What We’re Reading
A few good pieces the Collab team came across this week …
Diversity
More than a dozen companies, including Google, Apple and IBM, are no longer requiring applicants to have college degrees.
Many jobs have historically required employees to hold college degrees even if they are not relevant or needed. This is connected to an effort to improve diversity and make it easier for those that attend coding boot camps or pursue other non-traditional college paths to be hired.
Time off
Technology giants in the United States offer some of the country’s most generous employee benefits, but the workers who mow the lawns or serve lunch in the company cafeteria — jobs that are often staffed by outside firms — tend to get far smaller packages.
Microsoft announced a new policy Thursday that it hopes will shrink that gap, pledging it will ink contracts only with service providers who give their employees 12 weeks of paid family leave.
Rise of the independents
Losses
Kim Hyon-jeong, a 45-year-old teacher and mother of one who lives on the outskirts of Seoul, said she put about 100 million won, or $90,000, into cryptocurrencies last fall. She drew on savings, an insurance policy and a $25,000 loan. Her investments are now down about 90 percent.
“I thought that cryptocurrencies would be the one and only breakthrough for ordinary hardworking people like us,” she said. “I thought my family and I could escape hardship and live more comfortably, but it turned out to be the other way around.”
Playing God
Volkswagen is reversing course on the use of controversial weather-altering technology at a major Mexican car plant after local farmers complained that the system caused drought by preventing rainfall. The German carmaker had installed hail cannons, which fire shockwaves into the atmosphere, at its Puebla site to prevent the formation of ice stones that had been damaging finished vehicles parked outside its facility. But local farmers said the devices, which were set to fire automatically under certain weather conditions, caused a drought during the months that should have been Mexico’s rainy season.
Benefits
It’s good to be a credit card holder:
Have a good weekend.