Posts tagged work
Big News at PlaceIQ
TechCrunch has a good write up on our Series B and other recent news.
“ Without credentialing or careers, online education seems aspirational and removed from the day-to-day of many people.”
Careers will come long before credentials, which are determined by boards chaired by the Universities online education seeks to disrupt.
As an investor in Code Academy, I think USV should take the lead and implement what I call “The Last Starfighter Model”: students whom earn a Code Academy degree should automatically be funneled into interviews for entry-level positions within USV companies.
An Apple commissioned study by the Analysis Group (and their department of boring names) estimates that Apple has created roughly 514,000 jobs in the USA.
Half-a-million might seem large, but when you consider the infrastructure required to deliver $500 billion in value the estimate seems conservative.
“ When an Apple employee approached Pixar for a “Mac Tools Programming position,” a Pixar employee reportedly responded: “Only problem - we can’t poach from Apple.”
Court documents from the anti-poaching collusion trial involving Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel, Intuit, and others.
I know it isn’t comparable to factory conditions, but this evidence directly conflicts with Tim Cook’s email in response to worker issues, which states: “We are focused on educating workers about their rights, so they are empowered to speak up when they see unsafe conditions or unfair treatment.”
(Via The Verge)
Technology Participation in India
Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods is an amazing dissertation on the rise of modern India.
Here’s two tech bits that really caught my eye:
In 2000 India had a grand total of just 3 million mobile phone users, the precise number that neighboring China was adding to its subscriber base every month. By the end of 2005, India was adding 2.5 million users a month and had exceeded a total base of 100 million.
And yet:
Less than 10 percent of India’s dauntingly large labor force is employed in the formal economy, which Indians call the “organized sector.” That means that fewer than 40 million people, out of a total of 470 million workers, have job security in any meaningful sense. It means that only about 35 million Indians pay any kind of income tax, a low proportion by the standards of other developing countries.
This leaves just 14 million people working in the private “organized” sector. Of these, fewer than 1 million—that is, less than a quarter of 1 percent of India’s total pool of labor—are employed in information technology, software, back-office processing, and call centers. Software is clearly helping to transform India’s self-confidence and the health of its balance of payments situation with the rest of the world. But India’s IT sector is not, and is never likely to be, an answer to the hopes of the majority of India’s job-hungry masses.
Thinking about China or India requires wrapping your mind around an entirely different type of scale.
