Technology is radically changing the nature of work. As programmers, we have to take seriously our responsibility as creators of platforms for new kinds of workers.
My talk at Closing the Gap, Jeff Greene's conference on technology and income inequality, held in Palm Beach on Dec 7-8, 2015. I talk about lessons from technology for 21st century business.
It's Not About Technology (pdf with Notes)Tim O'Reilly
My talk at Velocity 2015 Optimized Business Day. I talk about the imperative to use technology to empower workers, not replace them. This isn't just for highly paid knowledge workers. Finding ways to put everyone to work productively is one of the great challenges of the 21st century. Bonus: a great segment from Steven Vincent Benet's poem John Brown's Body.
Helping Government Keep Up with Moore's LawTim O'Reilly
My talk at the World Government Summit in Dubai on February 8, 2015. I talk about the pace of Moore's Law, and how AI, sensors, and on-demand are raising consumer expectations of government software. I go from there to my notion of government as a platform. PDF with Speaker notes - read the notes for the narrative that goes along with the slides.
My talk to the joint OECD/G20 German Presidency conference on digitalization in Berlin on January 12, 2017. Fitness landscapes as applied to technology, business, and the economy. Note that the fitness landscape slides will not be animated in this PDF, which I shared this way so that you could see my narrative in the speaker notes. While it has some slides in common with my White House Frontiers conference talk, it includes a bunch of other material.
Open Data: From the Information Age to the Action Age (PDF with notes)Tim O'Reilly
This is the presentation I made at the UK Department for International Aid/Omidyar Network OpenUp! conference in London on November 13, 2012. I talk about open government not as a platform for transparency or citizen engagement, but for a developer ecosystem building useful services. A video of this talk is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OIlxdpfu71o
My talk at Closing the Gap, Jeff Greene's conference on technology and income inequality, held in Palm Beach on Dec 7-8, 2015. I talk about lessons from technology for 21st century business.
It's Not About Technology (pdf with Notes)Tim O'Reilly
My talk at Velocity 2015 Optimized Business Day. I talk about the imperative to use technology to empower workers, not replace them. This isn't just for highly paid knowledge workers. Finding ways to put everyone to work productively is one of the great challenges of the 21st century. Bonus: a great segment from Steven Vincent Benet's poem John Brown's Body.
Helping Government Keep Up with Moore's LawTim O'Reilly
My talk at the World Government Summit in Dubai on February 8, 2015. I talk about the pace of Moore's Law, and how AI, sensors, and on-demand are raising consumer expectations of government software. I go from there to my notion of government as a platform. PDF with Speaker notes - read the notes for the narrative that goes along with the slides.
My talk to the joint OECD/G20 German Presidency conference on digitalization in Berlin on January 12, 2017. Fitness landscapes as applied to technology, business, and the economy. Note that the fitness landscape slides will not be animated in this PDF, which I shared this way so that you could see my narrative in the speaker notes. While it has some slides in common with my White House Frontiers conference talk, it includes a bunch of other material.
Open Data: From the Information Age to the Action Age (PDF with notes)Tim O'Reilly
This is the presentation I made at the UK Department for International Aid/Omidyar Network OpenUp! conference in London on November 13, 2012. I talk about open government not as a platform for transparency or citizen engagement, but for a developer ecosystem building useful services. A video of this talk is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OIlxdpfu71o
Government as a Platform: What We've Learned Since 2008 (pdf with notes)Tim O'Reilly
My talk at the UK Government Digital Service Sprint 15 event in London, February 2, 2015. I talk about my idea of government as a platform, and what I've learned since I first articulated the idea, with specific reference to what the GDS has taught me about the idea.
An Operating System for the Real WorldTim O'Reilly
My keynote at the Concur #PerfectTrip Devcon on October 2, 2013. I talk about the "internet operating system," and how sensors are turning it into a real world operating system, with "context aware programming." I use this metaphor to give lessons from some projects and startups putting these principles to work, including Tripit, the Google Autonomous Vehicle, Square, Uber, and Google Now.
Reinventing Healthcare to Serve People, Not InstitutionsTim O'Reilly
My talk at South by Southwest on March 16, 2015. I use examples from consumer technology (the Apple Store, Uber/Lyft, and Google Now) to show where "the bar" is now for user experience, and what that should teach us about how to redesign healthcare. I also talk about the work of Code for America to debug the UX for CalFresh and MediCal.
