Author: openjargon

It was kind of cool that Keith Gill walked off into the sunset after the GameStop craze. Gill, who goes by Roaring Kitty on X and YouTube and by DeepFuckingValue on Reddit, was at the center of the 2021 GameStop saga. He was the leader of the retail-trader Davids facing down the Wall Street Goliaths, if that's the storyline you buy into. After the mania subsided — and after a trip to testify before Congress — Gill, a 30-something dad from Massachusetts, fell off the map. The assumption was that he probably made a lot of money off of the whole thing, but nobody really knows. He didn't even participate in the big Hollywood movie about him that came out last year.

Now Gill seems to be back, sort of. His Roaring Kitty account started tweeting again this week: On Sunday night it shared an image of a guy leaning forward in his chair, followed up on Monday with a bunch of video compilations of different movies. The videos have a "we're so back" tenor, but it's not clear what we're back to. Does Gill have something cooking? Or is he just screwing around? It's all pretty cryptic and doesn't make a ton of sense. He hasn't explicitly said he's trading again or even really mentioned GameStop. It's giving midlife crisis — like, if you told me Gill was getting divorced and bought a Porsche, I would not be shocked.

Whatever the case, the market is into it. GameStop's stock has popped. It jumped by more than 70% on Monday and 60% on Tuesday, halting trading amid volatility multiple times. Short-sellers are once again hurting. Shares of AMC, GameStop's fellow meme stock, surged by nearly 80% on Monday and 30% on Tuesday. The movie-theater chain took advantage of the rally to raise $250 million of new equity capital the same day. Both gave back some gains on Wednesday, but they're still up quite a bit for the week.

The market casino is back open, at least for now.

The recent surge in these stocks doesn't make any more sense than it did in 2021. GameStop's fundamental business story hasn't changed — it's a struggling game retailer whose supposed turnaround has not come to fruition. The same goes for AMC: The actual business didn't get better overnight. What's changed is Roaring Kitty is tweeting, and not even really about a company. It's just meme time again. While Robinhood crashed during the fervor a few years ago, it's E-Trade that's having issues now.

Beyond the stocks, crypto has been bouncing back lately, too. Bitcoin hit a high in March, thanks in part to the launch of a bunch of bitcoin exchange-traded funds. Crypto trading volumes on Robinhood hit $36 billion in the first quarter of the year, a 224% increase from the year prior. Even the crypto commercials are back. Crypto.com is running an ad during the NBA playoffs repeating the "fortune favors the brave" line Matt Damon was delivering on its behalf during the Super Bowl in 2022; this time around it's showcasing UFC fighters and has Eminem doing the talking. This is all pretty familiar, though as my colleague Peter Kafka likes to point out, nobody is really pretending this crypto surge is about building anything or the coins doing anything. "Number go up" is the whole shebang.

All of this feels a little sad — like it's trying to recapture a moment and spirit that is well in the past. In 2021, people were stuck at home with money to blow, and buying shares of GameStop was a way to channel some energy. The whole episode was exciting, novel, and fun. Now it's just kind of like, OK, I guess we're doing this again. Even if the "little guys taking on Wall Street" story was overblown during the 2021 rally, the newness of it and the fervor around the movement made it feel like a brief market-warping event. This latest bout of meme-stock mania has a narrower bent: young, male, nihilist. It seems like more of a rush to a hot blackjack table than any sort of groundswell. And given that shares of GameStop and AMC have started to fall, it's already fading anyway.

Maybe this run will be different and these stocks and coins won't completely crash again, but I wouldn't count on it. People are out and about more, and there's more stuff to spend on. Said stuff is also more expensive because of inflation, and stimulus checks are not on the way. If you bought GameStop or AMC shares in 2021, it might not be a bad time to consider selling some to break even. Check on that dogecoin you put in your Coinbase account a few years ago, too.

America has become a nation of gamblers — or maybe it always was, and the proliferation of sports betting and meme stocks and cryptocurrency has just made that extra obvious. Roaring Kitty is back, and people are tossing their money into the GameStop slot machine. Just remember, the house always wins.

• Singapore Airlines staff will receive bonuses worth nearly eight months of salary, per Bloomberg.
• The airline posted a record net profit of $1.99 billion, up 24% from the previous fiscal year.
• It comes days after Emirates also announced record profits and reports of a five-month salary bonus.

Singapore Airlines is giving staff a bonus worth almost eight months of their salary, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.

The carrier — one of just 10 in the world rated five stars by Skytrax — posted record profits for the second year running.

It reported a net profit of 2.68 billion Singapore dollars ($1.99 billion) for the last fiscal year. That's up 24% from the airline's previous record high in the 2022-23 fiscal year.

The company said demand "remains healthy" in the first quarter of this financial year, with more bookings to north and southeast Asia. However, it added that passenger yields could moderate as airlines expand capacity in the Asia-Pacific region.

Singapore Airlines also gave staff a huge bonus of up to eight months' salary last year. Part of that was a maximum of one-and-a-half months due to wage cuts during the pandemic, and Bloomberg reports that this year's bonus is, in effect, higher.

Last year, an airline spokesperson told Business Insider the bonus was thanks to "a long-standing annual profit-sharing bonus formula that has been agreed with our staff unions."

