This is a good blog post from BranchOut.
Edwin Miraflor
Through the years I've taken down notes from experience and from various sources. I had notes at one time going back to 1997. While I do feel that it's time to update my guide, I also feel that much of it is pertinent today. If you are actively interviewing, give it a read. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to me.
Here's a link to my Interview Strategies.
Edwin Miraflor
42,000,000 ++ views on Youtube. I've never watched it before and it just has a way of making you smile. It's only a few minutes - Watch it here.
Edwin Miraflor
Interesting article by Jessica Stillman of Inc - Read it here.
I don't know about you but I don't remeber the last time I worked less than 50 or even 60 hours a week. This is a good sanity check for us workaholics. We live life once, let's make sure we learn to enjoy what we work so hard for.
For many in the entrepreneurship game, long hours are a badge of honor. Starting a business is tough, so all those late nights show how determined, hard working and serious about making your business work you are, right?
Wrong. According to a handful of studies, consistently clocking over 40 hours a week just makes you unproductive (and very, very tired).
That's bad news for most workers, who typically put in at least 55 hours a week, recently wrote Sara Robinson at Salon. Robinson's lengthy, but fascinating, article traces the origins of the idea of the 40-hour week and its downfall and is well worth a read in full. But the essential nugget of wisdom from her article is that working long hours for long periods is not only useless — it's actually harmful. She wrote: "The most essential thing to know about the 40-hour work-week is that, while it was the unions that pushed it, business leaders ultimately went along with it because their own data convinced them this was a solid, hard-nosed business decision…."
Evan Robinson, a software engineer with a long interest in programmer productivity (full disclosure: our shared last name is not a coincidence) summarized this history in a white paper he wrote for the International Game Developers’ Association in 2005. The original paper contains a wealth of links to studies conducted by businesses, universities, industry associations and the military that supported early-20th-century leaders as they embraced the short week. 'Throughout the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, these studies were apparently conducted by the hundreds,' writes Robinson; 'and by the 1960s, the benefits of the 40-hour week were accepted almost beyond question in corporate America. In 1962, the Chamber of Commerce even published a pamphlet extolling the productivity gains of reduced hours.'
What these studies showed, over and over, was that industrial workers have eight good, reliable hours a day in them. On average, you get no more widgets out of a 10-hour day than you do out of an eight-hour day.
Robinson does acknowledge that working overtime isn't always a bad idea. "Research by the Business Roundtable in the 1980s found that you could get short-term gains by going to 60- or 70-hour weeks very briefly — for example, pushing extra hard for a few weeks to meet a critical production deadline," she wrote. But Robinson stressed that "increasing a team’s hours in the office by 50 percent (from 40 to 60 hours) does not result in 50 percent more output...In fact, the numbers may typically be something closer to 25-30 percent more work in 50 percent more time."
The clear takeaway here is to stop staying at the office so late, but getting yourself to actually go home on time may be more difficult psychologically than you imagine.
As author Laura Vanderkam has pointed out, for many of us, there's actually a pretty strong correlation between how busy we are and how important we feel. "We live in a competitive society, and so by lamenting our overwork and sleep deprivation — even if that requires workweek inflation and claiming our worst nights are typical — we show that we are dedicated to our jobs and our families," she wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal.
Long hours, in other words, are often more about proving something to ourselves than actually getting stuff done.
Edwin Miraflor
Good article by Vivian Giang of Business Insider - Read the article here.
Edwin Miraflor
August Capital partner Howard Hartenbaum, who was an early investor in Skype, tells us what entrepreneurs should do to prepare for a meeting with him:
- Have a vision of how the future is going to be better than it is today
- State a problem
- State the solution for that problem and how the technology solves that problem
- Know what the market opportunity is
- Have a good team
- Know how much money you need.
Edwin Miraflor
Here's a link to the original article from Business Insider.
There's no way around it. If you want to snag a great job at a hot tech company, you have to be on LinkedIn. But what exactly inspires these companies to call you? How should you spiff up your LinkedIn profile to get their attention?
That's what we asked head hiring honchos at six hot tech companies:
- Online game maker Zynga.
- The company that practically invented cloud computing and is No. 27 on Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For: Salesforce.
