The Internet has created a generation of great writers

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The best writers in the history of the world are graduating from college, right now. So everyone can just shut up about how no one can write anymore.

Newsflash: No one could write in the Middle Ages, when the good writers wrote in Latin and everyone else spoke colloquial languages like French and English, which priests told them were too lame for real writing.

It's the same situation today in that the best way to have a population of good writers is for people to write constantly, in the language that is theirs, so that they are great at expressing themselves.

People do good writing every day, in social media—when they write a note on someone's Facebook wall, when they post a caption to a photo on flickr, or when they post a comment in a group on Brazen Careerist.

The people who are complaining that no one can write anymore are the same ones who are stressed about information overload. This is not a coincidence. Information is changing, the flow of ideas is changing, and written communication is changing with it. Information overload is the feeling of not being able to deal with this change. Young people do not feel information overload, which is another sign that they are excellent writers for the new millennium: They can process and communicate new ideas at the new pace. Read more

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Asperger syndrome in the office: How I deal with sensory integration dysfunction

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A lot of people ask me how I manage to keep a job when I have Asperger syndrome. So I’m doing a series this week on the topic, because it's true that most people with Asperger's are not doing well at work. The work place rewards social skills, and people with Asperger's have a social skill disorder.

I will never have great social skills, but I make them better by ensuring that I'm in my best social environment for work. For most people with Asperger's, inadequate social skills are exacerbated by sensory integration disorder, which is a tendency to be overwhelmed by outside stimuli. This frequently overwhelmed feeling makes one unable to concentrate on social skills.

Here are the ways I compensate for sensory integration disorder so that I can focus on having social skills that will make people want to work with me.

1. Establish routines to limit input.
Food is a problem for me. I hate variety. I hate that I don't know what is coming. My effort to control food got so extreme that I landed in a mental ward with an eating disorder. Today, I try to never go out for a meal. If I have to, I order salmon. Everywhere. And just looking for the salmon I get overwhelmed reading the menu. Too many details about food.

Given a choice, I eat a Power Bar for every meal and snack, (two= a meal, one= a snack,) and I hate if the store is out of both peanut butter and vanilla. I don't like variety, even in Power Bars. Read more

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Take Your Child to Work Day should be cancelled

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It's time to admit that Take Your Child to Work Day is an outdated relic of 1970s feminism, and we can put the whole thing to rest.

Do you remember that the day started as Take Our Daughters to Work? It was the 70s, and women wanted their daughters to know that they could do anything. Here's what came of that era: Latchkey kids who never saw their parents after school except on Take Our Daughters to Work Day. And, then later, those same little girls grew up to feel intense pressure to put work before kids which ushered in the biggest fertility train wreck in history, with Gen X thinking it would be fine to wait until after 30 to have kids.

So I have a bad taste in my mouth from the era of Take Our Daughters to Work. But then we had the era of boys underperforming. That's right: Boys are doing so much worse than girls in school that it's officially easier to get into college if you're a boy (scores are lower and so are GPAs) and once these kids enter the workforce, girls make more than boys do.

So some probably-drumming, angry, white male decided that it shouldn't just be daughters. It should be sons, too. So now we have Take Your Child to Work. Read more

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5 Career tips women should run from

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There's a huge market for telling women how to be happier. Maybe it's because women read more than men. Or maybe it's the discrepancy that women know when they are overweight and men don't. Or the discrepancy that most men think they are good parents and most women think they need to be better parents. The list goes on and on, in a glass-half-empty kind of way.

In general, I think the strength of women is that they see things more clearly. Yes, it's a glass-half-empty world for women, compared to men, but women should leverage their stronger grip on reality. So here's my contribution to women and clarity. I am debunking five totally annoying pieces of advice I hear people give women all the time.

1. Take a look at the lists of best companies for women to work for
This is an advertising ploy, not a plan for you to run your life. Every single time there's a list like this, women write to me from the companies on the list to tell me how much they suck for women. But it's not like I need those emails. I can just look at senior management, which is almost always all men, and see that corporate careers are set up for a one kind of life: very focused, no other interests, except, maybe, oneself. And this is not all that appealing to most women.

So you can forget the lists. The bar is so low to get on the lists that which company is on and which company is off is statistically irrelevant to women planning their careers. Read more

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My annual rant about Christmas at work

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Last year, the most commented-on post here was Five Things People Say about Christmas that Drive Me Nuts. And the year before that, the piece that made the most newspaper editors cancel my column was, Christmas at the Office is Bad for Diversity.