This year's announcement comes days after Dubai's airline, Emirates, also posted record profits — up 60% from the previous fiscal year. Local outlet The National reported that Emirates staff will get a bonus worth around five months' salary.

Both Dubai and Singapore are seen as emerging global cities, and both airlines are among the world's best — especially for business travelers.

Singapore Airlines and Emirates were last year ranked second and third for the world's best business class by Skytrax, behind Qatar Airways.

When Josh Holbrook, a software engineer in Alaska, was laid off in January, he didn't expect to spend too much time looking for a new job. He certainly didn't think he'd need to relearn the job-hunt process.

A few weeks into his search, however, Holbrook found himself out of his depth. Instead of speaking with a human recruiter at a local healthcare organization, he was screened by an AI chatbot. His résumé, created nearly a decade ago in a technical format popular among academics, was incompatible with new automated recruitment platforms. He signed up for a professional service to update it in an AI-friendly format.

"The experience was completely novel," Holbrook told me. "I've never seen that before."

Over the past couple of years, job seekers have been forced to contend with incessant layoffs, a brutal recruitment market, and days of unpaid assignments. They can now add AI recruiting systems to that pile. In 2022, the Society for Human Resource Management found that about 40% of the large-scale employers it surveyed said they were already deploying AI in HR-related activities like recruitment. Rik Mistry, who consults on large-scale corporate recruitment, told Business Insider that AI is now leveraged to write job descriptions, judge an applicant's skills, power recruiting chatbots, and rate a candidate's responses. Ian Siegel, the CEO of ZipRecruiter, estimated in 2022 that nearly three-fourths of all résumés were never seen by humans.

Some job hunters have decided to fight fire with fire, turning to programs that use AI to optimize their résumés and apply to hundreds of jobs at a time. But the emerging AI-versus-AI recruitment battle is bad news for everyone. It turns hiring into a depersonalized process, it inundates hiring managers, and it reinforces weaknesses in the system it's designed to improve. And it only seems to be getting worse.

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Automation in recruitment isn't new: After job sites like Monster and LinkedIn made it easy for people to apply for jobs in the early 2010s, companies adopted applicant-tracking systems to manage the deluge of online applications. Now most résumés are first seen by software designed to evaluate a person's experience and education and rank them accordingly.

The automation has helped ease the burden on overstretched recruiters — but not by much. As the stacks of digital résumés have grown amid frequent changes to remote-work policies, the recruitment hamster wheel has spun ever faster.

We know AI isn't perfect, but we have to use it as there's pressure from the higher-ups.

AI is supposed to fix this mess, saving companies time and money by outsourcing even more of the hiring process to machine-learning algorithms. In late 2019, Unilever said it had saved 100,000 hours and about $1 million in recruitment costs with the help of automated video interviews. Platforms like LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter have started using generative AI to offer candidates personalized job recommendations and let recruiters generate listings in seconds. The Google-backed recruitment-tech startup Moonhub has an AI bot that scours the internet, gathering data from places like LinkedIn and Github, to find suitable candidates. On HireVue, employers can let a bot with a set questionnaire conduct video assessments to analyze candidates' personalities. Newer startups combine these abilities in a centralized service, allowing firms to put "hiring on autopilot."

But hiring experts Business Insider spoke with weren't convinced it's all for the best. Many fear that over time AI will make an already frustrating system worse and spawn fresh issues like ghost hires, where companies are misled into recruiting a bot masquerading as a person.

Several seasoned recruiters told me they hadn't incorporated AI into their workflow beyond auto-generating job descriptions and summarizing candidate calls. Tatiana Becker, who specializes in tech recruiting, said software that claims to match résumés with jobs lacked the nuance to do more than keyword matching — it couldn't, for instance, identify desirable candidates who came from top schools or had a history of earning strong promotions. Chatbots that Becker's boutique agency experimented with would frequently mismatch prospects and roles, ultimately pushing the prospects away.

This résumé matching "might work for applicants of more entry-level jobs," Becker told BI, "but I would worry about using it for anything else at this point."

Despite the problems, many companies are marching forward. "We know AI isn't perfect, but we have to use it as there's pressure from the higher-ups," said a recruiter in a Fortune 500 firm who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss his company's hiring process.

Pallavi Sinha, the vice president of growth at Humanly, a startup that offers a conversational-AI hiring platform to companies like Microsoft, said that "AI in recruiting, similar to other industries, is very much at a nascent stage." But she predicted it would continue to be incorporated into hiring.

"AI isn't here to replace human interactions," she said, "but to make our jobs and lives easier — something that we'll see more and more of over time." Sinha declined to share how many applications Humanly had processed but said its chatbot service had over a "million conversations last year alone."

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For candidates, though, AI has been a nightmare. Kerry McInerney, an AI researcher at the University of Cambridge, said AI increases the amount of labor for applicants, forcing them to complete puzzles and attend automated interviews just to get to the selection stage. She argued that it makes a "depersonalized process even more alienating."

Holbrook, the software engineer, wrote on LinkedIn about his frustration. "AI is too stupid to recognize transferrable skills among tech applicants," he said, adding, "I had a resume bounced because I don't have c# listed as a fluent language, even though I've dealt with c# in my jobs and have worked with plenty of languages that are 90% the same as c#."

