Bloomberg’s head of tech Catherine Hui handed out tons of great career tips at a recent Girls in Tech/Facebook meetup. Here, some of the best:
On mistakes:
“Acknowledge your mistakes and you’ll be fine.”
“It’s not about making a mistake - it’s about how you handle it.”
“The sky is going to fall at some point. The key is how you handle the post-mortem.”
On mentorship:
“Find someone who has your best interest in mind - that’s a true mentor.”
Don’t be shy. People want to help you.
Meet with your mentors/members of your network regularly.
Choose your mentor wisely.
Have at least one or two awesome geeks in your network of mentors.
On who she hires:
What blogs do they follow? What is their favorite news source? Does this person have a natural curiosity for what’s happening?
Can this person learn fast?
People don’t necessarily need to have a tech background- but they should have communication skills, be a team player, and most importantly they should have common sense/strong problem solving skills.And finally, these gems:
“We [women] need to learn how to ask for things … Men never wait to ask.”
“I didn’t become who I am by accident. I struggled through the whole journey.”
Read more about the event here! Also, here are some tips for finding (and keeping) great mentors.
In the current recessions, global giants have not only survived but thrived while small businesses have been oscillating depending on the economic cycle.
This phenomenon is partially attributed to the lower borrowing costs for the big firms especially when the economy is depressed(thus the bank demands higher credits to its borrowers), according to NewYorkTimes.
The global giants’ risk diversification strategy could be another attribute, I think. It’s hard to say that the big companies are greedy enough to hold the great moments alone and contributing to the polarization in the enterprise-level. It might be their constructive strategies and risk managing skills. Just my two cents.
Brain Games are Bogus
A decade ago, a young Swedish researcher named Torkel Klingberg made a spectacular discovery. He gave a group of children computer games designed to boost their memory, and, after weeks of play, the kids showed improvements not only in memory but in overall intellectual ability. Spending hours memorizing strings of digits and patterns of circles on a four-by-four grid had made the children smarter. The finding countered decades of psychological research that suggested training in one area (e.g., recalling numbers) could not bring benefits in other, unrelated areas (e.g., reasoning). The Klingberg experiment also hinted that intelligence, which psychologists considered essentially fixed, might be more mutable: that it was less like eye color and more like a muscle.
It seemed like a breakthrough, offering new approaches to education and help for people with A.D.H.D., traumatic brain injuries, and other ailments. In the years since, other, similar experiments yielded positive results, and Klingberg helped found a company, Cogmed, to commercialize the software globally. (Pearson, the British publishing juggernaut, purchased it in 2010.) Brain training has become a multi-million-dollar business, with companies like Lumosity, Jungle Memory, and CogniFit offering their own versions of neuroscience-you-can-use, and providing ambitious parents with new assignments for overworked but otherwise healthy children. The brain-training concept has made Klingberg a star, and he now enjoys a seat on an assembly that helps select the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The field has become a staple of popular writing. Last year, the New York Times Magazine published a glowing profile of the young guns of brain training called “CAN YOU MAKE YOURSELF SMARTER?”
The answer, however, now appears to be a pretty firm no—at least, not through brain training. A pair of scientists in Europe recently gathered all of the best research—twenty-three investigations of memory training by teams around the world—and employed a standard statistical technique (called meta-analysis) to settle this controversial issue. The conclusion: the games may yield improvements in the narrow task being trained, but this does not transfer to broader skills like the ability to read or do arithmetic, or to other measures of intelligence. Playing the games makes you better at the games, in other words, but not at anything anyone might care about in real life.
