Data is one of the most valuable resources today. The companies that own and store the world's largest and most valuable data wield enormous influence. Yet despite their power, these companies are increasingly vulnerable to data breaches, a costly and reputationally damaging affair.
Understanding the long term effects of two merging companies is complex. There are the melding of cultures, product lines, egos, and, not to mention, workforces. With all these complex variables, it’s no wonder so many mergers fail, and even more miraculous when some wildly succeed. So what makes a good or bad merger, and how can we predict them better?
Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk has, on more than one occasion, promoted the idea that the automotive company is uninterested in pedigree. In a noteworthy string of tweets in February, Musk wrote, “Don’t care if you even graduated high school… Educational background is irrelevant, but all must pass hardcore coding test.”
For years, the US military has promoted the idea that the armed forces is an effective launching pad to leadership positions. We wanted to dig into this presumption and explore whether those with military backgrounds really get more senior positions once they enter the corporate world. By tracking the careers of both veterans and non-veterans, we see how military service affects seniority when compared to civilians.
For decades, many states feared that they were losing their best talent to other states with prestigious universities. This “brain drain” as it’s been known to be called, has in part been attributed to the trend of people finding work close to where they attend school. By tracking individuals who provide information about their high school education, their college education, and their first job, we see a remarkable reversal of this trend.
As the country mourns the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, we remark on the influence she had on gender equality for all Americans. This influence was perhaps most pronounced in her own profession.
Despite the recent slowdown in hiring, the race for premier talent is only heating up. Top tech companies are aggressively competing for AI engineers to secure their future from the pervasive risks of automation. Skills in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Neural Networks are reaching new levels of demand as industries are preparing for the next industrial revolution.
Upward mobility is a huge concern, not just for ambitious employees, but for the workplace environment. By analyzing cohorts of employees from 1990 to 2018, we see a significant gender seniority gap that seems to be becoming smaller for younger cohorts.
There has been tremendous speculation about when a COVID-19 vaccine will be ready and what pharmaceutical companies will be involved in the manufacturing and distribution. It would be hard to find anyone whose well-being would not be dramatically improved by a vaccine.
Large industrial cities, like Detroit and Pittsburgh, have mostly been in decline over the last few decades, ushering in a new era of cities with a diverse set of industries and jobs. But in recent years that trend has reversed among technology hubs, like San Jose and Seattle. Their workforces have shifted so heavily toward engineering that they are now at risk of losing the diversity of thought that’s necessary for innovation.
In recent weeks, labor markets have appeared to stabilize as the number of new job postings has increased. But while postings have grown, the salaries associated with those postings have fallen dramatically. By tracking expected salaries from 9 million job listings since March, and controlling for changes in seniority, occupation, and city, we found that salaries have fallen by 8.8%.
For years, experts have been hailing a new era where companies can hire talent on a per project basis and labor can have a more flexible work-life balance. With the advent of many infrastructural technologies (personal websites, automated invoicing, flexible cloud storage, etc), many individuals have been taking advantage of their valuable skills and joining the freelance economy.
Skilled mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists have long been coveted by top hedge funds and big tech companies. For years, these sectors have competed over this technical talent pool to generate profitable trading algorithms, build infrastructure, and targeted ad platforms. But commentary on this war for talent has been little more than conjecture. Who is actually winning the war to attract top talent - top hedge funds or big tech?
Differences in gender and ethnicity distributions are most dramatic within senior management. Representation among senior management drops most dramatically for female employees. The effect of being from two minority groups is smaller than what would be expected if the effects were independent.
A great deal of attention has been brought to the racial inequities in the United States in recent days. Given that these concerns may persist within organizational structures, we wanted to take a look at how demographics differ across companies.
