Tech giants are spending millions to diversify workforces and address race and bias. Current and former Googlers call for deeper reflection.

"I went from a very average life to a broken life," Sybrina Fulton told a crowd at Google's offices in downtown San Francisco last November. After George Zimmerman shot her son, Trayvon Martin, in Florida in 2012, and was later acquitted of second-degree murder, Fulton transformed from a mother to an activist. Still, she said, she objects to people calling her strong. Speaking out was a matter of necessity.

"I didn't want to live the rest of my life bitter, because that would have taken two lives instead of just one," she said, name checking Beyoncé's Lemonade, in which she makes a brief cameo. She said her son's death forced her to speak out because "this country just did not see how broken it was."

Evidence of that brokenness has been piling up since Martin's death. It's there in the frequent shootings of black men and boys by police, and in the white supremacists hailing Donald Trump after he was elected to the presidency after a campaign marked by bigotry.

It's also there in the demographics of Google's employee population: As at most tech companies, there are few black or Latino workers, especially among engineers. This explains why Fulton had been invited to speak as part of a series of discussions on race. Google—along with nearly every other tech company, from giants to startups—is struggling to get past that brokenness to a place where the workforce better reflects the audiences it serves.

When the company released its first diversity report in 2014, it essentially forced other tech companies to do the same, and confirmed longstanding suspicions about the industry's makeup. But while the concept of annual diversity reports suggests that Silicon Valley wants to hold itself accountable for improving its dismal diversity figures, so far, not a lot has changed.

After spending two years and $265 million on the effort, Google's employee population was only 2% black in 2016, the same percentage as it was in 2014. Fifty-nine percent of Googlers are white, 32% are Asian, 3% are Hispanic, and 3% identified as a mix of two or more ethnicities. A roundup of diversity reports, gathered by The Hacker Life in March, finds similar numbers at many tech companies.

In the U.S., African-Americans and Hispanics make up 26% of the population over the age of 21, Knatokie Ford, the former senior policy adviser for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, recently told Essence. But they make up only 11% of the workforce in industries related to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. "To see something significant where we're actually hitting a market supply, you know, of 10% or something like that of hispanic and black Googlers, that's going to take several years," Nancy Lee, the company's former diversity chief, told the PBS NewsHour in July.

In mid-December, Google's efforts appeared to hit another snag after TechCrunch reported that Lee was retiring from the company. The company would not comment on her decision to leave, on who might replace her, or how its diversity and inclusion programs could shift in her absence. Lee could not be reached for comment directly.

Last month, the company's employment data entered the spotlight again after the U.S. Department of Labor announced it was suing Google over its failure to provide the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) with compensation information related to its equal opportunity program. "Like other federal contractors, Google has a legal obligation to provide relevant information requested in the course of a routine compliance evaluation," OFCCP Acting Director Thomas M. Dowd said in a statement. "Despite many opportunities to produce this information voluntarily, Google has refused to do so."

In response, Google spokespeople have said the request for that information was too broad and risked divulging confidential employee information. "We're very committed to our affirmative action obligations and to improving the diversity of our workforce, and have been very vocal about the importance of these issues," Google told the Society for Human Resource Management.

The company has invested millions in a program focused on reducing unconscious bias in its employees, tweaked its policies to make pay more equitable, and also sought to address the so-called "pipeline" problem, the argument that there aren't enough minority engineers to choose from, by improving its recruiting efforts. In recent years, Google has worked closely with historically black colleges in order to identify and recruit engineering talent. According to Essence, more than 400 recruits from that program are still at Google.

Google is also a hefty supporter of Black Girls Code, an organization that exposes girls of color to computer science and technology, and last year it set up shop in Oakland's predominantly black Fruitvale neighborhood in an effort to provide technology training to locals. A second site is slated to open in Harlem, New York, this year. Google spent $115 million on diversity initiatives in 2014 and $150 million in 2015, according to USA Today. However, spokesman Ty Sheppard said it's not divulging how much the company invested in those programs in 2016, or how much it plans to lay out in 2017.

But even getting diverse candidates through the door often isn't enough. At Facebook, for instance, an experiment offered recruiters "double points" if they found a candidate that was a "diversity hire." However, those candidates ran into trouble as a committee of high-ranking engineers often vetoed those candidates.

The effect of unconscious bias may even appear in the company's search results. Google's Photos app famously tagged two black people as gorillas, and image searches for common terms, such as "man" or "woman" (or, puzzlingly, "beautiful dreadlocks") mostly produce pictures of white people.

When Google was called out for returning criminal mugshots when people searched for images of black teenagers, Google claimed that its search algorithms are based on the availability and frequency of online data, but that the results don't reflect the company's own beliefs. Still, as Bradley Horowitz, the manager who led Google Photos at the time of the gorilla incident, admitted recently, according to TechCrunch, a more diverse team would have noticed the problems earlier in the process. (The company has recently funded research into fighting bias in machine learning.)

This all helps to explain what has brought activists like Fulton to Google's campuses, in an effort to nudge audiences to behave more inclusively. "We have to get to that space where it does not matter—if it's your 6-year-old brother or or your 6-year-old son—the color of their skin does not matter. Because I can sit here right now before you, and there are a lot of things I could take off . . . but I cannot remove the color of my skin. Nor do I want to, because it's who I am," she said.

Decoding And Upgrading

Valeisha Butterfield Jones, who was hired as Google's head of black community engagement in January 2016, is reluctant to predict how long it might take to create significant diversity among Google's employees, who now number 65,000. She admits, "We have a lot of work to do."

Sheppard, the Google spokesman, noted that with so many employees, even a small increase in the percentage of black employees translates to hundreds of workers. "While the percentage doesn't appear to change, there is progress happening," he says.

Jones was a youth organizer for Obama for America before joining Google. She's looking at a number of ways to bring more black and Latino workers to Google, and to change the tech titan's internal culture surrounding race. As part of a broader project called Race At Google, she helped launch a speaker series this year called Decoding Race, with the assistance of Michael Skolnik, the well-connected political director for the media mogul Russell Simmons. Jones so far has brought activist DeRay McKesson to speak to Googlers and hosted Van Jones as the star of a talk entitled, "Can Computers Be Racist?" Fulton's talk was another in the series; she spoke alongside comedian Cristela Alonzo, Google's in-house racial equitect Myosha McAfee, journalist and undocumented immigrant Jose Antonio Vargas, and moderator Michaela Angela Davis.

More than 3,000 Google employees have come out for the Decoding Race series so far, and many more have watched via Google's internal live-streaming systems. (The discussion is also available on YouTube.) At least 10 more talks are planned over the next year at Google sites around the country, Jones says.

"Most of the talks have had a majority of white men in the audience," she says. "That was so inspiring for me, to see that there was an appetite to come in and better understand the communities they work and live with."

At least one black former Google engineer isn't as inspired. Erica Joy Baker left her position as a site reliability engineer in May 2015 after almost 10 years with Google, largely because she was fed up with the company's failure to address a culture of casual racism. After leaving, Baker cofounded Project Include, an organization designed to help tech companies achieve real diversity, with former interim Reddit CEO Ellen Pao. She's also an engineer at Slack, which she says is doing its own work around diversity and inclusion. At a recent panel discussion, Leslie Miley, Slack's director of engineering, urged Google and other tech companies to use blind assessments when looking for new recruits, something Slack already does.

Baker was still at Google when the company launched its unconscious bias program, which aims to train folks to recognize when they're operating from places of unrecognized racism or sexism—including when interacting with coworkers or potentially hiring new ones. Last summer, the company reported that all new Googlers take the workshop as part of their orientation, and that over 65% of Googlers have participated in the workshops so far.

"Unconscious bias training is a way to say, 'We're working on it,' but since it's not required, the only people who show up are the people who are already thinking about and working on those biases, and the people who really need it aren't going," Baker says. She suspects the Decoding Race talks will appeal to a similar audience.

"You Have to Be Prepared to Fire People"

Baker experienced a gauntlet of casual and overt racism at Google. During her first years at the company, in the mid-2000s, she reported a white male colleague for making racist and sexist remarks, and was told she could either put up with it or move from the office in Atlanta to another one in New York, she says. She chose New York, then later transferred to Google's Mountain View, California, office.

Baker's coworkers regularly mistook her for a non-engineer because of her race. Some assumed she was one of Google's security officers, despite the fact that security personnel wear specific uniforms, while others thought she was her office mate's personal assistant. Those kinds of biases were baked into Google's beginnings, she says.

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google 18 years ago, they wanted to "re-create grad life at Stanford at Google," Baker says. They hired mostly white and Asian men, brought in ping-pong tables and pool tables, and kept the alcohol flowing. But nobody ever thought about how that culture might exclude others, she says.

Baker regularly witnessed discussions in which people talked about how, for example, they thought black people were less intelligent—or more prone to violence—than white people. "That sort of thing was permitted because there weren't enough black people to speak out against it," Baker says.

No amount of unconscious bias trainings or speaker events are likely to upend such behavior, say workplace consultants. For diversity and inclusion initiatives to really work, a company has to embrace them at every level—and show real accountability, says Y-Vonne Hutchinson, founder of ReadySet, a diversity consulting firm in Oakland.

"You need to bring in people who value diversity. Don't just bring a person of color into a place that's a little bit hostile and not bring in people who support diversity," says Hutchinson, who's also a member of Project Include. "You have to be prepared to make tough decisions. You have to be prepared to fire people."

Asked if she ever saw anyone at Google get fired for casual or even overt racism, Baker exhaled with a bitter laugh. "No. Absolutely not," she says. "They get to write it off as a different political opinion. It sends the message that someone can be blatantly racist, and this is a culture that tolerates it."

Sheppard disagrees, saying that Page and Brin "have been very committed to diversity" at Google. Acts of racism among employees are grounds for termination, and Google has fired employees for behaving in racist ways, he says.

Beyond making employees feel safe and respected, there are solid business reasons for creating a diverse workforce, says Hutchinson: Heterogeneous companies make better products, while homogenous companies make worse ones. "As tech companies become more risk-averse, being able to derive revenue early on is going to become very important," he says. "Ninety-two percent of startups fail in the first year—50% from a poor product fit."

Rhoma Young, a human resources expert and member of the Association of Workplace Investigators, says she used to support diversity programs in corporations. Now she's more reluctant to suggest them, unless a company is very committed to creating real cultural change in how employees treat each other from management on down.

"Unless they are willing to do it realistically and stand behind it, it's going to become a joke and a sham. It's going to give a mixed message," Young says. Without that commitment, "it's not worth the resources to raise an expectation level [about diversity] that's not realistic."

What About Employee Retention?

In addition to the Decoding Race series, Jones is beginning to work on building bridges between Google and communities of color. In early December, she facilitated a mixer in New York City where more than 300 black and Latino professionals mingled with Google employees and recruiters in an effort to bring more of those professionals through Google's doors. Jones says she's planning more such events in 2017, and also looking at how to retain black and Latino employees once they're hired.

Hutchinson said focusing on retention is incredibly important. "Apple is a great example. They've made huge gains in diverse hiring, and then have seen incredible losses when they're thinking about who they retain. Women are leaving. People of color are leaving. They're not making sure that people feel like they belong and can grow in the company."

Google does not make its employee retention data available to the public, according to spokesman Ty Sheppard.

Jones is also looking at the role technology is playing in the fight for racial justice, such as the use of live video feeds to reveal incidents of police brutality; she hopes to empower racial justice activists to make better use of tech and social media. "They're showing that evidence of these injustices are there in plain sight. They have made it a more human issue for people," she says.

Baker says it's not clear to her whether Google's newer initiatives are rooted in a real desire to change, or are a part of a public-relations effort, which she said was evident in 2014, when the company released its unconscious-bias training information through re:Work.

"They're thinking about, 'How does this make us look good?'" Baker says. "But the conversations on race need to continue, and Google needs to keep having them, whether it's for PR or altruism. They need to keep pushing the industry to keep having them. If we can't talk about the problems, we can't fix the problems."

More gamblers are betting against the president after his tumultuous first days.

Gamblers will bet on anything—and they're having a field day with President Donald Trump.

The odds are now 2:1 that the 45th president will be impeached before the end of his first term, the online betting site Paddy Power reports. Before his inauguration, those odds were 4:1.

Paddy Power has an entire section dedicated to U.S. politics. A surge in bets predicting an early exit for the president came in after his tumultuous first days. Wagers are even being made on what year impeachment proceedings will begin in the House of Representatives. The odds are 7:1 this year, and they get less likely as time passes (but offer bigger winnings if you're right): 9:1 in 2018, 16:1 in 2019, and 20:1 in 2020. In reality, presidential impeachment is a complex process. Only two U.S. presidents—Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton—have been impeached. Both were acquitted by the Senate.

The site Ladbrokes also has gamblers betting against Trump. It has 11:10 odds that the Republican real estate mogul will leave office via impeachment or resignation before the end of his first term.

Trump's impeachment isn't the only bet out there. A "Donald Trump Specials" section of the Paddy Power site includes bets on where he'll make his first state visit: Odds are 3:1 it's either Russia or Canada. Will his third marriage make it through the end of the year? Odds are 16:1.

Paddy Power also has odds on whether a tape will emerge to back allegations of golden shower dalliances with Russian hookers. Although Trump has vigorously denied the unsavory reports, the betting site says the odds a tape will pop up on RedTube are 4:1. Sticking to that theme, there are also odds on whether Trump will decide to paint the entire White House gold—500:1.

While gambling odds typically always favor the house, the house isn't always right. PaddyPower called the presidential race for Hillary Clinton and wound up paying out close to $5 million to those who put their money on Trump.

"We've been well and truly thumped by Trump, with his victory leaving us with the biggest political payout in the company's history and some very, very expensive egg on our faces," Paddy Power spokesman Lewis Davey told CNBC in November.

If betting on our current political climate is a little too much for you, you can also place wagers now on the 2020 presidential election.

Odds are most likely right now, 6:4, that Donald Trump will win in 2020. There are a number of other interesting candidates in the mix. Odds are 14:1 we'll have Michelle Obama as our next president, 66:1 we'll have a President Zuckerberg in 2020, and 275:1 Kim Kardashian will hold the highest office in the country in less than four years.

As for Clinton, Paddy Power hasn't quite ruled her out just yet. The odds she'll win in 2020 currently sit at 14:1.

Howard Schultz announced his company's plans to hire 10,000 refugees around the world. Here's a look into how he might go about doing it.

While other CEOs say they'll support their immigrant workers in the face of President Trump's sweeping ban on people from certain countries—without going even so far as to call out the executive order itself—other executives are trying to do a bit more. Take Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz as an example of the latter. Earlier this week he announced a program to counteract the newly inaugurated president's "Muslim ban": Starbucks plans to hire 10,000 refugees over the next five years.

