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Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc. | |
CAREERS
Going to the moon won’t make you a millionaire
Travelling into space isn’t a journey for the faint-hearted. Turns out it doesn’t pay a heck of a lot, either
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HERE AT WORKLIFE HQ, we were pretty glued to the Artemis mission and the journey of the four ‘moon people’ — Southwestern Ontario’s Jeremy Hansen, plus Americans Christina Koch, Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover. The launch, the moon fly-by, the high-drama re-entry — it all came together to form a communal viewing experience that at least briefly offered us a chance to think beyond our petty little Earth concerns.
In addition, the broadcasts and media coverage were packed full of young students who watched the mission and saw in it profound inspiration, sparking what might become a life-long fascination with astronomy and outer space.
But there might also have been a few miserly bean counters out there who watched the Artemis II mission and thought to themselves, “I wonder if that’s a good way to make a buck?”
The answer to that might come as a bit of a surprise to some: even going all the way to the moon and back, travelling unprecedented distances and speeds from Earth is no more lucrative than any other civil servant career.
“There’s no financial windfall waiting for them,” reported Fortune magazine. “No performance bonus, overtime or hazard pay, either. Instead, the astronauts return to their government salary that tops out around $152,000 for U.S. crew members, with Canadian pay structured on a similar sliding scale.” The astronauts also receive a daily stipend of about five bucks for “incidentals” — which is a bit baffling both because $5 doesn’t buy you much on Earth and can’t buy you anything in space.
“For a mission that pushed the boundaries of human exploration, the compensation is strikingly ordinary,” observed Fortune’s Preston Fore. “Closer to a mid-career desk job, or even skilled trade jobs like electricians and HVAC technicians than a once-in-a-generation journey around the moon.”
Now, we’re pretty sure that the moon people weren’t too unhappy about their salaries here; one does not get into spaceflight purely for the dollar figure attached to it. Some of the compensation will come later, “Their speaking fees will be insane,” wrote one Reddit user. “They’ll be fine, trust me.”
Retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, for instance, typically charges between $50,000 to $100,000 or more for corporate speaking events. Plus, he has parlayed his space experience into a successful writing career that includes the international bestseller An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth and The Apollo Murders fiction series, a trio of acclaimed Cold War space thrillers blending authentic astronaut experiences with espionage.
“This low pay actually makes a lot of sense. Because astronaut is one of the most sought-after jobs in the whole world, you do not have to pay them very much — many people would probably do it for free!” wrote FederalPay.org. “It is simple supply and demand.”
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TECHNOLOGY
Rewirement vs. retirement
The majority of mid-career and older employees want to embrace AI, but a lack of necessary training is pushing some to call it quits
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WE’VE CERTAINLY HEARD a lot about what AI may or may not be doing to the job market at the entry-level and for those coming out of university looking to start their careers. We have heard much less about what the arrival of generative AI technology means at the other end of the age spectrum: older workers who are witnessing a technological upheaval that many were unprepared for — and are now uninterested in.
What some are referring to as the Grey Divide is becoming a more pressing dynamic for workers in their 50s and older. “Artificial intelligence isn’t coming for jobs sometime in the future,” wrote Maya Perez. “It’s already here, and workers over 50 are scrambling to figure out what that means for them.”
What is apparent is the impact AI is having on the older part of the workforce isn’t easy to categorize. Reports from various outlets, including the The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian, make it clear this isn’t a stereotypical case of older workers not being able to adapt to new technology. Rather, the case of older workers versus AI reads a lot more like a battle over agency. AI may seem like an inevitability, but for a fiercely independent generation of older workers, the reaction hasn’t been to reject it, to fight it or to avoid it, but to instead adapt to it on their own terms.
For some, admittedly, the way to hold on to their agency has been to embrace an early retirement. “Maybe their autonomy is being challenged or changed, their friends are leaving the workplace or they disagree with the company’s direction,” observed Robert Laura, co-founder of the Retirement Coaches’ Association. “AI is a big one. It disrupts their autonomy, their professionalism.” One 68-year-old content strategist who packed up his career told WSJ that “the time and energy you have to devote to learning a whole new vocabulary and a whole new skill set, it wasn’t worth it.” This is probably the most common reaction and explains why workers over 50 have AI adoption rates that are half that of their younger counterparts.
But it’s not the universal response. Many older workers are keen to adapt to AI tools, even late career. “Older workers aren’t refusing to adapt,” said Perez. “They want to learn. Data shows that 60 per cent of mid-career and older workers express strong interest in AI upskilling. The problem is access, and willingness from the other side of the table.” Half of older workers, per one study, say they aren’t getting any AI training from their employers.
“We as employers aren’t doing a good enough job saying [to older workers], ‘We value the skills that you already have, so much that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better,’” said Manpower Group’s chief strategist, Becky Frankiewicz.
It appears the AI companies themselves, though, do have a use for older workers, in the (often precarious) world of AI training. A recent article from The Guardian looked at older workers who are finding their skills are in demand — albeit at a much lower pay rate — as AI trainers. “A doctor, for example, might review how an AI model answers medical questions to flag incorrect or unsafe responses and suggest better ones, helping the system learn how to generate more accurate and reliable responses,” the report reads.