In general, my point on the Christmas stuff is that religious holidays don't belong at work, and that people who don't celebrate Christmas should not be forced to use one of their religious holidays on Christmas. Why do I use a floating holiday for Yom Kippur and no one uses a floating holiday for Christmas? It's preferential religious treatment and there is no reason for it when you can give each employee x number of days off to use as he or she chooses.

Before you complain about this line of reasoning, please click on the links and read the posts I linked to above. Then you can argue.

I know that you guys have a lot to say about Christmas, not just because of the comments these posts receive, but also because over the years I have found that for the most part, Christians comment publicly, and Jews send private emails to me. Read more

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Work stuff that makes me happy

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It’s a season of joy, right? You are probably thinking that you can count on my blog posts to be a respite from seasonal joy. But still, I’m susceptible to peer pressure. Mostly because I think it’s an obligation of a friend to be sort of cheery. Because cheeriness is contagious. And on some level, I want to be your friend.

I have always thought a good mood is contagious, but now there’s more proof, in a study published last week in the British Medical Journal, (and in the Los Angeles Times, for those of us who like our research sliced in candy-sized bites.) The researchers followed 5000 people for decades and found that if you hang out with people who say they are happy then you are more likely to report that you are happy, too.

This might be a peer pressure thing, except it’s really a moot point. Because if you say you are happy, you get all the health benefits of being happy (image hosting). And, of course, those benefits are huge. It doesn’t really matter that it is irrational to be happy—you will mentally and physically in better shape if you go down that irrational path.

So even though I tend to choose rational discourse over cheery conversation, today we can have both. Here are three places where I found happiness and work intersecting.

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Feeling special is just as important as fitting in

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Tomorrow is Yom Kippur, and you can bet that there will be no big financial announcements. This is because Jews make up a disproportionately huge number of people in finance. So when the Jews take off work for Yom Kippur, there is not enough liquidity in the financial markets for anything really big to happen. As my hedge-fund brother says, “You don’t want to have to get anything big done in finance on Yom Kippur.”

I like learning this because I like being part of community. In general, it is lonely being Jewish. Not in New York City, where there are, really, more Jews than in Israel. But definitely in Wisconsin, where my son had to explain to a school administrator that Rosh Hashanah is a Jewish holiday.

There is part of me that likes being part of the community of Jews who almost all observe the High Holidays. But there is also part of me that appreciates being a minority, because you're different, and different often means special. And we all want to be special in some way, even at the cost of being a minority.

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Guest post: 5 new rules for dealing with race at work

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Here's a guest post from Carmen Van Kerckhove. I have learned so much about race from her blog, Racialicious, that I asked her to write five tips for dealing with race at work. She always surprises me and this is no exception.

Rule 1: Don’t be colorblind.
People say this all the time: “I don't care if people are black, brown, purple, or polka-dotted. I don't notice color!”

But that's a lie. All of us notice variations in physical appearance that cause us to draw conclusions as to what race a person is.

Then why do people insist on claiming that they don’t notice color? Often, it’s because they are scared to death of being labeled a racist.

But here’s the thing. Noticing a person’s race doesn’t make you racist. What does make you racist is if you make assumptions about that person’s intellectual, physical, or emotional characteristics based on the race you think the person is.

More importantly, when you proclaim that you’re colorblind, what you’re really implying is that race doesn’t matter in America. Race still matters because racism is alive and well. Pretending otherwise negates the everyday experiences of millions of people of color in this country.

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Five things that are about to stop sucking at work

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I used to write about my brother Erik a lot. I wrote about how I retooled his resume to make his dead-end job at Blockbuster into the perfect collection of achievements. Then I let him guest post while he was getting ready to quit the investment banking job he was sick of.

Now he’s at Microsoft and his job is to buy companies. (If you work with him, you know him by his real name, which he won’t let me use.) I don’t write about him much now because everything he says to me begins with, “Don’t blog about this.” (And then I see it on Valleywag an hour later, which is, of course, very frustrating for me.)

But I talk with Erik almost every day. (Sometimes twenty times a day, like when a very large company called about buying Brazen Careerist and then turned out to be as day-after-difficult as a one-night stand without a condom.) Erik sends me great links that are harbingers of the future of work. So here are a few. And, if you don’t think they are as good as tea leaves for the office, at least maybe this gives you insight into what Microsoft’s acquisition team is looking at right now.