- Mozilla, the non-profit that makes one of the most popular free open-source applications of all time, Firefox.
- The company that revolutionized books, retail and the software industry; Amazon.
- The company that proved open-source and Linux can be big business; RedHat.
- And the ultimate know-er of LinkedIn's secrets ... LinkedIn.
They gave us some surprising insight into how they judge prospective employees by their profiles, including
... how to fill out your profile
... what they really think about recommendations
... words NOT to use
... how they read between the lines to make judgments about you.
Put up a big, fat profile
LJ Brock, Red Hat's vice president of global talent acquisition and infrastructure
Red Hat. Used by permission.
Nearly all the companies agreed that a full profile was, for the most part, the way to go. They wanted the usual things ... a good work history, no large gaps of time left unexplained.
But what they really want is to get a sense of you and see that you have "passion" for your career choice.
"We look for candidates with robust profiles that reflect depth and genuine passion for their functional area," explained LJ Brock, Red Hat's vice president of global talent acquisition and infrastructure.
One indication of passion is the list of LinkedIn groups you've joined and how active you are in them, Brock says.
Another is the words you use to talk about yourself and your career.
"An authentic voice in your profile and summary goes a long way. Your personality is unique and should come through clearly and grab our attention," says Brendan Browne, Director of Global Talent Acquisition at LinkedIn.
"A LinkedIn profile is a blank sheet for you to get creative with, and it’s easy for your profile to come across as flat if you’re simply pasting your curriculum vitae," he says.
But PUH-LEASE avoid these words
Woodson Martin, senior vice president of recruiting, for Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com. Used by permission.
A beefy profile might be good, but not if it's filled with buzzwords. Overused words can make you look like an airhead.
If you "use tons of irrelevant buzz words, that makes you look like a light and fluffy person. I'm going to think that if I hire you, you're going to produce work that is light and fluffy and not very useful," explains Woodson Martin, senior vice president of recruiting for Salesforce.com. "Substance is what it's all about."
According to LinkedIn, the following ten words were the most overused buzzwords in 2011. If you are using them, time to edit your profile.
1. Creative
2. Organizational
3. Effective
4. Extensive experience
5. Track record
6. Motivated
7. Innovative
8. Problem solving
9. Communication skills
10. Dynamic
Sometimes less is more
A light profile tells HR follks you aren't looking.
Interestingly, not every profile has to be brimming with text.
"Over the last year we have found that "skeleton" profiles, those that simply display an outline of work history, often make some of the best candidates," says Red Hat's Brock.
Those profiles sometimes indicate "top performers" who are so happy at their current companies that they aren't pounding the pavement looking for work, he explains.
"These are exactly the people we want to connect with and so we have begun to actively target these candidates as part of our recruiting strategy," Brock says.
Beyond words, think keywords
Load your profile up with skills but research them first
LinkeIn
LinkedIn has a beta application it calls "Skills." Skills can act as keywords that gets your profile to surface when the company is searching for prospects.
You can load up your LinkedIn profile with as many as 50 skills, but you should first research which skills are hot keywords on LinkedIn (more people adding them) and which are losing favor. Click on the Skills page (under the More menu) to get started.
But skills-as-keywords are not enough. Your profile needs to detail how you acquired these skills and what projects you used them on.
"Providing detail about the relevant skills you use to get your job done is one thing, including context on how you use them is another. Take that extra step and be descriptive and explanatory" explains Colleen McCreary, Zynga's Chief People Officer.
Kristin Kalscheur, a senior recruiter for Amazon, agrees. "Job seekers should ensure that their profiles are keyword-optimized." For instance, she says, software developers should name the specific programming languages they use. Product managers should provide details of "products you’ve built or overhauled, what role you played in the overall strategy and implementation, and how the products you created have improved customer satisfaction."
Backscratching recommendations can be spotted a mile away
Mozilla crew circa 2007
Everyone agreed that recommendations are important, but not in the way you might think.
"Do recommendations matter? They do, but as with all good things, should be added in moderation," warns Bret Reckard, head of recruiting for Mozilla. "Too many recommendations will usually turn me away from a profile faster than zero. You could be awesome, or you could be trying too hard."
