After two years and lots of wasted postage, one illustrator explains how he started earning a living in a "dying profession."

It's June 1999, and I'm living in Toronto. A guy I know from art school comes into the store today, and he's surprised to see me. "I thought you'd be doing something else?" he asks. I laugh nervously.

At graduation, weeks before, I'd won a big scholarship, the one that's given to just a single student in each department. When I walked up to receive it, the MC read aloud a short blurb I'd written—something self-deprecating about how after graduation I expected to be living at home with my parents, working in retail, and trying my best to become a freelance illustrator.

Self-deprecating, but as it turns out, entirely accurate.

The other students who'd received awards sounded like they had way more potential: So-and-so would be working at this design firm, and that other person would be at such-and-such ad agency. In art college, I used to call freelance illustration the "dying profession," and now here I was, struggling to break into it.

What would it even look like once I did? If I did?

It would be another two and a half years before I'd be able to answer that—before I could finally quit my job at the Gap, move out of my parents' house, and begin happily earning a living in the dying profession (and I'm even happier to say, I still am). Here's what it took for me to get there, from graduation day to going full-time.

August 1999

I'm pounding pavement like crazy looking for work. Thankfully, I connected with a couple teachers in art school who run design firms, publish trade magazines, and hire young talent. I don't know what I'd have done without them. Illustrating one full page can get you about $750, and a cover pays even more.

Meanwhile, I'm poring over magazines at St. Mark's Bookshop, on Queen and John Streets, trying to build my own mailing list of art directors to pitch to. (The cost of buying one is around $1,000—way out of budget.) I show up every few days and page through as many as I can, quickly scanning mastheads and jotting down names and addresses, because I don't want to outstay my welcome; I'm not buying anything.

When I get home, I try to decide which art directors to mail my postcard promotions to. It's crazy how many names I've compiled already—over 100! It's my dream to work with Gail Anderson at Rolling Stone.

October 1999

My first promo is nearly done. My dad is helping me put it together. It's a small cardboard box containing a handmade book with a few illustrations. The theme is "My Wishes," one of which is to be Brad Pitt (duh), and another is to have tea with Oprah—I painted portraits of them both. I've also bought some decorative raffia to put into the box and nestled some dime bags filled with glittery sand (à la "Mr. Sandman," the 1950s hit by the Chordettes), then sprinkled everything with foil stars—you know, to reinforce the theme.

Anyway, I've put a lot of work into this—and money, too. I had no idea how expensive it is to mail 300 boxes! But gotta spend money to make money, right? I'm excited!

November 1999

I can't believe no art directors responded to my promo—the boxes were so cute! What a waste! Next time I'm just using the school's computer lab and printer (alumni privileges), then mailing those out instead. It'll be much cheaper.

January 2000

Lately I've been playing around making new portfolios. In school we were told to present our work in black presentation cases, but I want mine to stand out, so I've made a hand-bound book that's white instead. When I show art directors my portfolio, I want them to remember me as the guy with the white book!

June 2000

The white book didn't work. Fortunately I've cobbled together a few illustration gigs that pay around $400–$500 a month. I've been fretting over money because I'm anxious to move out of my parents' house. But by now the cash I'm making from those freelance gigs, added to my retail job, is just enough to cover rent—so I think I'm going to do it: I'm moving out!

April 2001

Money is super tight. The extra income I'd hoped would come from freelancing just isn't reliable. I've been sending out promos, cold calling, and trying to meet with art directors in Toronto, but most of them aren't returning my calls.

In the meantime, my friends who work in advertising have hired me to do storyboards. The money from those is awesome—one ad job is worth twice my rent—but there aren't enough of those projects consistently.

June 2001

I'm on my lunch break at the Gap. I recently sent out a batch of postcards to some clients and a few illustration agents hoping that someone would call. Just checked my voicemail a second ago—nothing. I start to cry.

July 2001

I need a computer. I can't afford to buy one, but my friend told me where I could lease one month-to-month. I tallied up the cost, and I can just barely afford it. I'm working enough hours at the Gap, and I've been lucky so far because I'm averaging two to three illustration assignments a month to help get me by.

October 2001

With my leased computer, I've been playing around with Adobe Illustrator these past few months. It's pretty cool using the mouse to draw with. I'm not doing anything major, just drawing scenes of people hanging out and socializing. But I'm learning something and it's pretty fun.

November 2001

It's nighttime and I'm sweeping up the stockroom with the radio playing. Whitney Houston's "One Moment in Time" comes on: Am I more than I thought I could be? It hits me that I've got to step it up and really push to get more illustration work. My new goal is to get out of this place by February.

December 2001

An illustration agent just called me! She said the paintings I sent her a few weeks ago weren't cohesive enough, so I sent her a few of the drawings I made on my computer instead. She loved them and wants to give me a chance! I'm so happy!

February 2002

It took a while, but in the past few months it feels like I've finally got the momentum I've been looking for over the past two years. This is the most illustration work I've ever had at once—I can barely keep up. I'm still working at the Gap but doubt that I'll be able to stay for much longer. In fact, I'm committing right now: I'm giving my notice in three weeks, no matter what. Time to do this full-time.

Oh, and some more good news: I got a call from Rolling Stone!

Marcos Chin is an award-winning illustrator whose work has appeared as surface and wall designs, on book and CD covers, and in advertisements, fashion catalogues, and magazines. He has worked with MTA Arts for Transit, Neiman Marcus, Fiat, Budweiser, Time, Rolling Stone, Fast Company, the New Yorker, GQ, Sports Illustrated, and the New York Times, among others.

A giant outage of Amazon Web Services and other recent accidents offer an opportunity to reflect on the perilous architecture of the web.

Recent outages from critical services across the net have created massive disruption in recent weeks: Whether it was Amazon's S3 service failure, which took down thousands of sites, Cloudflare's "Cloudbleed" security issue, which forced many sites to ask users to reset their passwords, or Google Wifi's accidental reset, which wiped out customer's internet profiles, the infrastructure behind the internet has looked substantially more unstable recently.

The packetized technology that underlies most of the internet was created by Paul Baran as part of an effort to protect communications by moving from a centralized model of communication to a distributed one. While the Internet Society questions whether the creation of the internet was in direct response to concerns about nuclear threat, it clearly agrees that "later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks."

From there, the foundation was laid for an internet that treated the distributed model as a key component to ensuring reliability. Almost 50 years later, consolidation around hosting and mobile and the development of the cloud have created a model that increases concentration on top of few key players: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google now host a large number of sites across the web. Many of those companies' customers have opted to host their infrastructure in a single set of data centers, potentially increasing the frailty of the web by re-centralizing large portions of the net.

That's what happened when Amazon's S3 service, essentially a large hard drive used by companies like Spotify, Pinterest, Dropbox, Trello, Quora, and many others, lost one of its data centers on Tuesday morning. The problem began around 9:37 a.m. Pacific, the company later explained, after an employee tried to fix a problem with S3's billing system: "an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers... Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended."

Companies that had content stored in those sets of servers, located in Northern Virginia, essentially stopped functioning properly, prompting experts to recommend that companies look at storing data across multiple data centers to increase reliability. The failure rippled across Amazon's other services, many of which depend upon S3, leading to "increased error rates" for sites that rely on AWS, and making engineers' efforts at recovery that much more difficult. Even the webpage Amazon uses to alert customers to outages was affected.

On a different end of the spectrum, other services intended to provide reliability in the event of an outage or an attack have been experiencing their own issues. Cloudflare, which provides security and hosting services for thousands of websites, revealed last week that it had discovered a security bug that could leak passwords from the sites of its customers, including companies like Betterment, Medium, Uber, and OkCupid. Thousands of companies were forced to ask their customers to change their passwords and make an assessment as to the potential security impact this would have on their overall infrastructure.

While those issues may only be fixed by the owners of the respective sites, the problem of centralization is slowly creeping into the realm of the millions of people who rely upon these services. People using Google Wifi and Google Chromecast found themselves forced to reinstall their systems last week as a bug wiped out centralized configuration files for many of those devices, forcing them offline for a period of time.

As more people and more devices get connected to the internet, the lure of centralizing control—which makes it easier for companies to manage them—is bumping its head against the initial design of the internet: to drive reliability and scalability. With every new largely centralized system that comes online, the internet becomes more brittle, as centralization creates an increased number of single points of failure. In a world where hackers are looking for new ways to take down infrastructures, those centralized services must double down on increasing security and reliability if we want the internet to survive.

Startups relying on standardized infrastructures can go to market faster and more cheaply, but complete reliance on a single set of servers is akin to building a castle on a swamp. While companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and others have a responsibility to ensure the infrastructures they provide remain stable, it is important for any company to consider how to best balance their offerings across different data centers and how to adapt in case of failures.

Unfortunately, that is not what the large cloud providers want you to do. While Adrian Cockroft, vice president for cloud architecture strategy at Amazon Web Services, acknowledged that many big corporate customers like to split their business among multiple cloud providers, as a risk mitigation strategy, he encouraged them to steer most of their business to a single favorite (such as AWS), in order to obtain the best discounts and minimize the need for duplicate training of their own information-technology employees.In a world where Amazon is increasingly becoming a core part of the internet's infrastructure, it makes sense for them to push for centralization on their own servers but such effort could lead to further problems.

Amazon pledged more fragmentation and decentralization, in order to keep future failures from spreading too fast. "As S3 has scaled, the team has done considerable work to refactor parts of the service into smaller cells to reduce blast radius and improve recovery," the company wrote in its explanation of this week's failure. "The S3 team had planned further partitioning of the index subsystem later this year. We are reprioritizing that work to begin immediately."

The challenges presented in these recent outages are nothing new to the internet, and many of the smarter companies have taken lessons from history and built their offering in a way that ensures reliability and stability. For example, while many companies were flailing because of this week's S3 failure, Netflix, one of the poster boys for Amazon services, was fine. In 2012, the company suffered from a major outage and learned its lesson. It built a set of tools to ensure that content keeps streaming even if the underlying data centers go dark and created a bunch of programs called "the Simian Army" to disrupt its own services.

