Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • Graphs, damn lies and the middle class

    Graphs, damn lies and the middle class

    Graphs are great for illustrating a story, and also excellent at misleading people.

    A good example of where a graph can give an incorrect impression is the Sydney Morning Herald’s story Whatever Happened to the Middle Class.

    The story is a very good explanation of the predicament Australia’s political classes have put themselves into – exacerbated by their 1950s view of dividing the workforce into poorly paid ‘blue collar’ workers and affluent ‘white collar’ office staff – but it suffers from the selective use of headline graphs.

    Viewing the big picture

    The first graph shows how Australians are identifying themselves as middle class and the trend looks staggering,

    Graph of How Australians see themselves as middle class

    Now if we add those who identify themselves as working class, the picture looks even more dramatic with some pretty volatile swings,

    A graph showing How Australians see themselves as middle or working class

    However if we now add in those who identify themselves as rich, or upper class, we get a better perspective as the entire range is now shown,

    Graph showing How Australians see themselves as upper middle or working class

    Selective choosing the Y, or vertical, axis will always give an exaggerated view of a trend or proportion. Once we take the full range in we see the real extent of things. It also has the benefit of showing the trends aren’t as volatile as first appear.

    Middle class perceptions

    When we look at the graph showing the full picture there’s a number of interesting trends and characteristics about Australian society that come out of it which are worthy of some future blog posts.

    Most notably is the identification of Australians being middle class as their property values increased.

    On this point, it’s worthwhile contrasting the Australian experience with the US, here’s a Gallup poll from last year on how Americans see themselves,

    A graph showing how Americans see themselves as upper middle or working class

    While the definitions are different – that Americans differentiate ‘working class’ and ‘lower class’ is interesting in itself – it’s clear that the same trend happened in the US with more people identifying themselves as being members of middle class when their property values were increasing.

    In 2008 and 9 there’s suddenly a sharp increase in Americans identifying themselves as working class as the property downturn bites. The steady increase in those claiming to be ‘lower class’ from 2006 onwards is worth closer examination.

    What this means for Australia

    The implications of the US trends is that any Australian politician intending to dismantle John Howard’s middle class welfare state will have to wait until the property market falls before trying to win any popular support.

    For this year’s Australian election though, what’s clear is that any attempt to stoke the fires of class warfare is going to fail dismally in the outer suburban marginal seats so coveted by both parties.

    We’re going to see a lot more selective graphs during the course of this year, it’s worthwhile taking time to look at them closely. The stories may be different, and a lot more nuanced, than the headlines tell us.

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  • People like us – could poor hiring practices bring down Silicon Valley?

    People like us – could poor hiring practices bring down Silicon Valley?

    A strange little story appeared in Business Insider a few weeks back, 9 Things Your Resume Needs if you want to be Hired by Apple or Google is a curious view into the mindset of Silicon Valley.

    Purporting to be an extract from a book written by a former recruiter who claims to have worked for Apple, Google and Microsoft, the story exposes a weakness in Silicon Valley and the technological elite which may cause the very disruptions they have unleashed to work against them.

    The nine items are fascinating for the elitist, US-centric view of the world they portray and each is worth investigating on their own.

    If you graduated from an elite college, your chances of getting an interview vastly improve

    Yes, where you went to school does matter to the tech giants. Of course there are exceptions, but McDowell says an Ivy League or other top university will get you noticed.

    There’s not much more to add to this, except to note that the vast majority of students whose families can afford such an education are from the upper middle class.

    The Googles and Apples like to see relevant internship experience.

    If you waited tables when you were 19, that isn’t attractive.

    If you are lucky enough to get into a an Ivy League school on a scholarship or manage to scrape together the money you may still not make the cut.

    To the author, only those with sufficient wealth to participate in unpaid internships are going to get jobs at the top Silicon Valley companies.

    Your major matters

    Sorry liberal arts people or chemical engineers, you’ll need another way in to Google or Apple.