1. The tyranny of internships will be exposed and companies will have to pay real wages.
Stuff White People Like has a smart and hilarious summary of why internships are for white kids. But seriously, the fact that internships are practically essential starting blocks for a top-tier career is just ridiculous when you think about how well-connected you have to be to get into all the great summer internship programs.

2. The tyranny of tech support will be exposed and they will actually offer help.
Here is a parody of a call, but it is actually what happened every single time I called tech support while I was working in the Fortune 500. If you have ever called internal tech support from within a large company, this will make you laugh. (If the Onion did a documentary on the tech support call, this is what the Onion would come up with.)

3. The tyranny of the discreet job hunt will be exposed and everyone will job hunt openly.
Accountemps reports that 75% of executives are comfortable with people job hunting while still on the job. And they would do the same themselves. This makes sense to me intuitively, because 25% of any office is people who are dead wood and are not going to look for another job—ever—and therefore don’t want anyone else to. The big news here is that most people are looking all the time. And since job hopping builds strong careers, the people who aren’t are the ones who have a problem.

4. The tyranny of high heels will give way to the pricey, good-for-feet-but-still-sexy, heel.
Academic researchers are finding on many fronts that men like to work with women who dress like women. This means shoulder-length hair or longer, a good amount of makeup but not too trampy, and, yes, high heels. They don’t have to be stiletto, but you need to look like you know how to pull an outfit together. This means that a lot of women are walking to work in flats and switching in the elevator, and kicking their stilettos off under the table during meetings. But that will end, soon, because the Wall Street Journal reports that shoe designers see a gold mine in saving female feet from career-girl frustration.

5. The tyranny of the prudish will be exposed for hurting productivity and coworkers will flirt openly.
Flirting at work has a positive impact on productivity, according to Heidi Reeder, professor of communications at Boise State University. This news doesn’t mean that upping the ante to sex actually ups the productivity level as well. In fact, you might ruin everything, especially if the sex is bad. But feel free to find the flirt in you and use it to get ahead.

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Barack Obama, the female vote, and why this matters at work

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Did you see the rally for Obama in Los Angeles last Sunday? It rocked my world: Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and California First Lady Maria Shriver talking to a packed stadium at UCLA. (Watch the video here.)

For one thing, Michelle Obama is a great speaker in her own right and she is teaching us how to talk about race and women in new ways that only a non-candidate could do. But also, Maria Shriver made an unscheduled appearance to endorse Barack Obama even though her husband, Governor Schwarzenegger, had just endorsed John McCain.

It’s a great picture of how much power women have—women who are so confident in their power that they know they can throw it behind a man to get what they want out of the world.

Some of my harshest critics say that I’m “bad for feminism.” They say I give bad advice to women because I don’t see work as a place for women to fight against men to get equality.

Indeed, I generally see work as a place where women have equal footing with men. And personally, I see work as a place where men have mentored me the whole way. I would be nowhere without all the men who have helped me.

Sure, I know I’m still at a disadvantage because I’m a woman in the workplace. I was reminded of it just the other day when my business partner Ryan and I met with a potential investor. The guy passed on girl-related small-talk and spent twenty minutes with Ryan talking football.

And the same is true for black people in this country. Obama’s success doesn’t mean that things are suddenly great for black people everywhere. But Obama’s success suggests that we can stop requiring everyone to divide everything by black and white.

And that makes me also think we can stop dividing things by men and women. I don’t need to vote for Hilary Clinton to show that I support women. I support women by looking ahead to the next generation. My generation—which is Obama’s generation—does not need to fight the women’s fight anymore. Other people did it for us.

So thank you, feminists, but we’re moving on. And to see all those women in California—those women who got their power on their own, using it to support a man—that sends chills up my spine, because I relate to that. I want to stand with the men and be on their team, and the only way to do that is to earn power myself and share it, with whoever deserves it, man or woman.

Watch for this in politics, and do it yourself at work. You can get stronger at work by breaking free of the divide that some people assume is there. We don’t owe it to the last generation to keep fighting their fights. We owe it to the last generation to thank them, and then move on.

We have our own, more relevant fights today. Like how to work to live instead of live to work, how to stop being a slave to money, and how to make time for our families. These are issues for men as much as women. We are in those fights together.

And that’s what I saw happening in Los Angeles on Sunday. I saw a centerpiece of the new fight: For change. Whoo hooo!

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