Having successfully proven them to work, the company has open-sourced that software so anyone can use and improve it. Even companies whose websites didn't fail on Wednesday would be wise to take advantage of it and similar ideas if they hope to avoid the next cloud catastrophe.

That section on your interests can go. Oh, and no shrinking the margins—that's cheating.

From spelling and grammatical errors to flowery language and absent keywords, there's certainly no shortage of resume mistakes you could make. But there is one surefire kiss of death for most job seekers: submitting a two- or, dare we say it, three-page resume.

"If you're fresh out of college, you may have a few internships under your belt, but by no means should you have a two-page resume," says Christopher Ward, founder at Ward Resumes.

Even many mid- and executive-level job hunters would benefit by sticking to a one-page resume, says professional resume writer Laurie J. James, since hiring managers have short attention spans. "When your resume is competing with dozens or hundreds of applications, hiring managers don't have time to look at a two-page resume," she says.

Don't think you can shorten your resume to one 8.5-by-11-inch document? Here's how to squeeze everything onto one page so you'll outshine the competition.

1. Don't Let Yourself Take Style Shortcuts

You might be tempted to trim margins, shorten line spacing, or shrink the font, but those not-so-obvious shortcuts stand out to recruiters and could get your resume tossed in the trash.

"You need to preserve the readability of the document," says Dana Leavy-Detrick, owner of Brooklyn Resume Studio. "You don't want to overwhelm the hiring manager with too much text," she says.

What font is the best for resumes? James recommends using Cambria, with up to 14-point font for section headers and no smaller than 10-point for content.

2. Write Concisely And Use Acronyms

To tighten up the language on your resume—and save space—avoid using personal pronouns (I, me, or we) and articles (a, an, or the), James advises.

Also, use industry-standard abbreviations or acronyms where appropriate; for example, in many industries it's universally known that "R&D" stands for research and development.

3. Cut Obsolete Content

If you have an objective on your resume—a me-centric statement where you describe what type of job it is you're looking for—scratch it. "Employers are focused on what their needs are," says James, "not yours."

Also, erase high school experience from your resume. The same goes for writing "references available upon request"—"that's a given," says Mir Garvy, owner and lead resume writer at Job Market Solutions.

As for having a section on interests, "generally speaking, that information is not what's going to get you hired," says James. There are exceptions, such as when your hobby directly relates to the job. "If you're applying for a position at The PGA and you're a lifelong golf player, then I would include it" on your resume, says James.

4. Consolidate Your Contact Information

Your address should not be eating up multiple lines on your resume. "You only need what city you live in, not your full address," says Ward.

Also, instead of separating your phone number, email address, and social media accounts by line, use vertical bars to divide the information and include everything on one line.

5. Erase Soft Skills

"Don't list subjective skills, like leadership, on your resume," Garvy says. Instead, focus on highlighting hard skills that make you more marketable, such as proficiency in Excel or a second language.

Mirroring the language used in the job posting will also help your resume get past applicant-tracking systems, which is the software used by employers to scan resumes for keywords. "So, if the job posting lists certain skills, include them on your resume," says Leavy-Detrick.

6. Eliminate Unnecessary Section Headers

The summary—a three- to four-sentence pitch where you highlight what makes you uniquely qualified for the job—should appear at the top of your resume, but you don't need to label it "summary." "That's just a waste of space," says Ward.

Also, instead of creating separate sections for professional and volunteer experience, combine them under one "experience" section. "Relevant volunteer experience is not something that you should necessarily cut when trimming your resume," says Ward.

If you're entry-level, volunteer work can help boost your resume. If you're more experienced, that volunteer work, like a hobby, could give you an edge over a similarly qualified candidate, if it's highly relevant.

A version of this article originally appeared on Monster. It is adapted and reprinted with permission.

Some people really do have ADHD. The rest of us just need to tweak our environments.

Did you click on this article just now to take a break from your work? Having trouble focusing today? Don't blame yourself. Blame the modern office, which in many cases makes us all feel like we're suffering from some kind of attention-deficit disorder.

Most of us aren't, though. Instead, the things that distract us the most aren't biochemical or psychological—they're environmental. And that means many (if not all) of us can change them ourselves, without the help of a pill. Here's how.

Blame Your Office First

Between push notifications, Slack alerts, calendar invites, and never-ending email threads, the digital environment is ceaselessly begging for more of our time.

The analog one isn't much better. Many people also work in crowded offices and cubicle farms, punctuated by the sounds of neighboring phone calls, prairie-dogging colleagues, and brief yet disruptive side-chats.

It doesn't help things that by now a generation of college students has entered the workforce having churned out term papers and crammed for exams with the aid of medications they didn't technically need. Trying to kick a reliance on prescription stimulants—especially in a work environment like this—sounds pretty hopeless (which for many, it sadly is).

For most people, though, Adderall and its cousins—all variants of amphetamine—generally aren't great solutions to the challenges of focusing in the modern workplace. For one thing, these chemicals' very long-term impacts still aren't well understood. For another, while stimulants can improve your focus, they also increase your tendency to lock into particular solutions to problems. Many jobs call for creative problem-solving, where you need to consider a range of options, and this type of medication may actually get in your way if you don't have ADD or ADHD.

And most people, after all, don't. Instead, they'll respond just fine to non-chemical methods to improve their focus. Here are a few tweaks to make to your work environment before calling up your doctor and asking for a new prescription.

1. Treat Your Brain Like Part Of Your Body

First, remember that the primary function of the brain is to control the body. Your brain is not a computer inside a robot designed to serve it. Brains evolved to help bodies navigate the world successfully. If you spend the day sitting down, it's eventually going to be hard to stay focused on the task at hand.

So use your body more during the workday. Get a standing desk if you can, or find somewhere you can pace back and forth while you're thinking or talking on the phone.

Take walks during the day or consider a lunchtime workout. Basically, just add more exercise and movement into your day in general. And consider taking up a hobby like painting or playing an instrument rather than sitting in front of the TV or fiddling on your laptop in the evening. All of this keeps that connection between brain and body functioning effectively.

Related:How And When To Exercise To Boost Your Productivity

2. Cut Yourself Off

If you're a slave to your smartphone and check it several times an hour, shut it off or move it out of easy reach when you're trying to accomplish something significant. I know, easier said than done. But because of that aforementioned brain-body connection, people are extremely sensitive to the objects in their immediate environments. Changing the environment changes what your brain believes is possible. Remove the biggest sources of distraction, and you'll find it easier to pay attention to the work that needs to get done.

3. Make Work More Social

Socializing may not sound like a great strategy for focusing on something that demands your unbroken attention—usually that means doing the reverse, and shutting people out. But the human brain is optimized to cooperate with other people (even if your current mood isn't). People still tend to get deeply engaged in conversations even when they're having trouble fixating on their computer screens for long stretches.

So if you find your attention drifting when you're working on a big project, don't just try to bite the bullet and isolate yourself even further. See if there are ways to get some other people involved, even if that just means seeking some quick feedback.

4. Turn Focusing Into A Team Effort

Finally, if your work environment is hectic, coordinate with your colleagues and manager to tame the worst of it—and again, try to involve others in the solution. Create a few signals that let your colleagues know when you're available to chat and when you need to be left alone. See if you can set aside some space in the office where individuals and small groups can gather when they need to get away from the hubbub.

Ultimately, staying focused is usually a combination of biology, environment, and habit. There isn't much you can do to change the way your brain is structured, but you can manage your behaviors and the circumstances in which you perform them. We simply aren't built to sit still and sustain our attention for long periods of time. So even if you're pretty good at that, get up and move around now and then. Your brain will thank you.

One VC has found that it's better when everything's out on the table rather than hiding beneath it.

There's no such thing as objective feedback. But rather than silently accepting that reality and trying to be as objective as possible, knowing that we'll fall short of the mark, it's often better to take the reverse approach. Why not start by acknowledging all the ways we aren't objective? This way the recipient at least understands where you're coming from and can question your views accordingly.

Because here's the thing: We're always biased. You're never passing objective judgment on another person's idea, product, or performance—it just isn't possible. Rather, your feedback is a highly subjective set of thoughts informed by a wide range of influences, from where you live to your upbringing, education, race, gender, you name it.

But the idea of giving helpful feedback doesn't need to seem so daunting because of that unavoidable fact. Here's how I've learned to give better feedback, not despite biases, but in full view of them.

Acknowledge Your Biases (Including Those You Don't Know)

Some of your biases will be really obvious to you—like how you may slightly favor a coworker who graduated from your alma mater. But not-so-obvious influences are sneakier. One way to tune into them is to bring a notepad to meetings and jot down anything that makes you flinch with anxiety. Whenever it's brought up, which topic makes you automatically feel resistance before the speaker has even finished?

Another method is to check your unfinished to-do list: Which items are you procrastinating on? Keep a running tally of the work-related interactions, ideas, and experiences you most resist, and patterns will start to emerge. Maybe you notice that you're more critical of that proposed marketing campaign because your team will have to manage the logistics. How might that fact influence your ability to listen and provide feedback to the person with the idea?

Once you know your obvious and not-so-obvious influences, your biases will become pretty clear. These biases are continually evolving based on daily experiences and the information we consume. Other biases, by their very nature, won't be apparent to you no matter what—that's what "unconscious biases" are. But while you work on those other "dim spots," keep in mind that there are "blind spots" in your mind that you're unlikely to discover at all. You need to acknowledge their existence, even if you can't give substance to them.

Declare Your Biases Before Giving Feedback

As a young founder, I had high hopes of convincing an investor that my idea would work. The investor had other ideas.

He explained that, according to his framework for making investments, any opportunity he considered needed to stand a good chance of creating a new market, not merely fitting into an existing one. He wasn't leaning across the table to make a deal with me because the idea I'd presented had no real hopes of seeding a new market. I was disappointed and wanted to interject with why his reasoning was wrong.