Open Data: From the Information Age to the Action Age (Keynote File)Tim O'Reilly
This is the presentation I made at the UK Department for International Aid/Omidyar Network OpenUp! conference in London on November 13, 2012. I talk about open government not as a platform for transparency or citizen engagement, but for a developer ecosystem building useful services. A video of this talk is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OIlxdpfu71o
My keynote at Velocity New York (#VelocityConf) on September 17, 2014. The failure of healthcare.gov was a textbook DevOps (or rather, lack of DevOps) case study. But it’s part of a wider pattern that reminds us that people should be at the heart of everything we build. In fact, getting the “people” part right is the key both to DevOps and great user experience design. It runs from the Internet of Things right through building government services that really work for citizens.
This is the pdf (with notes) of my slide deck from the Smart Disclosure Summit in Washington D.C. on March 30, 2012. Video will eventually be available.
Is IT Really the Villain? - Future of Technology in the EnterpriseJohn Mancini
Is IT the Villain? - The Future of Technology in the Enterprise -- A summary of my keynote presentation at the CITE Conference and Expo in San Francisco. How do organizations deal with the advantages of social, mobile, and consumer technologies without losing control?
How is Big Content Different From Big Data?John Mancini
Moving the Mountain -- Evanta CIO Presentation on Big Data and Big Content -- central premise -- Big Data analysis without a strategy for the Content that usually fulfills the analytics is a waste of time.
World Government Summit on Open SourceTim O'Reilly
PDF of slides and notes from my keynote at Acquia's World Government Summit on Open Source in Washington DC October 11, 2012. I talk about how open source enabled the internet as a platform, and how it can enable government as a platform. I talk about examples from the internet and from Code for America's work with cities. I crib shamelessly from some of Jen Pahlka's talks about Code for America, and some of the lessons that can be taken from her work.
Oakland Public Ethics Commission: Transparency, Open Data, and Gov as PlatformTim O'Reilly
I spoke at the Oakland Public Ethics commission on June 25, 2013. I was trying to set some context about how the ideas of transparency, open data, and government platform should shape their thinking. This is a PDF with notes on my talking points below each slide.
The Clothesline Paradox and the Sharing Economy (pdf with notes)Tim O'Reilly
My keynote at OSCON 2012 in Portland, July 18, 2012. Focuses on the contribution of open source software to the economy, using the metaphor of "the clothesline paradox" first articulated by Steve Baer in CoEvolution Quarterly in 1975
My talk at the White House Frontiers Conference at CMU on October 13, 2016. I was one of the warmup acts for the President, talking about why we should embrace an AI future. Full text can be seen here
Philadelphia Futurism 2018: A local take on the next 20 yearsJohn Cardone
The world will change more in the next 20 years than in the past 300 years. Artificial intelligence, self driving cars, robotics, the blockchain, the internet of things–the list goes on! Exponential technologies will produce waves of change, some good, others not so good. How will Philadelphia ride those waves? Will we drive change, or will we be driven by it?
In this exciting presentation and discussion, a diverse panel of local experts will help us explore how the technological “Megashifts” of today will affect the Philadelphia of tomorrow.
This event was part of Philly Tech Week 2018
Government as a Platform: What We've Learned Since 2008 (pdf with notes)Tim O'Reilly
My talk at the UK Government Digital Service Sprint 15 event in London, February 2, 2015. I talk about my idea of government as a platform, and what I've learned since I first articulated the idea, with specific reference to what the GDS has taught me about the idea.
An Operating System for the Real WorldTim O'Reilly
My keynote at the Concur #PerfectTrip Devcon on October 2, 2013. I talk about the "internet operating system," and how sensors are turning it into a real world operating system, with "context aware programming." I use this metaphor to give lessons from some projects and startups putting these principles to work, including Tripit, the Google Autonomous Vehicle, Square, Uber, and Google Now.
Reinventing Healthcare to Serve People, Not InstitutionsTim O'Reilly
My talk at South by Southwest on March 16, 2015. I use examples from consumer technology (the Apple Store, Uber/Lyft, and Google Now) to show where "the bar" is now for user experience, and what that should teach us about how to redesign healthcare. I also talk about the work of Code for America to debug the UX for CalFresh and MediCal.