Danielle Caldwell, a user-experience strategist in Portland, Oregon, was confused when an AI chatbot texted her to initiate the conversation about a role she had applied for. At first, she thought it was spam. After the exchange, she was left with more questions.

"There was no way to ask questions with the bot — it was a one-way experience," Caldwell said.

The University of Sussex has found that AI video interviews can be disorienting for job seekers, who behave much less naturally in the absence of a reassuring human presence. Plus, Mclnerney said, assessing a candidate's personality based on their body language and appearance is not only "reminiscent of 19th- and 20th-century racial pseudoscience but simply doesn't work." Her research has demonstrated that even things like wearing a headscarf or having a bookshelf in the background can change a personality score.

With AI you are only accelerating the brokenness of recruiting.

A cottage industry of tools has sprung up to help candidates game AI systems. One called LazyApply, for example, can apply to thousands of jobs online on your behalf for $250. "Anyone who has had to review over 50 résumés in one sitting wants to put a toothpick in their eyes," said Peter Laughter, who's been in recruitment for about three decades. With AI, he said, "you are only accelerating the brokenness of recruiting."

Bonnie Dilber, a recruiting manager at Zapier, said these services contributed to problematic behaviors on both sides of hiring. Candidates' submitting hundreds of applications leaves recruiting teams struggling to keep up and respond, which in turn pushes applicants to feel that they need to submit even more applications to stand a chance.

A more pressing issue, Dilber added, is that often these bots submit poor applications. Dilber and other recruiters told BI that some cover letters say only, "This has been submitted by [AI tool], please contact [person's email] with questions." When Aki Ito, a BI correspondent, tried using AI to apply for jobs, the system got her race wrong, made up that she spoke Spanish, and submitted an outdated cover letter.

"We had some people accidentally include ChatGPT's entire response," Hailley Griffis, the head of communications and content at Buffer, told BI. Griffis, who said she reviewed an average of 500 applications per open role, added, "There is a very distinct tone with a lot of AI content that hasn't been edited, and we saw a lot of that."

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Recruiters and researchers also worry about AI's tendency to reinforce many of the recruitment industry's existing biases. Researchers from the Berkeley Haas Center for Equity, Gender and Leadership said in 2021 that of about 133 biased AI systems they analyzed, about 44% exhibited gender bias. Other recent studies have found that AI systems are prone to screening out applicants with disabilities and de-ranking résumés with names associated with Black Americans.

Unlike a human, an algorithm will never look at past hiring decisions and rectify its mistakes, said Sandra Wachter, a tech and regulation professor at the University of Oxford. It will always do as it has been taught.

Wachter, whose team developed a bias test that's been adopted by companies like IBM and Amazon, believes it's possible to use AI to make fairer decisions — but for that to happen, employers need to address systemic issues with more inclusive data and regular checks. Moonhub, for example, has a human recruiter who vets the AI's recommendations and speaks with candidates who prefer a human over a chatbot.

But until AI improves enough, humans will remain the most effective hiring systems. Becker, the tech recruiter, said humans were still critical for "getting to the heart of the candidate's decision-making process and helping them overcome apprehensions if they've gotten cold feet," as well as for "dealing with counteroffers."

David Francis, a vice president at Talent Tech Labs, a recruitment research and advisory firm, said that while "recruitment is still and will always be a very human-focused process," AI "is a tool and can be used effectively or poorly."

But when it's used poorly, both candidates and recruiters suffer. After four months of job searching, Josh Holbrook has yet to find a job.

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Shubham Agarwal is a freelance technology journalist from Ahmedabad, India, whose work has appeared in Wired, The Verge, Fast Company, and more.

• The desks have a play area attached to keep babies and tots entertained.
• Parents say that the desks allow them to work near their children.
• They're best for short spurts of work, parents say.

When Maegan Moore returned to work about two months ago after the birth of her first child, she found a unique solution for balancing her career with mothering: a work-play desk that lets her care for her baby, Eleanor, while also having a dedicated workspace.

"For her age, it's been awesome," Moore told Business Insider. "I'll try to time it so I can feed her, put her down in the play desk area, and do some work that doesn't involve calls."

The work and play desk is a sort of cubicle designed for parents and children. The desk has a flat work area for parents and a play-pen-like attachment for babies.

Moore uses the desk at a coworking space in New York, but the idea originally started at a library in Virginia that largely serves a disadvantaged population that has trouble accessing both childcare and reliable internet.

Moore doesn't use the desk for long stretches of time — about an hour or two is her current limit. Although she has childcare during the middle of the day, she uses the desk most mornings and afternoons. She says that being able to have Eleanor nearby and nurse her, rather than pumping, has eased her transition back to work.

"That's been a real gift," she said.

A mom uses the desk to cope with days off school

Bethany Crystal, who contracts for multiple companies in tech and education, uses the work-and-play desk for her 21-month-old, Sydney. Because of the nature of her work, she doesn't have an office to report to. Before finding the work and play desk, she had instances of trying to nurse her baby in a WeWork coworking space or struggling to find a place to put her while she interviewed with firms. The work and play desk has solved that.

"It's really useful to be able to go places for an hour or two and have a place to put a baby," Crystal told BI.