But that investor's rationale stuck with me more than the fact that he'd turned me down. Looking back, he hadn't launched into his feedback by explaining why my idea was bad. He started by openly declaring his biases—"this is what I look for and why I look for it"—before even addressing my pitch. I could disagree with his criteria for making investments if I wanted to, or dismiss it as biased based on the scope of his experiences (which of course it was!), but now I at least knew what his criteria were.

I've since learned to make recipients of my feedback aware of the factors that govern my opinions, too. That way, they have the context to interpret them.

This is my feedback for you, and the reason I feel this way is because I have had these experiences.

Here's what I'm thinking, and this is why I'm thinking it.

Whether or not the feedback recipient takes your biases into account is up to them. But regardless, there's usually something valuable to be learned when we're more candid about it.

Taking Feedback Better

On the other end, we have biases when we receive feedback, too. We may struggle to accept feedback because our experiences (biases) direct us to. We tend to chafe emotionally at opinions that don't square with our own frameworks, even though we may understand where they're coming from.

It doesn't help that we often give extra weight to feedback from people with authority—whether they're a boss, mentor, or potential investor. That's one bias we may need to unlearn in order to make better use of feedback from a wider range of sources. When we understand that all feedback, no matter where it comes from, is biased, it's easier to look at it more critically.

This doesn't mean devaluing feedback wholesale—far from it. Instead, it's the first step toward processing that information more effectively, knowing full well that subjective attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions play a role on both sides of the table. But at least then, everything's out on the table, not lurking underneath it.

Rohit Sharma is a venture partner focused on infrastructure technologies at True Ventures, a Silicon Valley–based venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology startups.

Reshma Shetty began to see her startup's diversity problems more urgently after an accidental crash course in "sabermetrics."

To be perfectly honest, I started thinking about diversity later than I should have. There was, of course, the kind of diversity that I couldn't help but think about from the outset, as a woman cofounder of a synthetic biology company. But I didn't think strategically about diversity and inclusion until we started growing rapidly after raising our Series B funding.

As we started to ramp up hiring, our already pretty bad proportion of women at the company (27%) started going down. When I saw that trajectory, I got really worried. I knew we needed to act, but I still wasn't sure this was the right time. We were still small at that point, with a team of about 40 and a lot of work to do to achieve our mission—was now really the best moment to focus on diversity? Would these issues distract us from our core mission? Maybe, but I realized it would really suck to wake up one day, having totally nailed that mission, only to realize we were just another tech company full of white dudes.

It was around this time that my cofounder (and husband) and I watched the 2011 movie Moneyball. And sitting there together as the credits rolled, something clicked.

A Movie-Inspired "Aha" Moment

Moneyball, to refresh your memory, tells the story of Billy Beane and the 2002 Oakland Athletics. Faced with a very limited budget, Beane had to figure out how to put together a winning baseball team. To do so, he relies on "sabermetrics"—basically, the statistical analysis of baseball—to identify and sign great players who are undervalued according to the typical criteria used by other teams. The A's go on to have a record-breaking 20-game winning streak during the 2002 season. In fact, the Red Sox use a similar approach to break the "Curse of the Bambino" and win the 2004 World Series.

Watching Moneyball suddenly made me see diversity issues differently: The real challenge, I thought, is to look for talent that's being systematically undervalued by the competition. As almost any study will tell you, women and underrepresented minorities hold fewer positions and make less moneyin our industry than other demographic groups.

Since I believe women and minority candidates are every bit as smart and talented as their counterparts, it follows that they're being systematically undervalued in the marketplace. In other words, if I took more of a Moneyball approach to diversity, it wouldn't be a drag on our growth—it would be crucial to it. If we could make Ginkgo a place where these folks want to be, it would give us a competitive edge, right when we needed that most.

How To Swing For The Fences

Right away, we sat down to sketch out some methods for turning around our diversity numbers.

For starters, we realized that many companies were facing the same problem: not recognizing a diversity problem before it's (almost) too late, then having to play catchup. We hadn't exactly prevented that from happening, but we knew we could stop it from continuing. So we convened a diversity roundtable and invited the whole team—not just HR and execs.

Simply talking about our diversity problem and how we might tackle it pushed hiring managers to take a closer look at candidates from underrepresented groups and come up with ways to approach them more effectively. Our hiring managers then asked the recruiters they worked with to look out for those candidates explicitly. We even asked the team to recommend their favorite female candidates (even if they weren't on the job market) so we could target them for recruitment.

We've also found that when it comes to work culture, small gestures can go a long way in helping minority employees know they're more than just part of a quota. At Ginkgo, we changed some of our happy hours to breakfast meetings so parents working shorter days don't miss out. And we started a Slack channel where the awesome women at the company can share ideas and support.

To be fair, watching Moneyball may have helped me think about diversity differently, but it didn't magically solve those problems. Indeed, the analogy quickly comes to an end when we discuss salary. Fair and equal pay is vital to attracting and retaining top but overlooked talent. And make no mistake: Our approach isn't about fielding a team for less money or paying anybody less—it's about hiring great people who are being unfairly passed over by other companies. Recruiting and retaining great talent is one of the key challenges that any startup faces.

So while we still have a long way to go, I'm proud to say that 2016 was the year we reversed the downward trend in our team gender ratio. We entered 2017 with 37.5% women, compared to 23% just 12 months before. Our ratio of women in technical (35.8%) and leadership positions (34.5%) is now close to our overall percentage. And taking a queue from Moneyball, we'll continue to track these figures as rigorously as possible so we know where we stand, and whether we're still moving in the right direction.

We're going to keep talking about diversity and working to make our networks, job ads, hiring process, and culture more inclusive for everyone. And we challenge other companies in the space to help raise the bar.

Reshma Shetty is a cofounder of Ginkgo Bioworks, an organism design company expanding the role of biology in our world. Shetty holds a PhD in biological engineering from MIT and has been active in the synthetic biology field for 15 years.

Know what else nags at you when you're feeling unsure? Here's how to use it as a counterweight to your worst anxieties.

Silence your inner critic.

It's advice you've heard time and time again. In moments of doubt, you should turn down the volume on those self-deprecating thoughts, gather your courage, and take the leap anyway.

Most of the time, I think that's pretty sound advice. But every now and then I run into a problem: What if that little voice inside my head actually makes a pretty solid point? And even further, how do I know if what I'm hearing is my internal critic or my conscience?

Sure, that bully in your own brain often likes to tell you that you shouldn't do something simply because you can't. But you know what else often speaks to you in moments of uncertainty? Your gut. The two send totally different messages, but can still be easily confused.

Deciding which one is speaking to you (and, more importantly, when to listen!) can be tough. And, while I'm far from perfect at this, I have managed to identify a few telltale signs that help me when I'm figuring out how to move forward.

Keep your eyes peeled for these indicators, and you'll be able to identify those moments when you should actually heed the advice of your inner critic—rather than tuning it out altogether.

When There's Valid Reasoning

Your internal critic can be a little irrational. She tells you that you shouldn't put yourself out there for a new opportunity because you're simply incapable. You're nothing but a useless, fumbling, talentless fraud who's only managed to trick everybody into thinking you're skilled and accomplished.

Typically, those brutal thoughts aren't actually grounded in reality—but that doesn't stop us from believing them anyway.

But, what if your thoughts are a little more logical than that? Your inner critic isn't telling you to ignore that opportunity because you're incompetent—but because you don't have enough time to tackle it, it's not a project that you're truly passionate about, or it's not something that pushes you toward your larger goals.

When trying to decide whether or not you should heed that voice, take a moment to analyze the why. Why do you feel this way about this new challenge?

If the only reason you can think of relates to your fears of not being good enough, then you should flip a middle finger to those nasty thoughts and charge ahead. But, if there's really some legitimate reasoning behind your feelings of doubt? You're probably better to take some time to weigh your options before jumping right in.

When Others Agree

We can all be our own worst faultfinders—we're unnecessarily hard on ourselves. And, that can make it difficult to discern what is actually a real concern, and what we're blowing way out of proportion in our fragile state.

Fortunately, the people around us can help to get a better, clearer view of what things look like from the outside.

Talk to a close friend or colleague about the way you're feeling about this challenge or opportunity that's in front of you. If you're experiencing a severe case of imposter syndrome, that person will likely be quick to shoot down your negative thoughts and boost your confidence back up again.

But if your concerns and fears truly have some merit? Chances are, your confidante will back you up and remind you that, yes, your schedule really is too packed to add additional commitments and you should consider giving this a pass.

It's not often that the people around you cheerily confirm the nastiest thoughts in your head (after all, when's the last time your work best friend talked you down in your moment of panic by saying, "Yep, you're right! You really do suck at everything"?).

So, if you have gotten some outside reinforcement on the way you're feeling, that probably means there's some legitimacy to your concerns—and this deserves a little more careful thought.

You might think that your conscience and your internal critic are totally different. But, unfortunately, they can often be easily confused.

As much as you don't want to hold yourself back from new opportunities just because of your fear of the unknown, you also don't want to find yourself stuck in a situation that you should've said no to—but, instead of doing so, you brushed off those red flags your brain was feverishly waving as nothing more than a little bit of self-doubt.

Figuring out whether or not to listen to that little voice in your head can be challenging at times. However, if you're willing to press pause and consider these two signs before moving forward, you're that much more likely to make the decision that's best for you.

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

A growing number of companies think they can use VR experiences to lure gamers and gym-phobes off their butts.

Imagine driving a tank over snowy terrain, soaring on Pegasus's wings over idyllic apple orchards, or lassoing bandits on horseback—all just by pedaling a little harder on a bike that's bolted to the floor.

"You really have to experience it to understand it," concedes Spencer Honeyman, director of business development at VirZOOM, the maker of a virtual reality (VR) exercise bike and an accompanying athletic video game library. The bike itself weighs less than 40 pounds and began retailing last June for $399 at Amazon and Gamestop. It's compatible with Playstation VR, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive headsets, and comes complete with fantastical games that require eager calves and a suspension of disbelief.