"It’s easy to ask a friend to write you a recommendation," says LinkedIn's Browne. "It’s much more meaningful if they come from executives, managers and clients or suppliers. ‘Scratch my back’ recommendations are easy to spot and don’t carry as much weight,"
Timing is also important, says Salesforce.com's Martin. A whole bunch of new ones indicates you are actively searching. "It is very unlikely you recently solicited a ton of recommendations and are not looking for a job." That sends a signal that you want to hear from hiring companies.
The ugly truth about photos
Colleen McCreary Zynga's Chief People Officer
Zynga. Used by permission.
Hiring professionals were split as to how much the photo mattered.
The photo matters "not at all. We hire people for what they can do to make Mozilla better, not for what they add/detract from the corporate phone-directory," says Reckard.
Others said photos can't help but leave an impression. "LinkedIn is a great place to connect employers and future employees. Recruiters use it day in and day out. So be mindful what you use to represent yourself," warns Zynga's McCreary.
While photos can be fun (you can wear your favorite team's baseball cap), beware they don't show poor taste (an offbeat cartoon character).
Show some social genius
All tech companies want you to know your way around social media. Syncing your LinkedIn status with your Twitter stream is a good start, but only if the content is relevant to your career.
"When your LinkedIn profile has other social handles in it, it lets us know who you are on Twitter or Facebook," says Salesforce's Martin. "If it's there, it is definitely something we'll pay attention to."
"Interesting, insightful and sometimes unusual status updates are always a very good indication that someone is passionate about their field," says LinkedIn's Browne.
One time LinkedIn's CEO noticed a LinkedIn user "sharing some insightful feedback" on a beta product, recounts Browne. HR got in touch with person and heard more great ideas. LinkedIn eventually hired the person.
Zynga's McCreary adds: "It’s a bonus if you’re funny, but it’s usually not part of the job description."
It's not how many you know but who you know
Brendan Browne, Director of Global Talent Acquisition at LinkedIn
LinkedIn. Used by permission.
The number of connections in your network matters less than who those connections are.
Salesforce.com uses LinkedIn's recommendation engine to sift through the networks of all the company's employees looking for matches for job openings, says Martin. If your profile is full of the right keywords, you could bubble up from the crowd just by knowing an employee.
"Make meaningful connections," says LinkedIn's Browne. "If we see that someone in a relatively junior role is well connected to influential senior talent, that’s a great indication that they’re potentially a rising star."
Adds Mozilla's Reckard, "Large numbers of connections aren't as important as the quality of the connections. If I know and respect someone you know, it's a definite plus for you as a potential employee."
Be a mensch
Hiring pros are also looking to see what kind of person you are beyond work. Engaging in the conversation on the LinkedIn site about topics of personal interest can be a major plus.
"I like to see when candidates link to a personal website/blog from their profile. It's a great place to find a more well-rounded view of how a candidate will fit into our unique culture," says Mozilla's Reckard.
"Mozilla looks for people with strong motivations to contribute to society and these projects don't always make their way onto a traditional resume. LinkedIn is a perfect place to add this detail without sacrificing space normally used for work history," he explains.
LinkedIn's Browne agrees. "Well-rounded profiles including interests and even volunteer fields help give us a fuller picture of you as a person. It is great to see that someone is thoughtful of balancing their personal and professional life."
LinkedIn actually did some research which showed that 41 percent of hiring professionals "consider volunteer work equally as valuable as paid work experience when making recruitment decisions," Browne adds.
Edwin Miraflor
Big data is opening up new avenues of understanding and activity for companies and the people they serve. At the highest level, this movement provides a significant competitive advantage for organizations willing to invest in developing sound and actionable big data strategies.
The evolution of big data is becoming a key utility that can be leveraged as a resource both for profit and risk mitigation. On the profit side of the ledger, businesses can compile, analyze, manage, and leverage huge amounts of data that enable them to understand and serve the needs of their clients in new ways.
On the risk mitigation side, big data can be deployed to show patterns and irregularities that reveal — and even prevent — fraud and other security threats.
The stakes are high. Organizations that fail to develop effective big data strategies run the risk of being overrun by competitors who beat them to the punch, and of making themselves and their customers vulnerable to increasingly sophisticated existential cyber-attacks from predators in the market.