Open Data: From the Information Age to the Action Age (Keynote File)Tim O'Reilly
This is the presentation I made at the UK Department for International Aid/Omidyar Network OpenUp! conference in London on November 13, 2012. I talk about open government not as a platform for transparency or citizen engagement, but for a developer ecosystem building useful services. A video of this talk is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OIlxdpfu71o
My keynote at Velocity New York (#VelocityConf) on September 17, 2014. The failure of healthcare.gov was a textbook DevOps (or rather, lack of DevOps) case study. But it’s part of a wider pattern that reminds us that people should be at the heart of everything we build. In fact, getting the “people” part right is the key both to DevOps and great user experience design. It runs from the Internet of Things right through building government services that really work for citizens.
This is the pdf (with notes) of my slide deck from the Smart Disclosure Summit in Washington D.C. on March 30, 2012. Video will eventually be available.
Is IT Really the Villain? - Future of Technology in the EnterpriseJohn Mancini
Is IT the Villain? - The Future of Technology in the Enterprise -- A summary of my keynote presentation at the CITE Conference and Expo in San Francisco. How do organizations deal with the advantages of social, mobile, and consumer technologies without losing control?
How is Big Content Different From Big Data?John Mancini
Moving the Mountain -- Evanta CIO Presentation on Big Data and Big Content -- central premise -- Big Data analysis without a strategy for the Content that usually fulfills the analytics is a waste of time.
World Government Summit on Open SourceTim O'Reilly
PDF of slides and notes from my keynote at Acquia's World Government Summit on Open Source in Washington DC October 11, 2012. I talk about how open source enabled the internet as a platform, and how it can enable government as a platform. I talk about examples from the internet and from Code for America's work with cities. I crib shamelessly from some of Jen Pahlka's talks about Code for America, and some of the lessons that can be taken from her work.
Oakland Public Ethics Commission: Transparency, Open Data, and Gov as PlatformTim O'Reilly
I spoke at the Oakland Public Ethics commission on June 25, 2013. I was trying to set some context about how the ideas of transparency, open data, and government platform should shape their thinking. This is a PDF with notes on my talking points below each slide.
The Clothesline Paradox and the Sharing Economy (pdf with notes)Tim O'Reilly
My keynote at OSCON 2012 in Portland, July 18, 2012. Focuses on the contribution of open source software to the economy, using the metaphor of "the clothesline paradox" first articulated by Steve Baer in CoEvolution Quarterly in 1975
My talk at the White House Frontiers Conference at CMU on October 13, 2016. I was one of the warmup acts for the President, talking about why we should embrace an AI future. Full text can be seen here
Philadelphia Futurism 2018: A local take on the next 20 yearsJohn Cardone
The world will change more in the next 20 years than in the past 300 years. Artificial intelligence, self driving cars, robotics, the blockchain, the internet of things–the list goes on! Exponential technologies will produce waves of change, some good, others not so good. How will Philadelphia ride those waves? Will we drive change, or will we be driven by it?
In this exciting presentation and discussion, a diverse panel of local experts will help us explore how the technological “Megashifts” of today will affect the Philadelphia of tomorrow.
This event was part of Philly Tech Week 2018
Knowledge in the Age of Siri, Uber, and HololensTim O'Reilly
My keynote at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences annual summit. How knowledge is changing, becoming a part of real world services rather than a thing apart. Many of the slides are just pictures. The narrative is in the speaker notes, so be sure to download and read the whole thing.
DAMA Webinar - Big and Little Data QualityDATAVERSITY
While technological innovation brings constant change to the data landscape, many organizations still struggle with the basics: ensuring they have reliable, high quality data. In health care, the promise of insight to be gained through analytics is dependent on ensuring the interactions between providers and patients are recorded accurately and completely. While traditional health care data is dependent on person-to-person contact, new technologies are emerging that change how health care is delivered and how health care data is captured, stored, accessed and used. Using health care as a lens through which to understand the emergence of big data, this presentation will ask the audience to think about data in old and new ways in order to gain insight about how to improve the quality of data, regardless of size.