"We're asking [consumers] to make a leap," Eric Janszen, VirZOOM's CEO and cofounder, explains of the company's conceptualized workouts. But once you're on the VirZOOM bike, he promises, it feels natural.

So I saddled up, strapped on a wireless HTC Vive VR headset, adjusted my headphones, and suddenly found myself astride a white, winged stallion. Honeyman was right—you really did need to see for yourself. I could never have imagined this would be a pleasant way to work out. But here I was, pumping away without even realizing I was moving my legs. My thoughts were exclusively about preventing my sweet Pegasus from plummeting to his death.

If VR fitness can do anything, it can make you stop counting down the minutes of a workout. Of course, fitness gaming is nothing new: Nintendo Wii has been on the market for over a decade, but this immersive experience squashes just about every imaginable distraction. A bike, also, is perfectly suited for activity requiring fast movement in a controlled environment. You're safely stationary, so there's no jerking motion that might provoke nausea. I doubt a treadmill or rowing machine would offer the same experience.

Not that coming to such a conclusion was simple for VirZOOM. The Cambridge, Massachusetts–based company said it went through various equipment iterations before settling on the stationary bike. It needed to be comfortable, efficient, and not vomit-inducing. Plus, cycling is fuss-free and, for most Americans with healthy childhood memories, not terribly intimidating. That was imperative for Janszen, who liked the idea of a high-tech exercise solution being as easy as riding a bike.

But plenty of bike owners, as Janszen well knows, never take them for a spin. Ditto for people who sign up for gym memberships and never go, or buy treadmills only to banish them to the garage. If VirZOOM and a growing number of competitors are to succeed in reinventing fitness, they'll need to get the magic of VR to make exercising feel a lot more fun than it is.

Can Workouts Feel Less Like Work?

According to Janszen, VirZOOM is "not just a more fun way to use an exercise bike—but actually a sport. It's a way to compete with yourself and to compete with other people."

The company partnered with Fitbit so users can record their every calorie burned and minute clocked—not just to keep track of their own data but to compare those stats with others'. Whether it's that competitive spirit or the VR experience itself, something seems to be working. According to VirZOOM's research, the average time spent on a bike is 26 minutes per session, with users returning for a new session every 23 hours (whereas you get to the gym, what, three times a week?).

VirZOOM isn't alone in using VR to incentivize exercise. In April, German startup HYVE introduced ICAROS a flying experience simulator, which retails for $8,400. The device—which looks more like a medieval torture apparatus than fitness equipment—targets shoulders, abs, upper chest, and overall body control.

"The experience is based on a physical feeling of balance and unusual motion, since you have to shift your body weight to either lean downward, upward, left, or right," HYVE's CEO Michael Schmidt explains via email. With these movements, you steer your flight in one of two games, either soaring through mountains and canyons or diving in a subaquatic abyss teeming with sea creatures.

"Your head movement is free, so while flying, diving, or floating, you can look in any direction [that's] physically possible," says Schmidt. "This combination, and the constant body balance, is really putting you into a 'flight mode.'"

The Fitness Sector's Sprint Into VR

Michael De Medeiros is the editor of VR Fitness Insider, an eight-month–old site that chronicles that latest in the ever-growing field. He sees all these as just the start of what's to come. Worldwide revenues for the combined augmented reality (AR) and VR market is slated to climb from $5.2 billion in 2016 to over $162 billion in 2020, according to the International Data Corporation. For the fitness sector, that likely means more equipment, more games, and more widespread adoption by the public.

"As technology evolves, the world of VR and fitness will grow exponentially," Medeiros believes, adding we're roughly two years away from VR fitness being a 360-degree, full-body experience.

Vive Studios, the virtual reality content development and publishing initiative from HTC Vive, is already bulking up its athletic game offerings. The brand's most popular to date include Knockout League, a boxing game in which you continuously squat to dodge punches, and a tennis game where you sway left and right as you would on the court. Vive Studios releases around 30 games a year, and this year 20% are expected to be athletically driven.

Joel Breton, head of Vive Studios, envisions the company's catalog appealing to consumers who spend thousands of dollars on a treadmill or rowing machine, only to push it to a corner after a few weeks. "They get bored," he says. With an incoming rush of new games each quarter, Vive intends to keep them engaged—and fit.

It's no accident that VirZOOM's early adopters were gamers, but as PC prices dropped and VR has moved toward the mainstream, the company is going after casual fitness consumers on one hand (Janszen describes VirZOOM as appealing to "the person who buys a gym membership and doesn't use it") and casual gamers on the other.

"There is already is a huge number of people who like to work out and who are into fitness," Breton explains, "and so if we can show them the value of just having fun and maybe gamifying your workout, that's a fantastic crossover." According to Madeiros, the market data backs that up. If you look at gaming outside of VR, he says, there's enormous opportunity to build a rapid following in a growing market, but that potential has been held back so far by a rather stagnant user experience: "You navigate through these worlds and you live in them," he explains, "but ultimately you're still sitting on a couch" with a controller in your hands, staring at a screen.

VR, by comparison, is transportive. And when you're able to divorce yourself from mundane reality, it's easier to move without even realizing you are. "It feels natural, unlike pushing a button," Medeiros adds, and the competitive element means "you're not going to be looking at the clock—you'll be focused on the prize."

In a 2013 study titled "Mirrored Selves: The Influence of Self-Presence in a Virtual World on Health, Appearance, and Well-Being," University of Missouri researcher Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz explored how avatars affect people's perceptions of their fitness abilities.

"By becoming a different person online—or maybe even a better version of yourself through an avatar application," she explains, "you can then explore a healthier version of yourself" in the real world. Behm-Morawitz found that if you put someone in a virtual environment on a treadmill, they'll likely set aside time to actually exercise within the next 24 hours. Similarly, leaping high into the air while playing Second Life tends to get players to believe they might be able to do the same in reality.

Behm-Morawitz's test subjects emerged wanting to incorporate their virtual behavior into real-life actions. The low-risk scenario of role-playing in an idealized environment gave them the confidence to test out such activities in more "high-risk situations"—like real life. It's unclear whether this kind of role-playing has long-term effects, but it nevertheless motivates them to move, at least temporarily.

The Future Of Fitness—And What's Holding It Back

There are some issues, however, that plague the budding industry. One involves perceptions. The average consumer is still put off by what looks like a bulky, heavy VR headset and earphones. HTC Vive's wireless adaptors are not yet widely available but are expected to hit the market this year. With wireless headsets, weight becomes less of a concern, and a signal of industry's commitment to making the experience lighter and more comfortable.

"The tech that's out there right now is great," says Medeiros, "but the tech that will be out there in two to three years is going to make what's out there today look like wearing a heavy sack of potatoes on your head."

Then there's the issue of whether consumers will want to share sweat-drenched headsets at communal places like the gym. It's partially why VirZOOM targeted the home market, although, says Honeyman, early testers haven't seemed to mind. "People are so immersed in this experience, and they have the expectation that they're gonna sweaty," he says.

And lastly, some fitness enthusiasts complain that the current VR fitness market caters purely to cardio, ignoring weight-lifting or more resistance training. Medeiros acknowledges that "you're not gonna get bigger arms through ICAROS," which is meant as professional device, with targeted clients like gyms, physical therapists, and arcades.

Preston Lewis, cofounder of Black Box, which bills itself as the world's first virtual reality gym, is less interested in selling individual pieces of exercise equipment than he is in creating a standalone experience. He's now building an entire boutique gym dedicated to VR resistance-training in Boise, Idaho.

Black Box's patent-pending resistance system can scale weights up and down elastically. It uses an AI algorithm to track every repetition and progressively increase the intensity. Each equipment system, accompanied by the HTC Vive wireless headset, comes with handles that translate to something in virtual reality, like shooting a gun. "We're creating a new category of sports," says Lewis.

Black Box VR is in beta mode through April, but Lewis has high hopes it will resonate with fitness fans looking for a fresh workout alternative. "I couldn't imagine [a resistance training enthusiast] wouldn't want to do this," says Lewis, who finds it especially useful for the challenging monotony of reps. But the effect is much the same as the makers of other VR fitness systems claim: "Once you're in there, you forget that you're working out."

Gym franchises aren't likely to convert all their equipment to VR, but many may incorporate VR elements in the coming years. VirZOOM recently announced a partnership with LifeFitness, which makes commercial exercise equipment, to pilot a VR solution that can be used with its machines. The hope is to draw in people who might have otherwise taken a SoulCycle class. VirZOOM says it's been contacted by dozens of gyms in recent weeks that are interested in its equipment. "VR is becoming more mass market," Honeyman says.

Indeed, the VR customer is evolving; it's no longer hardcore PC users and tech geeks. Already, a third of VirZOOM's customers identify as health customers first, saying they buy VR headsets solely to complement their VirZOOM bikes.

In the meantime, VirZOOM is doing all it can to introduce consumers to what it believes is the future of fitness through product demos in arcades and elsewhere. It's even producing 28 tournaments around the country in 2017, week-long competitions where participants vie for Amazon gift cards. The goal is to acquaint consumers with a product they need to experience in order to get behind.

"It's truly about getting people on [the bikes]," explains Honeyman. "That's when you get it."

Psychiatrists shouldn't comment on the mentality of people based only on what they say. But we're well aware of the tendency to avoid truth.

The phrase "alternative facts" has recently made the news in a political context, but psychiatrists like me are already intimately acquainted with the concept—indeed, we hear various forms of alternate reality expressed almost every day.

All of us need to parse perceived from actual reality every day, in nearly every aspect of our lives. So how can we sort out claims and beliefs that strike most people as odd, unfounded, fantastical, or just plain delusional?

