet is the most influential medium—and, in some crucial ways, BuzzFeed demonstrates an understanding of that medium better than anyone else.

And this:

Culturally, economically, even politically: BuzzFeed is so influential because it is still in ascendance. We don’t yet know how big this publication will get, how sweeping and lasting its effects on the American media sphere will be. “We’re still really small,” Peretti insists. “You have Disney and Viacom and Time Warner—the really big media companies are giant compared to us.” But BuzzFeed’s growth has been relentless in recent years. It shows no signs of slowing. Peretti is deliberately and aggressively building his company to be big. “The Internet isn’t for small companies,” he said last year.

It’s hard not to admire the way Buzzfeed understands how the internet hive mind works. Let’s not forget that they were the first publication to figure out what the internet is really for:

Judy Wajcman’s Who’s to blame for the digital time deficit? starts off like many similar articles as she ponders the role smart phones play in making us feel time-starved. But then she takes an unexpected and well-reasoned turn:

If technology is going to contribute to a better world, people must think about the world in which they want to live. Put simply, it means thinking about social problems first and then thinking of technological solutions, rather than inventing technologies and trying to find problems they might solve.

We can’t do this while the people who design our technology and decide what is made are so unrepresentative of society. The most powerful companies in the world today—such as Microsoft, Apple and Google—are basically engineering companies and, whether in the US or Japan, they employ few women, minorities or people over 40. […] Such skewed organisational demographics inevitably influence the kind of technology produced.

And later on:

If we want technology to bring us a better future, we must contest the imperative of speed and democratise engineering. We must bring more imagination to the field of technological innovation. Most of all, we must ask bigger questions about what kind of society we want. Technology will follow, as it usually does.

Dave Pell—in the context of Facebook’s plan to host news sites’ content natively—explains what tech people are good at (and usually not good at) in Don’t Take a Flying Leap:

But building a really successful app or site does not mean you know more about education than educators. Disrupting the photo-sharing space does not qualify you to disrupt higher education. Or to understand the health system better than doctors. Or to understand the woes of urban poverty better than those who have spent a career on those corners. […]

This is not the time to give up and it’s not the time to give in to one of the most prevalent myths of the era: that people who can build technology know how to run your business better than you do.

Susan Pinker explains why face-to-face contact matters in our digital age:

Our survival hinges on social interaction, and that is not only true of the murky evolutionary past. Over the last decade huge population studies have shown that social integration — the feeling of being part of a cohesive group — fosters immunity and resilience. How accepted and supported we feel affects the biological pathways that skew the genetic expression of a disease, while feeling isolated “leaves a loneliness imprint” on every cell, says the American social neuroscientist John Cacioppo.

And here’s the problem: being “more social” online doesn’t help:

Recent MRI studies led by neuroscientist Elizabeth Redcay tell us that personal contact elicits greater activity in brain areas linked to social problem-solving, attention and reward than a remote connection. When the identical information is transmitted via a recording, something gets lost.

I guess catching up for coffee is still better than texting.

The Paradox of Empathy is such a great post by Scott Jenson that I pretty much want to quote the whole thing. But I’ll stick with just this one gem, and encourage you to read it in full. It is a fantastic exploration of empathy in design, and includes a framework for making empathy part of our everyday work in a very practical way:

Designers will be the first to admit that not every empathic observation leads to a miraculous insight. However, it’s called “Design Thinking” for a reason: it’s how we process and explore, taking a complex problem and breaking it down before we build it back up. Product managers seem to expect a designer to walk up to a product, say something brilliant, and drop the mic. Experienced designers deeply understand a simple fact: design isn’t a deliverable, it’s a process. A process paved with dozens of small empathic observations that lead you, slowly, iteratively to a better product.

The problem for us designers is that our fellow teammates don’t always think this way and unfortunately, we as a community don’t reflect on this difference. It’s ironic that designers are passionate about how a product interacts with people but not how they themselves interact with their team.