The AIs Are Not Taking Our Jobs...They Are Changing ThemTim O'Reilly
My talk at the Web Summit in Dublin on November 6, 2014. Reflections on the notion that AI will take away jobs, and our need to recognize and redefine the human role in the applications we build. Covers many of the same ideas as my "Internet of Things and Humans" talk, but from a slightly different angle.
Find and Land the Job you Want | LaSalle Network WebinarLaSalle Network
Most job seekers today know how to use job boards and career websites. But they still struggle to find open positions that excite them, and when they do apply, they don’t hear back.
Tom Gimbel shared the best strategies to successfully find the job you really want, get noticed by companies, and submit an impressive application.
Gain knowledge about the Future of Work(ers) in an on-demand economy. Understand how baby boomers are retiring and exiting the workforce in mass, and the Millennials are taking their place. Learn how job and career expectations have changed because of the shift. This includes workplace expectations, how people are searching for jobs, and how companies are hiring. See in detail how this shift is being driven by mobile app adoption and technology. #YourFutureWorkforce www.shiftgig.com/future
A brief story about the mobile world by Filipi Neves from Movile.
A little bit about virtual reality, internet of things, artificial intelligence and bots.
Do More. Do things that were previously impossible!Tim O'Reilly
My keynote at SxSW Interactive on March 9, 2018. I tackle the job of the entrepreneur to redraw the map, and not to accept the idea that technology will put people out of work rather than creating new kinds of prosperity. I try to provide a call to action to throw off the shackles of the old world and to build a new one. So many companies play defense. Cut costs, watch the competition, follow best practices. Great entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk play offense. They see the world with fresh eyes, taking off the blinders that keep companies using technology to make slight improvements to existing products and practices, rather than imagining the world as it could be, given the new capabilities that technology has given us.
An increasing amount of people are switching to work for themselves and become their own bosses and this growth of freelancers in Europe has far outpaced the growth of any other relevant segments of the labour market.
A somewhat longer version of my Frontiers talk about technology and the future of the economy, with additional material pitched to an audience of Internet operators at Apricot 2017, in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam on February 27, 2017
Digital Leadership: An interview with Tim O’ReillyCapgemini
Digital Leadership: An interview with Tim O’Reilly Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media on to understand more about the latest wave of digital disruptions and how companies can and should react.
My talk for TechStars at Techweek Kansas City in October 2018. While this is a talk based on my book WTF?, it is fairly different from many of the others that I've posted here, in that it focuses specifically on parts of the book that contain advice for entrepreneurs, rather than on the broader questions of technology and the economy. As always, look at the speaker notes for
Welcome to the Automation First Era: Your Guide to a Thriving EnterpriseUiPath
We’ve now entered the “automation first” era. Digital transformation is quickly becoming the status quo as businesses migrate their core business processes and workflows to digital and cloud-based platforms. Under this new operational framework, pervasive automation can propel companies to new heights of efficiency and productivity, while reducing the cost of doing business. Companies that embrace an automation first mindset — ie, if something can be automated, it should be automated — will position themselves to thrive in this new era. With that in mind, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is more than a tool for efficiency — it’s an agent of organizational change and evolution. This presentation breaks down RPA’s growing importance, and provides guidance on how to implement this technology and maximize your return on investment (ROI).
Ferovalo Interim Management trends and casesFerovalo Oy
Work is done already and more in future by freelances - through Ferovalo Interim Management service companies find over qualified the best possible match.
Cases: COO in Start-up and CFO in growth company
Similar to My grandfather wouldn't recognize what I do as work (20)
Lessons from Software for Synthetic BiologyTim O'Reilly
In my November 4, 2015 keynote at the SynBioBeta conference, I talk about lessons from open source software and the internet that should shape our thinking about the bio revolution. Licenses are only part of the open source story. The architecture of interoperability may matter even more.
We've Got This Whole Unicorn Thing Wrong (pptx)Tim O'Reilly
A few weeks ago, I wrote a Medium piece on unicorns. I realized I should put together a talk to go with it. Here are the slides from that talk, explaining why I've launched my Next:Economy Summit, and how we get from what I've called the WTF economy to a Next Economy and a future that we want to live in.