In a message to employees Schultz wrote, "We will neither stand by, nor stand silent, as the uncertainty around the new administration's actions grows with each passing day ... There are 65 million citizens of the world recognized as refugees by the United Nations and we are developing plans to hire 10,000 of them over five years."

I reached out to Starbucks to learn more about the company's plans to roll out this program, and it declined to comment further on its refugee initiative. But we can look at a few past programs that may illuminate the way Schultz could go about finding and employing these people

Veterans And Youth Programs

One of Starbucks's most well-touted programs is its initiative to hire 10,000 veterans. Similar to how Schultz is targeting refugees for jobs, the CEO announced in 2013 that he planned to hire the same number of veterans over a five-year period. So far the company says it has hired more than 8,800 veterans with one year to go to reach its goal of 10,000.

The first thing the company did was find areas where it could open new coffee shops, especially areas where military families were clustered. Since 2013, the company has opened 32 new military-focused shops, which it calls "Military Family Stores." Starbucks also hired military recruiters to make connections with military families who would be interested in working with the coffee company.

Another similar program is called "Opportunity Youth," and focuses on people ages 16-24 who aren't working or in school. Like the veterans program, Schultz pledged in 2015 to hire 10,000 of those youth by 2018. Then he went further and announced a coalition with 50 other companies to hire 100,000 young people. Now the company says it has opened four stores in low-to-medium income communities that also have training spaces inside as a way to create and foster jobs, and the 100,000 milestone has already been passed.

A Proven Strategy

Using both programs as a template, you can get a glimpse into how Schultz might strategize the refugee hiring initiative. In his statement, he said the company would look toward hiring them in the "75 countries around the world where Starbucks does business." In short, this will likely be a global initiative. The company may seek out areas known to welcome refugees and begin there. It's also possible that, like the military program, Starbucks would begin sending out recruiters to organizations representing refugees.

Of course, veterans and American youth are different targets than global refugees. For one, those programs focused on American employees and this new refugee-focused endeavor has a much more global scale. Moreover, it's much less politically charged to hire thousands of American military veterans or at-risk American youth than it is to hire foreigners seeking asylum. This a much more political stance, and the road for Starbucks may be rockier.

And indeed the pushback has already begun. People have begun calling for a boycott of Starbucks because of the refugee plan. Some have even said that the company should be focusing on hiring people like veterans, perhaps not realizing the company already does.

The pushback caused a group of military people, part of Armed Forces Network, to write an open letter defending Schultz. They write:

We respect honest debate and the freedom of expression. Many of us served to protect that very right. Some of our brothers and sisters died protecting it. But to those who would suggest Starbucks is not committed to hiring veterans, we are here to say: Check your facts, Starbucks is already there.

Schultz is a savvy businessman, someone who has shown the ability to execute large-scale programs. We'll be sure to keep track of Starbucks and try and learn more about this initiative as time goes on; it's likely Schultz has yet to even strategize a formal roadmap. But, with two other similar programs in his back pocket, we at least get the sense that this isn't brand new terrain.

More young scientists see social media platforms as an important way to engage the public and clear up misinformation.

Beth Linas has a reputation among her scientific colleagues for her love of social media. "Oh I'm ridiculed," she tells me, via Twitter direct message (of course). "Not by everyone, but by some old school folk."

Linas, an infectious disease epidemiologist, tweets regularly about topics that she's passionate about, whether it's mobile technology or public health. During her fellowship year at the National Science Foundation, she is leveraging social media to help debunk theories that aren't scientifically validated, such as that vaccines are linked to autism, as well as improve health literacy and inspire more women to train for STEM careers.

Increasingly, young scientists like Linas regard Facebook, Twitter, and blogging platforms as a key part of their day job. Not everyone is on board. Linas stresses that the ridicule from her colleagues isn't mean-spirited, but it still demonstrates some fundamental discomfort with engaging with the public. Social media is viewed by many, she says, as time spent away from more important work, like peer-reviewed research.

Experts say that academics have to walk a fine line, even today. Many scientists today will encounter a "cultural pushback," says Tim Caulfield, a health policy professor at the University of Alberta Caulfield, if they're viewed as being too "self promotional." Carl Sagan, for instance, is remembered for his television persona but many forget that he was also a prolific scientific researcher. Scientists on social media also risk alienating colleagues or university officials if they tweet or post about a controversial topic that doesn't reflect well on their institution. For Prachee Avasthi, assistant professor of anatomy and cell biology at University of Kansas Medical Center, the biggest risk is to protect her reputation within the scientific community, so she watches what she tweets. "[Another] scientist might have power over me in that they might review my grants or papers."

Despite the risks, experts who have studied the trend see this as a way to increase public support for the sciences at a time when the Trump administration is questioning facts and threatening funding for basic research. "I tell academics that social media is now the top source of science information for people," says Paige Jarreau, a science communication specialist at Louisiana State University. "And they are a trusted voice for people that don't have that background and literacy."

Surveys show that public confidence in the scientific community has remained stable since the early 1970s, and that they are more trusted than public officials and religious leaders. For that reason, Caulfield argues that it's meaningful for scientists to be part of the conversation even if they have far fewer followers than celebrities peddling pseudo-science, such as actress and Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow (Caulfield is the author of a book titled, Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?).

A trusted voice can be very influential, he says. "[Scientists communicating online] is an important part of pushing back against misinformation." Caulfield says he has been personally criticized for "spending so much time tweeting," but he's noticed a shift in recent years. Now, he says, students, scientists, and universities are approaching him to advise them on how to communicate their work to the public. At universities and medical centers, including Louisiana State University, science departments are now hosting regular workshops to encourage scientists to be present on social media.

For Dana Smith, a science writer and communicator who previously worked at the Gladstone Institutes, it's no longer an option for scientists not to engage with lay audiences. "It's becoming a moral obligation," she says, with much of their research funding coming from taxpayers. For this reason, she personally made the switch from academia—she was a doctoral psychology researcher at the University of Cambridge—to communications. She doesn't think everyone needs to be the "next public face of science," but she encourages researchers to try their hand at the occasional blog post or tweet.

The question of whether scientists should take the next step and engage in activism—many are planning their own march on Washington— and/or run for political office is up for debate. Some, like Smith, see it as a positive trend. But Caulfield warns that scientists might lose their status in the public eye. "When they get closer to an agenda," he says, "I think that trust might dissipate.

10 Scientists to follow on social media (as recommended by scientists)

@dgmacarthur
Daniel MarArthur, a geneticist who runs the MacArthur lab and describes himself as "committed to to open data and software."
Follow for musings about: genetics, science funding, open access

@AstroKatie
Katherine Mack, a theoretical astrophysicist and occasional freelance science writer
Follow for musings about: the universe, politics, science education

@HopeJahren
Anne Hope Jahren, an American geochemist and geobiologist at the University of Oslo
Follow for musings about: climate change, Scandinavia, political news

@phylogenomics
Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist at University of California, Davis
Follow for musings about: the microbiome, genetics, political news

@ClimateOfGavin
Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist, climate modeler ,and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York
Follow for musings about: climate change, current events, science communication

@EricTopol
Eric Topol, a cardiologist, geneticist, and digital medicine researcher.
Follow for musings about: the future of medicine, digital health, mobile medical technology

@AlongsideWild
David Steen, an assistant research professor of Wildlife Ecology & Conservation
Follow for musings about: wildlife, science communication, conversation research

@bradleyvoytek
Bradley Voytek, an assistant professor of computational cognitive science and neuroscience at UC San Diego.
Follow for musings about brain oscillations, computer science, San Diego

@seanmcarroll
Sean Carroll, a cosmologist and physics professor specializing in dark energy and general relativity
Follow for musings about: the origins of life, answers to basic science questions, philosophy

@Fishguy_FHL
Adam Summers, a professor of biology and aquatic and fishery sciences
Follow for musings about: fish, bio-inspired design, science communication

@BrennanSpiegel
Brennan Spiegel, director of Cedars-Sinai Health Services Research
Follow for musings about: medical technology, wearables, the future of medical education

@WhySharksMatter
David Shiffman, a marine conservation biologist and science writer
Follow for musings about: why sharks need love, climate change, nerdy science jokes

The organization's new Wave platform is designed to help girls connect with mentors and grow their personal network.

Last year the group #BuiltByGirls found its way into the spotlight when former First Lady Michelle Obama joined forces with the organization for the Let Girls Build Challenge, a project that encouraged girls to use the power of technology to create solutions to some of the problems facing the 62 million girls in the world without access to a traditional education.

Founded in 2014, the New York-based organization helps girls ages 15-18 get involved in technology, offering mentorship and guidance to help them learn about career opportunities that might be available to them, and get the training necessary to pursue their career dreams. And it's working. A whopping 92% of the girls who've participated in #BuiltByGirls say they feel more confident to be a leader after completing the program. 90% of girls feel more confident to work in tech, and 88% are more confident in pursuing careers in business.

Traditionally a summer internship-like experience at a single company, the group is now launching a new program called Wave, a much longer, year-long experience that will pair 150 girls with a total of three mentors at three different companies like Spotify, Rent the Runway, and Giphy. The hope is to change the "boy's club" of tech, and help qualified young women enter the workforce.

"The idea is long-term through the platform to build a pipeline of young women interested in technology, and pull together the best tech advisors in the country, to provide their expertise to the next generation of tech leaders," says Tory Marlin, director of marketing and partnerships for the organization.

With Wave, girls are paired based on their interests with a mentor at a tech company for three months, visiting once a month for an hour to chat with that mentor in person, often at their office. At the end of the third month, the mentor will introduce the girl to two relevant people from their network, helping to grow the teen's own network in the process. Afterward, the girl will go through the same experience with two additional mentors, ultimately growing those connections to three mentors and six additional introductions in a year. They've also been exposed to a tech company office, and have a bit of an idea on how that office works on a daily basis.

To help power the program, #BuiltByGirls has made a mobile app that will help guide meetings between mentors and advisees. With the app, the organization will provide profile information about both the girl and the mentor and facilitate conversations between the duo about everything from how to send a professional email to how to develop products and ideas in a way that makes them viable in the marketplace. At the end of the three months, the two will have also collaborated on solving a hypothetical business challenge, such as opening a new branch or rolling out a new product, for the mentor's company.

That may seem like a small deal, but it could be a huge one. A good number of tech positions are filled through employee referrals. By building their network early on, these girls are getting not only a feel for an industry they might want to join down the line, they're actually getting their foot in the door of the club, something that will come in handy when those same girls are looking for their first internship or even their first job when they graduate college. They're also learning some basic skills that will put them a few steps ahead of the competition when it comes to applying for those positions.

"The goal was to really tap into this network of early to mid-level professionals that were experts at what they do, that don't have a lot of time to offer, but have a ton of expertise to offer," says Marlin. "The goal of Wave is to really focus on their area of expertise paired with a young woman in their field, in their role, in their company, and really guide their sessions together using their phone so the conversation is focused, meaningful, and has a tangible outcome at the end of it. It's designed to be really meaningful on both ends."

Wave officially launches in beta today with its first group of girls. In order to participate, teens currently need to be located in the New York City area. Girls can apply to be part of the next group, which will begin in May, on the company's website.

"The idea is that we launch with a private beta of these 150 participants, and eventually scale from there," Marlin says. "The way that we see this is that by 2020 we would have 20,000 girls participating with more than 90,000 connections."

If social media is killing your productivity or making you depressed, it can be life-changing to cut back. Here's how.

Conventional wisdom says that Max Soni should be all over social media. He's the founder of DotComSEO, a digital marketing and search engine optimization company that, among other things, tells clients how to use social media. So it stands to reason that Soni should have a robust following on many platforms.

But that's not the case. Roughly 18 months ago, he logged off. He may log on to one of his profiles to check out a new platform feature when it's rolled out, but otherwise, he's not liking, tweeting, posting, or even peeking at social media.

"I found it was really polarizing," Soni says. "The anonymity social media affords you makes it so people are more inclined to say drastic things." He found that the negativity was affecting him—some of the things strangers said would even stick in his head, he says—so he decided he was done. And the result has been remarkable, he says. In addition to feeling more positive overall, he says that thoughts previously taken up by something he read online were released. It gave him additional time and headspace to devote to new ideas and ventures.

Do You Really Need Social Media?

"It's widely accepted that in creative fields, social media followers are the key to getting your work noticed," says Cal Newport, associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, and author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. "This is overblown. Good work gets noticed, even if you didn't send a tweet about it; bad work is ignored, even if you sent thousands. I can't tell you how many different artists and writers, for example, have written me to talk about how leaving social media had zero impact on their sales and huge impact on their well-being," Newport says.

That pretty much describes actor Brian Colonna, artistic director and owner of the Buntport Theater Company. Colonna cops to having a social media account for the theater company, but it's mainly just to push out information about shows. He doesn't use social media to promote himself as an actor, read status updates, or read news. The downside to disconnecting, he says, is that he's not privy to the events and parties that are planned online. However, he says it forces him to maintain regular contact with his friends and relatives, versus the casual digital connections that pass for relationships on social media, he says. Those people keep him informed of what he needs to know, he says.

The Benefits Of Logging Off

Not ready to go cold turkey? Even disconnecting for a short time has benefits. "Being away for a month allows the brain time to create new neural pathways, which means new behaviors and routines begin to replace old ones," says Sanam Hafeez, a faculty member at Columbia University, in a Fast Company post. "So if you typically reached for your phone when you woke up to check Facebook, after 30 days, you would have adopted a new ritual, which is the new normal."

RELATED:How To Quit Facebook For Good

In a world where part of your value is the number of followers, likes, and other engagement you have on social media, it's tough to imagine how you can live without it. However, streams of fake news, argumentative posters, and photos of OPM (other people's meals), social media sites can range from being a huge time-suck to having ill effects on your mental health. Newport argues that, for most people, there are better ways to spend your time. If you're feeling like social media is taking up too much time or energy—or if you just want to quit—try these steps.

Take the apps off your phone. "These apps are highly engineered to be addictive, and your phone keeps them readily available at all points," Newport says. If you simply remove them from your phone, you can still access the platform on your laptop or desktop, but you're not carrying around the constant temptation to check in.

"I've noticed, however, that when many people try this experiment, they discover that they almost never login to these services on their computer. The fact that it wasn't immediately available was enough to prevent them from bothering—a strong sign that these services are often more an addictive crutch than we admit," he says.

Set ground rules. If you are in a business that requires you to use social media, set boundaries based on those needs, says time management and efficiency consultant Helene Segura, author of The Inefficiency Assassin: Time Management Tactics for Working Smarter, Not Harder. Set aside a specific time of day and time limit to handle your social media tasks, then log off. Once you experiment with the best time of day and the best amount of time to spend, you may be motivated to cut back in other areas.

"If you're finding that you can still produce the same amount of revenue and business by only spending an hour a day on social media versus six hours a day, then you can use that as motivation to realize, well, where else can I be using my time?" she says.

Colonna says he has friends who have "no social media" at home so they're not distracted from spending time together.

