This just in: workers well-being is cool again | Newsletter
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Quick Hits
Boomerang employees: Companies get a second chance on talent, luring them back with culture and benefits.
Automating busy work: Employees headed back to the office have new options to minimize the tedium with AI.
Pond hopping: American crypto investors pick up their toys and head to London.
Come (back) together: The Beatles record a final record using John Lennon's voice via an AI assist.
Plag-AI-rism: New tool detects ChatGPT-generated academic text with near perfect accuracy.
AI in the clouds: Salesforce amasses $500M generative AI investment war chest, unveils AI cloud offering.
Kitchen’s closed: Robotic pizza delivery startup Zume shut down despite $400M+ in VC funding.
Remote reversals
The collective groan is rising among tech workers being ushered back to the office. Google, Lyft, Meta, and Salesforce are among the Big Tech companies calling people back to their cubicles after several years of lax policies. “Humans are deeply social: we live longer and are happier when we connect with one another,” Lyft CEO David Risher said, after laying off 1k people and bringing the rest back in the office 3 days a week.
Last month, an estimated 600k U.S. workers faced newly effective return-to-office mandates—and the tech industry accounted for about a third of them. Some companies try to entice workers back with incentives; others aren’t asking. “You can’t possibly get everything done working three days a week in the office and two days remotely,” Martha Stewart said.
Here’s the rub: The majority of U.S. workers want to stay remote.
Want to love work? Find purpose
The biggest determining factor of job satisfaction has nothing to do with your boss or paycheck. It boils down to purpose.
People who felt their work was useful and valuable reported higher levels of happiness, according to a study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Feeling appreciated by coworkers also turned out to be a big factor.
Bosses care about employee happiness because, as an NIH study confirms, happier employees tend to be more productive.
ChatGPT’s bedside manners
Doctors are using ChatGPT to improve their bedside manner. They use AI to find words to break bad news to patients, to show empathy, and to simplify medical jargon. “I wish I would have had this when I was in training,” one doctor told The New York Times. “I have never seen or had a coach like this.”
In one survey, 85 percent of patients reported that a doctor’s compassion was more important than waiting time or cost. In another survey, nearly three-quarters of respondents said they had gone to doctors who were not compassionate. And a study of doctors’ conversations with the families of dying patients found that many were not empathetic.
Oracle’s $2B AI gift
Companies like Mosaic ML, Adept AI, and Cohere, are making Oracle stock holders very happy these days. The company claims that over $2B in cloud capacity has recently been contracted by companies doing large language model development.
Overcoming imposter syndrome
Are you a victim of imposter syndrome at a tech startup? You’re not alone. Symptoms include being talked over in meetings; your ideas being disregarded; male colleagues getting the credit; and not being taken seriously. Here’s advice from Edna Shamouni, software development manager at Flexe: “At the end of the day, believe in yourself, stand up for yourself and be your own greatest fan.”
No more free rides
Reddit and Twitter communities are red-hot hot over new and rising third-party developers fees. “/r/aww has gone private due to Reddit’s decision to effectively kill 3rd party applications with their API costs,” one popular community announced. Reddit’s chief executive said new API fees are needed for survival.
“Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use,” he said. Twitter also announced price rises for access to its API, saying heavy users could spend as much as $42k a month.
Minimum win
New York City’s 60k food delivery drivers are celebrating a major win: a (more than) doubling of the minimum wage from $7.09 to $17.96 per hour. DoorDash is fighting it, saying it will mean “$33.27 per hour for platforms selecting the trip time pay option.”
GM free-loads Tesla charging
GM and Ford owners free-load off Tesla’s charging network after agreements with both car Goliaths. “This really almost doubles access to chargers” for GM customers, the company’s chief executive wrote in a tweet conversation with Elon Musk.
Table of Contents
Tweet of the Week
The Weekly Pulse
Worker well-being in demand
Since the pandemic, attitudes about employee mental health have dramatically shifted. Today’s tech workers report their startup bosses are more considerate of their mental health. According to a 2022 survey by the American Psychology Association, more than 80% of workers say that how employers support their mental health will be an important consideration for them when they look for future work.
“The pandemic forced employers to recognize that they must pay more attention to the mental health of employees, and that the conditions in the work environment can either exacerbate or prevent mental health challenges,” said one professor.
What We’re Reading
- Accenture to Double AI Workforce Three Months After Mass Layoffs (Bloomberg)
- They Fled San Francisco. The A.I. Boom Pulled Them Back. (NYT)
- Using Tech to Make Government Better (WSJ)
- Doctors Are Using Chatbots in an Unexpected Way (NYT)
- Rivian hopes to earn carbon credits for its home electric vehicle chargers (MIT)
- Oracle Tops Sales Estimates as AI-Frenzy Spurs Cloud Demand (Bloomberg)
- Apple Shares Close at Record in Latest Sign of Big Tech’s Dominance (Bloomberg)
- Binance plans to swap 750 million of token pairs to ensure liquidity (Reuters)
- Grubhub lays off 15% of corporate workforce, or about 400 employees (CNBC)
Podcasts of the Week
All the Hacks with Chris Hutchins: Travel Smarter, Cheaper, and Longer with Nomadic Matt
The Anxious Achiever: Do Entrepreneurs Need Specialized Mental Healthcare?
Startups Hiring Now
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