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Less Is More: What Not To Put On Your Resume»

Exec founder Justin Kan dishes on what startups look for in a resume and perhaps more importantly what you should leave off.

In your resume you need to 1) demonstrate that you are exceptional at the thing you do, and 2) not be disqualified by seeming crazy or imbalanced.

A simple rule: if something on your resume isn’t achieving one of the aforementioned two things, leave it off.

GitHub’s Code For Work Place Happiness The Utopian workplace that is GitHub didn’t just materialize. GitHub CEO Tom Preston-Werner is on the phone from San Francisco speaking with the cordial certainty of a professor. Halfway through our conversation, I read to him something he blogged back in October 2010: At Github, we don’t have meetings. We don’t have set work hours or workdays. We don’t keep track of vacation or sick days. We don’t have managers or an org chart. We don’t have a dress code. Things have gotten more sophisticated since then, he says. Founded in 2008 by Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ Hyett, GitHub’s grown from 10 people to 160. A Most Innovative Company, it recently received $100 million in funding at a $750 million valuation. And as a social network for programmers to share code—and the largest host of code in the world—it’s increasingly an integral part of the software that’s running the world. What GitHub solves for: GitHub acts like a cross between Wikipedia, Google Docs, and Facebook, letting programmers share code and, crucially, discuss the differences between builds. Preston-Werner says that when projects grow, managing complexity becomes the center of software development—making the decision of what code goes in where is more important than the code itself. By keeping the discussion close to the code, GitHub accelerates the engineering process. But GitHub—like another social network—didn’t begin with the intention of becoming a company. It was a passion project that he and cofounder Wanstrath built on nights and weekends until it grew into their own company. “We wanted to make GitHub a place where we wanted to work; that was part of the deal,” he says, noting that he and Wanstrath were coming from gigs with a lot of process, rigid departments, and inflexible job descriptions.“That’s what makes it interesting to us to build a company, not just the product that we’re building, but the company itself.” From the CEO’s description, GitHub exemplifies the connected company: a kind of arch-meritocratic, libertopian ant colony. He told us how to build one here.

GitHub’s Code For Work Place Happiness

The Utopian workplace that is GitHub didn’t just materialize.

GitHub CEO Tom Preston-Werner is on the phone from San Francisco speaking with the cordial certainty of a professor. Halfway through our conversation, I read to him something he blogged back in October 2010:

At Github, we don’t have meetings. We don’t have set work hours or workdays. We don’t keep track of vacation or sick days. We don’t have managers or an org chart. We don’t have a dress code.

Things have gotten more sophisticated since then, he says. Founded in 2008 by Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ Hyett, GitHub’s grown from 10 people to 160. A Most Innovative Company, it recently received $100 million in funding at a $750 million valuation. And as a social network for programmers to share code—and the largest host of code in the world—it’s increasingly an integral part of the software that’s running the world.

What GitHub solves for:

GitHub acts like a cross between Wikipedia, Google Docs, and Facebook, letting programmers share code and, crucially, discuss the differences between builds. Preston-Werner says that when projects grow, managing complexity becomes the center of software development—making the decision of what code goes in where is more important than the code itself. By keeping the discussion close to the code, GitHub accelerates the engineering process.

But GitHub—like another social network—didn’t begin with the intention of becoming a company. It was a passion project that he and cofounder Wanstrath built on nights and weekends until it grew into their own company.

“We wanted to make GitHub a place where we wanted to work; that was part of the deal,” he says, noting that he and Wanstrath were coming from gigs with a lot of process, rigid departments, and inflexible job descriptions.“That’s what makes it interesting to us to build a company, not just the product that we’re building, but the company itself.”

From the CEO’s description, GitHub exemplifies the connected company: a kind of arch-meritocratic, libertopian ant colony.

He told us how to build one here.

Are Ambitious People Happier? If you go and get yours, you may get more in the end—but contentment and longer life span may not be among the spoils… Atlantic writer Emily Esfahani Smith can wield a semicolon: “Ambition drives people forward; relationships and community, by imposing limits, hold people back.” To Smith, the tension between ambition, relationships, and happiness is at the center of our conversations about leaning in, having it all, and why we’re always so busy. It’s often a problem of latency: As Clay Christensen once told us, the extra hour you spend at work might yield positive feedback the next morning, but you won’t get that same immediacy when you leave that work to have dinner with your family. Read the rest here.

Are Ambitious People Happier?

If you go and get yours, you may get more in the end—but contentment and longer life span may not be among the spoils…

Atlantic writer Emily Esfahani Smith can wield a semicolon: “Ambition drives people forward; relationships and community, by imposing limits, hold people back.”

To Smith, the tension between ambition, relationships, and happiness is at the center of our conversations about leaning in, having it all, and why we’re always so busy.

It’s often a problem of latency: As Clay Christensen once told us, the extra hour you spend at work might yield positive feedback the next morning, but you won’t get that same immediacy when you leave that work to have dinner with your family.

Read the rest here.