Find work-arounds, if you must. Sometimes your work role requires you to be on social media from time to time. But you can find solutions that don't plunge you down the rabbit hole. Colonna strictly limits his time on social media to theater company business. While he removed the social media platform app, Soni keeps Facebook's Messenger app on his phone so he can text everyone with whom he's connected on the platform, making it easy to connect.

Gather reinforcements. You might have to wean yourself off of social media in increments. First, cut back to checking at certain times of day, then scale back those times until you've kicked your habit, Segura suggests. Tell others about the transition and the best ways to get in touch with you. And, if you have trouble staying off, use reinforcements like Freedom or Anti-Social.

Purposefully making yourself uncomfortable can help you push beyond your limits and accomplish more.

Standing barefoot in the snow. Soaking in a tub of icy water. Taking a plunge in a cold lake. These things sound really uncomfortable and a little crazy, right? But investigative journalist Scott Carney says a regular habit of any of them can improve your health and reduce your stress.

Carney discovered the life-changing power of extreme environments in 2013 when he set out to debunk eccentric Dutch fitness guru Wim Hof's claim that he could control his body temperature and immune system at will. Carney had just written about another so-called guru who had lost touch with reality in the pursuit of enlightenment, and he was pretty sure Hof was another charlatan.

Related: The Scientific Case For Cold Showers

"I thought perhaps he had genetic adaptations and others would die if they tried to emulate him," says Carney. "I was going to prove him wrong, and as it turned out that wasn't the case. Within a week I was able to replicate the feat he could do."

The experience prompted Carney to eventually climb to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro wearing nothing but shorts and hiking boots, and sit on the snowy banks of a river until the ice melted around him. He chronicles his limit-pushing adventures in his new book, What Doesn't Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength, and suggests that extreme activities (when done with a doctor's approval) could improve your life, too.

"I'm not an adventure seeker; I'm not even an athlete," he says. "I happened to be pulled along and discovered these are innate human abilities."

The environment is an important but forgotten stimulus, says Carney. "We used to think health relied on diet and exercise," he says. "It is those things, but it's also the space you inhabit. The problem is that technology has outpaced our body's ability to adapt."

Our species has had 200,000 years of constant environmental changes and the evolutionary system had adapted to deal with it, while climate control has been around for just about 150 years, says Carney. "The drive for comfort was once something we could never achieve," he says. "But now comfort is available at flip of a switch, and that's a terrible thing for our bodies."

Physical Benefits

Our body's ability for handling the environment sits untapped, waiting to act. "The immune system is like a predator in the body, going around trying to kill bacteria, but its job has been compromised and it's got nothing to do," says Carney. In some cases it turns against the body with autoimmune diseases. Using environmental stimuli gives the command structure something to do. It's like giving that predator a chew toy."

Regular exposure to cold triggers a number of processes to warm up the body, and those adjustments will help regulate blood sugar, exercise the circulatory system, and heighten mental awareness, says Carney. Studies have shown cold exposure treatment can help with conditions such as Crohn's and Parkinson's disease and obesity.

Personal Growth

Growth starts with a willingness to break yourself down, try new things that challenge you, and feel discomfort or even pain on the road to remaking yourself even better, says Sarah Robb O'Hagan, author of Extreme You: Step Up. Stand Out. Kick Ass. Repeat. "Your greatest potential is not found in your comfort zone," she says. "We now have scientific research showing that getting outside of our comfort zone is what develops our personal growth. That's why extreme fitness endeavors are now so popular."

Robb O'Hagan says the training for a Tough Mudder competition pushed her to examine her limits. "The thought of jumping into a dumpster of ice cubes is far from enticing, but once you do it you feel this huge sense of accomplishment and frankly newfound confidence because you survived it," she says. "There's no question that it leaves you feeling stronger than before you took on the challenge. Research shows that muscle and brain power act very similarly. Your strength grows when you are trying something new and figuring out how to accomplish it."

Finding Discomfort Every Day

If mountain climbing and icy baths aren't your thing, you can still find benefit from introducing some discomfort in your life. Carney suggests starting your day with a cold shower. "Once you do that, everything else feels easier," says Carney. "A cold shower will give you a little more resilience to get through day. It goes to your nervous system to a place where your body deals with environmental stress. Other stresses will not feel like as big a deal."

Or keep your thermostat at 63 degrees. "It's right at a point where you might feel like you might need to shiver," he says. "And one of the things we do in the training is we suppress your natural shiver response to make your body find a different way to heat itself. And this is usually ramping up the metabolism. And by doing that, you'll burn more calories, you'll get thinner, but you'll also just be more adapted. You will use less energy in general, and that's a good thing.

Comfort isn't inherently bad, says Kent Burns, president of Simply Driven, an executive search firm. "What's bad is the worship of comfort," he says. "Candidly, most humans, especially Americans, literally make an idol of their own comfort. Comfort then becomes a master that we serve at the expense of other important things. To grow and realize our potential, we need an outside force, and events like Polar Plunges and Tough Mudders serve that purpose, forcing people to confront obstacles and their own limitations."

Carney admits climbing mountains and sitting on an icy snow bank are extreme tests, but he believes both are important examples of the body's capabilities. "Don't be afraid of a little bit of pain," he says. "I'm not suggesting that people get hurt, there's a difference between damage and pain. Do whatever you can to give your body variation every day. It's so easy to do; it's just turning a knob."

The service pitches itself as a more ethical Uber and is built around offering its drivers better wages and a slice of equity.

As Uber CEO Travis Kalanick quits President Donald Trump's advisory council under pressure from drivers, competing service Juno is borrowing a page from Lyft and trying to take advantage of the dominant ride-hailing service's crisis moment. The upstart company issued a formal statement noting that it will help workers affected by Trump's ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. "Juno was founded with a mission of Social Responsibility. For us, this is not just a business decision, but a way of life," the statement reads.

Granted, they're a little late to the game, considering that Uber and Lyft issued similar statements in the days after Trump's executive order. On Saturday, Uber sent out a note to consumers saying that it would not be activating its surge pricing mechanism for rides coming and going from JFK airport. Some took the note as an attempt to take advantage of protesting taxi drivers, triggering a grassroots campaign to #deleteuber. And a number of Uber users had difficulty deleting the app, further fueling criticism of the company. Amid the chaos, competitor Lyft offered to donate $1 million to the American Civil Liberties Union, further building support for Uber's main competitor.

Juno, which emerged in May 2016, pitches itself as a more ethical Uber. It's built around treating its drivers well, offering them both better wages, support, and a slice of equity. While it's a tiny player in the overall ride-sharing space, only operating in beta in New York, Juno may be well positioned. Under a Trump administration, its ethical stance may also be good for business, attracting riders eager to choose a brand based on the values they publicize.

CEO Talmon Marco, himself an immigrant, says he was reluctant to make any noise on the issue since Juno is as he says, "not a political organization." But, because the company's drivers are nearly all immigrant workers and there has been increased interest in Juno in the wake of #deleteuber, he feels the company has to come out with something more official.

"I don't think being in the U.S. and saying that you stand for freedom is necessarily making a political statement," says Marco. "America at the end of the day was built by immigrants for immigrants."

While Lyft has seen a significant boost in app downloads as a result of the protest, so too has Juno. Since launching, Juno has ranked as one of the top 50 travel apps on mobile ranking platform App Annie. As of Monday, it also ranked in the top 1,200 apps in the U.S. Prior to that, it didn't rank at all among overall apps. It may not seem like a significant increase, but for an app that operates in just one city, every new user makes a difference.

Marco says Juno has seen ridership increase by double-digit percentages over the last few days. "Some of this might be seasonal, but it seems like more than that," says Marco. On Twitter, people from Boston and Washington, D.C. have begun inquiring when Juno will come to their cities.

Juno is not promising to donate funding to the ACLU or create a $3 million legal defense fund for drivers, as Uber has done. Talman claims that when you're known for being good to your drivers, you don't have to make those kinds of grand gestures. "If you're tall, you don't need to shout," he says by way of comparison. "If you stand for social responsibility…." he trails off, implying that people should already know.

Here is Juno's full statement:

"Juno was founded with a mission of Social Responsibility. For us, this is not just a business decision, but a way of life.

As a New York based service, the vast majority of our drivers and many of our riders are immigrants. They came into this great country in the Pursuit of Happiness, just as envisioned in the Declaration of Independence. Banning immigrants based on their religion is fundamentally wrong and goes against everything America stands for.

Juno will be working with affected drivers during this time to ensure they can provide for themselves and their families."

Sometimes an in-app purchase just causes too much "friction."

There's a fun little section in today's Snap Inc. IPO filing titled "Why We Sell Ads." It's odd, in a way, that Snap should have to explain this in the first place—advertising is the company's primary source of revenue, after all.

Yet it starts with a candid admission that "When we first started building Snapchat, we didn't know how it would make money." Like so many other tech companies, Snap was focused on creating fun ways for people to share pictures on smartphones and so they didn't even consider how to make money. But soon they realized that "we needed to start monetizing—and fast. Our server bills were getting expensive."

They knew that people liked to draw funny things on top of their pictures—they already offered some free as well as advertiser-sponsored Lenses—so they figured those same people would be willing to buy even more options. Snap opened the Lens Store at the end of 2015; you could now buy animations to stick atop your selfie—each one cost just 99 cents as an in-app purchase. But the results were disappointing. They closed the store after just two months, in January 2016, and gave away all the Lenses for free.

That's when things get interesting… After the Lenses became free, the Snap community began creating a lot more pictures.

"We learned that asking users to pay for Creative Tools was a bad idea. It meant introducing more friction into the process of self-expression, which was the opposite of what we wanted on Snapchat. We also learned something exciting about building new products: If we built more Creative Tools and made them available to everyone for free, our users would create more Snaps and spend more time on Snapchat."

That's why Snap decided to focus solely on advertiser-backed Sponsored Lenses and Geofilters, as well as making lots of their own. Active users now visit Snapchat more than 18 times per day on average, according to today's filing, and spend 25 to 30 minutes on the platform. Advertisers reportedly pay between $100,000 and $700,000 per day for Lenses.

Snap's 2016 revenue was $404.5 million, and it's global average revenue per user was $1.05.

For Bangalore-based physician Jagdish Chaturvedi, practicing medicine and expressing his creativity go hand-in-hand.

It might be easy for a layperson to regard medicine as a dry, exceedingly intellectual profession practiced by somber brainiacs in white lab coats. And then there's Jagdish Chaturvedi, a young doctor in India who moonlights as a stand-up comedian, has a side hustle as a medical device inventor, and sees medicine as an endlessly creative profession.

That's partly because being a physician in his home country comes with abundant constraints. India, he says, can be a place of idiosyncratic patient expectations, where superstitions and religious beliefs (across socioeconomic and educational backgrounds) can influence the choice of doctor and treatment. Chaturvedi says that some people refuse treatment because they are convinced that taking medicine is a bigger gamble than learning to live with a particular ailment. Those who do seek out a physician's expertise may be among the estimated 80% of Indians who don't have health insurance and pay for care out-of-pocket. They often shop for affordable cures and treatments, negotiating with doctors on pricing, Chaturvedi says, "just like they would with a vegetable vendor in a farmer's market." A 2012 government census reported that 29.8% of the 1.3 billion population of India live below the poverty line. (Because of debate over where the poverty line falls, some estimates put the figure as high as 77%.)

Chaturvedi is only 32, but the Bangalore-based ear, nose, and throat surgeon has already helped invent and launch 18 low-cost medical devices tailored for the singular needs of India's health care system. "As a doctor in India," says Chaturvedi, who dedicates about 40% of his clinical practice to underserved rural areas, "I need to deal with the disease, the limited resources, and the cultural and superstitious beliefs. Many times, it's hard to treat a patient if the doctor doesn't seem aligned with their beliefs." Confronting those challenges on a daily basis has forced him to become an uncommonly creative doctor in a traditionally left-brain profession—an ENT specialist who calls himself "the first ENTrepreneur," one who has made it his mission to dream up new gadgets that offer solutions to otherwise intractable problems.

And in his downtime, he tells jokes.

Chaturvedi performs as a stand-up comedian and an actor on the small stage. And no, he doesn't do this in service of some cliché notion that laughter is the best . . . Oh, you know the rest.

He does it because he sees humor as a secret weapon that sharpens his creativity and improvisation skills—both essential to his medical work. "Because I am on the constant look-out for stand-up material content, it keeps me very vigilant and helps me exercise my observation skills," says Chaturvedi, who landed on the MIT Technology Review's list of 35 Innovators Under 35 in 2016. "You need to be observant to be able to find something that's funny."

Chatarvedi came up with the idea for his first device in 2010, when he was in medical school. While studying throat cancer, he noticed that expensive, state-of-the-art endoscopy systems were cumbersome machines outfitted with a TV screen, a light source, and a long cylindrical scope outfitted with a high-resolution camera for capturing images of potentially cancerous tissue. They weren't portable enough to take out to rural areas. In those less affluent sectors, doctors tended to use crude, often ineffective tools to perform endoscopies. "At that point," Chatarvedi says, "I wondered if there was a way to make this more affordable and portable so [physicians] didn't have to rely on outdated mirrors and headlamps for the diagnosis of throat conditions."

His a-ha moment came when he realized that low tech didn't have to mean low quality. With a bit of experimenting, he discovered that using a less sophisticated camera could lead to a solid diagnosis, even based on a lower-resolution image. He funneled this discovery into the Entraview, a hand-held, low-cost, ENT multi-endoscope recorder that Chatarvedi estimates has diagnosed a few hundred thousand patients all over India. In 2014, he licensed the Entraview to the medical supply company Medtronic.

In 2013, eager to continue developing devices, Chaturvedi joined the Indian med-tech company InnAccel, where, as director of clinical innovations and partnerships, he has access to engineers and colleagues who share his passion for pushing health care technology forward. His most recent invention is a low-cost balloon device that he's been taking with him as he travels around India and trains doctors how to use it.

"It's for people whose sinuses are obstructed because of infection or inflammation," he says. "We can basically take a balloon catheter inside and open up their sinuses by dilating the balloon."

Balancing the practice of medicine with the creation of medical gadgetry has given Chaturvedi a unique point of view when it comes to seeing people at his clinic. "I can't tell if I am seeing the patient as a doctor or an innovator," he says. "The two have been integrated so positively."

The key for him in both pursuits is to look past the constraint—for example, a patient's lack of access to care that involves high-cost equipment—and work backwards from there, using whichever tools are on hand to treat an illness. "I allow the problem to [determine] the solution and the path to bring it to commercialization," he says. "It's like seeing the entire picture first before putting together pieces of a puzzle, rather then putting them together one step at a time and then figuring out the picture."

And when he gets stuck—really stuck—well, it's like the Bard said: "One man in his time plays many parts." Especially, perhaps, if you're a young doctor who enjoys strutting his hour upon the stage.

