Work is a Verb A newsletter by Flexibility shouldn't be a one-way street Their employer trusts them to get work done on the road, unsupervised, through long weeks and delayed flights. However, that trust stops just before they open their front door. Between work trips, office attendance is required. That's the situation a real Work is a Verb reader described in a reply to my welcome email. They asked to stay anonymous. Between trips, they want a little room to recover the time that work...
9 days ago • 4 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by "Show Me, Don't Tell Me." Last Friday I spoke at the Remote Rebellion virtual job fair. The speaker right before me was a recruiter, and near the end of her talk she said this: Don't tell me you use AI. Show me a workflow that you built... Don't just tell me you're a fast learner, tell me about the things that you didn't know six months ago that you know today. The talk I was about to give made the same argument from the other side of the table. We had never...
16 days ago • 4 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by Uber's Office Rule Did Not Change. Its Exemptions Did. On September 2, Uber told about 10 percent of its roughly 34,000 employees that their jobs were gone. In the same memo, they told the people who were left where they would be living. Global teams move to New York and San Francisco. Regional teams go to designated regional hubs, local teams to country hubs, tech teams to tech hubs. Managers sit with their reports "wherever possible, particularly for...
23 days ago • 4 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by The jobs exist. The candidates exist. The match is failing. Heat Geek installs heat pumps. This summer it opened eight roles, enough to grow its headcount by more than a quarter, and its chief operating officer told the Financial Times the entry-level jobs needed to be “filled yesterday.” The graduates she wanted were, in the FT’s words, nowhere to be seen. “We know exactly what we want,” Holly Foster said. “The struggle is communicating that … what we’re...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by Cut First, Measure Later In early June, Meta's chief technology officer shared some surprising numbers on the company's internal processes. Changes to the software platforms and infrastructure employees use inside Meta were up 220% year over year. Changes that actually resulted in new or upgraded features reaching Facebook and Instagram users were up only 36%. Meanwhile, major technical and security incidents—including service disruptions and possible data...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by The 48-Hour Search Monday morning: coffee, a clean spreadsheet, and a weekend's worth of saved postings. By Wednesday night, every open tab has your name on it. For two days, every click moves the search forward. Then the batch is submitted, and the next move on every application belongs to an employer. In the December 2025 revision of their NBER working paper "Application Flows", economists Steven J. Davis and Brenda Samaniego de la Parra analyzed 125 million...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by Your Calendar Sorts Backwards Two meetings get requested on the same Monday morning. The first is thirty minutes on which vendor to use for the new company hoodies. Two people, neither of them senior. It lands on Tuesday afternoon. The second is whether to correct the comp band on an engineering team that keeps losing people over it. It needs four people, two of whom run departments. The first slot where all four are free is three weeks out, long enough for...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by There is a message sitting in my LinkedIn inbox from someone I have never met. It is friendly. It mentions a post I wrote and says something reasonable about it. It asks for nothing at all. I already know what the second message says. So do you. Everyone has been on both ends of this, if not on LinkedIn then in every sales email that opened with a compliment before it got to the point. The friendly "loved your post" note does not read as a compliment. It reads...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by Last week, walking my dog Biba back from the mailbox, I found an actual letter. Handwriting on the envelope. It stopped me mid-step: that old warmth of being thought of by someone who wasn't in the room. Strange, because a letter is about as far from "being in the room" as communication gets. You write, you wait days, they read it alone... and it still did exactly what CEOs insist only an office can do. A letter takes real effort to produce. Someone sat down,...
3 months ago • 3 min read