We've Got This Whole Unicorn Thing Wrong (pdf with notes)Tim O'Reilly
A few weeks ago, I wrote a Medium piece about Unicorns. I realized I should put together a talk to go with it. Here are the slides from that talk, explaining why I've launched my Next:Economy Summit, and how we get from what I've called the WTF economy to a Next Economy and a future that we want to live in.
Government as a Platform and the Digital Front DoorTim O'Reilly
My keynote at the National Association of Govenrment Web Professionals (NAGW) in Albuquerque on September 23, 2015. I talk about government as a platform, but also about the Code for America Digital Front Door process for building a user-centric website. Be sure to read the notes, which contain the text of the talk.
My talk at Velocity 2015 Optimized Business Day. I talk about the imperative to use technology to empower workers, not replace them. This isn't just for highly paid knowledge workers. Finding ways to put everyone to work productively is one of the great challenges of the 21st century. Bonus: a great segment from Steven Vincent Benet's poem John Brown's Body.
My talk from Tech Summit Puerto Rico 2015. An update of my thinking on Government as a Platform. Includes guidance on a model RFP for government services built as modular components called by APIs and so enabling external 3rd party services as well.
Technological Revolutions and Cultural Revolutions: OSCON 2014Tim O'Reilly
Open source, DevOps, cloud computing, and the internet of things don't just require new technology, they require new thinking about how society and business is to be organized. It's critical, therefore, to infuse the work that developers do with human values, and to build a world that we are proud of.
Slack (or Teams) Automation for Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Soluti...Jeffrey Haguewood
Sidekick Solutions uses Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Solutions Apricot) and automation solutions to integrate data for business workflows.
We believe integration and automation are essential to user experience and the promise of efficient work through technology. Automation is the critical ingredient to realizing that full vision. We develop integration products and services for Bonterra Case Management software to support the deployment of automations for a variety of use cases.
This video focuses on the notifications, alerts, and approval requests using Slack for Bonterra Impact Management. The solutions covered in this webinar can also be deployed for Microsoft Teams.
Interested in deploying notification automations for Bonterra Impact Management? Contact us at sales@sidekicksolutionsllc.com to discuss next steps.
Connector Corner: Automate dynamic content and events by pushing a buttonDianaGray10
Here is something new! In our next Connector Corner webinar, we will demonstrate how you can use a single workflow to:
Create a campaign using Mailchimp with merge tags/fields
Send an interactive Slack channel message (using buttons)
Have the message received by managers and peers along with a test email for review
But there’s more:
In a second workflow supporting the same use case, you’ll see:
Your campaign sent to target colleagues for approval
If the “Approve” button is clicked, a Jira/Zendesk ticket is created for the marketing design team
But—if the “Reject” button is pushed, colleagues will be alerted via Slack message
Join us to learn more about this new, human-in-the-loop capability, brought to you by Integration Service connectors.
And...
Speakers:
Akshay Agnihotri, Product Manager
Charlie Greenberg, Host
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
91mobiles recently conducted a Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey in which we asked over 3,000 respondents about the TV they own, aspects they look at on a new TV, and their TV buying preferences.
Encryption in Microsoft 365 - ExpertsLive Netherlands 2024Albert Hoitingh
In this session I delve into the encryption technology used in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview. Including the concepts of Customer Key and Double Key Encryption.
Accelerate your Kubernetes clusters with Varnish CachingThijs Feryn
A presentation about the usage and availability of Varnish on Kubernetes. This talk explores the capabilities of Varnish caching and shows how to use the Varnish Helm chart to deploy it to Kubernetes.
This presentation was delivered at K8SUG Singapore. See https://feryn.eu/presentations/accelerate-your-kubernetes-clusters-with-varnish-caching-k8sug-singapore-28-2024 for more details.
Neuro-symbolic is not enough, we need neuro-*semantic*Frank van Harmelen
Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI is on the rise. However, simply machine learning on just any symbolic structure is not sufficient to really harvest the gains of NeSy. These will only be gained when the symbolic structures have an actual semantics. I give an operational definition of semantics as “predictable inference”.
All of this illustrated with link prediction over knowledge graphs, but the argument is general.
Key Trends Shaping the Future of Infrastructure.pdfCheryl Hung
Keynote at DIGIT West Expo, Glasgow on 29 May 2024.