Why The Happiest People Have The Hardest Jobs “The happiest people I know are dedicated to dealing with the most difficult problems,” Rosabeth Moss Kanter writes for HBR. Whether reversing schools’ struggles, making unsafe water potable, or helping the terminally ill, “they face the seemingly worst of the world with a conviction that they can do something about it and serve others.” Kanter pulls in a number of anecdotes, including that of her friend, the Pulitzer Prize-winner Ellen Goodman. Upset by the care her dying mother received, Goodman left her syndicated columnist gig to start The Conversation Project, which aims to get every family to talk about death and end-of-life care. While Kanter doesn’t quote Goodman in the piece, we can infer that Goodman is doing emotionally fulfilling work—which, as positive psychology tells us, is a key to enduring happiness, as opposed to the fleeting nature of pleasure. A meaningful, happiness-generating career, then, will include a sense of engagement—or even devotion—to the work one does. And while engagement is a predictor of success on a global level, less than half of American workers have it. The role of money Money isn’t what motivates these high achievers, Kanter writes; instead, engaged people pursue mastery, membership, and meaning. Money was a distant fourth. Let’s be clear: money matters plenty—if you don’t have enough to feel secure, you’llact like an alligator. But as research suggests, once you clear the income thresholds of $50,000 to $70,000 a year, the cash-to-happiness correlation levels off). “Money acted as a scorecard, but it did not get people up-and-at ‘em for the daily work,” Kanter observes, “nor did it help people go home every day with a feeling of fulfillment.” But fulfillment doesn’t have hockey-stick growth. Kanter talks about the corps members of City Year who are working with at-risk students and seeing improvements and problems come in waves. But progress “isn’t linear,” she says—it may only be apparent after many long days, like when a D student raises his hand. In the office, on purpose So, in our work, we need to be mindful of cultivating mastery of our skills, give our people a sense of membership, and look for where we can find meaning from what we’re doing. “It’s as though we all have two jobs,” Kanter says, “our immediate tasks and the chance to make a difference.” The Happiest People Pursue the Most Difficult Problems [Image: Flickr user Bob Vonderau]

Why The Happiest People Have The Hardest Jobs

“The happiest people I know are dedicated to dealing with the most difficult problems,” Rosabeth Moss Kanter writes for HBR. Whether reversing schools’ struggles, making unsafe water potable, or helping the terminally ill, “they face the seemingly worst of the world with a conviction that they can do something about it and serve others.”

Kanter pulls in a number of anecdotes, including that of her friend, the Pulitzer Prize-winner Ellen Goodman. Upset by the care her dying mother received, Goodman left her syndicated columnist gig to start The Conversation Project, which aims to get every family to talk about death and end-of-life care. While Kanter doesn’t quote Goodman in the piece, we can infer that Goodman is doing emotionally fulfilling work—which, as positive psychology tells us, is a key to enduring happiness, as opposed to the fleeting nature of pleasure.

A meaningful, happiness-generating career, then, will include a sense of engagement—or even devotion—to the work one does. And while engagement is a predictor of success on a global level, less than half of American workers have it.

The role of money

Money isn’t what motivates these high achievers, Kanter writes; instead, engaged people pursue mastery, membership, and meaning. Money was a distant fourth. 
Let’s be clear: money matters plenty—if you don’t have enough to feel secure, you’llact like an alligator. But as research suggests, once you clear the income thresholds of $50,000 to $70,000 a year, the cash-to-happiness correlation levels off).

“Money acted as a scorecard, but it did not get people up-and-at ‘em for the daily work,” Kanter observes, “nor did it help people go home every day with a feeling of fulfillment.”

But fulfillment doesn’t have hockey-stick growth. Kanter talks about the corps members of City Year who are working with at-risk students and seeing improvements and problems come in waves. But progress “isn’t linear,” she says—it may only be apparent after many long days, like when a D student raises his hand.

In the office, on purpose

So, in our work, we need to be mindful of cultivating mastery of our skills, give our people a sense of membership, and look for where we can find meaning from what we’re doing.

“It’s as though we all have two jobs,” Kanter says, “our immediate tasks and the chance to make a difference.”

The Happiest People Pursue the Most Difficult Problems

[Image: Flickr user Bob Vonderau]

How One Company Taught It’s Employees To Be Happier And What Happened Next Media agency MEC offered a happiness workshop to a group of workers in its Manhattan office. Co.Create looks at the thinking behind the effort and the results. Here’s the story.

How One Company Taught It’s Employees To Be Happier And What Happened Next

Media agency MEC offered a happiness workshop to a group of workers in its Manhattan office. Co.Create looks at the thinking behind the effort and the results.

Here’s the story.

Infographic: The Grinders Vs. The Dreamers. Who Wins? To be great at your job, you have to embrace the grind. But the very word implies pulverizing something into nothing, as if with every type of your keyboard, your fingers flake away, until work has consumed your wrists, elbows, shoulders and chest. Sorry! Don’t think about that visual! Here’s a better one, by Joey Roth, that imagines the grind not as a platform for powderization, but as the step-by-step means to ascension. By ‘grind’ I mean a combination of work ethic and improvised strategy that becomes a daily ritual, and ensures progression or improvement over time, regardless of an individual day or even week’s outcome.” Here’s the full story.

Infographic: The Grinders Vs. The Dreamers. Who Wins?

To be great at your job, you have to embrace the grind. But the very word implies pulverizing something into nothing, as if with every type of your keyboard, your fingers flake away, until work has consumed your wrists, elbows, shoulders and chest.

Sorry! Don’t think about that visual!

Here’s a better one, by Joey Roth, that imagines the grind not as a platform for powderization, but as the step-by-step means to ascension.

By ‘grind’ I mean a combination of work ethic and improvised strategy that becomes a daily ritual, and ensures progression or improvement over time, regardless of an individual day or even week’s outcome.”

Here’s the full story.