Untruths Aren't Always Lies

First, we need to make a distinction often emphasized by ethicists and philosophers: that between a lie and a falsehood. Thus, someone who deliberately misrepresents what he or she knows to be true is lying—typically, to secure some personal advantage. In contrast, someone who voices a mistaken claim without any intent to deceive is not lying. That person may simply be unaware of the facts, or may refuse to believe the best available evidence. Rather than lying, he's stating a falsehood.

Some people who voice falsehoods appear incapable of distinguishing real from unreal, or truth from fiction, yet are sincerely convinced their worldview is absolutely correct. And this is our entrée into the psychiatric literature.

In clinical psychiatry, we see patients with a broad spectrum of ideas that many people would find eccentric, exaggerated, or blatantly at odds with reality. The clinician's job is, first, to listen empathically and try to understand these beliefs from the patient's point of view, carefully taking into account the person's cultural, ethnic, and religious background.

Sometimes, clinicians can be wildly mistaken in their first impressions. A colleague of mine once described a severely agitated patient who was hospitalized because he insisted he was being stalked and harassed by the FBI. A few days into his hospitalization, FBI agents showed up on the unit to arrest the patient. As the old joke goes, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you!

When What You Believe Is Wrong

We can think of distortions of reality as falling along a continuum, ranging from mild to severe, based on how rigidly the belief is held and how impervious it is to factual information. On the milder end, we have what psychiatrists call overvalued ideas. These are very strongly held convictions that are at odds with what most people in the person's culture believe, but which are not bizarre, incomprehensible, or patently impossible. A passionately held belief that vaccinations cause autism might qualify as an overvalued idea: It's not scientifically correct, but it's not utterly beyond the realm of possibility.

On the severe end of the continuum are delusions. These are strongly held, completely inflexible beliefs that are not altered at all by factual information, and which are clearly false or impossible. Importantly, delusions are not explained by the person's culture, religious beliefs, or ethnicity. A patient who inflexibly believes that Vladimir Putin has personally implanted an electrode in his brain in order to control his thoughts would qualify as delusional. When the patient expresses this belief, he or she is not lying or trying to deceive the listener. It is a sincerely held belief, but still a falsehood.

Falsehoods of various kinds can be voiced by people with various neuropsychiatric disorders, but also by those who are perfectly "normal." Within the range of normal falsehood are so-called false memories, which many of us experience quite often. For example, you are absolutely certain you sent that check to the power company, but in fact, you never did.

As social scientist Julia Shaw observes, false memories "have the same properties as any other memories, and are indistinguishable from memories of events that actually happened." So when you insist to your spouse, "Of course I paid that electric bill!" you're not lying—you are merely deceived by your own brain.

A much more serious type of false memory involves a process called confabulation: the spontaneous production of false memories, often of a very detailed nature. Some confabulated memories are mundane; others, quite bizarre. For example, the person may insist—and sincerely believe—that he had eggs Benedict at the Ritz for breakfast, even though this clearly wasn't the case. Or, the person may insist she was abducted by terrorists and present a fairly elaborate account of the (fictional) ordeal. Confabulation is usually seen in the context of severe brain damage, such as may follow a stroke or the rupture of a blood vessel in the brain.

Lying As A Default

Finally, there is falsification that many people would call pathological lying, and which goes by the extravagant scientific name of pseudologia fantastica (PF). Writing in the Psychiatric Annals, Drs. Rama Rao Gogeneni and Thomas Newmark list the following features of PF:

• A marked tendency to lie, often as a defensive attempt to avoid consequences. The person may experience a "high" from this imaginative story-telling.
• The lies are quite dazzling or fantastical, though they may contain truthful elements. Often, the lies may capture considerable public attention.
• The lies tend to present the person in a positive light, and may be an expression of an underlying character trait, such as pathological narcissism. However, the lies in PF usually go beyond the more "believable" stories of persons with narcissistic traits.

Although the precise cause or causes of PF are not known, some data suggest abnormalities in the white matter of the brain—bundles of nerve fibers surrounded by an insulating sheath called myelin. On the other hand, the psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch argued that PF stems from psychological factors, such as the need to enhance one's self-esteem, secure the admiration of others, or to portray oneself as either a hero or a victim.

Who Cares About Facts Anyway?

Of course, all of this presumes something like a consensus on what constitutes "reality" and "facts" and that most people have an interest in establishing the truth. But this presumption is looking increasingly doubtful, in the midst of what has come to be known as the "post-truth era." Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, described ours as a period in which "up is down and down is up and everything is in question and nothing is real."

Even more worrisome, the general public seems to have an appetite for falsehood. As writer Adam Kirsch recently argued, "more and more, people seem to want to be lied to." The lie, Kirsch argues, is seductive: "It allows the liar and his audience to cooperate in changing the nature of reality itself, in a way that can appear almost magical."

And when this magical transformation of reality occurs, whether in a political or scientific context, it becomes very difficult to reverse. As the writer Jonathan Swift put it, "Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it."

Psychiatrists are not in a position to comment on the mental health of public figures they have not personally evaluated or on the nature of falsehoods sometimes voiced by our political leaders. Indeed, the "Goldwater Rule" prohibits us from doing so. Nevertheless, psychiatrists are keenly aware of the all-too-human need to avoid or distort unpleasant truths. Many would likely nod in agreement with an observation often attributed to the psychoanalyst Carl Jung: "People cannot stand too much reality."

Ronald W. Pies, the editor-in-chief emeritus of "Psychiatric Times," is professor of Psychiatry, lecturer on Bioethics & Humanities at SUNY Upstate Medical University; and clinical professor of Psychiatry, Tufts University School of Medicine. This story was originally published on The Conversation.

The move is more likely a political placeholder as the Trump administration calculates risks and benefits of further restricting the program.

The move by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on Friday to suspend "premium" processing of H-1B visas puts the issue of high-tech worker immigration reform back in sharp focus. Big tech companies routinely pay the $1,225 fee to get a decision on an applicant's work visa in weeks instead of months. This adds to the thousands in attorneys' fees that sponsor companies pay to navigate the tricky and unforgiving legal waters of the H-1B application process.

The suspension, which takes effect on April 3, appears to be President Trump's attempt to begin fulfilling his campaign promise to curb H-1B abuse, wherein companies recruit foreign (mostly Indian) skilled workers for lower salaries than they'd have to pay American workers. And it comes just after Senator Dick Durban released a statement calling on the White House to follow through on its H-1B reform campaign promises. But the USCIS's move on Friday seems more like a small administrative tweak than the precursor to real reform.

USCIS says that it's suspending premium processing for administrative reasons, as a way of speeding up H-1B applications generally.

"This on its own makes no sense; the (premium processing) program has been working well, and it's been effective for the better part of a decade," says immigration attorney David Leopold, who routinely represents U.S. companies seeking visas for foreign IT workers. "There's simply no rational reason for it, except for political reasons." Leopold is former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

"It's only because of the agency's inefficiency that we need this to begin with," Leopold says. "Companies need this, they need premium processing to get their business done."

Speeding up the application process is important, but it's just a small part of the problem. The main issue is that companies, foreign and domestic, are gaming the system as a way to hire cheap labor at the expense of U.S. workers.

Several bills have already been introduced in the new Congress to reform the H-1B system, two of them from Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) both of whom represent Silicon Valley districts.

But there may be no simple legislative fix to H-1B abuse—though increasing funds for enforcement (bigger government) would likely help.

The government issues 85,000 H-1B visas each year, with 20,000 of them reserved for foreign grad students studying in the U.S. The number of applications always dwarfs the supply of visas, so the government uses a lottery system to distribute them.

But the lion's share of the H-1B visas get swallowed up by Indian labor outsourcing firms like Tata Consulting Services and Infosys. These companies hire IT and engineering talent in India and send them to the U.S. to work in the U.S., H-1B visas in hand.

Lawmakers are concerned that U.S. companies shift work to the outsourcing firm contractors as a way to save money, even as (more expensive) U.S. workers are available. Some lawmakers, like Issa, believe that imposing a minimum yearly salary requirement (in Issa's bill, $100,000) for the foreign workers might remove the incentive for the skilled labor arbitrage game that some U.S. companies have played using the Indian outsourcing companies.

That might do some good in places like New York and San Francisco, one expert tells me, but might do more harm in other places.

"If you live in San Francisco or New York, $100,000 might be barely enough to get by," said work visa expert Theo Negri. "But what if you're in Nebraska where you can live well on $50,000? It doesn't seem fair to require that the company to pay twice that much." Negri runs the Jobsintech.io website, where employers can post H-1B jobs in the U.S.

Negri says the key is to make sure that employers, including the outsourcing companies, pay the "prevailing wage" for a given position, or more. In fact, the USCIS requires it. Almost all of the H-1B jobs listed on Jobsintech.io list salaries that are at or above the prevailing wage. The H-1B jobs posted by U.S. companies like Apple and Facebook are all well above the prevailing wage.

The same can also be said of lower-paid job listings by Indian outsourcing companies, which illustrates how the program has been exploited. Those outsourcers use a different way to post jobs with lower salaries, Negri says. Since the "prevailing wage" is based on the job title, the outsourcing companies often make up their own titles for the positions. So a highly skilled software development position might instead be advertised as a "technology lead" role. Using such a generic job title, Negri says, the outsourcers can set the salary at whatever they want.

Still, those lower-wage jobs are often snatched up, because for the predominantly Indian workers who take the positions, the salaries are still far more than what they'd make at a similar job in their home country, Negri said. Sounds like a win-win for employers and workers, except for those Americans with similar levels of experience who might be beaten out of a job by foreign workers who will work for less. Or those Americans could be booted out of the jobs they currently have. At least 400 IT workers at Southern California Edison were laid off last year and replaced by workers from India, some of whom they had reportedly trained for their new roles.

The Indian outsourcing companies consider H-1B reform a material threat to their businesses. And when Indian leaders met with Trump last week, they expressed their concerns about changes proposed to the program. In its most recent 10-Q filing, Infosys stated: "Anti-outsourcing legislation in certain countries in which we operate, including the United States and the United Kingdom, may restrict companies in those countries from outsourcing work to us, or may limit our ability to send our employees to certain client sites."