For Chaturvedi, performing takes the edge off and keeps him on his toes creatively. He's acted in local plays since childhood (he once played an "unempathetic cardiologist"), and got into stand-up comedy four years ago when his schedule no longer allowed him to commit to month-long rehearsals for theater groups. "Stand-up comedy is a flexible format that depends upon me and me alone," he says. "I can write material whenever I find time, and I can practice whenever I am free."

When he explains his brand of comedy to an outsider, it can have a certain kind of nerdy charm—almost like you're listening to The Big Bang Theory's Sheldon Cooper talk about having a go at the mic on amateur night.

Like many comedians, he often mines the women-are-from-Venus-men-are-from-Mars debate. One of his go-to bits is on "confusing" things women say in relationships.

"They often end an argument with, 'Do whatever you want,' and it confuses me," he tells me, slipping into performance mode. "Because the whole reason for the argument was because of what I wanted to do. You know when a relationship is going downhill when a woman asks, 'How could you do this to me?' There is no possible way to answer this question correctly. Any answer will only lead to more problems. One day I waited for my wife to make a mistake to ask her the same question, and I did. She said . . . 'How could you say this to me?'" (His YouTube series, The Magaa of Small Things, is a pun on the title of a popular book, The God of Small Things.)

For Chaturvedi, there's a very human benefit to doing stand-up. Facing a room full of strangers and trying to tease a laugh out of them, he says, has made him a more approachable and likable doctor. It's even taught him how (and when) to keep interactions with patients lighthearted.

And it's all thanks to that magical ingredient.

"I think creativity is quite intrinsic when it comes to the application of medicine," he says. "The basic knowledge tools may be scientific and factual. [But] every patient is different and often requires a customized approach. We need to be alert, think creatively, and figure out the most effective way to cure the patient."

Reforms are long overdue, but some of the proposed solutions could hurt consumers and tighten the tech sector's job market.

This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.

For years, economists and politicians have complained about the abuse of the H1-B visa program—claiming that a system meant to attract highly skilled workers for roles that Silicon Valley struggled to fill in the States was being used to staff tech positions at pay rates too low for most Americans to accept. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump stressed the need to revamp the system by raising the wage requirement and hiring Americans: "I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions."

The Trump administration has recently drafted an executive order to prepare for such an overhaul, which includes the following:

Our country's immigration policies should be designed and implemented to serve, first and foremost, the U.S. national interest . . . Visa programs for foreign workers . . . should be administered in a manner that protects the civil rights of American workers and current lawful residents, and that prioritizes the protection of American workers—our forgotten working people—and the jobs they hold.

But to make good on these "America First" intentions, the Trump team is championing certain proposals that could undermine them. One potential unintended outcome, labor experts believe, would be to encourage U.S. companies to outsource labor to India and other low-wage markets, thereby taking those jobs from Americans. And an even likelier consequence is that consumer products, from the iPhone to VR headsets, could surge in price as companies are forced to raise wages to attract American workers.

VIDEO: HOW AN EXECUTIVE ORDER ON H-1B VISAS COULD ACTUALLY HURT THE AMERICAN WORKFORCE

The draft order also proposes several changes to other visas vital to Silicon Valley, such as shrinking the amount of time a foreigner with a student visa is allowed to work in the U.S. after graduating. Another provision that's up for elimination is the L1 visa, which lets companies transfer a foreign worker from an overseas branch to its U.S. office.

There's little doubt that the current H1-B visa system has strayed from its original intention of hiring workers for highly technical positions—those that tend to command big salaries—in science, technology, engineering, and math at companies like Google and Apple. These days, many H-1B visas go to to companies like Tata Consultancy and Infosys, which recruit low-wage workers primarily from India to staff the technology departments of major American firms. Trump and fellow reform advocates aren't wrong to point up that problem.

What's more, about 40% of the 85,000 H-1B visas available each year go to such outsourcing companies, according to research by Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at Howard University. His findings also showed that those outsourcing firms paid workers 20%-30% less than the average salaries for those roles in California. Last year, Disney World became a poster child for this kind of abuse when it fired more than 200 IT workers and replaced them with foreign workers on H1-B visas, recruited through an outsourcing firm.

But while Trump's plan to raise the wage requirement—and several pieces of legislation that attempt the same—could stem this inflow of lower-wage tech workers, it also threatens to shrink the overall labor pool for those roles, warns Hira. "It might be hard to find Americans for those jobs," he says, "and then those companies might have to go abroad to find those people [anyway]." It's one thing to use outsourcing firms to bring in foreign workers for U.S.-based jobs, but it's even cheaper to get workers in Bangalore to do your back-office work. In that scenario, you're still not delivering jobs to Americans.

And if such a proposal does succeed at getting U.S. companies to hire more Americans, they'll likely be at higher wages, raising companies' overhead. "And then they're going to have to pass that cost in some way," Hira tells Fast Company, most likely "to the consumer in the form of higher prices.

Reforming the H-1B visa process is long overdue, but it's not going to change employers' mind-sets overnight. For years, they've gotten used to finding highly qualified labor on the cheap, says Gary Burtless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies in labor markets. "It's become far too easy for employers to say, 'I can't find any Americans to do the job' and then look to these outsourcing firms for those workers. Well maybe that's because you offered such a low wage."

And there's also the possibility that some smaller U.S. companies may pick up and move altogether, to a country where such visas are still plentiful for lower-wage workers. "There are billboards in Silicon Valley that say, 'Have a visa problem? Come on up to Canada,'" Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), tells Tech Republic. The administration's approach to reforming the program "will make it harder for U.S. tech companies to thrive and for tech companies to grow," said Atkinson.

"It's not going to make America great again."

Indeed's new service is aimed at top tech talent and hopes to fill some of the most in-demand job openings.

If you were to make a Venn diagram of the most promising jobs and jobs that have the biggest shortage of qualified workers, one position would definitely fall into the overlap: software engineer.

That's because coding has quickly surpassed other skills in importance regardless of industry sector, and a software engineer could just as easily find themselves working at Apple, a hospital, or an auto manufacturer. The demand for this talent, according to Indeed's database of millions of resumes, shows that eight of the 10 most contacted types of resumes on its platform over the past five years have been software engineers.

Noting this burgeoning talent gap, Indeed recently launched its own startup to match companies with skilled job seekers called Indeed Prime. The way they do this is by first vetting the pool of candidates. Terence Chiu, vice president of Indeed Prime, says that the process entails coding challenges, which companies like HackerRank also use to eliminate bias against certain applicants. "This helps us discover the hidden gems," Chiu explains, "those candidates who may not have a traditional computer science degree or big tech company experience, but have high-caliber coding skills." While any candidate can take a coding challenge, Chiu says Indeed Prime can also assess and find candidates who have strong job experience in one of the high-demand roles and those with stellar educational credentials.

"Our team goes beyond just reviewing a job seeker's profile and will research an individual's background to gather additional data points that will make them more attractive to hiring companies," he points out. Only the top 5% of candidates pass this screening and vetting process.

That elite group of job seekers get a talent consultant to coach them through interviewing and negotiating. Chiu says the talent consultants act as career coaches and are available to candidates throughout the recruiting and hiring process. Multiple consultations are typical, says Chiu, and can range from a quick 10-minute check-in after an interview to much longer conversations about how to improve their profile or highlight their individual strengths. "Regardless if it's a role on Prime or an opportunity they found on their own, the talent consultants are there to help the job seeker find a new job," he says.

Employers will then be able to see the top talent and schedule interviews or make an offer. That's because as Chiu notes, transparency of salary expectations and interest in other benefits is noted by the candidates upfront.

Indeed Prime is free for job seekers, and while every company gets a free trial, they are then required to pay a monthly subscription fee for unlimited hiring on the platform. Indeed's overall business model is cost-per-click, meaning that companies can place a job ad for free and only pay when someone clicks on that listing. With Indeed Prime's launch, the company has moved closer to a recruiting cost per hire model, which is usually a percentage of the salary of the person placed in the job.

Indeed, Prime has been launching city by city where there is the biggest demand for tech talent. Currently candidates and companies in Austin, London, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York City are able to use the service, and additional markets will open up during this year.

Chiu says they are not able to share exact figures, but says they've already received "thousands of applications each week and hundreds of job seekers have found jobs on Prime." Companies range across industries and run from Fortune 500 and well-known tech brands to smaller startups. Likewise, says Chiu, applicants come from a variety of backgrounds, from Google software engineers to career professionals just starting out.

A misinformed, short-sighted policy will only reinforce the poverty cycle in poor countries and have the opposite of its intended effect.

Two days after large numbers of people across the globe joined Woman's Marches, U.S. President Donald Trump reinstated the "global gag rule," which cuts off all U.S. funding to international NGOs whose work includes abortion services or advocacy.

Fortunately, the Dutch government has announced a plan to compensate NGOs for the funding shortfall of US$600 million over four years. Several countries within and outside the EU have indicated their support, as have private companies and foundations.

But it remains to be seen whether this ambitious target will be reached and what other needs will be left unmet as a result of any redirected funds.

Dutch Minister for International Development Co-operation, Lilianne Ploumen, who announced the initiative, said, "I'm pro-choice and pro-women's rights. It's important to stand your ground."

But as welcome as efforts toward replacing the funding lost to the global gag rule is, it's important to realize that this is not a pro-life debate. It's a global health issue that has serious implications for the most vulnerable populations—millions of men, women, and children in developing countries.

Threat To Services

Also known as the Mexico City policy, the global gag rule requires all NGOs operating abroad to refrain from advising, endorsing, or performing abortions as a method of family planning. However, some NGOs operate in contexts where abortion—safe or unsafe—is the only accessible form of contraception.

Many international NGOs are working hard to increase access to both short-term and long-term contraception. But such a transition takes time and money.

NGOs that may be forced to reduce or close health services as a result of the policy are often a woman's only source of reproductive health care. They may, in fact, be her family's only point of medical contact for other primary health-care services, such as cervical screening, HIV prevention, testing and counseling, STI prevention and treatment, pre and post-natal care and even newborn health care.

Services threatened by the policy also train health professionals, including midwives and traditional birth attendants, in countries that are desperately short of qualified health personnel.

Most developed countries have 33 health professionals per 10,000 people; most developing countries have two health professionals for the same number of people. Research also shows that unattended births have much higher rates of maternal and newborn death.

Unintended Consequences

The rule was first put into place by former U.S. president Ronald Reagan in August 1984. Since then, it has been lifted by Democratic presidents and reinstated by Republican presidents.

Unlike when Reagan implemented the policy, we now have ample evidence of its unintended health consequences. A 2011 study showed that women were 2.73 times more likely to have an abortion under the rule. So while its intention may be to reduce the rate of abortion, the policy actually increases it.

Reducing access to family planning services leads to more unplanned pregnancies, more unsafe abortions, and more maternal death.

The sexual and reproductive health research organization the Guttmacher Institute quantified this in 2016. It showed that when US$607.5 million is cut from family planning and reproductive health services, 27 million women and couples are prevented from receiving family planning services and supplies. This leads to 6 million more unplanned pregnancies and 2.3 million more abortions, 2 million of which will be unsafe.

This may not mean much in a developed country, where deaths resulting from pregnancy and childbirth are 12 women per 100,000 live births. But it will have a huge impact on women in developing countries, where the maternal mortality rate is 239 women per 100,000 live births, and where 99% of total global maternal deaths occur.

In 2000, 189 countries including the United States committed to the Millennium Development Goals. These included a commitment to improving maternal health by reducing maternal mortality and providing access to reproductive health services by 2015. This was one of the least successful Millennium Development Goals, falling short by half.

Falling Short

While the U.S. ranks 19th worldwide as an international aid donor in terms of percentage of gross national income, USAID is the largest humanitarian donor in dollar terms. It allocated in excess of $USD6.42 billion to humanitarian aid in 2015.

This means the global gag rule seriously threatens the UN Sustainable Development Goal of reducing maternal mortality to less than 70 per 100,000 live births by 2030. It also threatens the goal of ensuring access to sexual and reproductive health-care services, including family planning, information, and education.

The rule targets family planning, which is essentially about spacing out childbirth. The health and economic benefits of child spacing are well documented and include reduced pregnancy-related deaths and better child survival. Then, there's reduced rates of HIV/AIDS, and sexually transmitted infections, empowerment of women, enhanced education, and a reduction in adolescent pregnancy.

These benefits lead to more advantages, including slowed population growth, natural resource conservation, climate change mitigation, and economic growth, which reduces conflict and migration.

The Wrong Debate

Forcing impoverished women—in places where they have no access to health care or contraception—to have more babies has a detrimental impact on the entire family. It places demands on scarce resources, reduces access to education, limits employment options, reduces family income, and ultimately reinforces the poverty cycle.

The regions predicted to experience the largest population growth in the coming decades (South Asia and Africa) are also the most impoverished. They have the weakest health-care systems and rely on foreign aid to provide essential services.

Their only hope for economic development and poverty eradication is to undergo the demographic transition, which high-income countries have already experienced. And this starts with a reduction in family size. Anyone who has worked in reproductive health in developing countries will tell you that this is what impoverished women with large families want.

So let's get it right: This is not a high-income country, religiously charged pro-life debate. The global gag rule actually increases abortion demand and has consequences for a range of other health issues such as HIV/AIDS, cervical cancer, and child health and well-being.

This misinformed, short-sighted policy is as far removed from scientific evidence as denying climate change. As a global community, we have a duty to expand access to family planning for people worldwide, particularly to the most vulnerable.

Patricia Schwerdtle is a lecturer in the School of Nursing and Midwifery in the Faculty of Medicine, Monash University This article was originally published on The Conversation.

The amazing, little-known backstory of the most popular arcade game in U.S. history.

Thirty-five years after its release, Ms. Pac-Man is one of the most successful and enduring video games of all time. After debuting publicly on February 3, 1982, in its original form as an arcade game from Bally Midway, versions have since appeared on at least 28 different game and computer platforms.

Today, this "first lady of video games"—as she was dubbed by Midway in 1982—remains a ubiquitous ambassador of coin-op games, as the machine can still be found in restaurants, truck stops, arcades, and other venues across the U.S. In fact, having sold 117,000 units in this country (more if you count recent re-releases combined with other games), Ms. Pac-Man still holds the all-time sales record for a standalone arcade video game in the U.S. (Her spouse, Pac-Man, holds the No. 2 spot.)

Despite its dramatic success, few people know that this arcade classic was not developed by Japanese firm Namco, the company behind Pac-Man. In fact, a small group of MIT dropouts from New England created the game. In an astounding feat of business acumen and teamwork, they sold Midway on the concept and quickly pushed the game into record-breaking reality.

In 2011, I conducted extensive interviews with three of Ms. Pac-Man's creators for a planned feature about Ms. Pac-Man's creation for the game's then upcoming 30th anniversary. While the subject has since been covered in other venues, I have found that my original interviews are still packed with nuggets of information that have not yet come to light.