Now that Sydney is a toddler, she's enrolled in a local Montessori school, but the frequent days off mean that Crystal still utilizes the work and play desk regularly.

"There's a lot of inservice days and holidays, which wreaks havoc for professional, entrepreneurial parents like myself," Crystal said.

Sydney is "so happy" to be next to her mother, and Crystal is able to get solid two-hour blocks of work done, which add up over the course of her 60-hour workweek.

"Even being able to put her in the crib for little stints made such a big difference," she said.

To Crystal, the desk is representative of a modern work-life balance.

"I believe we are in a new era of work, where it's no longer about what job you want, it's about what kind of lifestyle you want," she said. "For me, it's critically important to have spaces to do work that lean into the messy complications of an imperfect life with a lot of demands."

Solving the problem of the generation

Both Moore and Crystal use the work and play desk at Workplayce, a family-friendly coworking facility on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In addition to the desks, the building offers quiet work space, a communal area for parents to work while kids play, and dedicated on-site childcare that can be booked by the hour.

For Crystal, who also has a 4-year-old, the community aspect has been as important as the physical space.

"Not only do I have a place where kids can be kids and I can be at work, but I have fellow parents who are in work-hybrid mode," she said. "It's the first time I've felt like I've been part of a peer-parent community."

"It's refreshing to me," she added, "and helpful for us to see each other and learn how we are all making it work."

When Moore heard about Workplayce, she thought, "This is incredible. What a cool tool to equip working parents."

Prior to this, Moore tried working from home with a babysitter for Eleanor. But living in a small apartment, it was difficult "to not look around and see all the tasks and to-dos," which could distract from work, she said.

Now, she typically goes to the coworking space about four times a week, enrolling Eleanor in childcare when she has a meeting, a call, or work that requires deeper concentration.

"It's great having her around and getting to pop in and see her, but when I need full separate space, I have the ability to do that as well," Moore said.

That setup more accurately matches the lives of many modern working parents, Crystal said.

"There's a unique opportunity for parents to make work and kids fit with their lives. Decoupling work and kids from these arbitrary 9-to-5 work days or 9-to-3 day care days is the first step to making a life that works for you," she said. "This is a really important thing for our generation to solve for."

• Lucy Puttergill worked for Citi and JP Morgan before quitting the banking industry at 30.
• Puttergill said her job felt like "golden handcuffs," and she disliked her relationship with money.
• She said she feels a greater sense of purpose having quit banking, but she's stressed about money.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Lucy Puttergill, a 34-year-old based in South Africa, about her time working at a high-paying job at JP Morgan. It's been edited for length and clarity.

I never intended to go into banking. When I finished university, I wanted to travel. I got a job in client services at Citi, a global bank, in 2011. I thought it would be temporary.

I started working in a towering office building in London, and I felt completely out of my depth. My salary was £45,000. That was pretty good for a recent college graduate. I thought, I might as well make more money and then I can travel.

I knew from day one that banking wasn't for me. But I kept putting off leaving.

I felt like I had to prove myself

I tried to resign in 2013 to travel for a few months and work in consultancy. But Citi offered me a different role on the trading floor instead of sales. The role seemed to be the pinnacle of the "boss lady" I imagined myself as when I was younger.

I accepted, partly because I felt the need to prove I was clever enough to do it, even though I had no interest in financial markets. I don't know who I was trying to prove that to.

In 2016, I was about to move into an area I didn't want to work in when JP Morgan headhunted me. I left for a role there in equity derivatives.

My career masked my insecurities

I like the prestige of banking. I worked in great teams, and I thrived on the stress. I enjoyed having money to spend on posh restaurants and taking clients for meals. At JP Morgan, I'd start at 7 a.m. and finish at 6.30 p.m. I had an incredible boss and team, I enjoyed the work and I was earning six figures.

But I was young, insecure, and had very little romantic luck. My career inflated my ego and my sense of myself as an important person. It was a mask for those other insecurities. I was crumbling inside.

I was obsessed with spending money

I realized I was becoming someone I didn't like. I became obsessed with buying expensive items to numb how unhappy I was. Some days, I'd order £500, which is about $625, worth of clothes online before I even got into work. I wouldn't want them and would send them back.

I was grateful. I had lots of support, and I was getting paid a lot. But I didn't have any meaning in my job, and I felt like I was moving away from my true self. I couldn't admit that to myself for years because I'd always been told by the world that the life I had was aspirational.

I snapped and resigned from JP Morgan

When I was approaching 30, people around me started getting married and having children. I thought to myself: "If I don't get married, for example, is this career enough for me to feel like I've lived a full life?" The answer was no.

I went on a yoga retreat in Italy in May 2019. The day before I flew home, I found myself in a café in floods of tears. I thought: "I can't go back to that life." It was crushing.

I asked for a sabbatical. My manager was amazing, and they let me take four months off. I traveled around South America, where I met lots of people who helped me see that there are different ways of living.

I was surrounded by people who weren't impressed by my attempt at being impressive. When I told one person about my career, they responded by saying: "You wasted your 20s by working." I realized I'd missed out on so much fun because I was working so hard. It was brutal.

I went back to work in January 2020, but it was difficult.