Infosys declined to comment for this story.

American companies like Apple and Microsoft hire a certain amount of H-1B visa workers every year, but not nearly as many as the outsourcing firms. Those tech giants have a harder time seeing into the future to know how many H-1B workers they might need during the coming year. So they sometimes bring foreign employees to the U.S. on a temporary work visa, Negri says, then gamble that the employee can get an H-1B visa when the lottery opens up again the following April.

In comparison, the outsourcing firms know they will need contractors during the year, so they file for thousands of H-1Bs when the application period opens April 1. Demand for the workers recruited by the outsourcing firms to work at U.S. companies is high and fairly predictable.

"You should not be able to get 80% of the total number of visas," Negri says. "In what world should a company that produces nothing—they're just consulting companies—be able to get that many visas? It's not like they are Google or Facebook—companies that actually make real products."

And yet, as the outsourcing companies have argued in court, they are not breaking the law by vacuuming up all the H-1B visas. Well, not the letter of the law, in any case. There's no law saying that U.S. companies must use U.S. natives as employees, and no law prescribing how many H-1B visas any one sponsor company can receive.

Negri believes the outsourcing companies go further than just flooding the system with applications. "People have been cheating the system for a long time," he told me.

The outsourcing companies, for instance, sometimes try to bring employees to the U.S. with the wrong kind of visa, like a J1 temporary visa, Negri says. The J1 is meant to bring researchers, professors, and exchange students to the U.S. to promote "cultural exchange." But the J1 can get a foreign person into the country for a year while the sponsor company works to get the employee a proper H-1B, which can be used for six years.

That's just one technique. Negri says there are many others. "Where there's a will, there's a way." Gaming the system is part of the outsourcing companies' business model, he claims. The potential cost of fines from getting caught is built into their business model as a risk factor. If the outsourcers beat the system more than they lose, they're happy.

David Leopold would not comment on the visa practices of the Indian "job shops" (they are not among his clients), but he would say that it's often the case that he can't get one of his client companies an H-1B visa for an employee simply because there are none left.

There may be too many ways to game the system to fix it all with a new federal law. And, Leopold points out, H1-B visa are already the most regulated of all the temporary visas.

"The Department of Labor has their requirements in it, the USCIS has their requirements in it," he says. "It's already company-specific, employee-specific, salary-specific, venue-specific . . . In many ways it's not a great visa; it's expensive and full of red tape."

"What we need is more enforcement," Negri says. U.S. agencies may need new funding and new powers to monitor H-1B visas on a case by case basis.

This isn't asking too much, Negri notes. When you remove the graduate students, we're only talking about 65,000 visas. Asking the Labor Department to monitor 65,000 people out of 300 million people living in the U.S. isn't asking the impossible.

"Companies should be made to play it more straight in getting visas," Negri says. "and if you get caught cheating there should be real consequences."

The newest Zelda and Mario machine is an innovative blank slate that's loaded with promise but short on online features.

I've been agonizing over what to say about my time with the Nintendo Switch since the first reviews went up.

On one hand, the hardware is a marvel of modern mobile architecture, running console-grade games for hours on a battery charge. Press the power button, and the 6.2-inch display lights up almost as quickly as a smartphone would, ready to jump right back to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or whatever else you'd been playing with no loading screens. Being able to drop the Switch into a TV dock for big-screen play is just icing.

On the other hand, Nintendo's vision for ambitious online services is a no-show. Over the past couple of years, the company has spoken of loyalty programs, deep ties between its console and smartphone games, and a cloud back-end for syncing saved games and other data. None of those things exist in the product that Nintendo is launching right now.

The result is the first game console whose hardware feels like a credible counterattack on smartphone gaming, but whose services feel anchored to the past. Also, the Switch has one potentially disastrous defect.

In With A Snap

The Nintendo Switch draws its name from the modular nature of the system, which includes a 6.2-inch tablet (with a kickstand on the back), a pair of attachable "Joy-Con" controllers, a grip accessory for holding the Joy-Cons together like a regular game controller, and an HDMI dock that sends audio and video from the tablet to a TV.

Within this system, a few modes of play emerge:

• By yourself on the tablet, with controllers attached or held separately in each hand.
• By yourself on the TV, with controllers held separately or connected to the grip accessory.
• With a friend on the tablet or TV, separating the two Joy-Cons into mini-controllers for each player.

The modular approach could easily come off as complex, but Nintendo handles it with elegance. A small release button on each Joy-Con allows them to slide free from the tablet or controller grip, and a controller menu appears on-screen any time the connections change. Transitioning between portable and TV modes is as simple as plopping the tablet into the dock and yanking it back out again: The video pops up on either screen a second or two later.

Beyond Nintendo's obvious 2-in-1 sales pitch, the Switch solves some other genuine problems. Offering two detachable controllers in one portable package lowers the barriers to competing with a nearby friend, which has become a sadly lost art in modern gaming. And by combining home and portable hardware into one unit, Nintendo no longer has to fracture its game development efforts between radically different platforms. (Nintendo has said it will keep releasing new games for its existing 3DS portable until at least next year, but Switch seems likely to take over in the long run.)

I must mention, however, a major problem with my Switch review unit: While docked, the Switch would intermittently lose its connection to the left Joy-Con, often for several seconds at a time. This occurred frequently enough to make games unplayable on the television. Numerous other reviewers have experienced the same problem. A Nintendo support page points to numerous potential causes, the most likely culprit being wireless interference, yet this has not been an issue for any of the numerous other consoles in my entertainment center (or the right Joy-Con, for that matter). Nintendo says it's looking into the problem further.

Little Guy, Big World

As with any console launch, the first batch of games is not only designed to entertain, but to prove the system's potential. And Nintendo has a whopper in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Zelda puts you in an open world whose vastness reveals itself any time protagonist Link reaches the top of a tower or mountain. Spot a glowing shrine along a sun-drenched valley in the distance, and Link can almost certainly get there by foot, hang glider, or horseback. Infiltrate the belly of the giant mechanical elephant, and you might gape at how small Link seems within the beast's inner workings.

The game's scale might not be so impressive if it wasn't happening on a device the size of a small tablet, which runs quietly, doesn't get uncomfortably warm, and manages roughly a few hours of play time on a battery charge. The Switch, which uses an Nvidia Tegra X1 processor, is a testament to the ascent of ARM's chip architecture, which powers pretty much every phone and tablet on the market.

Nintendo's bet on ARM could prove wise in the long run, as the technology becomes increasingly powerful without losing its portability. That could help give Nintendo an edge in portable virtual reality headsets, which the company says it's exploring. Still, the approach does pose some short-term challenges. The list of upcoming Switch games reveals few big-budget releases from major publishers, and the launch lineup offers nothing to demonstrate how the Switch holds up against Microsoft's Xbox One and Sony's PlayStation 4, which use the same x86 architecture as PCs. Porting games from those consoles to the Switch may be a tough engineering challenge.

It helps, then, that Nintendo is pursuing a separate strategy of wooing independent developers, whose creations tend to be less demanding. Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment, for instance, is an excellent homage to 8-bit platform games, and Fast RMX is a futuristic racer that allows split-screen multiplayer with the Switch's two Joy-Con controllers. In lieu of broad support from mega-publishers, these games could help carry players over between Nintendo's own tentpole releases.

Head In The Sand

For most of my time with the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo's online system wasn't yet available. But even after Nintendo enabled it with a launch-day patch, not much has changed.

The eShop is now open for purchasing downloadable games, but only a handful are available, and the Virtual Console store for classic Nintendo games isn't online yet. The My Nintendo Rewards program, which offers discounts on game content in exchange for buying and playing other games, is not yet active on Switch either. And Nintendo has not said whether it will support cloud saves, which would be useful for syncing progress between multiple Switches in a home.

Meanwhile, the only link I've found to Nintendo's budding smartphone ecosystem is the ability to add fellow Super Mario Run players to my friends list. (Aside from that method, or adding other Switch owners who are nearby, the only way to build your friends list is by sharing randomly assigned 12-digit codes.) The StreetPass and Miiverse social features of Nintendo's 3DS console aren't making their way over to Switch either. And while other consoles have delved into the phenomenon of live game streams and YouTube videos, the Switch only supports capturing and sharing screenshots for now.

The problem isn't so much the individual missing elements, but the overall sense that Switch isn't really a connected device. Sure, you can download games and play with other people over the internet, but there's little broader connectivity to the world of phones, tablets, and PCs, let alone other Nintendo hardware. (It's sort of astounding, by the way, that the popular NES Classic Edition has no tie-ins to the Virtual Console on other Nintendo devices.)

Nintendo often draws comparisons to Apple for its integration of hardware and software, but even Apple realizes hardware and software are not enough anymore. Online services are now just as important, yet Nintendo seems to have missed the memo despite its repeatedclaims to the contrary.

Into The Future

The upside is that Nintendo can still develop those online services, at least in theory. While we're speculating, the company could also bank on improvements in ARM for future iterations of Switch, and start closing the performance gap with its console rivals. Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's former president and CEO who died in 2015, had even hinted at a suite of devices all running on the same platform, akin to Apple's iOS.

Those possibilities make it difficult to surmise whether the Nintendo Switch is a success. The device isn't merely unfinished in terms of game selection and features, as all new consoles tend to be. It's a blank slate upon which Nintendo is expected to build its future, and we still don't know what that's going to look like. Here's what I know for certain: The Switch is Nintendo's most interesting new device since the Wii, and its most important since the original NES arrived over 30 years ago.

Experts offer a road map for repairing the company's dysfunctional culture.

It's been over a week since the most recent Uber crisis, and the company has taken great pains to let the public know that it's willing to change. But it's the coming months that will really dictate whether or not it plans on truly fixing its internal problems.