But the report also warns that for some, the working conditions used to train AI models “represents another thing entirely: a last refuge in a brutal job market that is harder to stay in, or re-enter, the older they get. For many of them, whether or not they’re training their AI replacements in their professions is beside the point. They need the work now.”
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Terry Talk: Leadership BS. Why nice leaders win in the end
| We love to talk about kindness, humility and people-first leadership. But when things get hard, that is not usually what gets rewarded. In this Terry Talk, Ahria Consulting president & CEO Terry Gillis calls out an uncomfortable truth about leadership. Leaders who reject humility and lead aggressively may “win” short-term, but they also create burnout, disengagement and exits. Leaders who hold onto humility and kindness build teams that stay, perform and deliver results over time. This is not soft leadership. This is leadership that actually works. | | | |
PRODUCTIVITY
Digital clutter is weighing you down
The average employee spends a staggering 29 days a year searching through digital clutter for the information they need
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IN BETWEEN WRITING sections of this newsletter this past weekend, there were domestic tasks to which I’d been assigned. It is spring, after all, and that means dealing with clutter (or, in this case, a pile of picture frames waiting to be mounted to the wall). And while we hate to add to the list, consider taking an hour out of your day to do some spring cleaning for your files, as well.
A survey that came out last month from software company Smallpdf found that digital clutter can be a sneaky little time water. According to their survey, the average employee spends just under an hour every day searching for emails, files and links that are lost in the digital torrent.
“Digital disorganization has quietly become one of the biggest drains on focus and productivity,” they wrote. “The constant cycle of searching, sorting and reopening the same documents or emails adds up to a staggering loss of time every year.” By their estimates, 29 total workdays each year are lost to the task of trying to find something you saved, somewhere.
Classic economic laws have made some of this possible. Digital storage has decreased significantly in price, and the cost of storing something, anything, is now more marginal than it was in the past, resulting in yet more clutter. “This situation causes the amount of stored information to increase exponentially, and causes many problems caused by digital complexity,” another study found. “Since accumulating digital assets does not create a physical space narrowing, individuals do not realize that their savings turn into big garbage rather than big data over time.”
“In many workplaces, it’s not just one big mess but hundreds of small ones that people constantly double-check and search throughout the day,” said Fineas Tatar, speaking to The Globe and Mail. “Constant context switching can affect focus, risk errors and make simple tasks more exhausting.”
While they hold deep enmity towards each other at other times, though, millennials and Boomers can celebrate together over the fact that neither are the worst offenders here, according to Smallpdf. Millennials may have other problems, but we spend the least amount of time looking for files compared to Gen Z and Gen X, who cite misplaced files and inbox overload as the two top pain points, respectively.
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CULTURE
all lowercase, all of the time
Lowercase is the new corner office: Why tech CEOs abandoned the shift key
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A PAINFUL REVELATION hit me this week: apparently I text like a tech bro. Or, should I say: i text like a tech bro. i have no desire to use capital letters unless strictly necessary. this is fine for me; when i replaced my computer last year, the first thing i did was turn off auto-capitalization, so i could freely type in all-lowercase, all the time.
Unfortunately, this week I learned that this habit — an affect of the late millennials and Gen Z generations, who for whatever reason see capitalization as stern or abrupt — is one shared by a number of tech bazillionaires who are making it part of their personal brands, thus rendering it incredibly uncool.
“As tech executive amass more influence on humanity, ‘type softly and carry a big stick’ has become the unspoken communications mantra among many of them,” reports Business Insider. “OpenAI CEO Sam Altman abandons capital letters with abandon. Other practitioners of lowercase include Y Combinator CEO Gerry Tan and LinkedInfluencers everywhere.”
Committed to figure out why, BI’s Zak Jason experimented with all-lowercase typing for a week. He asked Altman about it, who said that he was “trying to change to upper case! but it’s hard.”
Jason’s grand theory of lowercase seems to hinge on the idea of ease. “Lowercase is the slippery patois of Slack,” he muses. “Bosses, middle managers and entry-level employees message each other all day sans caps — likely a function of volume. The average Slack user sends nearly 100 messages a day; so many words, so little time to hit the shift button.”
Gen Zers who spoke to The Guardian a while back made an aesthetic case, with one telling reporter Nyime Jobe that “there’s something about how the letters line up — it just looks better to me.” Others had even less tangible and concrete explanations for the preference. “Lowercase is more than just a style,” said one 24-year-old. “It’s a way to communicate in a way that feels like me.”
Like any other affectation of younger generations, it has its haters. “When I see writing without capitalization it seems sloppy, unprofessional, and a little lazy,” a professor of business ethics, Tara Ceraniac Salinas, told Fortune magazine. “How hard is it to capitalize?”
Perhaps in the age of AI, as polished as it can often be, all-lowercase can be a human refuge. (Although you can easily instruct an LLM to use all-lowercase as well.) If nothing else, the loping no-caps vibe exudes a certain je ne sais quoi. One social media strategist told The Wall Street Journal he adopted no-caps during the pandemic, when it “became clear there were a lot of benefits in being a human being online and not trying to be overly polished.”
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