Content tagged with “work” under “The Interesting List”

“ Uber drivers in London are embarking on a multi-year journey to pass the black cabbie test, whcih requires them to memorize most of the street in London. ”

“ An enlightening interview with the head of a firm that recruits home staff for billionaires. ”

“ A lake town in Wisconsin is the only place mail carriers deliver mail from a boat that never stops moving. ”

“ Some fascinating behind-the-scenes stories of working at a zoo. ”

“ A freighter was abandoned at the mouth of the Suez in 2017. Due to a legal quirk, a single sailor is stuck onboard and cannot return home. ”

“ A Japanese craftsman restores a book. (Turn on the closed captions for an English translation.) ”

“ Graying COBOL programmers still get pressed into service to modify programs that might otherwise run for decades without changes. Also, in many cases, the Y2K problem was never fixed, just deferred. ”

“ An episode of a web series that focuses on hand-crafted goods. This one is about a dying breed of bookmaker. ”

“ There are some fascinating aspects to being a hand model. One of which is that you pretend to be other people’s hands a lot. ”

“ In shattered Venezuela, a shadow economy exists of people who play Runescape characters to higher levels of experience and wealth, then sell them. ”

“ The Coronavirus might be the thing that tips us into a vastly expanded world of remote work, where physical contact is deemed to be largely unnecessary. The long-term effects on society – both good and bad – might be considerable. ”

“ Fascinating perspective from a bartender who watched several of her regular customers spin into self-destruction. A meditation on the culpability of forced, unwitting enablers. ”

“ Content moderators at YouTube spend their days looking at the worst of human nature. Not surprisingly, some of them are suffering from PTSD. ”

“ A series of wild, surreal stories describing what it was like producing content for Alex Jones during his heyday. ”

“ An interview with the head writer on Jeopardy! with lots of information on how clues get written. ”

“ Turns out the advice for lasting a long time in the NBA is pretty good advice for lasting a long time in anything . ”

“ A look into the psychology and drive of wealthy people who want more of everything, all the time. ”

“ The story of a management theory that came and went, then sort of came back. Everything has a hype cycle, and Six Sigma was no exception ”

“ A long, contemplative video of a single Mercedes technician hand-building a high-performance V8. I can’t believe I watched the entire thing. ”

“ Riveting essay on what it’s like to do the back-breaking labor of a French kitchen, with a larger look at the future of French cooking and the Michelin rating system. ”

“ This doesn’t break any new ground, but I like the central point: the road to success is fairly boring. You just need to get a little bit better at regular intervals, and keep doing this for a long time. ”

“ The US health care system only works because doctors and nurses have little work-life balance and they constantly expand their workflow to fit the demands placed on them. ”

“ A screenwriter breaks down how she would come up with a scene under time pressure and random feedback from the studio. ”

“ You become better at decisions when you’re not trying to win, but rather just trying not to lose. It has an extended bit about tennis and the differing strategies of professionals and amateurs. ”

“ The CIA has a checklist for how to analyze problems. It’s an interesting set of questions to make sure you’re looking at a problem from all angles and all possible solution frameworks. ”

“ This starts as a blistering indictment of Epic, the medical records system, but morphs into a larger discussion of how doctors relate to technology and whether it makes things better or worse. ”

“ An idea to log all your decisions in a journal, along with all the factors that led to them, in order to avoid Hindsight Bias. ”

“ For every developer doing amazing, cutting-edge things and writing about it on the web, there are 99 that just get work done every day using boring technology that still works just fine. ”