Open-plan offices are less productive
In a literature review of studies on open-plan offices, researchers from Virginia State University and North Carolina State University found evidence to suggest that they’re linked to lower productivity. Scanning work from the Journal of Human Ecology, Academy of Management Journal and Administrative Science Quarterly, Tonya Smith-Jackson and Katherine Klein identified reduced motivation, decreased job satisfaction and lower perceived privacy as factors negatively affecting productivity in open-plan environments. Similar to Mak and Lui findings, the resounding message in the research is that overhearing conversations in the office is very intrusive and distracting for workers.

Do you work in an open-plan office? Would you be better off in a cubicle? Quartz explains why open-plan offices make us less productive (and also more likely to get sick). Personally, I like the open-plan office (as long as there is a room for people to make phone calls/conduct interviews).

Photo: Jaysin Trevino

I realized that if I was ever going to come out of my depression, I needed to get real work. Also, more pressingly, I had nearly burned through my entire savings account while waiting for inspiration to hit.

I read a newspaper article about young people who move to SF for money-making start-up jobs. I began looking for a start-up gig of my own.

I told everyone before they even asked that working in tech had been my dream all along. In truth, my only knowledge of Internet culture was based on what I saw in 40 Days and 40 Nights in high school.

Our pal Rebecca Pederson has a lovely essay up at The Bold Italic, an online magazine based in San Francisco. It’s about making career goals in college, discovering that things don’t go exactly as planned after you graduate, and then figuring out what to do about it next. We’ve been there!

• First paycheck
• First and second paycheck
• 10% of every paycheck
• 20%?
• Dinner. Nice dinner. During which you look into eyes and say, “thank you for job”
• Deli flowers, plastic torn off so it looks like you just picked them from a field
• Flowers you actually picked from a field
• Complex contract promising percentage of earnings over time with clauses in event of IPO
• 1 round of drinks every time you hang out (“to you, getting me a job”)
• Daily updates on how happy you are about job
• Heartfelt handwritten letter thanking them for job
• Promise never to complain about job for duration of job
• You have to get them a job

There’s a lot of buzz about LinkedIn these days (even here on The Billfold)—but for all the buzz, it seems like most people still don’t really understand how or why to use it.

I think that’s because for a long time, a lot of us pictured LinkedIn as a dusty old social network for pinstripe-suit-wearing, briefcase-carrying, stuffy businessman types, and it was a place we simply did not need to be. And that was fine. But now suddenly, it turns out LinkedIn is important and is a place we need to be, and we still don’t know how to use it.

It’s like finding out senior year that all those extracurriculars everyone else was doing in high school actually matter for getting into college, and you wonder if you’re the only one who didn’t know how important that was.

Or at least, that’s how I felt when I found out LinkedIn was important.

In my former life as a Girl Friday to more than one executive in the Seattle tech startup scene, I put together my fair share of impressive LinkedIn profiles. It was only then that I learned how important LinkedIn is to grownup careers, especially in technology and startups, but in most other fields too. Here were people who were making well over $100,000 a year, wanting their assistant to spend time updating their LinkedIn profiles, because it really mattered that they were good.

It mattered not just because these folks got the bulk of their recruiting offers and job candidates via LinkedIn, but because it’s the place where a huge percentage of people went first to learn more about them. When you meet someone at a conference, you might go to their Twitter, and you might go to their blog, but you might also go to their LinkedIn page. And if they don’t have one? Well, hmm, that might be weird.

So now we know that LinkedIn matters. Now, how do you make a LinkedIn profile that doesn’t suck? A profile that’s not just a copy of your resume, but which also tells recruiters from your dream company with absolute certainty that YES they MUST contact you TODAY about that open position?

One word: storytelling.

The one thing that makes LinkedIn better than a resume is that you can target it to the next thing you want to do in your career, make it dynamic, and passively share it in public for any recruiter to find. When you create a profile, you can fill in as much or as little as you want, and you can target the information you include to draw the eye of recruiters and business contacts from the industries that you want to notice you.

When you include past work history, don’t just do the bullet-point list from your resume. Write complete sentences, and tell the story of the best thing you did at each job. Share what achievements you had and how important your very special knowledge was to the success of every project you were on. Explain how this work sparked your interest in the next step you want to take. In most industries, a conversational tone on LinkedIn is welcome and appreciated. Just be a real person talking about your career.