For this oral history, the participants' responses have been edited for length and clarity and arranged to tell the story. Set in New England rather than the familiar setting of Silicon Valley or Japan, their tale is one of creativity, gumption, and loyalty among a group of gifted friends who happened to work very well together.

Meeting Up And Dropping Out At MIT

At the time of Ms. Pac-Man's release in early 1982, arcade mania was in full swing in the U.S. Concepts pioneered in coin-op games filtered down to console and home computer level, and advertisements for less-advanced home titles bragged of "arcade-like realism," as if it were the peak aspiration of all games.

Such was the primacy of the coin-op realm in video game culture when a group of young students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge first began dabbling in the arcade business as a side job in the late 1970s.

Steve Golson, former engineer, General Computer Corporation: I moved into a dorm at MIT in '76 as a freshman, and the following year Doug Macrae and Kevin Curran moved in as freshmen into the same double suite of rooms that I lived in. That's how we all met each other.

Doug Macrae, cofounder and former chairman, General Computer Corporation: In 1977, I went up to start MIT. I was working on a combined bachelor's and master's degree in mechanical engineering, economics, and architecture. My thesis was supposed to be done in the spring of 1981, and I never got around to it. Rather than doing my thesis, I developed Ms. Pac-Man.

Golson: In our dorm, there was a local guy who had pinball games. His games kept getting trashed, and he finally pulled his games out. Doug's brother had this old Gottlieb Pioneer game and we had a big party coming up, and we said, 'Hey, we don't have a pinball game.' Doug said, 'Well, I can get my brother's game.'

Doug was working on the game one day and Kevin was there and they said, 'Hey, we could start a business doing this.'

Macrae: Kevin Curran and I operated the original video game route on campus.

Golson: They joined up and bought a new pinball game and put it in the dorm, and that was really successful. They got another one and put it in the dorm. I got involved really early on helping them out with running their games at the dormitory.

Macrae and Curran's arcade route—a series of machines they owned and operated both for their own profit and for the benefit of students—quickly expanded to three dorms, but they soon had trouble with declining revenues as people began to master the games. As arcade operators themselves, they had a direct financial stake in making the games more interesting. So they did what any clever MIT student would do in that situation: confront the problem with mathematical precision. And their thinking gravitated to Atari's Missile Command, one of the most popular games of the early 1980s.

Macrae: When we first got them, our Missile Command games on the MIT campus were pulling in roughly $600 a week. If you do the math on that, that's one quarter every three minutes on 17 hours a day. The problem became if a game lasted longer than three minutes, the quarter count would go down, or if it wasn't being played 17 hours a day because people didn't like it as much, and were not standing in line to play it, the quarters went down.

We were looking at ways to keep the time-per-game down some—because it was obviously creeping up as people got good at it—but also to keep the excitement there so people would want to play it more often. We were trying to keep the quarter count up in any way we could.

Golson: At this point in the video game world there were these kits called speed-up kits or enhancement kits that were being sold directly to arcade owners. The first really successful one was for Asteroids because people learned how to beat Asteroids, and they could play forever on a quarter. So somebody game up with a little circuit that you could clip on, and wow, it made the game much more difficult.

Doug and Kevin started looking around for an enhancement kit for Missile Command, but nobody had figured out how to do it. The complexity of the programming techniques of the game were substantially more difficult than the other games. You had to understand how it was programmed. Doug and Kevin said, 'Well, hey, we go to MIT. I bet we can figure it out.'

Macrae: We did the enhancement kit to Missile Command, called Super Missile Attack, and were wildly successful with it—at least for college kids. We sold 1,000 kits at roughly $250 profit per kit, and made a quarter of a million dollars while in college. Super Missile Attack was designed to make the game more interesting, more challenging, and take away some of the shortcomings of the game.

When taking inflation into account, $250,000 in 1981 is roughly equivalent to $663,000 today. Macrae and Curran met their newfound success by incorporating the business into a firm called General Computer Corporation (GCC). Lacking the capital to pay engineering salaries, they set up a profit-sharing structure to benefit those who worked for the small firm.

Macrae: Kevin and I were the two founders of the company and owners of it. John Tylko was brought on primarily as a business partner; he did not do any of the programming. The other three, Mike Horowitz, Chris Rode, and Steve Golson, were engineers. Kevin and I were equal partners, and the other four were set up to share in the profits.

Golson: I was there in the spring of '81 when they decided to start up this company. Doug and Kevin had moved off campus and with a couple of other students. They were renting a house in Brookline. They said, 'Oh, we've got a spare bedroom in this house. You could live with us.'

Macrae: Technically I think I was chairman and Kevin was president. I'm not sure whether we had established it formally. It might have just been on the legal filing in Massachusetts.

Enter Pac-Man

As Super Missile Attack proved popular, it became evident to Macrae and Curran that they could expand their arcade enhancement kit business. They experimented with modifying Atari's hit game Asteroids and other titles, but one breakthrough maze game from Japan caught their attention in particular.

Namco's Pac-Man had been released in the U.S. in the fall of 1980 by Bally Midway, but it wasn't until early 1981 that it began to make waves in the U.S. arcade market. With its iconic characters and easy-to-learn game play, Pac-Man soon became a cultural force unto itself that moved beyond video games and into merchandising, music, and, eventually TV.

Macrae: After the success of Missile Attack, we looked up and said, 'We should do this again,' and the most successful game at that time was Pac-Man, and we said, 'Let's do an enhancement kit for Pac-Man.'

Golson: Pac-Man had already been a big hit in Japan and the Far East, and we knew it was going to be a big thing.

Macrae: We had a Pac-Man cabinet and we played it over and over again, trying to say, "What are its weaknesses? Why are we bored? Why would be able to play for a long amount of time?'

We realized that Pac-Man had the same kind of issues Missile Command did. People could learn the patterns and play it forever, and that once you played it for a while, it was pretty much the same game. It got a little bit faster, but there was only one maze, and nothing really changed.

Golson: We wanted to have more than one maze instead of the same maze every time. We wanted to make the character algorithm truly random so that it was no longer predictable and make it harder. Those were really the big things that drove us.

Macrae: We attacked it in the same way as Missile Command—in trying to take what was good in Pac-Man and make it even better. That's what became Crazy Otto.

GCC hoped to avoid trademark issues by reworking Pac-Man's characters and visuals into something similar but not identical.

Golson: We brought a woman named Patty Goodson, who was a professional musician, on board to come up with game ideas for us. I remember her drawing the character of Crazy Otto. I'm not sure if that was after we had picked the name and knew what he looked like, or if she came up with the name.

We started Crazy Otto in late May or early June of '81, pretty much right after the Super Missile Attack was done. For Crazy Otto, we gave him legs and blue eyes inspired by the side of the Pac-Man cabinet.

During the development of an enhancement kit for Pac-Man, most of the GCC crew moved into a five-bedroom house in Wayland, Massachusetts. At first, Doug Macrae, Kevin Curran, Steve Golson, Chris Rode, John Tylko, and a friend named Larry Dennison all lived in the house at the same time. They soon brought on two more engineers to help with the project: Mike Horowitz and Phil Kaaret. While Macrae got married and moved out shortly thereafter, the house still served as the locus for the company's development activity.

Mike Horowitz, former software engineer, General Computer Corporation: They were all MIT guys, and they all knew each other, and they were all living in this house.

Macrae: Mike Horowitz was an engineer out of Cornell. I had worked at the same company as he did, Computervision, and I recruited him.

Golson: The house belonged to a professor who was taking a sabbatical and sailing a sailboat to Norway.

Horowitz: Doug and I did not live there, and we were both newly married. We were both competitive people, so we'd see who could get there earlier. You would come in the door, and to the right was a kitchen area. To the left was this, I guess you'd call it a sun room. It was a big room, and that's where we had all our emulators set up.

Macrae: We were using in-circuit emulators created by Tektronix, which were roughly $25,000 computers that could emulate Pac-Man's microprocessor.

Golson: We had a desk right next to the front door which is where our secretary, Cathy Rohrs, would sit. UPS would come by every day to pick up our shipments.

Macrae: Down in the basement we were doing the manufacturing of the Super Missile Attack board—stuffing them, putting them in packages—and we were taking phone calls anywhere it rang in the house to take orders.

Horowitz: I would just come in, park myself at my emulator, and start coding. That was at like 7 or 8 a.m. The other guys, they'd come down at like 10 or 11 in their pajamas, go have breakfast, then see how I was doing.

Golson: I remember times where I'd come downstairs in my bathrobe, but that's what we did. Basically, we were just working nonstop. Doug was married, but he was there pretty much all the time.

Like Pac-Man, Only Better

Living and working in close but comfortable quarters in the relative isolation of a house up a wooded hill in Wayland, the young crew set out to implement its planned improvements to Pac-Man.

Macrae: The maze design was being done carefully to help prevent areas where you could get dead spots and hide from the monsters. It took a good bit of time to create interesting ones that would be challenging for people and not have the monsters get trapped or stuck. They were originally designed on graph paper, then implemented and tried out. We kept playing with them until we liked them.

Horowitz: I, unlike everyone else at GCC, actually graduated from college in 1979. Doug said he'd be able to pay me no salary, but my wife made enough to support us.

By the time I joined, they had already made the mazes. I had to come up to speed. I knew nothing about microprocessors, or video, or anything. I had been doing CAD/CAM software.

The first thing I did was work on sounds. We had to reverse-engineer the game. Reverse-engineering the sound generator was pretty much impossible, but I just played around, substituting in values trying to get a feel for what changed if I put a 6E here instead of a 24. I did all the sound effects for the whole game. Chris Rode did the music.

Golson: I remember Chris on the piano there at the house figuring out the music for the attract mode and for all of the intermissions for all the cartoons.

Horowitz: Then I did the intermission animations. I remember driving to a friend's wedding. It was a long drive, and I'm in the car with my wife, and just thinking. That's where I thought of the three animations. It was basically boy meets girl, and they chase each other, and then they find true love.

Macrae: As we strived to look for more interesting improvements, at some point it was mentioned that we could have the fruit move.

Golson: We had the idea to move the fruits around the maze because the hardware allows you to have six moving objects. There's the four monsters, then Pac-Man, and then the bonus fruit. In Pac-Man, they never moved the fruit around. We said, "Well, if the hardware allows us to move it around, why don't we move it around?'

Macrae: Once we started the fruit moving, it became really fun to try to catch it.

Golson: With the fruit design, the thought was, again, we were trying to be careful to not infringe on the other guys' trademarks, and if they had a particular character that was recognizable like Pac-Man and the monsters and the Galaxian ship, well, we're not going to use that. So that's what we changed.

The two cherries is not trademarked because everybody uses that same two cherries image on every slot machine game. That's where the fruits came from. The pretzel bonus fruit was because Kevin Curran really loved pretzels.

With its new mazes and its refined monster AI, Crazy Otto aimed to overcome the patterns that Pac-Man players memorized to play the game perfectly on a single quarter. That would give Crazy Otto the potential for gameplay longevity that Pac-Man never had.

Horowitz: The original Pac-Man was totally deterministic. It played the same way every single time. You could hide in a spot, walk away from the game, and the game would play forever, because the monsters would never get you.

We added some randomness to it, and we made the monsters have different modes depending on the level of the game the different amounts of time at each mode. They would either chase Ms. Pac-Man, they would run away from Ms. Pac-Man, they would go to some specific corner of the maze, or they would just take a bunch of left turns. When they went to their corner we made them go to a random corner instead of going at the same corner every time. Just doing that made it different every time.

Tangling With Atari

Not long after the release of Super Missile Attack—and during the development of Crazy Otto—Atari caught wind of the unauthorized Missile Command add-on board and planned to sue GCC to stop its distribution. GCC heard of Atari's plans through a local arcade distributor, and in July 1981, the startup preempted Atari with a suit of its own, ensuring that GCC could pick the venue, which meant that the trial would take place in Massachusetts and not California. That gave the small firm a considerable home field advantage in the negotiations that commenced after Atari, then a division of media giant Warner Communications, sued GCC for $15 million.

Horowitz: I joined, and pretty much a couple weeks after, Atari filed the restraining order against GCC to stop them from selling Super Missile Attack.

Golson: At that point, Atari was like Google plus Microsoft. They were the high-tech behemoth that could do no wrong and were doing amazing stuff.

I think they felt that we would just be so cowed by, 'Oh my gosh, Atari is suing us.' I'm sure that was successful with other people. These people doing the rip-off clones of games, you send them a nasty letter and you say, 'Please stop making Asteroids T-shirts because that's our trademark.' People would say, 'Oh, of course. We'll do whatever you say.'

Instead, we said, 'Yeah, okay, bring it on. Let's go to court.' We felt like we must really be something if we've gotten Atari's attention.

We had nothing to lose, and we actually had carefully thought about what they were claiming, which was that we had infringed their copyright and trademark and unfair trade practices. We had previously thought about how to design our kit as such that we do not violate their copyright and trademark. It wasn't like we had just gone into this planning on infringing or knowing that we infringed.

Horowitz: We could have burned ROMS that were the game plus our changes. But we didn't want to do that, because there was the whole legal issue of copyright, so we didn't want to copy their code. What we produced was all our code, we wrote it all, and we were just adding it to the game, sort of an aftermarket thing.

Golson: We had this little daughter board that we would sell to the arcade owner and they would unplug their ROMs and plug them into our board, and then our board would plug into their Missile Command game. For business reasons and also for legal reasons, that's how we built it. We felt pretty confident that we would eventually prevail if we had gone to court.

Atari succeeded in getting a temporary restraining order to keep Super Missile Attack off the market until the suit could go to trial, although the judge gave GCC an opportunity to address Atari's complaints and resubmit a new version of the game that they could potentially sell in its place.

GCC's maneuvering and moxie caught Atari off-guard, and the suit soon became an annoyance for Atari's executives, whom were suddenly and unexpectedly under threat of being deposed to appear across the country in Massachusetts court. The suit also presented a David versus Goliath PR problem as the case gained press attention, and Atari soon sought a way to make it end quickly.

Macrae: We fought in court for a while, and eventually Atari came to us and said, 'What do you guys really want out of this?' They definitely did not want enhancement kits done. We said, 'What we're really after is designing games.'

So as a way of buying us off, they gave us a development contract saying, 'Here's $50,000 a month for the next two years, or $1.2 million, and in exchange, develop games for us with no strings attached.' We didn't really have to do anything.

We later found out that Atari just wanted us to go sit on the beach, or go back to school, and never wanted to see us again. What we did was eventually started developing video games for them.

Golson: It was go-away money, but we said, 'No, we're going to design games for you.' We took the money and started cranking out games.

Getting Midway's Attention

The settlement of the Atari-GCC suit on October 8, 1981, marked a new beginning for the small New England company, which would go on to design several arcade games and an entire new home console (the 7800) for Atari over the next several years. But the most immediately pressing issue was the fate of Crazy Otto, whose development had been ongoing during the tussles with Atari in court.