I felt like I couldn't do it anymore. I resigned in February and left in May. It was terrifying. I was so worried I would end up without a roof over my head.

I moved to Mexico

I spent a few months figuring things out. I spent less money, partly because of the pandemic but also because I had less desire to buy random clothes. I started feeling I had a deeper sense of purpose and stopped linking money with impressiveness.

I had been stuck in golden handcuffs, but I was lucky that I didn't have some of the financial pressures other people have, like children. My expenses were lower because I wasn't doing much during the pandemic, and, then I moved to Mexico City in 2021 for a few months, which had a lower cost of living than London.

I moved to Cape Town, South Africa, in October 2022. The city revolves around the mountains and the sea, and there's a much better work-life balance than in London.

Money is a worry

I posted about my experiences on LinkedIn in July 2020, and many people messaged me about my work, asking for coaching. After that, I decided to train in trauma-informed coaching with Gabor Mate and started coaching people who reached out to me.

I'm earning nowhere near what I was in banking. I feel much more stressed out about money than I used to. But I get much more of a sense of purpose from my work and feel like I am supporting people. In banking, I used money as a way of feeling like I was living, but now I'm much more fulfilled, I don't need to go to fancy restaurants.

I'd never go back.

If you left a high-paying career and would like to share your story, email Ella Hopkins at ehopkins@businessinsider.com.

• Daniel Rizea is a director of engineering at Google.
• He says those aiming for success should avoid pushing for premature promotions and job-hopping.
• Being trustworthy and slowly building up complex skills is crucial for long-term career success.

Charlie Munger, the legendary investor and Warren Buffett's right-hand man, was once asked what it takes to be a successful investor.

His reply was surprising, if not simple: Think of the things you will do that will make you fail and just avoid doing them. Avoiding ruin is better than chasing after fast and easy tricks for success, which usually turn out to be wrong.

It's fascinating how our brains can come up with reasons for something to fail rather than things that must be done to succeed. For thousands of years, we've had to spot things that might pose a threat to stay alive. So how can we use this to our advantage, and what should high achievers do to reach their full potential?

Thinking back to Charlie's advice, I came up with five things you should avoid doing in order to have a successful and meaningful career.

1. Avoid pushing for a promotion when you're not ready yet

Getting a promotion when you're not quite ready may negatively impact yourself and your career trajectory. I have seen many people burn out and quit because they were underperforming at their new level.

You go from somebody who overachieves to somebody who underdelivers based on the new role and expectations. Imposter syndrome kicks in, and you can go down a spiral. This is very discouraging and can be overwhelming.

I experienced this firsthand, but my luck was that I learned to swim after I had jumped in the water. Looking back, it would have been better to wait a little more, polish my skills first, and then go for a promotion a year later. It turned out OK in the end, but the pressure was high.

There's a reason promotions are usually based on evidence of next-level traits and not on potential. You get comfortable performing at the next level, you know what success looks like, and it becomes natural to do next-level work. Skipping this has big consequences for both employees and businesses.

Most people overestimate their readiness for promotion — it's a normal bias. A good way to see if you're ready is to think about how you would feel if you were promoted tomorrow. If this surprises you, you are most likely not ready because you don't see yourself performing at that level.

You can fool others, but it's harder to fool yourself. Do the work; it will save you a lot of pain compared to trying out shortcuts.

2. Don't fly below the radar

Doing the bare minimum has multiple downsides. It stops your growth, reduces your engagement toward your work and your happiness, and makes you less lucky.

It's easy to spot people flying below the radar. They do the bare minimum, hoping to get an OK review with minimum effort. Some also take pride in sharing their tips and tricks on social media platforms and exchanging ideas with others on how best to accomplish this. It's a pity because they could use the same enthusiasm to improve their craft and not search for shortcuts. Instead, they just disconnect themselves from the things they do.

Everybody wants to take pride in their work, and nobody likes to feel that they are failing. Not being engaged has direct implications for overall happiness.

Doing this directly impacts your success because career-changing opportunities will elude you. You will miss that one project that may have changed your career or that chance of changing your area altogether because those opportunities will go to other people.

3. Stop avoiding the work

There's no easy way around it: regardless of how smart you are, you still need to put in the hours. Some people waste a lot of time figuring out creative ways or shortcuts and realize they might as well have done the work.

On average, it takes 20 hours of deliberate practice before learning a new skill. This could be playing the guitar, cold calling, writing code, or even writing blog articles. Josh Kaufman has written a book on this.

The main problem is that most of us avoid doing those 20 hours for years, pushing the things we want in life even further away.

It was the same in my case. I wanted to start writing but kept pushing out my 20 hours of practice for years. When I finally carved out the time to do it, it became something I really enjoyed.

There is some magic behind the scenes. After 20 hours, you become decent, meaning you don't feel like you are failing. This is very important because, at this point, continuing to do the work requires less energy on your part. You just need to push through the discomfort of the start.

4. Avoid extreme job-hopping

This is another one that slows down your growth. You may get more money for a while, but things will plateau: you won't get better, and you won't learn new skills.

I've seen people take pride in how many jobs they've had. I know about an extreme case with 8 jobs within 10 years. The issue is that they probably have had their first-year experience 10 times in a row.