The Hadoop Phenomenon: Open source isn’t free
The big data movement is being driven by Hadoop, an open-source platform developed by a team of Yahoo developers and named after the stuffed elephant of co-creator Doug Cutting’s son. A host of prominent organizations, led by household names such as Walmart, Amazon, and Facebook, and a growing number of financial institutions are deploying Hadoop for a wide range of applications.
While Hadoop is an open-source platform, the process of developing and deploying it is far from free. Hadoop’s sheer complexity makes it necessary to build and maintain a significant infrastructure. Hadoop’s widespread and growing resonance in the marketplace is based on the genuine advantages the platform provides: the market’s highest performance and scalability at much-reduced costs compared with other approaches. Once this Hadoop infrastructure is built, it enables the extraction of far more data and information than can be obtained using Oracle infrastructure or other competing solutions.
How to Hadoop: Maximizing the value of big data
There are two primary ways of engaging with Hadoop.
The first, building the capability internally, seems to hold out the promise of flexibility and control for organizations that employ it. While this has sometimes been the case for some large companies, a variety of studies indicate that even among Fortune 500 companies, less than 20 percent that began Hadoop development succeeded in deploying a solution.
The second approach entails working with a big-data, Hadoop-focused third party to develop a bespoke solution. In addition to eliminating the requirement of enormous equipment and human capital investment, this approach also enables organizations, their executives, and IT staff to focus on their core value propositions rather than being forced to become Hadoop specialists.
In addition, a number of Hadoop specialists are quickly developing deep domain expertise in big data. For example, Zettaset recently partnered with Hyve Solutions and Fusion-io to create the market’s fastest Hadoop solution, and it’s 20 to 30 times faster than anything else currently available.
In our experience, working with organizations across a wide spectrum of industry areas and sizes, we have found that the best way to develop and leverage Hadoop is to start with small but significant projects. Following this path, companies need not become Hadoop specialists to fully leverage Hadoop, or to boil the ocean hiring programmers off the street or professional services to build a huge, robust ecosystem without an endgame in sight.
With a relatively modest investment in hardware, companies can leverage a Hadoop solution across the organization. The smaller footprint maximizes server efficiency and enables small-to-medium-sized companies as well as large players to participate in the ongoing big data revolution.
Freed of the requirement to download, program, manage, secure, and write code in Hadoop, companies are able to use their resources to do what they do best: analyzing data, developing business, mitigating risk, and confronting external threats.
In a wide range of high-impact businesses (including financial institutions, social media, ecommerce, oil and gas and other utilities, and healthcare) big data represents a profoundly new way of doing business. Powered by Hadoop, big data has hit the big time, and its influence will only increase exponentially.
Edwin Miraflor
Industry analysts like to refer to 2011 as “the year the cloud arrived.” But now that it’s here, what are we going to do with it?
Vendors are tripping over themselves to bolster their product lineups with cloud-hosted software and services, while customers in the public and private sectors alike are realizing the cost saving benefit of letting someone else worry about their servers and applications. And that’s not even mentioning the burgeoning consumer cloud market, where even Apple sees ample opportunity.
Despite the hype, there’s a lot of substance to the cloud. Here are five trends that you’ll want to keep an eye on this year.
Hybrid clouds
Pop quiz: You’re an IT administrator at an insurance company, where strict internal mandates and Federal regulations alike require you to keep sensitive customer data on-premises and in your care. But you want to take advantage of affordable, scalable, externally-managed public cloud services, too.
Enter the hybrid cloud. Every vendor has their own definition of what exactly “hybrid cloud” means, but at the core, the idea is that on-premises resources and the public cloud are joined for the best of both worlds. That way, data and applications that need to stay local can do so, while those apps that can be outsourced can get many of the benefits of the public cloud. As cloud computing picks up steam in 2012, more and more businesses are going to find that they need this mixed approach to meet their security and privacy guidelines.
And vendors are ramping up to meet the challenge. On stage at CloudBeat 2011, Oracle technology product marketing VP Rick Schultz listed hybrid cloud enablement as a key priority for the recently-unveiled (and succinctly-named) Oracle Public Cloud. And speaking of CloudBeat, a survey we took at the event found that IT pros had hybrid clouds on their minds. Also, Cloud operating system Nimbula makes hybrid cloud management its specialty.