Cheryl Hung, ochery.com
Sr Director, Infrastructure Ecosystem, Arm.
The key trends across hardware, cloud and open-source; exploring how these areas are likely to mature and develop over the short and long-term, and then considering how organisations can position themselves to adapt and thrive.
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 3DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 3. In this session, we will cover desktop automation along with UI automation.
Topics covered:
UI automation Introduction,
UI automation Sample
Desktop automation flow
Pradeep Chinnala, Senior Consultant Automation Developer @WonderBotz and UiPath MVP
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
Transcript: Selling digital books in 2024: Insights from industry leaders - T...BookNet Canada
The publishing industry has been selling digital audiobooks and ebooks for over a decade and has found its groove. What’s changed? What has stayed the same? Where do we go from here? Join a group of leading sales peers from across the industry for a conversation about the lessons learned since the popularization of digital books, best practices, digital book supply chain management, and more.
Link to video recording: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/selling-digital-books-in-2024-insights-from-industry-leaders/
Presented by BookNet Canada on May 28, 2024, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Generating a custom Ruby SDK for your web service or Rails API using Smithyg2nightmarescribd
Have you ever wanted a Ruby client API to communicate with your web service? Smithy is a protocol-agnostic language for defining services and SDKs. Smithy Ruby is an implementation of Smithy that generates a Ruby SDK using a Smithy model. In this talk, we will explore Smithy and Smithy Ruby to learn how to generate custom feature-rich SDKs that can communicate with any web service, such as a Rails JSON API.
4. @timoreilly #NextEconomy
Low wage employers like McDonalds and Walmart are the
new sweatshop, but something different is happening in tech
McDonalds 440,000 employees, 68 million monthly users
Snapchat ~300 employees, 100 million monthly users
6. @timoreilly #NextEconomy
Programmers are actually managers
Every day, you are
inspecting the performance
of your workers and giving
them instruction (in the form
of code) about how to do a
better job
7. @timoreilly #NextEconomy
There are other companies where programs are
managers, while many of the workers are human
At
companies
like Uber
and Lyft,
algorithms
tell people
what to do
I’ve been organizing a new event called the Next:Economy Summit (http://conferences.oreilly.com/nextcon/) for this coming October. It’s focused on technology and the future of work. As I usually do, I talk to lots of smart people to inform my thinking. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, is one of these people. He said to me: “My grandfather wouldn’t recognize what I do as work.”
So he says! I say “The more things change, the more they stay the same!” These programmers at Pivotal bear an uncanny resemblance to workers in a Victorian sweatshop!
I’m really kidding, though, as is illustrated by these statistics. Low wage employers like McDonalds and Walmart are the new sweatshop, but something different is happening in tech. McDonalds has 440,000 employees and 68 million “monthly users,” while a company like Snapchat serves 100 million monthly users with only about 300 employees. How can that be?
It’s because programs are the real workers at companies like Google, Facebook, and Snapchat. This is a portrait of a 21st century worker: a github repo. The programs, not the programmers, are the equivalent of the assembly line workers or the servers at McDonalds.
And all of the people contributing code are the managers! This kind of mental inversion helps you to see the world in a whole new way!
Programmers like you are actually the managers. Every day, you are inspecting the performance of your workers and giving them instruction about how to do a better job. The Build-Measure-Learn cycle is the equivalent of a manager giving feedback to his employees.
Of course, there are still human managers at Google, but the hierarchy is much flatter, because so many of the people who appear to be workers are actually already managers, whose principal activity is not to be told what to do, but to understand the company objectives, and act on their own to tell their “workers” what to do.
It strikes me that that is why OKRs have taken such root at Google and other tech companies. The focus on clear, measurable results fits well with a world in which the workers do exactly what they are told! And managers spend their day trying to figure out how to align their workers better with measurable high level goals.
There are other cases where the algorithmic workers produced by coder-managers like you are in turn managers for human workers. You can see this clearly in a company like Uber or Lyft, where the managerial programs tell people where the demand is, track the performance of the job and how to pay for it, and even solicit feedback from the customers about the human worker’s performance.