You can also include a summary at the top of your LinkedIn page, which you can basically turn into a not-so-subtle call for recruiters. LinkedIn isn’t for the timid; it’s for networkers and go-getters, so go ahead and say in the summary at the top of your page that you’re looking for new roles (if you are) in whichever industry, company, continent you’re interested in working in/at/on next.

If you’re not looking to be recruited at the moment, you can still organize your profile to interest your professional contacts who will be looking you up on LinkedIn. Talk about what’s exciting you most in your industry by updating your feed (did you know you could do that? It’s like the Facebook newsfeed) with interesting news stories or updates from your blog. Add Projects to the Work History section of your profile to bulk up your description of your role. Projects let you go into deeper detail, and you can even tag the specific people you worked with.

And freelancers: Don’t think that just because you don’t work in an office you’re off the hook. Quite the opposite. Potential clients are Googling you all the time, and want to find your professional presence online. You can link to your website, your best client work, and your portfolio (if you have one) easily all in one place.

Oh, and you should have a photo on your LinkedIn page. You don’t have to be wearing a suit or closing a big deal in the photo, but you do need to have your face on your page. Like any other social network, profiles with no pictures just read as creepy.

The whole point is to use LinkedIn as your digital stand-in at the 24-hour networking event called the Internet. You’re projecting your best professional self, and you’re telling a story about where you’ve been and where you’re going. It’s not phony; it’s aspirational.

And if you fancy yourself a grownup with a grownup job (or aspire to have one someday), it’s worth testing the waters and making a LinkedIn profile that tells your story.

Kate Stull learned more than she ever wanted to know about LinkedIn by creating a site called Recruiting Hacks. Her LinkedIn profile today is…fine.

MARY HIGGINS CLARK
Back in 1966, the young romance author was trying to sell a story she called “Journey Back to Love.” It didn’t go well, however; her submission to Redbook came back with a rejection from the editors, stating “We found the heroine as boring as her husband had.” Ouch! The piece was eventually run as a two-part serial in an English magazine, and Mary Higgins Clark currently boasts forty-two bestselling novels.

Mental Floss has a list of best-selling authors and their experiences with rejection. I remember being rejected from a paid internship I really wanted when I was a fresh-faced graduate. You get used to seeing rejections when you’re young and starting out, but this one particularly hurt because I had interviewed with four of the senior editors in the office, and had my hopes up. Years later, the same company contacted me and offered me a staff job, which I turned down because I was already happy with what I was doing. Rejection is not the end of the world, though it can feel like it at the time.

Susan Adams at Forbes thinks that high school students should make LinkedIn profiles because it will help them get jobs and will professionalize their online presence. She makes some compelling points, kind of. I mean, LinkedIn SEEMS like a great idea! But in the Real World: I have never felt anything positive when someone has tried to connect with me on LinkedIn and I don’t like spending any time on that site and I would never recommend anyone make an account, because, why would you invite that into your life? Connect ye olde fashioned way, kiddos. Write an email. Send a DM.

He placed ads in local media outlets and inquired at area gemology programs, but after several weeks had failed to find any viable candidates. Then he went on LinkedIn and typed “gemologist or jewelry appraiser Toronto” into the search bar. Within an hour of reading the profiles that appeared in the search results, he had four candidates, one of whom he hired a week later. “I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner,” he said. “It should have been obvious.”

LinkedIn is increasingly becoming a go-to resource for employers looking to hire workers in specific fields. Have you been contacted by headhunters on LinkedIn? I’ve been contacted by someone who asked me if I was interested in working at a hedge fund, and also by Google to work as an editor in their “offers” division (their Groupon-like program). I declined both.

Photo: Steve Parker

When you read this offer, please picture Ms. Leesa Kugel as she is—a television producer who always chews gum, probably even in her sleep, and engages in verbal up-speak. All names have been changed to protect the guilty and, yes, this was an actual job offer.

Re: PAID WRITING GIG
On Mon, April 21, 2013 at 2:24 PM, <kugel@embryo.com> wrote:

Dear Katy,

Hi! My producing partner Cole Jeffries specifically recommended you, so you should be ultra flattered! Our production company EMBRYO just acquired a project that we think would be PURRRFECT for your voice. It’s… young. It’s hip. It’s really zeitgeisty.

We’ve had a T-O-N of interest, but we want YOU to make it your own and have fun with writing it. Let me know if you’re interested. Paying, duh.

Yers,

Leesa Kugel

 

 
On Tues, April 22nd, 2013 at 10:44 AM, Catie Lazarus <underemployedwriter@me.com> wrote:

Dear Leesa,

Thanks for contacting me. I’m not quite sure what the project is exactly, so it’s hard to say whether it’s the right fit.