With this much momentum, it seems likely that plenty of other vendors are going to be putting the hybrid cloud model into the spotlight this year.
Consumer cloud services
Unlike hybrid clouds, this is a trend you can see every day. Chances are pretty good you already have a Dropbox or a Box account for cloud file storage and sharing. Everyone has their choice of Google Apps or Microsoft Office Web Apps for everyday document creation and editing in their browsers. Android devices can choose between Amazon Cloud Player or Google Music for MP3s on the go. And perhaps most influentially, the Apple iPhone 4S brought with it the Apple iCloud, enabling the hordes of iOS customers to keep their music libraries, bookmarks, calendars and other files in sync wherever they go.
As XKCD presciently pointed out, people are increasingly finding that all they need is a browser to get stuff done.
If you need proof that 2012 is only going to make that ball rolling, then just look at this month’s CES coverage. As usual, where Apple goes, the technology market follows, and Acer took the lid off AcerCloud, its shameless iCloud competitor. LG and Gaikai are teaming up to bring video gaming straight from the cloud into your television set. Even Mercedes-Benz is putting a cloud-connected console straight into the dashboard. And so on.
Pretty soon, there’s going to be no escaping the cloud, whether you’re at home, at the office, or even in between.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
Before CES, I would have pegged this as another enterprise-focused, behind-the-scenes kind of avenue of cloud innovation. But then OnLive, best known for streaming video games from the cloud, debuted OnLive Desktop, and opened the door for the consumer, too.
Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is an acronym that pretty much what it sounds like: Essentially, it gives you a remotely-accessible virtual desktop that simulates a computer that doesn’t (physically) exist. For businesses, the value can be immense: Rather than buy five hundred desktops, just build a VDI cloud or contract one out from a third-party provider, and a dozen people can share one computer’s worth of resources.
As an added benefit, employees can often log on from any computer that has an Internet connection and have their exact same work desktop waiting for them wherever they go. And when the size of the workforce changes, it’s easier and cheaper to provision and delete accounts than it is to buy a new machine or reformat it for a new user. Plus, in the rising “bring-your-own-device” era of IT, the ability to run any enterprise app on a tablet or smartphone is too good a bonus to pass up.
OnLive isn’t the only company that sees market potential here. Startup dinCloud kicked off 2012 by raising a cool million in seed funding for its cloud-hosted VDI service, with investors no doubt drawn by the fact that it launched with support from major players like NetApp. But that’s small potatoes next to the $70 million Goldman Sachs invested in AppSense in the early part of 2011, as it predicted that the VDI market would hit $2 billion over the next several years.
And as the Google Chromebook, the Apple iPad and other mobile devices continue to rise in popularity this year, VDI is in a good place to help make them business-worthy, since what’s under the hood matters a lot less than the strength of the network connection.
Open source and open standards
The OpenStack open source cloud platform may have started in 2010, but 2011 was the year that it really kicked into high gear. Built on community-contributed code, OpenStack aims to let any enterprise deliver its own infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform on standard hardware. OpenStack project founders Rackspace and NASA were joined by a community of over 110 other vendors, including heavyweights like HP, Dell and Citrix, as it debuted no less than three major feature releases. And while OpenStack’s leadership openly admits that there’s still a ways to go before it can compete with entrenched vendors like Microsoft and VMware in the data center on its own terms, the platform is maturing quickly and 2012 is going to see many companies build real, functional, salable cloud offerings on top of OpenStack.
But OpenStack isn’t the final word on open source in the cloud by a long shot: Apache Hadoop came out of beta earlier in January, giving companies tools to manage huge amounts of data, and the Oracle Big Data Appliance is already using it. The Open Data Center Alliance is going to continue its mission of improving and standardizing more efficient cloud facility designs. Node.js is only getting more popular for developing web applications. Even US Federal Chief Information Officer and Administrator Steven VanRoekel has publicly trumpeted the development of open standards in the cloud as a priority for his office.