This is where things get tricky. When you’re writing a program that serves users directly, measuring user satisfaction is all you have to worry about. But when you’re writing programs that will also manage human workers, you have a real responsibility to make sure that those managerial algorithms are taking care of their workers. Companies like Uber have set their algorithm to optimize for only one factor: passenger pickup time. Until recently, drivers have been considered a throwaway commodity. That’s a big mistake. It’s becoming increasingly clear that many Uber drivers are being paid less than a living wage.
The current state of the ride sharing management algorithms, is somewhat akin to the state of search engines before google, crowded with ads and not doing a very good job of satisfying all of the user needs of the ecosystem. This is a screenshot of Altavista from 1996. I’m old enough to remember how bad search was back then.
Google came along and not only made algorithms that were focused on better search quality, but also algorithms focused on better ad quality. That’s what ride sharing companies need to do today - improve their algorithms to manage their human workers not just for passenger pickup time and customer experience, but also to make sure that the drivers themselves have a good experience and can make a good wage.
This isn’t just a matter of social justice. Worker experience is a matter of competitive advantage, just like user experience. I predicted early this year that competition for better working conditions would shape the competitive landscape for ride sharing companies. And sure enough, Uber has now made a deal with the Mechanic’s Union in NYC, and better wages is a real point of competition between uber and lyft.
As my friend David Rolf of the SEIU said to me before my Next:Economy summit last year, “God did not make being an auto worker a good job.” We have to do the same hard work that was done in the industrial economy to make jobs good for ordinary people again, not just for “managers” like us.
Workers at companies like Walmart and McDonalds are also managed by algorithm, and it’s a particularly user-hostile algorithm, which tells workers when to show up, gives them very little control over their schedule, and even makes sure that they don’t get more than 29 hours a week so that they aren’t eligible for health benefits. There is a whole industry of algorithmic workplace scheduling systems designed to maximize profits by screwing workers.
Fortunately, even in the old economy, some companies are starting to take notice, and realize that the scheduling algorithms need to take the human workers into better account. For example, in 2014, Starbucks ended the dreaded “Clopen” - in which an employee, who might live an hour away, was assigned to close the store at 11, and reopen it at 4 or 5 am. Many companies still follow this practice, though.
And that’s what allows Uber to attract workers with promises like these, even if they don’t yet live up to them.
Bringing this home to all of you - Being a YouTube creator, or someone who has built and monetized a big fan base on Facebook, is one of those jobs that Hal Varian’s grandfather wouldn’t recognize. In the age of networks, a lot of the people who “work for you” aren’t your employees. The stars who drive all those billions of views on YouTube need to make a living too. The programmers who build the algorithmic workers at YouTube, which in turn manage these outside workers, have a responsibility to think about these workers and how to make what they do pay off.
Consider someone like Brandon Stanton, the heroic photographer and journalist behind Humans of New York, one of Facebook’s most successful feeds.. It’s grown from a hobby into more than a full time job - yet he makes his entire living outside of the platform, via his books and speeches. The platform enables his work, but doesn’t pay him to do it. He decided not to take advertising on his pages, and uses them instead to crowd fund money for charitable causes. He told me earlier this week that he thinks he’s raised about $6 million for charity so far this year. But that was when he was only about halfway through his latest fundraiser, for cancer research, which raised $3.5 million.
Jack Conte told me the story that led him to found Patreon, the crowdfunding patronage site for artists, which now pays out millions of dollars a month.
He and his wife Nataly perform as Pomplamoose, and he got fed up when he realized that 17 million YouTube views had turned into only $3500 in income. “Our fans value us more than that.”
Not finding ways to pay for user contributed content is a bug in the system, because in tomorrow’s economy, a lot of the serious content is being produced by people like Brandon Stanton, and entertainment is being produced by people like Jack and Nataly.
In homage to Norman Mailer, whose wonderful book Why Are We in Vietnam wasn’t about Vietnam at all, but instead was an exploration of American macho, I will end by saying: “And that’s why Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are dominating the political headlines today.” Human income inequality is a bug in many of the systems we’re building, and it’s our job as managers of the systems that employ people today to fix that bug.
It’s time to build technology, and companies, as if people matter! And when I say “people,” I don’t just mean our users, but the human workers, because the boundaries between managers and workers, customers and suppliers, are all breaking down. And that’s the conversation that I’m trying to enable at my Next:Economy Summit.