If you're an individual contributor who wants to advance in a leadership position, you need at least two years to grow this skill set. Why? You must build trust with your team, take on a big project, deliver it successfully, and repeat the process a couple of times. If you change your job every year, you'll never develop your leadership skills fully. You'll start multiple times from the same spot but never complete the full cycle.

Some jobs are worth leaving—it may be the culture or the organization—but try to be mindful that every change has a cost. Avoid optimizing for the short term at the expense of the long term.

5. Don't be untrustworthy

Trust is essential. It's hard to obtain and easy to lose. When someone new joins a team or organization, the team assesses, consciously or subconsciously, whether the person is competent and trustworthy.

Believe it or not, there is a trust formula out there. It involves balancing credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-orientation.

• Credibility is linked with your words and how believable you are. Expertise helps a lot with this.
• Reliability is about your actions and if people can depend on you.
• Intimacy involves psychological safety and how safe others feel when they share things with you.
• Self-orientation is linked with your motives and how much you keep in mind and act in the interest of others versus just self-interest.

Here are some actions you can take to build trust:

• Find things the team cares about to solve and say you will do them. This ties in with self-orientation.
• Do the thing and do it well. This shows proven competence.
• Follow up and show that it has been solved. This will close the loop and increase your reliability in the eyes of a group or person.
• Be mindful and invite diverging opinions, help people out, and create a safe space for communication. This contributes to psychological safety.

It's very important to take all of the actions; otherwise, the formula will not work. Do this all the time, and you will build a reputation as somebody trustworthy.

Putting the steps together

How can you reach your full potential? We just flip the above points:

1. Advance to the next level only when you're ready; focus on the work needed to be done that will get you there.
2. Find ways to be engaged in your work, learn new skills, and keep growing. This will positively impact your happiness and your career.
3. Do the work, push through the discomfort of something new, get past the 20-hour mark, and you will be able to master any new skill.
4. Give yourself time to develop complex skills before moving to a new job. The longer a skill takes to develop, the more valuable it is.
5. Finally, try to be trustworthy. This will give you a big competitive advantage, given that competence is slowly being commoditized by AI.

The road to achieving your full potential is not easy. We often shy away from the work and search for shortcuts to move faster and skip the pain involved. This often creates a detour that pushes our goals further away. Whenever this happens to me, I try to remind myself that the work still needs to be done, so I might as well start.

Disclaimer: The views presented are my own and can't be attributed to any past and current employers.

Daniel Rizea is a director of engineering at Google who writes about management and leadership in tech. He is a technology enthusiast and former startup founder.

• Elon Musk says he's still open to fighting Mark Zuckerberg.
• "I've offered to fight him any place, any time, any rules, but all I hear is crickets," Musk said.
• The mercurial billionaire brought up the fight a day after Zuckerberg's 40th birthday on Tuesday. 

Forget regular birthday presents like socks or a fun mug. Turns out, if you're Elon Musk, the biggest birthday present you can gift to a tech world nemesis may just be yourself.

All of this is to say that one day after Mark Zuckerberg's 40th birthday, Elon Musk is back on their old beef, bringing up that fight he challenged Zuckerberg to last year.

"If only Zuckerberg were as tough (sigh). I've offered to fight him any place, any time, any rules, but all I hear is crickets," Musk said in an X post on Wednesday.

Musk was responding to a satirical news story about a hypothetical face-off between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump when he mentioned his own proposed battle with Zuckerberg.

Musk challenged Zuckerberg to a fight in June amid speculation that Meta would launch a rival to his social media platform, previously known as Twitter. Zuckerberg would eventually launch his text-based social media platform, Threads in July.

"I'm up for a cage match if he is lol," Musk said in an X post on June 20, 2023.

"Send Me Location," Zuckerberg responded via an Instagram story the next day.

But despite all the trash-talk and bluster, little would materialize from the banter between the two billionaires.

At one point, Musk claimed that the fight would be live-streamed on their respective social media platforms and that it would take place at an "epic location" in "ancient Rome."

Zuckerberg, however, said Musk never made it clear when they were scheduled to glove up and face off in the ring.

"I've been ready to fight since the day Elon challenged me. If he ever agrees on an actual date, you'll hear it from me," Zuckerberg said in a Threads post on August 11. "Until then, please assume anything he says has not been agreed on."

On the other hand, Musk seemed to see Zuckerberg's reluctance as a sign of cowardice.

"Zuck is a chicken," he wrote in an X post on August 13.

"He can't eat at chic fil a because that would be cannibalism," he wrote in a separate post on the same day, referencing the fast food chain famous for its chicken sandwiches.

To be sure, Musk also suggested that whatever fight he and Zuckerberg were gearing up for wouldn't have happened as quickly as he'd hoped. That was because he first needed to recover from some older injuries he had, Musk said.

"There is a problem with my right shoulder blade rubbing against my ribs, which requires minor surgery. Recovery will only take a few months," Musk said in an X post published on August 11.

In November, Zuckerberg also said that he tore his ACL while sparring and had surgery to fix it. This meant that he wouldn't be able to participate in a "competitive MMA fight" he planned for earlier this year.

Meta isn't the only tech company Musk has problems with. In fact, the mercurial billionaire has been picking fights with most of his peers in Silicon Valley.