Read More:This Is What Caused Uber's Broken Company Culture

Here's a quick rundown of what's been facing the company recently. First, former engineer Susan Fowler wrote a blog post detailing the sexual harassment she experienced during her time at Uber, claiming that it was disregarded by human resources. Then, the New York Times wrote an in-depth exposé about working at Uber, citing over 30 current and former employees who preferred to stay anonymous. It detailed allegations similar to Fowler's, along with other anecdotes about a permissive culture of debauchery and harassment. Following that, a tape was leaked to Bloomberg that showed a cringeworthy shouting match between CEO Travis Kalanick and an Uber driver over cutting prices. A few days later another New York Timespiece came out, this one detailing a technology it built—called Greyball—which was used to surreptitiously identify enforcement officials in cities where the Uber's services were prohibited.

As a result, the company has spent the last week on the defensive. Kalanick announced that the company would pursue an internal investigation of Fowler's allegations. Those leading the investigation, however, have ties to the company, including board member Arianna Huffington and former attorney general Eric Holder, who has advocated for Uber in the past. Once the tape of Kalanick's argument with the driver went public, he announced to employees that things would change. "It's clear this video is a reflection of me—and the criticism we've received is a stark reminder that I must fundamentally change as a leader and grow up," he wrote in a note.

Though Uber is trying to prove that it can change its ways following this string of events, the question remains: What does it actually plan to do, and what will it take to fix their broken culture?

What Can Be Done

In a recent New York Times article, columnist Farhad Manjoo looked at this recent Uber saga as potentially a moment for new leadership strategies to come forth and include more women and minorities in tech. He quotes VC Freada Kapor Klein, a well-known advocate for diversity and inclusion in Silicon Valley, on the best way for Uber to go forward:

Ms. Kapor Klein is looking for several steps. She wants Mr. Holder's report to detail for the public everything he's found at the company. She wants to see new policies for how Uber hires people, ones that put more weight on the diversity of its workforce. She wants the company to offer more formal and informal ways for employees to report problems to management, including allowing them to do so anonymously in order to avoid retribution. She also wants Uber to offer more training for employees, and better workplace surveys to get a sense of what's going wrong.

I emailed Kapor Klein to ask if she had anything else to add that would help fix the company's systemic cultural problems. She wrote back explaining that "every company needs a customized, comprehensive approach that fits their business, their culture, and their stage of growth. Uber is no exception."

VIDEO: HERE'S WHAT UBER NEEDS TO DO TO FIX THEIR BROKEN CULTURE

Kapor Klein said that she launched a diversity consulting nonprofit organization called Project Include with Ellen Pao, the chief diversity and inclusion officer at the Kapor Center for Social Impact. (Pao sued her former employer venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins for gender discrimination in a high-profile case in 2015.) Project Include aims to provide research-based solutions to the sort of culture and diversity problems that Uber faces. One of these solutions focuses on conflict resolution and systems for incident reporting—something Uber greatly needs. "Uber provides a pretty stark example about the harm traditional human resources departments can do when they're set up to protect upper management rather than the workers," Kapor Klein wrote in her email.

Related:The Future Of HR And Why Startups Shouldn't Reject It

Beyond that, the work starts at the leadership level. Kalanick's actions are going to be even more under a microscope as a result of these events. It's up to him and his team to be earnest and forthright on how to approach this problem. "Any team knows whether their boss is sincere, or just saying what needs to be said to get through the current crisis," wrote Kapor Klein.

Create Business Imperatives

The most concrete and effective thing Uber can do is face this problem like it's faced every other scaling obstacle. The company has grown to be worth at least $28 billion, according to Bloomberg, and that surely requires a business plan. Solving internal cultural problems requires that same sort of implementation and finesse. The best way to begin fixing these internal fissures is to first create a more diverse and inclusive environment. To many in the industry, dealing with issues like diversity and inclusion doesn't go much beyond a vague public statement saying that their company cares about the issue.

Companies' systemic lack of diversity, according to Professor Joan C. Williams of University of California, Hastings College of the Law, stems from two types of biases. Blatant bias is when someone is egregiously discriminated against, and the solution to eliminating it is to ensure those types of actions are prohibited. There's also subtle bias, Williams says, where there might not be over-the-top examples of harassment, but there's still a distinct lack of diversity and inclusion. When that happens, she says, it's probably because bias is an unconscious part of things like hiring, performance reviews, and promotions.

"The solution is to change your business systems," she says. If there's something hindering a company financially, she explains, a smart organization would perform "evidence-based analysis." This would require developing a metric for what needs to be improved and then holding themselves accountable to accomplish that metric.

It's more than just founding a women's initiative or bringing on a couple of speakers, says Williams: "Use analytics and big data to actually solve a business problem."

Williams's tool kit suggests these metrics to help figure out how bias plays out inside a company:

• Do your performance evaluations show consistently higher ratings for men than for women, people of color, or other relevant groups?
• Do women's ratings fall after they have children? Do employees' ratings fall after they take parental leave or adopt flexible work arrangements?
• Do the same performance ratings result in different promotion or compensation rates for different groups?

Organizations can measure how these metrics improve over time with internal surveys. Williams has created a program called Bias Interrupters to help businesses attempt to tackle this problem.

She's also begun to analyze data associated with it. Williams cites one new finding, which has yet to be published, where a big STEM company adopted a more thorough approach to bias training, similar to the prescriptions her program offers. The organization also began to evaluate how employees responded to this new system. According to Williams's data, both women and people of color felt "increases in belonging." They also saw an increased intent to stay among these demographics. Of course this is a small subset—one company adopting a formalized approach to attacking this problem—but it does show promising and quantified outcomes.

To add to that, Kapor Klein believes that technology can help advance this. "A whole new crop of tech startups are tackling this issue of mitigating bias at scale—whether it's resume review or interview questions or technical coding interviews. Tech tools can be used to fix tech culture," she wrote.

What Uber Must Do

If the taxi giant wants to successfully begin to reform the toxic culture so many people claim it has, Uber must craft a specific plan for what everyone—from the top down—needs to do to make the place more inclusive. And they need to check to see if it's working by using real data and analysis.

Uber also needs to be more transparent. This is the one area where the company has continuously refused to act. The only way for people to see what happens inside the company has been through blog posts like Fowler's or anonymous accounts. The best way for a business to figure out its shortcomings is to be ready for critique. "This means detailing the results of its internal investigation to the public, being clear on the initial steps it's taking to build a more inclusive culture, and being open and accountable to internal and external feedback," wrote Kapor Klein.

This is going to require a seismic shift in how the company views itself in relation to both its employees and people on the outside. While Uber has now pledged to release its diversity report, it only did so in light of recent news. Until now, the company did not understand the need for such measures.

I recently chatted with Uber's new chief HR officer, Liane Hornsey, before these allegations came to light. I asked her why the company hasn't released a diversity report. She said, "I haven't seen it move the numbers. I haven't seen anyone who's done it say it's made any difference for them. I reserve to right to really think about that over time. But it hasn't worked for anyone, so why would I?"

The company has now shifted its thinking on releasing diversity numbers. But it's that knee-jerk response of "Why would I?" that demands introspection, and absolutely needs to change in order for real progress to come.

Just 7% of the top 100 VC firms have partners who are women. Here's how these young, female investors are beating those odds.

I'm in public relations, an industry known to be dominated by women. We work with the companies backed by a number of venture capital firms, an industry known to be dominated by men. And not just by a little—by a lot. One thorough study last year found that just 7% of the partners at the leading 100 VC firms are women.

Years ago, I'd find myself stepping into one of those firms' offices or scanning the crowd at an investor conference and would feel a sharp pang: "Oh, damn. It's the opposite in this world." Happily, that feeling hits me less often these days. Change has been painfully slow, but it's happening as more investors back female founders, more tech insiders tout the profitability of companies with real gender diversity, and more women simply start their own funds.

Today, I'm meeting more women partners than ever, seeing more women appearing on firms' websites, and now just expect that if there's a panel of investors at an industry event, it will be at least 50/50 men and women. How'd some of these ladies manage to break into investing, despite its notorious reputation for being less than hospitable to women? I asked a handful to find out—here's what they told me.

Start With What You Know

Helen Zelman Boniske, founding partner of Lemnos Labs, surveyed the Silicon Valley landscape and realized she and her cofounder had unique transferrable experience. "Previously he had built lasers and missiles in the U.S. Air Force, and I worked in the front office of the Arizona Diamondbacks."

Those may sound like unlikely skill sets for VCs, but the two saw an opening for them. "As two mechanical engineering grads who didn't want to build an app and [had] nowhere to go to start a hardware company, it became our mission to back hardware startups we knew we could help," says Zelman Boniske. So they relocated to the Bay Area in 2010 and eventually raised a $20 million fund. Lemnos Labs opened four years later and has since invested in 38 companies and counting.

Partner With Somebody You Trust

Like Zelman Boniske, Arianna Simpson also joined up with a trusted copilot to launch a fund. She'd gotten to know Tikhon Bernstam, a Y Combinator alum turned fund manager by working on "a number of informal bitcoin-related projects together" over several years, Simpson explains. "He had an exceptional angel track record, and I was prominent in the bitcoin circuit. When he put the wheels in motion for a new fund, it was an obvious 'yes' to partner up."

She adds, "The trend of super angels launching funds is a great opportunity for young, hungry folks to get into venture." Simpson's new fund closed $52 million in 2016.

Combine Traditional And Non-Traditional Experience

"I connected with a former colleague and landed a summer internship" at Scale Venture Parnters, says Cack Wilhelm. Now a principal at the firm, she approached her "five weeks on the job as a 24/7 interview."

"And my weird angle to help stand out?" says Wilhelm. "I ran for Nike for two years"—as a professional athlete in track and cross-country—"and pre-answered any questions of, 'Is she competitive? Does she strive to win?'"

From there, Wilhelm went on to two other fields, all of which made for a unique background as a VC. "I collected finance experience as an investment banker," she says, "and collected operational experience as a sales rep at Oracle and Cloudera."