Golson: As part of the negotiations with Atari, Kevin and Doug said, 'Hey, we've been working all summer on this kit for Pac-Man. We'd like to be able to sell it, and that's totally independent of whatever deal we do with Atari.'

Atari said,'Okay, We will allow you to sell enhancement kits as long as you can get the manufacturer's permission.'

Macrae: Atari did not want [unauthorized] enhancement kits out there in the industry because it would set a precedent that they did not want happening.

Golson: So Kevin calls up the president of Midway, a guy by the name of Dave Marofske—just cold calls him. One president to another. Kevin's an MIT dropout, but says, 'Dave, maybe you saw in the news that Atari dropped their lawsuit against us, and we're about to bring out a kit for your game Pac-Man.'

Macrae: We told him we were going to produce the enhancement kit with or without them. We'd just like to get their blessing, rather than ending up in court with them.

Golson: Marofske is in court all the time against people making unauthorized Pac-Man merchandise, so to have somebody who actually calls him up and talks to him, he thought that was pretty cool.

Marofske says, 'Hey, are you going to be in Chicago? Why don't you show us what you're working on?'

Macrae: We happened to show up shortly after their production had ended on Pac-Man. They'd run 24/7 for months, and had nothing in the pipeline. They were about to lay off lots of people, and we walked in with what they saw as the sequel to Pac-Man.

Golson: I flew in with the prototype kit. Kevin, Doug, and I go off to see the folks at Midway, including Marofske and Stan Jarocki, who was the head of marketing. They brought in one of their assembly guys, who was really good at playing Pac-Man, to play it. He plays the game for a little while, and he likes it.

They said, 'Thanks very much' and they gave each of us a Pac-Man tie. We packed up and flew home.

Macrae: Midway was very impressed with Crazy Otto. The game played very well. We'd already had it out on test in Framingham, Massachusetts, and it was earning very well.

Golson: Over the next week or so we're having these negotiations with them about what kind of a deal would we have.

Macrae: Midway said, 'Let's not do it as an enhancement kit, let's create the sequel to Pac-Man.'

Golson: I went back out about a week later with a more complete kit that they then put on location in Chicago to test to see how well it would work in an arcade. That's mid-October.

Macrae: While it was out there, a photographer for TIME magazine was sent on an assignment to write about video games, and he wanted to go get a picture of Pac-Man. He walked into one of the only arcades in world to have a Crazy Otto. He took a picture of it, and used it as his picture of Pac-Man.

Golson: The test on location went really well. On October 29, we signed the agreement with them for Crazy Otto. It was a royalty thing, so we got a certain amount if they sold it as a kit, and we got more if they sold it as a complete game. So now we're frantic in getting it done so they can go into production.

Horowitz: The fact Doug and Kevin knew that there was only one way they could sell this thing, and how they convinced Midway to do it, is just one of the great sell jobs. They were kids. They were like 21 years old. They had some stones, you know?

Becoming Ms. Pac-Man

After signing a contract with Bally Midway on October 29, 1981, for Crazy Otto, GCC began the process of modifying their once-illicit aftermarket mod into a full-fledged sequel to Pac-Man. With guidance from Midway and some input from Namco, Crazy Otto began to take a new thematic direction.

Macrae: As soon as Midway said, 'Let's make a sequel out of it,' we no longer had to avoid the Pac-Man name. They originally said, 'Let's make it into Super Pac-Man.' I think that was the first game that they suggested.

We looked at the intermissions. Even on Crazy Otto, in the first intermission, a yellow Pac character with legs called Otto meets a red Pac character with legs, which obviously had to be a female Otto, because a heart goes above their head. They chase each other, and eventually a baby is brought to them by the stork.

We were looking and going, 'Wow, we've got a whole storyline here about how a character meets a red character that's female. Why don't we turn this into a male and female Pac character, and build a bit more personality into them?'

Golson: In the span of just two weeks, it went from Crazy Otto to Super Pac-Man to Miss Pac-Man, which is what it says on this little board that they manufactured. It was Pac-Woman at some point. Then again very quickly it changed to Ms. Pac-Man.

Macrae: "Pac-Woman" did not roll off the tongue very well. It then became "Miss Pac-Man," and it was that way until someone pointed out that the third intermission had Mr. and Miss Pac-Man having a baby brought to them. We need to have them married.

Word was sent back to Mike Horowitz that it should be Mrs. Pac-Man. Well, Mike was married to Eileen Mullarkey who refused to take his last name. She really did not like going by the name Mrs. Horowitz, or even Mrs. Mullarkey. She liked Ms. Mullarkey.

Horowitz: The women's movement was kind of big then—Ms. magazine—so Ms. was the new thing. I married in '81, and my wife didn't take my last name. She said that if I changed my name to her name, she would change it to something different just because she didn't want to have the same.

Horowitz: My wife just thought, you know, she's an independent woman—she can be. In the progression of the animations, the implicit thing is they do get married, because they have a child. But she's still a Ms.

During the one or two weeks when potential names for the new female Pac-character were being debated, Mike Horowitz began working on new artwork for the game to bring everything in line with the new concept.

Macrae: Mike Horowitz designed the Ms. Pac-Man character, with some review cycle going on with both Bally Midway, and with Namco in Japan. The first character we had was a Ms. Pac-Man with red hair—shoulder-length red hair, not that she had any shoulders.

Horowitz: It was hard to develop the characters. I used graph paper and colored pens, and would draw them, and then you'd have a 16-by-16 three color picture, and then you'd have to hand code them into a ROM burner, and it wasn't straightforward.

Macrae: We sent out ROMs to Midway, and they sent them over to Japan for the President of Namco, Masaya Nakamura, to look at. He said, "Love the concept, get rid of the hair." Ms. Pac-Man lost her hair—it was actually Pac-Woman at the time, I believe. The beauty mark stayed, and the lips stayed. I think we added a bow, and were quickly done with it, so Ms. Pac-Man had been created.

Masaya Nakamura died on January 22, 2017.

Golson: As I recall, the Midway folks had some suggestions. 'Hey, let's have a bow, let's have eyelashes and a beauty mark.' Well gosh, it's only 16-by-16 pixels. We went through several iterations. We tried several different things until we ended up with what we've got.

Macrae: We used a Lite Brite on Ms. Pac-Man some also, as a way to see what some of the characters would look like. It provided a relatively inexpensive character development system. Mike Horowitz insisted on doing it by hand on graph paper.

Courting Namco

Considering the unusual nature of how Ms. Pac-Man came to be, there has been much confusion over the years in history books and press reports about who gets credit for what in the game, and if Namco ever actually gave Midway approval to create Ms. Pac-Man, even thought Midway possessed the legal latitude through its Pac-Man license with Namco to do so. Today, Doug Macrae and other GCC veterans take special care to note that Namco was aware of Ms. Pac-Man during its development.

Macrae: Basically, Namco was fully approving of Ms. Pac-Man. In fact, their president was approving what the character would even look like. At the same time, there was a little bit of embarrassment, I believe, in-house in Japan, of the fact that the sequel was being done somewhere other than in their own laboratories.

There was always a little bit of bad feeling there, but they were fully aware. The arrangement that Namco had with Midway was that Namco would still get their royalty on Ms. Pac-Man, being the same as what they got on Pac-Man, and Midway could choose to do whatever they wanted in paying us a royalty in addition to Namco.

Because of its design, Ms. Pac-Man still operated as an after-market add-on board—even during its production run. So Midway essentially sold a copy of Pac-Man every time they sold a copy of Ms. Pac-Man. In that way, Namco still got the same Pac-Man royalty on every unit of Ms. Pac-Man that sold.

Horowitz: If you open up a Ms. Pac-Man, it'll have a Pac-Man board in it with our data card that sits in the processing slot. When the Pac-Man program came to certain addresses, it would jump to run the software in our data card.

Macrae: Every Ms. Pac-Man ever made has a Pac-Man board in it and a Ms. Pac-Man add-on, the same way Super Missile Attack was an add-on. If you were to remove that board, you'd get Pac-Man. Our intention was, once we went into production, that it would eventually be integrated onto one board, but things moved so fast that the entire [standalone] production run of Ms. Pac-Man was done with Pac-Man boards and Ms. Pac-Man enhancement kits.

The graphical appearance of Ms. Pac-Man wasn't the only suggestion that Midway offered the development team at GCC. During the final, frantic push to finish the game, GCC went back and forth repeatedly over minor changes, and some last-minute bugs were fixed. But the team still likes to stress that Ms. Pac-Man was their creation.

Golson: The only difference between the Crazy Otto that we showed Midway and Ms. Pac-Man was the characters. The Crazy Otto characters and monsters were gone, and it was back to the old original monsters and the new Ms. Pac-Man female character. Nothing else—other than a couple of minor bug fixes, which made no difference to the appearance. The music, the colors, the mazes, the game play, everything—none of that came from Midway.

Macrae: The fourth monster in Ms. Pac-Man is named Sue, which is my sister. I always get to joke about that with her a little bit. I worked really hard to make sure I could name a monster after my sister. It was a great way to take an inside poke at her.

Horowitz: Toward the end, I found a spot where Ms. Pac-Man could hide. We didn't want to ship like that, so the one last thing I did was with the red monster. When the red monster was put in chase mode, it went directly at Ms. Pac-Man and never left chase mode. That way if you ever found a corner where you could have hidden, once the red guy starts chasing they'll chase forever, and then, well, get you.

Golson: Midway kept coming back with what to us were silly changes. They could not make up their mind what the copyright was going to say. Make it do this. Okay, we'd turn it out. Then it would be, 'No, no, make it do this.' There was some of that towards that December/January timeframe. We just wanted to be done with it.

Horowitz: We gave Midway the board and the software, and they did everything else.

Success!

Ms. Pac-Man made its worldwide public debut on February 3, 1982, during a press conference held by Namco at Castle Park Entertainment Center in Sherman Oaks, a neighborhood of Los Angeles. Local reports of the conference spread nationwide through wire services, and word of Pac-Man's new female counterpart, complete with cheeky headlines ("Why is Pac-Man Grinning? Because He's Sharing His Quarters.") ran widely in papers across the U.S. By every measure, the response from both the press and video game players was immediately enthusiastic.

Horowitz: There was an old arcade between Central Square and Harvard Square in Cambridge called 1001 Plays, and we found out that they had a Ms. Pac-Man, so we all rushed over, because it wasn't far from where we were. It was just so cool to go into an arcade and see this thing that you had done. It was awesome.

It was the first time we ever saw the cabinet. We didn't know what the artwork would be. When we got there, there were people playing it, and I think it was a hit from day one.

Golson: It got rave reviews. All the changes we made from Pac-Man to Ms. Pac-Man were just universally accepted and people said, 'Pac-Man was great, this is even better.' That, again, was a real vindication the improvements we had made were well thought-out.

Macrae: Midway kept the Ms. Pac-Man production line running as long as orders kept coming in, 24/7. They produced 117,000 units. General Computer made roughly $10 million on the Ms. Pac-Man arcade at the time.

Golson: That year while it was such a huge, big thing, it was this feeling of being on top of the world. Here we are, dropouts in our newly rented space and we got this development deal with Atari, the biggest consumer electronics company in the world, and we had the No. 1 video arcade game. It was just a wow, we're just doing well on everything.

Interestingly, one of the reasons for Ms. Pac-Man's astronomical sales success in the arcade may have been a clever copy protection method baked into its hardware design that strongly deterred clones from flooding the market and cannibalizing its sales.

Steve Golson: There was a chip called a PAL, which stood for Programmable Array Logic. You could program your own digital logic into it, and then you could prevent it from being read back out, so you could not tell how it had been programmed.

The Ms. Pac-Man had four of these PALs, and the sophistication of the security technique was quite a bit more than the Super Missile Attack. It really prevented it from being copied because there were certainly people who tried.

As Ms. Pac-Man became wildly popular, GCC stayed busy with their Atari contract. They blazed through dozens of games at the twilight of the golden age of the American video game industry—a period that included the major video game market crash that hit in 1983-84.

Macrae: The success all happened unbelievably quickly, that not only did Ms. Pac-Man get put into production, and 117,000 made very, very quickly, but at the same time we were diving into designing games for Atari, and those were also taking off. Not in the same quantity in the arcade, but we were doing very well in the home market.

In addition to Ms. Pac-Man, during the next few years, we shipped 76 other games, mainly for Atari's 2600, 5200, and eventually the 7800, which we designed, and got paid on each one of those.

Horowitz: The whole game era was kind of short-lived. In four years, it was pretty much all over. Atari got sold, and we lost our funding, and we started doing other things. It was just like a little kind of blip.

Macrae: I don't think it was until 1984, 1985, that we kind of came up for breath, when the market slowed down, and we had a chance to look around.

The Fight For Ms. Pac-Man

Like Pac-Man before it, Ms. Pac-Man became a blockbuster overnight, spawning reams of merchandise like T-shirts, comic books, lunchboxes, toothbrushes, bed sheets, pajamas, board games, puzzles, trash cans, and more. Before long, GCC even created a follow-up arcade title for Midway called Jr. Pac-Man.

With GCC busy at work with new projects, Midway went full throttle in pursuing Ms. Pac-Man licensing opportunities—to the exclusion of GCC. In September 1982, a Saturday morning cartoon from Hanna-Barbara debuted and got the small firm's attention. It featured the basic family plotline introduced by GCC during Ms. Pac-Man's animated intermission scenes (and the ghost named Sue), and GCC felt it had to speak up to avoid being excluded from profiting on its own creation.

Macrae: Who owns the rights to Ms. Pac-Man is a very, very complicated issue. Ms. Pac-Man was originally created as a derivative work on Pac-Man. The whole concept of derivative works I don't think was ever heavily fleshed out in intellectual property law.

It was obvious always to us that Ms. Pac-Man could not exist without Pac-Man. You could never pay a royalty on Ms. Pac-Man without having a royalty going to Namco who created Pac-Man. With that being said, we always took the position that you cannot ever pay a royalty on Ms. Pac-Man without some going to us, because we are responsible for Ms. Pac-Man, and also the family that got created—Jr. Pac-Man and the whole Pac family.

Horowitz: They came out with all this Ms. Pac-Man stuff. There was a cartoon, and there were all the dolls and plush things. Midway wasn't giving us any of that, so I think we took them to court. Since we had created the character, we thought we were entitled to some of those proceeds.

Macrae: We ended up in court in 1983 with Midway, which became known as 'the maternity suit,' because we were claiming that we were the mother of the family, that we created Ms. Pac-Man and Jr. Pac-Man. The first member of the next generation was created in the third intermission, with the stork flying in with Jr. in its mouth.

Eventually we settled in a three-way agreement between us, Midway, and Namco, to how the various rights would work over the years that would follow, on characters that would get created and on the use of Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man in arcade games, and the use of Ms. Pac-Man elsewhere, etc. All of that was pretty carefully spelled out for the '80s.