On February 22, Musk went after Google after users claimed that the company's Gemini chatbot was "woke" and generating pictures of people of color in accurate historical contexts.

"I'm glad that Google overplayed their hand with their AI image generation, as it made their insane racist, anti-civilizational programming clear to all," Musk said in an X post.

Just a week later, on February 29, Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the AI company he cofounded with Sam Altman. In his lawsuit, Musk accused the ChatGPT maker of violating its nonprofit mission when it partnered with Microsoft.

"OpenAI should be renamed 'super closed source for maximum profit AI,' because this is what it actually is," Musk told journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin at last year's The New York Times' DealBook Summit.

Representatives for Musk and Zuckerberg didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.

• When I took a substitute position at the same school my husband teaches at, I was worried.
• But seeing him at work has allowed me to see him in a new, professional light.
• It also brought us closer together physically.

I've heard horror stories about working with your significant other, so I was admittedly a little worried about what it would be like to work with my husband now that we're married.

We had actually met during my first teaching job — where he had already been a teacher for a couple of years. I know now that we had each been attracted to one another the whole time but didn't want to make the first move at work. We didn't begin dating until I was at a different school, which made the possibility of asking him out and being shot down less awkward.

Fast forward a few years, we're now married, and I find myself out of the classroom and substitute teaching part-time. I thought returning to my first school — where my husband still works — would be a seamless transition for my new, slightly different role as a substitute. But I worried what it would be like to have my husband at work.

I'm happy to report that working together hasn't been uncomfortable at all; it's actually been quite romantic.

Working in the same environment has some surprising benefits

There's something about working in the same environment we first met that reminds us of why we liked each other initially. Seeing each other in the same place and in similar roles rekindles our initial feelings of attraction. Working together again is like taking a step back in time and getting the opportunity to remember why we liked each other to begin with.

It also helps that we get to be separate individuals at work. I see him working in the library, and he sees me subbing in different classrooms. Seeing each other in our respective professional roles and as separate from one another reminds us how much respect we have for one another because being a teacher and working with young people is hard work. Witnessing how hard he's working at school makes me feel so grateful that he's working that hard for his family. Plus, I get to see how loved he is by his coworkers and students, and I just feel so lucky to be his wife.

It's also great because we have a common ground now. When we've worked at different schools, it could become tedious trying to share tidbits from our days. So much can happen in one school day that we would either not want to talk about our days at all or have to be highly selective with our stories around the dinner table. Now that we work in the same school, we are able to apply faces to names and contribute our own experiences with those same people and situations.

While I thought it might be boring to have the same workplace and know the same coworkers and students, it's actually really nice that he is able to understand my work tidbits more fully just because he knows exactly where, who, or what I'm talking about.

Working closely together makes me want him even more

My husband and I are very affectionate, and it's difficult not to be ourselves in that way in a professional environment. We're not going to kiss or hug each other at work or even say, "I love you," in passing.

There are two benefits to this, though. For starters, it creates the same feelings I had when I saw him at work before we were even dating, so that when we get home, sometimes it feels like getting to kiss him for the very first time. The other benefit is that it's very romantic. It definitely makes me want to pull him in for a hug as soon as he gets home.

While I was worried that working with my husband might cause friction, it has actually strengthened our relationship. In addition to having a great deal of respect for each other, seeing him at work reminds me of seeing him at work for the very first time. Now, when I come home to him after work, I just feel so grateful that I got to marry him.

Working with him reminds me of our whole love story — from the very beginning until where we are today.

• Google's new AI products may be making some start-ups nervous.
• An AI-enhanced Google Search and email assistant could threaten smaller AI companies.
• Web creators are also nervous that a widely used AI-search engine may disrupt web traffic.

Google has new AI products — and they might be making some start-ups nervous.

The company unveiled several of its AI efforts at its I/O conference on Tuesday, including a flashy AI-enhanced Google Search and an assistant that can summarize and sort through Gmail.

The announcements were followed by social media chatter claiming Google's new launches would "kill" email and browser-based agents, including Perplexity AI.

Founded by former Google and OpenAI employees, Perplexity's product is an AI chatbot search engine that provides conversational answers.

Google's new AI-enhanced search promises to do pretty much the same thing — but already benefits from a loyal user base. This could allow users to abandon tools like Perplexity AI and go straight to Google for their AI needs instead.

It's not the first time Big Tech has wreaked havoc on smaller players.

Last year, a minor update to ChatGPT that allowed it to interact with PDFs threatened to make startups building "wrappers" for AI chatbots redundant. As Business Insider's Hasan Chowdhury noted at the time, startups without a moat to make them significantly different from competitors are at risk of being plundered.

Google's new AI search is also making creators nervous that web traffic could be disrupted.

The company's new vision for search could transform how the internet has worked for decades. Instead of displaying a list of links to answer queries, it could send users automated answers and disrupt the flow of traffic around the web.

A lot of internet creators rely on SEO to drive clicks, bring traffic, and advertising revenue.

Google appears to be aware of some of the hand-wringing. In a blog post, search chief Liz Reid addressed concerns that the changes could result in fewer website visits.

"We see that the links included in AI Overviews get more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional web listing for that query," she wrote. "As we expand this experience, we'll continue to focus on sending valuable traffic to publishers and creators."