    This is an interesting one, Silicon Valley boosters often talk about the creative process and how coders are artists however according to the recruiter that’s just lip service.

    She encourages students to pick majors that are directly relevant to Google or Apple. Finance, accounting, marketing or computer science majors have the best shot of being noticed by a tech recruiter.  At the very least, minor in one of those fields.

    A focus on finance, accounting and marketing is the same as any old corporation – you could be going for a job with AT&T, Goldman Sachs or the government with qualifications like that. So much for unique.

    Dissing chemical engineering is particularly interesting as Chem Eng graduates have passed one of the toughest university degrees. Whats more, the demands of mobile computing devices means battery technology is one of the most pressing issues facing Silicon Valley at the moment. Chemical Engineers are the folk who will solve this problem.

    Big tech companies like to see people giving back to their communities.

    Volunteering can be a great way to buff up your resume. That said, McDowell warns: “don’t serve soup in a soup kitchen.”

    Instead she suggests hunting for a sales or marketing position, or offering to help a charity with its website and design.

    This is a really obnoxious statement – basically saying we want to you volunteer, but we don’t want you to help people.

    Just how many sales and marketing people are needed by soup kitchens, volunteer fire brigades or community pantries is open to debate.

    A bigger issue with this mentality is that it favours bureaucrats and paper shufflers rather than doers. Which again is something anathema to the public statements of Silicon Valley’s leaders.

    They also like good spellers and speakers.

    Writing and communications skills aren’t just necessary for media jobs. They’re important in any career you’ll have.

    Well, duh.

    If you are buddies with college professors, that’s a plus.

    Professors aren’t just impressed by how you do in their classes.  McDowell suggests helping them with research projects, asking for help and attending office hours, or becoming a teaching assistant.

    That doesn’t hurt, but it’s pretty basic vanilla advice and again it’s tough luck if you have to do a shift at the local fast food restaurant so you can feed yourself.

    Show you understand multiple positions at Google or Apple

    If you want to work at one of the top tech companies, it helps to have at least a basic understanding of multiple positions in the organization.  McDowell calls this being a Generalist.

    On one hand this advice makes sense but on another many technical roles are not generalist positions.

    Generally having a knowledge of the company’s structure and roles is going to look good to any interviewer, assuming you can get past the gatekeeper at the recruitment company.

    Entrepreneurs have a better shot of being hired.

    This is a funny one, if you’re a real entrepreneur then the thought of working in cubicle at Apple or Microsoft while answering to a middle manager straight out of a Dilbert cartoon ranks with getting hot pine needles thrust under  your toenails.
    One of the conceits of modern corporate life is that they value entrepreneurs and the free-wheeling spirits – the truth is they don’t and the first true hint of entrepreneurialism among the ranks will be smothered quickly with a deluge of paperwork.
    Funnily enough, being a successful tech entrepreneur is a path to getting a good job at a tech company although it’s more likely to happen as an acqui-hire than through a recruiter.

    Good news: Your GPA doesn’t matter very much

    Most people think tech companies, Google in particular, harp over candidates’ GPAs. McDowell says there is little truth to that rumor.

    This is only good news if you’ve ticked most of the other boxes, which means you’ll be considered if you’re middling graduate from Stanford or Harvard but forget it if you went elsewhere, regardless of how good your marks are.

    The danger of recruiters

    What the Business Insider story really illustrates are the risks of relying on third party recruiters as gatekeepers to filter out new employees.

    Regardless of how good the recruitment consultant is they are going to apply their own cultural filters and biases onto the selection process and as a result knock out most good candidates.

    More importantly, a company risks developing a monoculture if the recruitment process is too effective at filtering out people who don’t fit a narrow stereotype.

    A new breed of officemen?

    Reading the Business Insider story leaves one with the feeling that many of these companies are beginning to look like IBM in the 1960s – monocultures more concerned about the colour of an employee’s tie and choice of shirts rather than the talents they bring to the organisation or the value they can add to customers.

    This is probably the greatest risk of all to the tech industry, that they end up with an insular group of people with fixed mindsets.