Almost 20 years later, Ms. Pac-Man saw a revival that wasn't spelled out in the original agreements. In 2000, Namco of America released an arcade machine called 'Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga-Class of 1981' that combined the firm's two all-time most popular arcade titles in one machine, and it represented the second release of Ms. Pac-Man in the arcade. The only problem was that they had not consulted GCC about it.

When GCC veterans heard about the new machine, Macrae and others went knocking on Namco's door to see what was up. The result shocked them.

Macrae: They had not even heard of who we were, and did not have any idea that we were the creators of Ms. Pac-Man.

Golson: When we were talking with the folks at Namco, we said, 'Look, hey guys, we designed this. This little outfit in Massachusetts.' They were like, 'What? What are you talking about?'

Macrae: I think this was totally honest because both Nakajima and Nakamura, the two Namco executives we had negotiated with, had passed away. [Class of 1981] was a machine developed by Namco of America. We got the old contract, faxed it out to them, and started our discussions.

After an initial period of confusion, Namco of America and the former shareholders of GCC entered into arbitration that lasted between 2002 and 2007. After a first round over the new Namco arcade cabinet, a second round of arbitration during the period covered the emergence of Ms. Pac-Man onto platforms not envisioned in the 1980s, such as iPods, cell phones, and plug-and-play game consoles. The two firms reached a new agreement whose terms are still confidential.

Macrae: When [Namco of America] decided to put the new game out, I don't think they had ever known that Ms. Pac-Man was not their creation. We'd never made much noise back in the '80s that we had created it. I don't think we've ever demanded credit, so I don't think we've really cared. Fame was never what we were after, so that was fine.

Horowitz: I think we've all been pretty much low-key about this thing. At some point, people found out about it, and there was some word of us on the internet. We're all engineers, right? So we're pretty quiet guys anyway. None of us have been going around bragging that we did Ms. Pac-Man, but it was our friends that would.

Golson: As for getting credit, getting paid was the first step. The thought was, well, eventually somebody will write the big history of video games and then we can talk about how it all came out.

Horowitz: Doug and Kevin have been very nice. When I first signed up, I wasn't getting a salary, but Doug said that the developers would get 10% of the profits from anything they did. To their credit, when this latest arbitration thing happened, even though we didn't do much except answer some emails, they held to the same 10%. They didn't owe us that, but they're nice guys.

To this day, Namco does not publicly acknowledge that Ms. Pac-Man was created outside of Japan, and Toru Iwatani, the creator of Pac-Man, declines to comment on the very popular American-made spin-off of his game. I have tried to contact Iwatani about this issue twice since 2011, and I have received no response.

Golson: At some point I'd love to sit down with Toru Iwatani and say, 'Hey, what do you think of us?'

Yeah, I suspect they were a little bit annoyed—probably not so much that they were not responsible for it—but I think that they were very proud of Pac-Man, which they should be. Pac-Man's a wonderful game.

I think the fact that Ms. Pac-Man showed flaws in their game, that their game could be improved a little bit, might be annoying to them. Maybe they have those feelings. I don't think that's very fair to themselves, though.

Horowitz: Typically, there's a lot of innovation that happens in America and then Japan will take that innovation and refine it a little bit and sell it back to us, so I think we sort of turned the tables on them.

The gameplay of Pac-Man is awesome. There are a lot of games that, like Tetris, are incredibly simple, but they're really compelling to play. They came out with this great idea, and we fixed those flaws and made a better game.

Golson: Frankly, I'm sure that there are other games under the Namco brand that were designed by third parties, and they do not talk about that either—and rightly so. You contract out for somebody to do some work for you, and whether your acknowledge them or not, it's up to you. Our attitude was as long as we get paid, we don't care.

Macrae: It has brought in tremendous amounts of revenue for Namco. They made as much on every Ms. Pac-Man that shipped in America as they did on Pac-Man. If you get down to the profits behind it, they don't care in the least.

The Legacy

Thirty-five years after its release, Ms. Pac-Man remains both iconic and addictively fun to play. It even makes the news from time to time, as it did in January when computer scientists taught an AI to play the game better than any human, achieving a record-breaking high score of 43,720.

After a brief but successful run in the video game industry, General Computer pivoted to other technologies, creating the first internal hard drive for the Macintosh and a pioneering set-top box for TV Guide before settling down in the laser printer market. Despite decades of work on dozens of products since then, Ms. Pac-man remains a satisfying high-water mark in the lives of the engineers who brought her to life.

Horowitz: How has it changed my life? It introduced me to a bunch of smart guys and from a career point of view. We made a bunch of money, and it was great. I bought a house basically from the proceeds of Ms. Pac-Man that I still live in.

In terms of Ms. Pac-Man itself, until recently, it really wasn't a active part of my life. It was something we did in less than a year, and it was fun, but I didn't walk around with a sign saying 'I made Ms. Pac-Man.'

Golson: It's been a real trip, I'll tell you. It's the most popular arcade video game ever in the U.S., and to be able to point to that and say I was one of the designers is a real feeling of accomplishment. It certainly turns people's heads when you tell them and they want to hear the story. On a personal level it affected me because it was financially a big thing.

Horowitz: I was 24 when Ms. Pac-Man was released. I have four daughters, and my two oldest are older than I was when I did Ms. Pac-Man. So they sometimes moan, 'Dad, I'm 25 years old and I haven't created the most popular video game of all time, I'm a failure.'

Macrae: I still have a Ms. Pac-Man machine in my basement. I was never amazingly good at it, but my wife's best friend growing up played Ms. Pac-Man a lot, and she got so good at it that she decided to start playing it with her toes. She can beat me while I'm playing with my hands.

Horowitz: They're all over the place. Usually you see them if you're driving on the Mass Turnpike that runs through Massachusetts. At all their rest stops, there are all these gas stations, and they all seem to have the combo Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga game.

It was a little short thing in my life that happened: It was wonderful, and I have nothing but great memories of that. It was the only cultural phenomenon I've ever worked on.

Leaders who can't justify their views or explain how they're acting on them aren't really leading.

This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.

In my role at Fast Company, I'm responsible for reviewing hundreds of articles a month. These are a few draft headlines that have landed in my inbox over the past year:

Developing Employee Relationships Is The First Step In Chasing Elusive Employee Engagement

Bring Honor And Accountability Back To The Workforce To Get Results

Why Internal Communications Are Essential To Your Corporate Culture

The reason I chose not publish each of these stories was the same: Their underlying ideas were boring, obvious, or inert—they didn't lead to any sort of action, or explain why to take it.

What's Your Point?

Who would argue that good relationships have no bearing on employee engagement? Does anyone believe workforces without "honor" or "accountability" (which vanished when, exactly?) can still "get results"? Or that good internal communication is a pernicious evil that will devour a company's culture from the inside out if it isn't stopped?

Having a point matters; it's the whole point of sharing your ideas in print, whether you're writing an op-ed or talking to a reporter. Ideally, that point will be surprising or novel. Maybe it will even be provocative, something that somebody else could conceivably—and compellingly—argue the reverse of. Above all, it will lead people to do something differently, to exit the realm of thought and enter the realm of action.

Especially now. In a world where "alternative" realities jockey incessantly for dominance, confusion spreads and paralysis sets in. It's up to leaders to reverse that, by clarifying where they stand and what they stand for—then explaining what to do about it.

It used to be considered needlessly "political" for business heads to weigh in on current events, and it's true that the risks of doing so remain high. But that's now part of the job. Fall short of it, and you leave your customers, employees, and the public in the lurch—unable to make choices (both as consumers and members of the workforce) that impact your business's fate much more profoundly than any veneer of neutrality can protect it.

The Rising Stakes Of Taking A Stand

It's never been clearer that what companies do affects more than what they sell or how well they sell it. Businesses have always been scrutinized for their labor records, employment and hiring practices, social impact, and overall sense of purpose. But as the federal government executes a sharp turn away from progressive social policies, large swaths of the country are watching to see whether the private sector picks up that banner or runs from it. Execs may not think that's fair, but they can't avoid reckoning with it.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has long traded jabs with Donald Trump, but this week he pushed back against the recent executive order blocking U.S. entry to refugees and immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. "No nation is better at harnessing the energies and talents of immigrants. It's a distinctive competitive advantage for our country—one we should not weaken," Bezos wrote in a memo announcing that the company is considering legal action to protect that advantage, or at least its own. "To our employees in the U.S. and around the world who may be directly affected by this order, I want you to know that the full extent of Amazon's resources are behind you."

The pressure to take a position isn't just on left-leaning companies. Earlier this month, L.L. Bean heiress Linda Bean went on Fox & Friends to condemn boycotters of the clothing brand after revelations that she'd donated $60,000 to a pro-Trump super PAC. Her stance was helpful to know: L.L. Bean would be staying the course ("I never back down if I feel I'm right," Bean averred).

Consumers, current employees, and prospective hires of the company now knew where one of its leaders stood with regard to Trump's proposals. By stating her case and laying out her intentions, Bean, like Bezos, was offering clarity to people looking for it—about something much more important than rainproof outerwear or same-day delivery.

Acting On What You've Always Believed

Shortly after the election, I received a draft of a story by an exec at a major company advocating for private-sector support for community service programs—not an especially incendiary idea. But when I suggested the author acknowledge that the political climate might spur people to get involved in such service, the company's PR team got cold feet. We had to kill the piece.

Here's the thing: The exec who'd written that story clearly supported this idea before Trump was elected president. Likewise, Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz didn't arrive at the conviction that immigrants give U.S. employers a competitive edge just a few days ago. It was this firmly held belief that led him to vow this week to hire 10,000 refugees over the next five years. Similarly, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has vocally supported women's reproductive rights well before she sharply criticized Trump's recent renewal of a Reagan-administration ban on health care providers from advertising abortion counseling options, and she continues to speak out about what she believes in.

These leaders' opinions haven't changed all of a sudden. The political climate has, in ways that forced them to speak out. What that means is that the people who look to Shultz and Sandberg for leadership, and in many cases for their livelihoods, now rely on them to defend these views—not just in thought but in deed. A Facebook employee with foreign citizenship who's facing deportation needs to know whether the company has her back. A Starbucks drinker who wants to see U.S. borders tighten should know whether to consider getting caffeine boosts elsewhere.

So it's no longer enough for leaders like Ford CEO Mark Fields—who just weeks ago was spouting tepid support for the Trump team's "pro-growth" strategies, in a bid to avoid being tweeted to death—to declare that "all of our policies, including our human-resource policies, support a diverse and inclusive workplace," referring to the immigration ban.

What company would ever say otherwise? Ford's employees and customers deserve to hear what Fields thinks should be done about it. His bland avowal—"We are going to stay focused on the well-being of our employees and running a successful business"—just doesn't measure up.

Make Thought Leadership Mean Something Again

"Thought leadership" is a wretched name for work that's often managed by PR agencies and teams of marketing experts. But when leaders really say what they think, it clears a space for action, not just thought. That space is where decisions get explained and justified, ideas aired, adjudicated, shot down, applauded, and reasoned out.

Stay on its margins or flood it with platitudes, and people will make their own assumptions. What they'll likely assume is that you're fine with the status quo. They'll grasp that your business's main purpose is profit—that its leaders don't see any need to act differently because they're making money just fine.

But even this choice is worth explaining and defending. Issuing milquetoast or disingenuous comments—or none at all—is an abdication of leadership. Choosing not to say what you think still reveals what you value.

This week's top stories examine Trump's mixed reception by business leaders, how recruiters use LinkedIn, and the downsides to optimism.

This week we learned why some business leaders are already looking askance at the Trump administration, how to retool a LinkedIn profile to appeal to recruiters, and why positive thinking might be overrated.

These are the stories you loved in Leadership for the week of January 29:

1. This Is What Recruiters Look For On Your LinkedIn Profile

Want to see your LinkedIn account through a recruiter's eyes? Look no further. Here's a checklist of some of the features that catch their eye for the right reasons, and others that are instant turn-offs.

2. How Trump's First Week In Office Proves He's Bad For Business

For one business owner, President Trump's first week as commander-in-chief put to rest any doubts as to his agenda. Taking a swing at auto industry execs who've voiced optimism for the new administration's "pro-growth" plans, Hiro Taylor argues," If businesses pretend they have more to gain than lose by adapting to Trump's world, the next four years may disappoint."

3. The Unexpected Drawbacks To Positive Thinking

Is a sunny disposition overrated? One psychologist thinks so. "In reality," writes Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, "not only is positive thinking less universally beneficial than we might think, but negative thinking may not be so categorically bad." That's good news, he explains, since summoning an optimistic mind-set isn't as easy as some like to claim.

4. How Sesame Street Explains The Toughest Parts Of Life

The long-running children's show has always explored issues other kids' programming scrupulously avoids. This week, Sesame Street's producers explained how and why the show has tackled AIDS, autism, incarceration, and more. "It's not a fantasy," one executive notes. "It's not a fairy tale."

5. Six Ways I Built A Career Traveling The World In My 20s

This 27-year-old jet-setter entered the workforce the way lots of new grads do, by taking a corporate job in which she sat at the same desk five days a week. Looking back, Elaina Giolando thinks that was actually a hidden advantage. This week she shared how she's managed to visit 50 countries and counting, and expand her network across the globe in no time. "If I wanted a job producing Norwegian techno music in India, I literally have a contact for that."

People with narcissistic qualities usually know it, researchers have discovered.

Let's get one thing straight: Some aspects of narcissism can be healthy. In fact, people we wouldn't otherwise think to call narcissists share tendencies with people who basically scream it. That can make ID'ing a narcissist accurately more difficult than you may think. But research suggests there's at least one way to tell if you're dealing with a narcissist, and it's amazingly simple.

Narcissism By Degrees

Being a narcissist doesn't necessarily mean obsessed with yourself.

To psychologists, the term simply describes people who derive a considerable amount of their self-esteem from others' accolades. So maybe, for instance, it isn't so terrible to think other people should listen to what you have to say if you really do have something important to say. In that case, narcissism can lead you to broadcast your views in public (perhaps by writing articles for sites like Fast Company!). Plenty of effective politicians and business leaders have a touch of narcissism, and that probably benefits them.

Where narcissism goes astray is when someone has such a high need for others' approval that it gets in the way of them working with people. People psychologists refer to as "vulnerable narcissists" can lash out at others when their actions and ideas are criticized. They take more credit for what the team does than they personally had a hand in. They shift the blame for bad actions from themselves to others.

In other words, narcissism is more of a spectrum than a quality you either possess or you don't. This isn't news. For a long time, researchers have used the narcissism personality inventory to measure people's degree of narcissism. When it was originally developed, it included 40 questions that explored different aspects of narcissism. But field researchers found it was often hard to use such a long questionnaire in studies, so they managed to shorten it into a 16-question version.

What if it could be boiled down to just one?