Google did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Google has been working on AI for more than two decades. 
• Now, Google is betting on its Gemini LLM as it seeks to be an "AI-first" company.
• Here's what you need to know about Gemini, from where to access it to how it compares to ChatGPT.

For over two decades, Google has made strides to insert AI into its suite of products. The tech giant is now making moves to establish itself as a leader in the emergent generative AI space.

Google is no stranger to the technology. Back in the 2000s, the company said it applied machine learning techniques to Google Search to correct users' spelling and used them to create services like Google Translate.

Then, in the following decade, Google acquired DeepMind, at the time a little-known AI research company. It also introduced TensorFlow, an open-source machine learning framework that developers have used to build models with capabilities like image and speech recognition, natural language processing, and predictive analytics.

The company doubled down on its strategy in 2016 when CEO Sundar Pichai declared that Google would be an "AI-first company." Years later, that's set Google up for the generative AI wars, where it's now duking it out with competitors like OpenAI and Microsoft to make the best products in the sector.

It released Bard, its first AI chatbot, in early 2022, though it later folded that into its family of large language models that it calls Gemini.

"Every technology shift is an opportunity to advance scientific discovery, accelerate human progress, and improve lives," Google's CEO wrote in December 2023. "I believe the transition we are seeing right now with AI will be the most profound in our lifetimes, far bigger than the shift to mobile or to the web before it."

But what, exactly, do Google's latest AI tools do? And how do they compare to rivals like ChatGPT? Business Insider compiled a Q&A that answers everything you may wonder about Google's generative AI efforts.

Google didn't respond to a request for comment from BI before publication.

What is Google's Gemini?

Gemini is the name of Google's family of large language models. The search giant claims they are more powerful than GPT-4, which underlies OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Launched in December 2023, Gemini is multimodal, meaning it can recognize and understand text, image, audio, video, and code to generate human-like responses. Google claims the model can help with writing, brainstorming, and learning, among other tasks. That's because Gemini is trained on troves of public data, including "publicly available" Google Docs, and, soon, Reddit posts.

The model comes in three sizes that vary based on the amount of data used to train them. From smallest to largest, they include Nano, Pro, and Ultra. Gemini 1.5 Pro, Google's most advanced model to date, is now available on Vertex AI, the company's platform for developers to build machine learning software, according to the company.

CEO Pichai says it's "one of the biggest science and engineering efforts we've undertaken as a company."

How do I access Gemini?

Users are required to make a Gmail account and be at least 18 years old to access Gemini.

Web users can access the generative AI tool at gemini.google.com. Smartphone users can download the Google Gemini app for Android or the Google app with built-in AI capabilities for the iPhone. Those who own the tech company's Pixel 8 can expect to see Gemini Nano, the smallest version of the model, on their phones after the next feature drop that could arrive in June 2024.

Users can interact with Gemini's 1.0 Pro model for free. But for $19.99 a month, users can access Gemini Advanced, a version the company claims is "far more capable at reasoning, following, instructions, coding, and creative inspiration" than the free one.

Paid users can access Gemini in Google's workspace apps like Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Sheets.

Users can also incorporate Gemini Advanced into Google Meet calls and use it to create background images or use translated captions for calls involving a language barrier.

How do I use Gemini?

Using Gemini is relatively straightforward.

Simply type in text prompts like "Brainstorm ways to make a dish more delicious" or "Generate an image of a solar eclipse" in the dialogue box, and the model will respond accordingly within seconds. You can also talk directly to Gemini using your voice.

Another way to use it is to insert images and have the AI identify specific objects and locations.

But don't expect the chatbot's outputs to be perfect. In February 2024, Google paused Gemini's image generation tool after people criticized it for spitting out historically inaccurate photos of US presidents. The company also restricted its AI chatbot from answering questions about the 2024 US presidential election to curb the spread of fake news and misinformation. And, in general, Gemini has guardrails that prevent it from answering questions it deems unsafe.

Google Gemini vs ChatGPT — which is better?

The question of whether Gemini is actually more capable than ChatGPT is up for debate.

Overall, it appears to perform better than GPT-4, the LLM behind ChatGPT, according to Hugging Face's chatbot arena board, which AI researchers use to gauge the model's capabilities, as of the spring of 2024.

One possible reason: ChatGPT's knowledge cut-off date is April 2023, whereas Gemini draws from the most recent information on Google in real time.

A chatbot test Business Insider did in 2023 illustrates Gemini's seemingly superior capabilities. When comparing ChatGPT's responses with Gemini's, BI found that Google's model had an edge at responding to queries regarding current events, identifying AI-generated images, and meal planning. ChatGPT, however, spat out more conversational responses, making interacting with the AI feel more enjoyable and human-like.

What happened to Bard?

Bard was the name of Google's first AI chatbot, which the company folded into Gemini. Its reason: to "reflect the advanced tech at its core."

After all, Bard's rollout in 2023 wasn't smooth sailing. Google employees criticized its public release for being "rushed" — an issue that doomed the discontinued Google Glass — and "botched" after the AI chatbot spit out incorrect information during its inaugural demo. John Hennessy, the chairman of Alphabet, Google's parent company, agreed, saying that the AI wasn't "really ready" yet.