And there are many more initiatives out there, besides. Vendors are moving to both open up and standardize the cloud, with an end goal of completely eradicating the concept of cloud vendor lock-in – which has stood as one of those major obstacles to cloud adoption mentioned before.
Cloud legislation
Here’s where things get a little sticky. There’s a reason Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier was originally slated to testify against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) on January 18th – though with the January 17th announcement that the debate over the controversial would be tabled for a month, Napier never wound up following through.
As a prominent cloud service provider, Rackspace stands to suffer in unforeseen ways under the act. If a customer stores infringing material in their cloud, is Rackspace liable? If so, would they be required to turn off that customer’s access with no warning? And so on, and so forth. SOPA is problematic in many ways, and 2012 is going to bring a lot of confusion before it brings answers.
Meanwhile, across the pond, European businesses are rethinking their own cloud migrations for a reason you may not expect. It turns out that any data stored with a cloud provider based in the USA is legally vulnerable to the Patriot Act, granting American authorities essentially unlimited license to potentially sift and analyze it without ever letting the customer know. Microsoft signed the EU model clauses for its Microsoft Office 365 cloud productivity suite as a way to quell fears, but several analysts have found it to be an insufficient safeguard against that kind of privacy breach.
The debate over legal issues in the cloud is only going to heat up as we find more questions and fewer answers. And it seems only a matter of time before someone somewhere introduces legislation to try to address these issues.
Edwin Miraflor
Most of the data in this blog was pulled from Business Insider, Reuters, and various news organizations. I don't know for a fact that these numbers are accurate.
We all know this but we ignore it. As a society we seem to selectively pick our battles and since there's so much love for Apple products, we just turn the other direction. On top of slave labor, child labor, hourly pay of .70 cents per hour, abhorrent living and working conditions... Apple charges top dollar and are raking in record breaking profits. As stock holders, we love the super-high profit margins of Apple, Inc.
And that's why it's disconcerting to remember that the prices of iPhones and iPads — and the super-high profit margins of Apple — are only possible because our iPhones and iPads are made with labor practices that would be illegal in the United States.
And it's also disconcerting to realize that the folks who make our iPhones and iPads not only don't have iPhones and iPads (because they can't afford them), but, in some cases, have never even seen them.
This is a complex issue. But it's also an important one. And it's only going to get more important as the world's economies continue to become more intertwined.
(And the issue obviously concerns a lot more companies than Apple. Almost all of the major electronics manufacturers make their products in China and other countries that have labor practices that would be illegal here. One difference with Apple, though, is the magnitude of the company's profit margin and profits. Apple could afford to pay its manufacturers more or hold them to higher standards and still be extremely competitive and profitable.)
Last week, PRI's "This American Life" did a special on Apple's manufacturing. The show featured (among others) the reporting of Mike Daisey, the man who does the one-man stage show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," and The NYT's Nicholas Kristof, whose wife's family is from China.
You can read a transcript of the whole show here. Here are some details:
- The Chinese city of Shenzhen is where most of our "crap" is made. 30 years ago, Shenzhen was a little village on a river. Now it's a city of 13 million people — bigger than New York.
- Foxconn, one of the companies that builds iPhones and iPads (and products for many other electronics companies), has a factory in Shenzhen that employs 430,000 people.
- There are 20 cafeterias at the Foxconn Shenzhen plant. They each serve 10,000 people.
- One Foxconn worker Mike Daisey interviewed, outside factory gates manned by guards with guns, was a 13-year old girl. She polished the glass of thousands of new iPhones a day.
- The 13-year old said Foxconn doesn't really check ages. There are on-site inspections, from time to time, but Foxconn always knows when they're happening. And before the inspectors arrive, Foxconn just replaces the young-looking workers with older ones.
- In the first two hours outside the factory gates, Daisey meets workers who say they are 14, 13, and 12 years old (along with plenty of older ones). Daisey estimates that about 5% of the workers he talked to were underage.
The dormitories.
- Daisey assumes that Apple, obsessed as it is with details, must know this. Or, if they don't, it's because they don't want to know.
- Daisey visits other Shenzhen factories, posing as a potential customer. He discovers that most of the factory floors are vast rooms filled with 20,000-30,000 workers apiece. The rooms are quiet: There's no machinery, and there's no talking allowed. When labor costs so little, there's no reason to build anything other than by hand.