The One-Question Narcissism Test

That's what researchers Sara Konrath, Brien Meier, and Brad Bushman wondered, then set out to test it. In 2014, they published a study in which they asked people to rate how much they agreed with the statement, "I am a narcissist" on a scale from 1–11. They added the note, "The word 'narcissist' means egotistical, self-focused, and vain."

Surprisingly, this one-item scale worked extremely well. It turns out that narcissists are typically aware that they're narcissists, and many are willing to admit it—at least when answering a question in a scientific study.

To be fair, this one-question test doesn't exactly parse the different levels of narcissism somebody may exhibit; it can't tell you if someone's a vulnerable narcissist or just has a few mild narcissistic qualities. Nor does it mean that you should just walk up to people and ask them how much of a narcissist they are, and expect to get highly accurate results.

But it does mean that most narcissists are aware of how much attention they need from others, and how threatened they feel by people who criticize them. And those are things you can usually ask people about pretty straightforwardly.

This isn't actually all that surprising. When you think about it, most of the behaviors and reactions related to narcissism are pretty consciously available. People know when they're being vain and when they're putting their own egos ahead of others.

What To Do About It

So if you find yourself mentoring a rising star who you think has some narcissistic qualities, it's worth sitting down and having a conversation with them. You may want to point out—gently—that they'll need the help of their team members as they rise through an organization.

A simple chat like this may even help preempt a bigger problems down the road. Studies suggest that narcissists often wear out their welcome with groups—usually pretty quickly—and are forced to move on. Since it doesn't come naturally, young narcissists have to learn to spread the credit across their team and accept some blame for things that go wrong.

If you find yourself working for a narcissist, though, you may want to shield yourself a little, too. Try to find a powerful ally in the organization who can protect you from any misplaced blame flung your way. Ultimately, though, remember that the narcissists you know really are aware of their own need for attention. That means that you may be able chat one-on-one about it and show them how to work with others—yourself included—before anything gets out of hand.

Can you get fired for airing your political beliefs in the office? What about on social media? The answers can get complicated.

In the days after the election, conversation shifted at work from upcoming projects to the outcome. Nothing felt more important than what was happening in our country, and I openly discussed how I felt with several coworkers. Additionally, I took my thoughts to social media. It's safe to say no one walked away from a conversation with me unsure about where I stood politically.

I recognize that I'm employed by the kind of organization that encourages people to be themselves (as long as being themselves doesn't translate to being disrespectful toward others). But speaking to friends in less open environments, I learned that there weren't candid conversations, that a few hushed words were spoken and then never broached again.

For most people I know, it was back to business as usual. This was partially because they worked at companies in which speaking up about political beliefs wasn't considered appropriate, and partially because people feared that speaking up could get them into trouble. Worst-case scenario: It could get them fired.

At first I rolled my eyes, because thanks to free speech you couldn't actually lose your job for expressing your political views, right?

That would be wrong. There's free speech, and then there's free speech in the workplace.

So The First Amendment Doesn't Apply When I'm At Work?

Eric Kluger, in house counsel and director of operations at The Muse, explained the complicated nature of the First Amendment, pointing out that a common misconception is that it protects speech in any place. It doesn't. And that means a private employer is not prohibited from making rules or setting regulations about what is or isn't appropriate for work discussions.

And guess what? Politics, given its often polarizing effect, is easily one of those topics that a private organization could justly determine isn't to be discussed while you're on company time.

What Happens If I Do Discuss Politics At The Office?

According to Helen D. ("Heidi") Reavis and Deena R. Merlen, partners with the law firm Reavis Parent Lehrer LLP, the answer is, "It depends."

For starters: Where do you work? As Reavis and Merlen explained, you might work in a state where the law protects employees from workplace discrimination based on political affiliation or extends other protections that would tend to protect you from being fired for talking about politics.

Another variable is whether your political talk falls within the protection of the federal National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Assuming that you and your employer are covered by the NLRA—which generally would be the case, with a few exceptions, as Merlen noted—it would be unlawful for your boss to fire you for participating in what the NLRA calls "concerted activity" for mutual aid or protection (like when workers speak among themselves about how they might improve the terms and conditions of their employment).

This sort of "free speech" right under the NLRA can overlap with talking politics at the office. For example, let's say you're speaking with coworkers about your company's refusal to provide paid parental leave and you're expressing support for Candidate A because you believe he'll implement parental-leave policies that you and your coworkers stand to benefit from. Talking about this workplace issue is arguably your right under the NLRA—you are protected, even though within the discussion you're talking politics.

But then there's the sensitive matter of not working when you're supposed to be working, and mandated breaks aside, if you're engaging in political chatting on social media or even just talking to coworkers throughout the workday, you could, technically, get called out for it by your boss. It may not be because of the topic, but it's nonetheless problematic.

The takeaway? It's a smart move to limit nonworking activities throughout the workday, lunch or coffee breaks aside.

How Do I Know If My Company Cares About This One Way Or The Other?

Best-case scenario is that your organization has spelled out how the internet can be used on the job, but if it hasn't, it's a good idea to ask HR for some clarification so you know what's allowed and what isn't. It's also a good idea to look beyond company policy and make sure you're aware of your state's laws because the ways these protect you as a working professional can vary quite a bit.

What Other Laws Are There To Protect Me?

Even though you don't have all your First Amendment rights in the office, there are a lot of protections. Some states even consider one's political affiliation a protected class. The nonprofit Workplace Fairness can help you understand your rights and what laws apply to you based on where you live and work.

Does This Apply To Social Media?

Your company can have a policy that prohibits employees from using social media during work hours (although you should still be able to engage in the sort of activities protected by the NLRA or other potentially applicable laws).

There's some murkiness here, though, since many people regularly go onto their social media pages from their own phones, or they scroll through non-work-related sites while they're eating lunch at their desk.

For example, if your boss suddenly tells you to stop posting on Facebook when you're supposed to be working, and you assume he's only made that request because he doesn't align with your recent political postings, you could view it as singling you out and retaliatory—when, in fact, perhaps you shouldn't have been online at all.

If you're in a location where you are protected from discrimination at work on the basis of political opinion or affiliation, and you experience negative treatment at work because of it, then it could be the employer facing an issue with the law.

What About When I'm Out Of The Office?

What you do outside of the office is your time. Mostly. Even when you're not working, you're representing your company, and behaving professionally is good practice, which is why, in spite of some protections, it's in your best interest to privatize any social media accounts you don't want your employer to see.

Also, as political talk can grow heated, be mindful if your social media exchanges or other communications with coworkers, even outside of work, could potentially violate company policies about not harassing or bullying other employees. Some policies apply 24/7, not just from nine to five.

How Do I Participate In Causes I Care About Without Risking My Job?

If you want to be involved and actively participate in supporting causes and people you believe in, you don't have to abandon or dismiss your politics, you simply need to be smart about it. For starters, when you're at work, be at work and make that your focus. Reavis says, "Don't forget, that's why they call it work. Someone else is paying you for your time, so be mindful of that. Or you will have a lot more time on your hands to discuss politics!"

When you're out the office, make the privacy setting your pal, and if you're going to marches or protests, don't do anything stupid like wear a T-shirt with the company logo. Make it clear you're only representing yourself.

It's all fine and well to say that you wouldn't want to work for a person or company with drastically differing values than your own, but when it comes down to it, is that really a move you'd be willing to make? Those bills aren't going to pay themselves. I'm not saying this to shame you into staying quiet, but rather to make you aware of the risk you might be taking when you speak up at the office.

At the end of the day, caring about the work you do and investing your time and efforts into helping the company you work for is key. As Reavis says, "Both employees and employers should make more of an effort to put politics aside in pursuing shared goals and for the good of the company." If everyone followed this sentiment, things might just be a lot less complicated.

This story originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.

Stop obsessively fine-tuning your resume and do this instead.

Job searching may be at the bottom of your "fun-things-to-do" list—but that might just be because you've hit the "job search wall." It happens to the best of us, and it's pretty common. But it can be reversed!

"Looking for a job is a universal source of anxiety," says Steve Dalton, author of The 2-Hour Job Search: Using Technology to Get the Right Job Faster. It's also intimidating, he says, given that there's a seemingly endless number of job postings at your fingertips.

That's the irony: While you have great access to job openings, having too many options can make the job-search process seem overwhelming. Monster asked career experts for their advice to avoid job-search burnout. Here's what they said can turn those feelings of fatigue back into excitement.

1. Adjust Your Mind-Set

"It's all about how you look at the job search," says Danny Rubin, millennial career coach and author of 25 Things Every Young Professional Should Know by Age 25.

Instead of thinking of applications as a total time-suck, he says, consider them the next (and necessary) step to scoring a job at one of your dream companies. With every application you submit, you're that much closer to landing "the one," because it's a numbers game.

So if you feel like you're drowning in a sea of job applications, focus on the end result instead—getting that killer job offer.

2. Step Away From Your Computer

When you're job searching, you spend a lot of time at the computer—like, some serious screen time. While looking for and applying to jobs online is important—and most likely the way you'll find your new gig, too much of it could drive anyone crazy.

Drag yourself away from your laptop to meet people who work in the field face-to-face. That way, you'll start meeting people who work in your industry, and you can start doing your homework to find the right fit for you. When you get home, research the companies where your new connections work to read employee reviews and get a deeper sense of what the company is about.

"You don't always need to go to conferences or formal industry events to meet people," says Chip Espinoza, author of Millennials@Work: The 7 Skills Every Twenty-Something (and Their Manager) Needs to Overcome Roadblocks and Achieve Greatness.

He suggests starting with alumni networking events, which can be a fun way to reconnect with people you went to school with while talking about your job search—like mixing business with pleasure.

3. Ditch The Elevator Pitch

A well-honed elevator pitch can be a great way to explain who you are and what you do, but sometimes you've got to go off-script to shake things up. The key to building relationships is establishing trust and likeability; so don't always feel pressured to sell yourself when you meet new people.

"Hearing an elevator pitch can make people's defenses go up," says Dalton.

So instead of immediately answering the question, "What do you do?" try to see if you have shared interests outside of work, or any common links so that you can get to know the person you're talking with on a less formal level.

4. Don't Spend Days Fine-Tuning Your Resume

Hiring managers have short attention spans. In fact, some only spend a few seconds looking at an applicant's resume.

"They're trying to get back to their real work as quickly as they can," Dalton explains.

Rather than devoting a ton of time to perfecting your resume (psst—there's no such thing as a "perfect" resume), "put three to four hours into updating it, but make sure it's error-free," Dalton says.

5. Write A Skeleton Cover Letter

It's okay to use a template for cover letters to help speed up job applications. However, you'll still want to tailor each letter to the specific company and position. To do so, Espinoza recommends customizing the first paragraph, incorporating language from the job posting.

Keep cover letters brief. (In many industries, a half-page letter is sufficient.) "Tell hiring managers the information that they need to know upfront," says Dalton, adding that if you have an internal referral you should mention it in the first sentence.

Also, "the shorter the cover letter, the less chance there is for grammatical errors," says Dalton.

6. Create An Online Portfolio

If you're applying for jobs where you need to submit samples of your work (think writing, graphic design, or advertising), don't waste time attaching multiple documents to each job application. It's cumbersome, and hiring managers don't like having to download multiple attachments, says Rubin.

One solution: Create a free or low-cost professional website on Wordpress, Carbonmade, or Contently, where you can house your portfolio, and include the URL on your resume.

7. Prepare Three Go-To Interview Questions

During most job interviews, you have an opportunity to ask the recruiter or hiring manager questions. The good news: You don't need to exhaust yourself by trying to come up with unique questions for each interview. Dalton recommends these three:

• What's your favorite part about working here? "It doesn't require the person to have to sum up the company culture," says Dalton. Simply asking "What's the culture like?" often leads to a generic answer.
• How do you think the market will be different three years from now? "You're asking for the person's expert opinion and that shows respect," says Dalton.
• If you had to attribute your success to one skill or trait, what would it be? "You're essentially asking the person why they're good at their job, which is flattering," Dalton says.

This article originally appeared on Monster and is reprinted with permission.

Brands will be hitting Twitter hard this Sunday with custom hashtags, emojis, and even 360-degree Periscope videos.

With 16.9 million tweets, last year's Super Bowl was the most tweeted event of the year in the United States. The next biggest event, the Grammys, came in at less than half that, 7.9 million. Now Twitter is gearing up to do it all again this Sunday, with a few new bells and whistles for users.

"For us Super Bowl is one of the most important time of the year," says Alex Josephson, head of Global Brand strategy at Twitter. He says that the Super Bowl is consistently the highest tweeted event of the year, with millions of tweets getting literally billions of impressions, and this year is shaping up to be no different.

"It's everyone on the platform, meaning everyone from your peers and colleagues to sports writers and the athletes themselves, the anchors on television, celebrities—all weighing in on this one thing that's happening in real time," says Josephson. "Obviously that presents a lot of opportunities for brands to get involved and connect to consumers they care about in a meaningful way."

This year Twitter's relationship with football went a step further when it broadcast 10 regular season games live. Josephson says that those broadcasts helped some advertisers reach an audience that they've been having trouble capturing in recent years: millennials, many of whom don't have traditional cable subscriptions. A whopping 70% of the viewers of games on Twitter this year were under the age of 35.

"It's becoming harder and harder for advertisers to reach that millennial-age consumer in particular," says Josephson. "That Thursday-night live football for us was really a way to facilitate the ability for marketers to reach that audience."

So, what can we expect this year?

As in years past, Josephson says emojis will be a huge part of this year's big game. Twitter says to expect a number of custom emojis from big brands this weekend, including Pepsi, which has already launched its #PepsiHalftime emoji. Other custom emojis to look out for this weekend: #SuperBowl, #SB51, #RiseUp, #Patriots, and #UnlimitedMovies, a campaign with T-Mobile and Justin Bieber.

Twitter also worked with @LadyGaga on five custom Twitter emojis and eight customer stickers for her halftime show. Look for those at #thefame, #TheFameMonster, #BornThisWay, #ARTPOP, and #Joanne. Gaga went live on Periscope in 360 yesterday and her behind-the-scenes video hit over 1 million viewers within an hour of going live.

Don't expect brands to just include a hashtag in their ads. Josephson says that this year there will be a lot more interactivity.

"We're beyond just running hashtags in commercials and hoping people go to Twitter and search for that hashtag. We're starting to see this two-screen experience," Josephson says.

"You'll see things like calls to action in Super Bowl commercials where interacting with the hashtag might unlock exclusive content or the chance to win prizes."

Twitter's Niche platform will also be huge this year. The platform connects brands with influencers who further promote their message. So look for some of those, like this campaign by Best Buy from the holidays, to take those Super Bowl commercials a little further.

And there's always an opportunity for brands to take advantage of those left shark moments.

"What we typically advise marketers and brand to do is to prepare to be spontaneous," says Josephson. "You don't know exactly what's going to happen during the game."