    Should that happen, then the wave of disruption Silicon Valley has unleashed on the world will end up being the industry’s undoing as smart kids working out of garages in Michigan or slums in Delhi will out innovate the staid, comfortable incumbents.

    It’s also interesting to consider how many other industries are now suffering after several decades of similar recruiting practices where leading businesses are now dominated by insular, unworldly monocultures.

    Image courtesy of Alexfurr on SXC.HU

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  • It’s too late, baby – when digital reality bites

    It’s too late, baby – when digital reality bites

    Yesterday Sensis announced it would restructure for digital growth by sacking staff, offshoring and “accelerate its transition to a digital media business”.

    The directory division of Telstra has been in decline for years, a process that wasn’t helped by then CEO Sol Trujillo embarking on his expensive “Google Schmoogle” diversion.

    A decade later, Managing Director John Allen has announced another 650 jobs to go from the remaining 3,500 workforce.

    John’s comments are worth noting.

    Until now we have been operating with an outdated print-based model – this is no longer sustainable for us. As we have made clear in the past, we will continue to produce Yellow and White Pages books to meet the needs of customers and advertisers who rely on the printed directories, but our future is online and mobile where the vast majority of search and directory business takes place.

    Carol King put it best – it’s too late, Baby. These are words that should have been said a decade ago.

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  • New York celebrates its entrepreneurs with Made in NY

    New York celebrates its entrepreneurs with Made in NY

    Part of a thriving industrial hub is having the business and skills that support the sector. If you’ve got them, you need to tell the world you’re open for business.

    Somebody who is doing this well is New York City’s Office of Media and Entertainment which runs the Made In NY program.

    While much of the focus of the program is on attracting film production, Made in NY recently branched out into promoting the city’s tech community boasting successful businesses like video sharing site Vimeo, tutor matching service Tutorspree and stock photography supplier Shutterstock.

    Towards the end of the Shutterstock clip one of the staff mentions ‘drop bears’ – a little bit of Sydney argot creeps into the story.

    It’s the Sydney connection that makes the Made In NY campaign so bittersweet, I was involved in setting up the Digital Sydney project for the New South Wales government.

    While Sydney doesn’t have the size of New York’s or London’s tech industries it does share the advantage of being one of the most diverse cities in the world. The work of organisations like ICE in Parramatta is important in realising some of that potential.

    That potential is huge – having sizeable communities of East and South Asian language speakers gives Sydney a real opportunity in the Asian Century.

    Unfortunately most of those communities live in Sydney’s West and while lip service is given to the needs of that region most economic development work focuses on corporate welfare for established interests and supporting inner city stuff that white folks like.

    When I started at what was then the Department of State and Regional Development in 2009 I was told that many in the agency believed NSW stood for “North Sydney to Wooloomoolloo”, something that largely turned out to be true. The west of Sydney, like most of the state, took second place behind the wants of big business.

    This is what’s encouraging about the Made In New York campaign, it promotes smaller business – although they all seem based in lower Manhattan staffed largely by a middle class monoculture, which seems to be a problem when you buy into hipster chic.

    Hipster chic is one of New York’s strengths and that’s what every city and country needs to be doing in a global connected economy.

    If you can’t define and articulate what it is you add to the economy, then you’re locked into the low value, small margin commodity end of the marketplace and that is a tough place to be.

    The question for all of us, on a personal and a national basis, is do we want to be price taking commodity producers or do we want to develop the high value, growth business of the 21st Century.

    New York City has made its choice, we have to make ours.

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  • ABC Nightlife February 2013

    ABC Nightlife February 2013

    Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy on ABC Nightife across Australia to discuss how technology affects your business and life. For February 2013 we’ll be looking at the software rip-off, smartphones for seniors and Telstra’s roadmap for the mobile economy.

    The show will be available on all ABC Local stations and streamed online through the Nightlife website.

    Some of the topics we’ll discuss include the following;

    We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

    Tune in on your local ABC radio station or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

    You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

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