Catie Lazarus
 

 
On Tues, April 22nd, 2013 at 10:47 AM, <kugel@embryo.com> wrote:

Katy!

TV series, obviously, there will be a web component. But we’d love you to pen the pilot script. It’s called…. SLAVES. Fun! (Right?!!!)

We know that as the writerly creative, you’ll want to own it and fill in the small stuff, like plot holes and story lining. We’d love you to start concepting, so happy to discuss payment.
Leesa
 

 
On Tues, April 21, 2013 at 11:04 AM, Catie Lazarus <underemployedwriter@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Leesa,

If I knew how to make slavery funny, I’d be a millionaire or an asshole.

Catie
 

 
On Tues, April 22nd, 2013 at 10:47 AM, <kugel@embryo.com> wrote:

Catty,

Just to clarify, nobody is trying to make slavery funny per se. LOL! We just feel like the enslavement of people for the extractment of comedy is very zeitgeisty right now. We’re not talking about sad slaves. Or poor slaves (not “black” slaves.) White slaves. Like Hot Young Slaves or Slaves of Beverly Hills kinda thang.

Let me know if that helps and if you want to try and take a stab at it.

Thx.

Leesa

PS Sucks I know, but you’ll want to avoid words like asshole.
 

 
Epilogue:

Despite how competitive TV pilot staffing season is, Catie Lazarus passed on this singular opportunity. Please contact Leesa at kugel@embryo.com if you have no moral compass.

Catie Lazarus is a writer and comedian. She has contributed drivel to The Daily Beast, Slate, Cosmo, Bust, Gawker, and edited the “Kvetch Section” for Heeb Magazine. She also hosts the podcast Employee of the Month, which is taped live monthly at Upright Citizens Brigade Theater.

Hannah Friedman is a television writer in Los Angeles. She enjoys puppies and stiff cappuccino foam.

Photo: Sevan Sekhon

Chanel Dubofsky: So, Sarah Seltzer. I’d like to talk about professional jealousy. Do you experience this? If not, this will be a short conversation.

Sarah Seltzer: Haha. Yes, everyone has this problem, right? Particularly in our Facebook age. It is sometimes potent for me because I have a limb in different professions. I envy people who are totally devoted to one subject, because they can hone a “brand” and be known in a shorthand way, like “person X, he is a civil liberties activist.” Sometimes I feel like I’m all over the place, so no brand for me. What about you?

CD: I am constantly professionally jealous, even though I theoretically know that numerous people can do the same kind of work. Everyone has a unique perspective, and someone else’s work doesn’t take away from what I’m doing. But I don’t always remember that, and I’m not proud. How do you deal with it?

SS: Well this is what I tell myself when I feel the prick of envy: you forget that everyone doesn’t see these invisible hierarchies and networks that you do.

Especially when you live somewhere like New York, which is a media and publishing and finance and theater and legal hub. People are focused on their own industries! Once at a party when some new acquaintances found out I had a part time job, freelanced and was getting an MFA, they were like “your life is awesome.” And was like “why would you say that? I can’t append a two-word tagline to my name!” And then I considered it and I felt SO VALIDATED because I’ve worked hard to craft a meaningful existence and that’s not easily measurable, not the way being a darling of a specific industry is.

CD: Yes it is good to remember that, no matter how jealous you are of others, it is very likely there is someone who is jealous of you. We may be always thinking how much better we could be doing, but not everyone sees it that way. I am, for example, mostly professional jealous of people who are making their entire living writing because, let’s be real, I am only interested in doing that. But that I’m making any money from writing is also something to be proud of.

SS: Dreams are important, but rent is too, and not feeling dependent is very, very important, at least to me.

CD: Yes! There’s this idea that there’s a way that your career has to look, and I’m constantly having to remind myself that I am the boss of me. I decide how it looks. And people tend to see freelancing as really scary, so, you know, we are actually brave.

SS: We are! I am working 24 hours a week in an office now and it’s great. BUT my years of being a free agent were awesome. I could run out and cover a protest if I wanted. I could take my work outdoors and lie on the grass. That freedom, for me, has a value that has to be weighed against money and respect. That’s a frequent balancing act we face as writers, isn’t it? Do you have a rule about working for free?

CD: My rule about working for free is that if I’m not doing something for money, I have to be doing it to expand my audience or because it’s fun. I am not allowed to do free things because I feel flattered to have been asked (I have to keep telling myself this). What about you?

