May 14, 2008

Get a Google Internship and Fame Follows....
Posted by Maureen Crawford Hentz at 3:59 PM

Google, the category-killer-always-ranked-a-best-employer company is running a contest for the best doodle (art) for their logo and special days. One of the links from the contest page is about The Original Doodler, Dennis Hwang.

From the interview:

"How did you get such a cool job that meshes computers and art?

I had an internship with Google in college. I was given the task of helping with maintenance of the website and I soon became an assistant webmaster. Before I joined Google, the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were already thinking about holiday logos...and when I joined, they knew I was studying art and suggested I should give it a shot. I've been doing it since then...

What a great story of how an internship, some talent and a can-do attitude can change your life.

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May 5, 2008

Millennials, Work Life Balance and Technology
Posted by Maureen Crawford Hentz at 12:30 AM

One of the great things that came up at BU's Recruiting Roundtable is work-life balance. One of the points I made is in the difference between millennials and other generations in terms of work-life balance. For Xers and boomers, work-life balance is a 'sane' ratio of time spent at work versus not at work. Millennials, on the other hand, perceive work-life balance very differently--often by how much of their lives they can live at work.

To wit, this interesting information reported on the searchcio.com:

According to the survey, for example, 75% of millennials access Web-based personal email at work, compared with 54% of other workers; 66% regularly access Facebook or MySpace, compared with 13% of other workers; and 51 % of millennials access personal finance applications, compared with 27% of other workers.

The article then goes on to talk about how to cope with this:

How should the IT establishment respond? Not by yelling and telling, said Samir Kapuria, managing director, Symantec Advisory Consulting Services.

"This is a large volume of people who use these personal technologies," Kapuria said. "Businesses need to ask themselves, 'How do I harness the capabilities of this tech-savvy group while also making sure of eliminating the risks associated with the use of this technology?'" Kapuria said there needs to be a council of people who understand the mind-set of the millennials and can measure the business's risk level through this lens, then identify the hard and soft skills required to remediate the risk.

To read the whole article click here.

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May 2, 2008

Party like it's 1964
Posted by Diane Danielson at 1:00 PM

Ellen Goodman does a great job of capturing the pathetic treatment of Lilly Ledbetter and the rest of our gender when it comes to wage equality in today's Boston Globe:

The idea that the wage gap might be because of, um, sex discrimination seems soooo 20th century. In fact, the Supreme Court implied that Lilly Ledbetter's lower paycheck was her own fault because she didn't start investigating her employer for sex discrimination as soon as she started her job.

As for the conductor of the Straight Talk Express? McCain said he was all in favor of equal pay for equal work, but that women don't need lawsuits, they need "education and training." So let's begin with a couple of basics.

Lesson One: An unequal paycheck is a thief that keeps on taking. Even in retirement, Ledbetter is still, in her own words, "a second-class worker" with a pension and Social Security check that carry Goodyear's bite marks.

Lesson Two: In 2008, the Republicans are partying - "political partying" - like it's 1964.

Click here to read the full story.

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