UI/UX Articles and Interesting Tidbits of the Week
September//27//2024
Here are some interesting finds on UI/UX of the week!
Following a brief break.
1.
Soft Skills to Boost the Career. Dice’s blog always offer interesting insights or helpful reminders we should have as we navigate our professional careers. This article from Nick Kolakowski is a healthy call out for what has fallen under the umbrella of “soft skills”, that while tailored for tech driven professions, is actually perfectly suitable for any industry. The author highlights aspects such as problem-solving, communication, adaptability, teamwork, leadership, continuous learning, to name but a few, but the overall sentiment harks back to: curate yourself and invest in yourself and in your career for the long term, and not solely for a specific position or company one has in mind. Professionals should always keep in mind that they, themselves, should be the most important and focal point of their path, since jobs come and go, but investing in themselves will allow them to transfer their skills for other opportunities that come along. Worth reading through. Highlight of the article includes:
“Self-assessment: Reflect on your own experiences and behaviors. Are you consistently able to communicate effectively, collaborate with others, and solve problems efficiently? Consider seeking feedback from colleagues, mentors, or managers to gain a more objective perspective.
Observe others: Pay attention to how successful tech professionals demonstrate these soft skills in their work. Identify areas where you can learn from their examples.
Performance reviews: Review your past performance reviews to see if any recurring themes related to soft skills emerge. Use this feedback as an opportunity for growth.”
2.
Breaking Tech Monopolies. Very interesting article from the Shutterstock blog, detailing their stance on AI, and how their inventory of artifacts is being leveraged to both improve technology, while still being ethical and rewarding the creators for their essential role in providing that baseline for the algorithms to learn and keep expanding their footprint. It’s an interesting perspective from a company that is known as an Image Bank (amongst other elements of course), with its array of contributors, and a reflection on how AI may disrupt this ecosystem (are basically contributors being rendered useless by leveraging generational AI). While rewarding the content providers is without question a way to ethically address any guilt there may exist in leveraging that content to further automate how their inventory is created, it does not address the larger question of what future lies for these human content providers. And that’s also something the article doesn’t address. Highlight of the article includes:
“Shutterstock’s role extends beyond sharing its extensive digital content library; it champions a holistic ecosystem that protects creators and intellectual property rights via a program called “dataset licensing.” Dataset licensing from Shutterstock allows customers to use images, videos, audio/SFX, or 3D models from its vast library specifically for machine learning purposes. This means AI models can learn from and use information from original content to generate new pieces. Shutterstock tailors these datasets to fit customers’ specific model training needs, carefully curating collections of assets.”
3.
Top Startups 2024. Every year Linkedin publishes their list of the top startups (and this according to multiple countries and areas of the world). This list in particular, focuses on the US alone, and still serves as a demonstrative statement that though the macro-economic environment hasn’t been the best, there’s still resilience and persistence pushing these young organizations forward. Even though the job market itself has been a challenging one, particularly for Tech (and we can also thank Twitter and its new ownership for both being a catalyst and for sanitizing the principle that you can layoff 70% or more of your staff without regard for consequences, or even full pay of severance), this list still reveals that opportunities do exist, and that focused entrepeneurs, backed by high performance teams, will continue to succeed. Highlight of the article includes:
“LinkedIn measures startups based on four pillars: employment growth, engagement, job interest and attraction of top talent. Employment growth is measured as percentage headcount increase over methodology time frame, which must be a minimum of 10%. Engagement looks at non-employee views and follows of the company’s LinkedIn page, as well as how many non-employees are viewing employees at that startup. Job interest counts the rate at which people are viewing and applying to jobs at the company, including both paid and unpaid postings. Attraction of top talent measures how many employees the startup has recruited away from any global LinkedIn Top Company, as a percentage of the startup’s total workforce. Data is normalized across all eligible startups. The methodology time frame is July 1, 2023 through June 30, 2024.”
