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Did you catch the reference?
The Junior bits were choice. He was on Countdown tonight. Busyness vs. Burst -- and change at a snail's pace in attitudes toward telecommuting I don't know if this is what Anne's book is going to be about, but it should be. Good insightful stuff about work styles that every "burst" worker believes deep down. But what about the boss? I think attitudes about "face time" are changing, but so slow as to be almost imperceptible. I haven't seen all that much movement, at least in the Midwest, since I did a survey on manager attitudes toward telecommuting for Home Office Computing magazine in the early 90s. I also used to write some about work-at-home programs for a subscription HR newsletter I edited a couple different times in the 80s and 90s. The bigger companies talk a good openminded game (about a lot of workforce issues) when you speak to the more theoretical senior HR types. Some have cultural anthropologists on staff and all kinds of cool stuff. Then you drop down to first line supervisors, and they're never as liberal about staff control issues, and I'm not sure they're ever encouraged to become less controlling, not even in the most forward-looking organizations. It's in a company's interest to appear to embrace new work styles. Maybe less traditional tech, service and virtual companies making telecommuting work will show the way to the old-style old-values firms. I hope so. Women in tech There's a post and odd comment thread on Tim O'Reilly's blog about women in computer science. I asked my older son, who's a junior at Pace University in CS, about the composition of his classes. He doesn't have numbers but said he thinks there are no more than 20% females in any of his classes and in some classes there are none at all. I'm curious which classes have none; I'll have to find out. There's a separate IS sequence at his school that he says attracts more women. |
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