- A Chinese working "hour" is 60 minutes — unlike an American "hour," which generally includes breaks for Facebook, the bathroom, a phone call, and some conversation. The official work day in China is 8 hours long, but the standard shift is 12 hours. Generally, these shifts extend to 14-16 hours, especially when there's a hot new gadget to build. While Daisey is in Shenzhen, a Foxconn worker dies after working a 34-hour shift.
- Assembly lines can only move as fast as their slowest worker, so all the workers are watched (with cameras). Most people stand.
- The workers stay in dormitories. In a 12-by-12 cement cube of a room, Daisey counts 15 beds, stacked like drawers up to the ceiling. Normal-sized Americans would not fit in them.
- Unions are illegal in China. Anyone found trying to unionize is sent to prison.
- Daisey interviews dozens of (former) workers who are secretly supporting a union. One group talked about using "hexane," an iPhone screen cleaner. Hexane evaporates faster than other screen cleaners, which allows the production line to go faster. Hexane is also a neuro-toxin. The hands of the workers who tell him about it shake uncontrollably.
- Some workers can no longer work because their hands have been destroyed by doing the same thing hundreds of thousands of times over many years (mega-carpal-tunnel). This could have been avoided if the workers had merely shifted jobs. Once the workers' hands no longer work, obviously, they're canned.
- One former worker had asked her company to pay her overtime, and when her company refused, she went to the labor board. The labor board put her on a black list that was circulated to every company in the area. The workers on the black list are branded "troublemakers" and companies won't hire them.
- One man got his hand crushed in a metal press at Foxconn. Foxconn did not give him medical attention. When the man's hand healed, it no longer worked. So they fired him. (Fortunately, the man was able to get a new job, at a wood-working plant. The hours are much better there, he says — only 70 hours a week).
- The man, by the way, made the metal casings of iPads at Foxconn. Daisey showed him his iPad. The man had never seen one before. He held it and played with it. He said it was "magic."
Importantly, Shenzhen's factories, as hellish as they are, have been a boon to the people of China. Liberal economist Paul Krugman says so. NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof says so. Kristof's wife's ancestors are from a village near Shenzhen. So he knows of what he speaks. The "grimness" of the factories, Kristof says, is actually better than the "grimness" of the rice paddies.
So, looked at that way, Apple is helping funnel money from rich American and European consumers to poor workers in China. Without Foxconn and other assembly plants, Chinese workers might still be working in rice paddies, making $50 a month instead of $250 a month (Kristof's estimates. In 2010, Reuters says, Foxconn workers were given a raise to $298 per month, or $10 a day, or less than $1 an hour). With this money, they're doing considerably better than they once were. Especially women, who had few other alternatives.
But, of course, the reason Apple assembles iPhones and iPads in China instead of America, is that assembling them here or Europe would cost much, much more — even with shipping and transportation. And it would cost much, much more because, in the United States and Europe, we have established minimum acceptable standards for the treatment and pay of workers like those who build the iPhones and iPads.
Foxconn, needless to say, doesn't come anywhere near meeting these minimum standards.
If Apple decided to build iPhones and iPads for Americans using American labor rules, two things would likely happen:
- The prices of iPhones and iPads would go up
- Apple's profit margins would go down
Neither of those things would be good for American consumers or Apple shareholders. But they might not be all that awful, either. Unlike some electronics manufacturers, Apple's profit margins are so high that they could go down a lot and still be high. And some Americans would presumably feel better about loving their iPhones and iPads if they knew that the products had been built using American labor rules.
In other words, Apple could probably afford to use American labor rules when building iPhones and iPads without destroying its business.
So it seems reasonable to ask why Apple is choosing NOT to do that.
(Not that Apple is the only company choosing to avoid American labor rules and costs, of course — almost all manufacturing companies that want to survive, let alone thrive, have to reduce production costs and standards by making their products elsewhere.)
The bottom line is that iPhones and iPads cost what they do because they are built using labor practices that would be illegal in this country — because people in this country consider those practices grossly unfair.
That's not a value judgment. It's a fact.
So, next time you pick up your iPhone or iPad, ask yourself how you feel about that.
