If you are looking for a blueprint on how to operate a good company culture, this Seth Godin blog post is a great place to start. Testing falsifiable assertions in a supportive a progressive environment is the goal.
The seven Irish universities published a report this week on the impact of graduates on the Irish economy. It turns out, university graduates contribute €8.9 billion each year! You can read the full report on saveourspark.ie.
Nikita Prokopov has a superb blog post about how a lot of tech companies approach the hiring of software engineers incorrectly. He pulls no punches in describing how impractical it is to write code on a whiteboard, not being able to run and test interview code, the irrelevance of puzzles and the missed opportunities when not customising interviews to the interviewee. I could not agree more with everything in this post!
Okta have released their business apps survey which shows the most popular apps used by businesses this year, overall and broken down by categories such as HR, accommodation, transport, banking and news. Microsoft Office 365 is king.
Talent Works analysed 6000+ applications across 118 industries and have found that applicants are as likely to get an interview when meeting 50% of the advertised job requirements as meeting 90% of the requirements. The also found that women who match at least 30% of the requirements have increasing chances of getting an interview.
This is a fascinating long read by The Verge about the cut-throat goings on between super-competitive Amazon Marketplace sellers. A sub-industry has formed of "Amazon Lawyors" that help sellers recover from attacks by other sellers. Sellers have learnt to use new rules and terms against each other whenever Amazon introduces new legislation to their marketplace. When the hoverboards started exploding, Amazon cracked down on flammable products.
Bill Gates has published a post on gatesnotes.com describing his work learnings for 2018. The interesting read highlights trends he noticed with Alzheimer's disease, Polio and the global energy landscape. Gates also ponders the future of gene-editing and dealing with global epidemics, as well as defining his focus topics for 2019, privacy and innovation, and technology in education.
Coglode are back with another great behavioural pattern called Reactance. This is the scenario where controlling people's sense of freedom can trigger an angry motivation to regain it. An example in commerce is an online shop to uses too many scarcity game dynamics to scare the user into purchasing because there are only "2 seats left at this price" and the "offer ends in 2 minutes 12 seconds". Reactance occurs when the user is so put off by this that they decline to purchase anything out of spite.
Andreessen Horowitz have published a handy post listing the different types of metrics that can be used to measure network effects in software and marketplace businesses. The list progresses from the basic organic vs paid users metric up to metrics like market depth and unit economics.