SS: If it’s short and gives me pleasure and a reputation or resume booster, I’ll do it. If it’s really eating into my paid writing time which is now limited, I won’t.

CD: It took me a while to get to the point where I acknowledged that writing for free had advantages that I could talk about. I didn’t want to admit that I did it for a while. There is such a stigma about money and respect, and I felt like admitting I didn’t get paid also meant admitting my work wasn’t worthy of respect. I believe in negotiation, and asking for money, particularly for women, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that (often) not being able to pay people has a larger context based on ideas of what’s valuable. I write about gender and feminism, but that space on the internet is generally non paying. (There are exceptions, of course.)

SS: What triggers your jealousy? I get jealous of people who don’t have outward doubt. I get hamstrung asking myself, “Shouldn’t I be helping save the world instead of advancing myself? Why am I writing a meandering piece about a novel when I should be exposing corruption? And of course what does it matter, death is coming for us all so I should go lie in the grass.” (I like lying in the grass). And then I see people out there steadily doing their thing and I want to say, “Can I lend you these existential saddlebags for a bit?”

CD: Yeah, people who front really well get to me. People with seemingly unshakeable confidence in their work and in general. I have to remind myself that they have days when they’re unsure of themselves, too. (Right?) Although, I also think you kind of have to be able to project that kind of confidence even if you don’t have it. Faking it until you make it is a thing.

SS: It is. That is sometimes harder for women. We have “imposter syndrome” as they say.

CD: Do you have any tricks or mantras?

SS: My partner introduced me to a trick that works for me to ward off envy: Asking, “Would you change places with person x” who has had some notable triumph? The answer is always no, no matter the triumph.

Also Lawrence Selden from the House of Mirth, says, “My idea of success is personal freedom. To keep a kind of republic of the spirit, that’s what I call success.” This is both Selden’s virtue and fatal flaw, but it was my high school yearbook quote and remains my mantra. For instance, I refused to take any unpaid internships, which would likely have helped me a lot career-wise. And yet here I am. I get paid—often—to write! I am so fucking lucky, and I recognize that.

CD: We are lucky! I feel lucky that I don’t have a kid or anyone to take care of, so I can take some risks and not get a “real job” just because that’s what “normal” people do, that’s how people are supposed to function, they go to an office every day.

SS: Yes! An anarcho-socialist direct democracy of the spirit is extreme. But a kingdom that rules over the spirit is brutal. In the middle there’s a nice republic where you balance the need to eat with the need to soar.

CD: I don’t think I have a mantra? I should probably get one? Other than “Write like a motherfucker,” which is borrowed from Cheryl Strayed. Although, that is a really good one and gets me through and over pretty often. Speaking of which, I am trying to rid myself of this idea of scarcity-that if I share, there’s less for me. That’s not true!

SS: That’s why I try to be generous and spread good karma and Tweet-boost other people. And then I get mad if they don’t return the favor. But it’s not a transaction.

CD: Yes! But with capitalism, everything is a transaction! Maybe a big part of overcoming the professional jealousy is learning how to rethink things. Especially in terms of what we do, writing about labor and feminism and the like. I don’t want to have bought into that crap, that there is only one way to be good at what you do,that there’s a prescribed path, a system. I love writing so much that I will do it no matter what, and that means breaking a lot of rules. And inventing some.

SS: The green-eyed monster lives in all of us! It’s part of being human. But the only thing you can control is yourself. I tell myself, “sit down and do the best job you can do.” On a good day, that works. On a bad day, well, there’s always schadenfreude—other people are bound to fail once in a while, aren’t they?

Chanel Dubofsky and Sarah Seltzer live in New York.

Our pals at Planet Money asked a bunch of economists to give some graduation advice to the batch of college graduates who will be applying for jobs and entering the workforce soon. Much of the advice is pretty solid. Justin Wolfers:

This pattern of hopping between jobs while young, before settling down, is in remarkably common. And it makes sense, too. Romantic success never follows from trying to improve your partner; it follows from moving on and finding a better match. The same is true in the world of work.

Some other advice I’m too sure about. Kenneth French: “And if things don’t turn out so well, you can always change jobs or, better yet, go to business school.” Tim Harford: “A year’s delay would do no harm—might I suggest signing up for a master’s degree?”

As we’ve been cautioned, graduate school should be what people choose after careful consideration—especially if it results in taking on student loans. Godspeed Class of 2013!

Photo: COD newsroom