Take Leaps Inside Your Own Field

Jess Kwan, an associate with Archer Gray, has always stuck with what she loved. She worked in creative development and production in the film industry before joining her firm. It was a natural fit. "Archer Gray both produces films and invests in early-stage media technology startups, so this position allowed me to leverage my network and experience in one media space into being a strategically valuable investor in another."

Kwan adds, "I didn't go to business school, but working in film taught me to be comfortable with a mix of creative, 'big-picture' thinking and practical business decisions. That has served me well in VC."

Pick A Place You Want To Live, Then Do Some Local Networking

VC firms aren't all in the Bay Area. "I didn't know many people in L.A. at all," says Chang Xu, now an associate at Upfront, but she knew she wanted to live there without leaving the startup scene. Having cofounded one herself, she knew how important relationships were.

So, using her entrepreneurial experience to kick off conversations, Xu began to build a local network. "To get your foot in the door," she advises, "get a warm intro to a VC and have a good conversation over coffee about the industry you love, trends you see, your investment thesis, and a couple startups to check out." Those connections invariably lead to others.

Look For Gaps To Fill

Sarah Moret also wanted to set down roots in Los Angeles. With almost a year of investment experience under her belt after a stint at Formation8, one of the hottest VC firms in Silicon Valley, she, too, started to network in L.A. The city is "quickly growing into a tech epicenter," Moret says, and it wasn't long before she learned about CrossCut, where she's now an investment associate.

At first, "The partners weren't looking to hire anyone, but I had a good mix of skills that complemented the partnership," and she eventually became the firm's first female investor.

Look To Other Women Leaders

Women in venture capital lead to even more women in venture capital. Anarghya Vardhana, senior associate at Maveron, points out that another woman, Rebecca Kaden, is general partner at the firm. "There are very few women GPs, and for me as a young investor early in my career, it meant a lot to have Rebecca befriend me and mentor me early on."

When Vardhana was looking to get into the VC world, she says, "seeing [Kaden] as a leader in the firm meant a lot. And any firm looking to hire women onto their team could probably do so by actually having women on their team. That made a difference for me."

Beck Bamberger founded BAM Communications in 2008 and writes regularly for Forbes and the Huffington Post about entrepreneurship, public relations, and culture.

Update: A previous version of this article misstated where Cack Wilhelm had interned and the number of startups Chang Xu had cofounded. Both errors have been corrected.

In one recent study, MBA students put leadership at the top of their list of marketable job skills. Recruiters put it at the bottom.

As a partner at a consulting firm as well as a professor in the University of Texas's MBA program, I not only team up with some of the brightest young business minds in the country, but hire them, too. And in the process, I've come to suspect that their expectations don't always match recruiters' needs.

So to test my suspicion, I recently conducted a survey of over 3,000 students and recruiters to uncover their assumptions about the skills that lead to success in the job market. And the most startling gap that I found had to do with mismatched perceptions about leadership skills.

Why (And When) Leadership Is Overrated

Students considered leadership to be one of the most important traits for getting a good job after earning their MBAs. Recruiters ranked it near the bottom of the list. In business school classrooms around the country (and online), students are taught loads of courses on leadership. They learn plenty of techniques, case studies, and strategies that all focus on what makes a good leader. When they leave with their degrees in hand, many seem to consider themselves pretty well-equipped with leadership skills.

Recruiters, on the other hand, have seen a lot more leaders out in the real world, and they realize one important thing that students often miss: Leadership isn't a skill to be learned in class; it's the result of doing other things right.

In professional settings, effective leaders aren't usually people who've spent many hours diligently poring over academic case studies on leadership. Rather, they're simply people who've focused on building their own competence—being really good at whatever it is they do—and subsequently developed leadership skills through that competence.

Recruiters get that. They know that when hiring junior talent—even highly pedigreed, MBA-holding junior talent—being preoccupied with leadership is premature. Instead, they focus on the traits that correlate with competence, like critical thinking, teamwork, and professionalism. My survey data may not be representative of the entire U.S. knowledge economy, but the story it tells couldn't be clearer. Not only did we ask about the perceived importance of various job skills, we also addressed perceived ability. And that difference was striking.

While students estimated their own proficiency in leadership at an average of 8.2 (out of 10), recruiters rated students' proficiency at just 5.7. That's the largest gap between all the job skills we measured—26% greater than teamwork, the second-highest area—in which students rated themselves. Through the data, recruiters appear to be saying to students, "Leadership shouldn't be a priority right now. Focus on things you can already do well, achieve some results, then use that competence to develop your leadership abilities."

So if not leadership, what should young professionals be focused on? The survey results suggest there are four main areas that recruiters are looking for: professionalism, critical thinking, teamwork, and communication. Here are some tips for how to exemplify each one, both in the interview and on the job.

Professionalism

When interviewing young consultants at Infosys, I'm always impressed when they take the time to set clear expectations before agreeing to do a task or make a commitment. Rather than the typical, "Sure, I'm on it!", they pause, reflect, and then get really clear about what I'm expecting and when I'm expecting it.

Once you're on the job, take the extra time to make sure all the deliverables are "done done." Submitting something to your manager isn't an intermediate step. It's fine to ask questions and solicit feedback on something you're working on, just as long as you keep pushing things as far as you possibly can on your own. Everything should be as close to client-ready as possible, so your boss knows she can rely on you without her oversight.

Related:Four Easy Ways To Reboot Your Relationship With Your Boss

Critical Thinking

In interviews, make an effort to show your line of thinking in whatever concepts you're discussing. You don't need to have all the answers. Just ask questions to clarify your understanding, and don't be afraid to express something counter to conventional wisdom. It shows that you think for yourself.

Once on the job, show that you're capable of being fact-based and quantitative in your reasoning. Try your best to test your opinions and intuition against the data every time. Don't overlook the communication challenge, either: Practice explaining your logic to others, so you can catch the assumptions underlying your rationale and convey it as clearly as possible.

Teamwork

In your interview, always give credit to others where they deserve it. Don't pretend you did everything on your own—because trust me, you didn't. Use "I" only where you're describing specific steps that you took or ideas that you had. And when those steps and ideas informed collective action, make sure to replace the pronouns with "we" or "our team."

Once you're on the job, look for ways to help others be successful wherever possible. You don't need to do it at your own expense, but keep an eye on what other people want to achieve and how you can help them—especially when that could benefit the whole team. That's a nascent leadership skill if there ever was one.

Communication

In your interview, listen actively. This sounds so obvious, but too many interviewees show up trying to prove themselves, with little awareness that the person on the other side of the table is a human being. Show empathy by asking questions that can help you better understand the other person's needs and perspective.

Related:Four Tips for Communicating Well In Nerve-Wracking Situations

On the job, take the time to tailor your message to your audience. Whether it's verbal or written, explicitly lay out where the information you're presenting fits into their work, how they should apply it, and why it matters. This helps you make sure that whatever you're communicating is serving a clear purpose, and stops most potential miscommunications in their tracks.

If these four other job skills sound pretty intuitive, well, they are. But they're easy to overlook—or even undercut—when you're focused on demonstrating your leadership chops. Those will become apparent the more competent you prove yourself, and that's what recruiters will be looking for above all.

Jeff Kavanaugh is a senior partner at Infosys and an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. He writes about careers, consulting, and the future of work at JeffKavanaugh.net.

Using a heart-rate monitor, Fitbit will gauge how deeply you sleep. Can the resulting data help you get more out of your slumber?

If you're nodding off while reading this, it might not be because of my writing. You may not have had enough sleep—either the overall duration or the right mix of light, deep, and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Lots of fitness trackers measure the duration of slumber and periods of restlessness, using accelerometers to register movement. Now Fitbit says it can break sleep down by stage using the optical heart rate monitor in some of its fitness bands to measure slight fluctuations. The capability, called Sleep Stages, debuts in Fitbit's slim new Alta HR band (available in April, starting at $150) and through a software update for its current Blaze and Charge 2 bands.

"Fitbit was a way to really address a broad consumer need," says Conor Heneghan, the company's director of research. An entrepreneur and former professor at University College Dublin, Heneghan joined Fitbit two years ago with the goal of bringing some of the capabilities of a sleep lab to a consumer device that people could wear all the time, not just when wired up for study.

The Alta HR is a subtle upgrade to the original Alta (introduced in 2016) that adds continuous heart-rate monitoring—the most-requested feature, according to Fitbit. The optical sensor lays almost flush on the underside of the band, unlike the prominent bump under the larger Charge 2, which sometimes presses a slight dent into my wrist. I got to wear the new Alta HR for just a few minutes, but it felt less likely to do that.

The new band comes in 10 styles ranging from basic black to 22-karat rose gold. Four colors are available in the floppy, entry-level elastomer bands. I found the leather bands, in three colors for $60 extra, a bit more comfortable. The top Alta HR model costs $250 and is mounted in a stainless-steel bracelet. (Bands are interchangeable, so you can always upgrade.)

Inactivity Tracker

With the Alta HR, Fitbit is upping the value of heart-rate monitoring to include sophisticated sleep tracking. Fitbit isn't the first company to claim the ability to distinguish sleep stages. Intel's now-defunct Basis brand used an optical heart-rate monitor in its Basis Peak model back in 2014 to do something similar. Rival Jawbone began distinguishing sleep stages in 2015 with skin sensors in its Up3 band that measure factors including heart rate, respiration rate, and body temperature.

Colin Espie, a professor of sleep medicine and the University of Oxford (who isn't affiliated with Fitbit), hasn't been impressed with any of these past attempts. "In short I haven't seen a wearable that accurately measures sleep architecture (stages of sleep)," he told me in an email.

Regardless of what came before, Fitbit's entry into sleep-stage tracking could have a big effect on raising awareness. Fitbit is the Kleenex of fitness trackers, the dominant brand with over 20% market share among all wearable devices, according to IDC. It's bringing sleep-stage tracking not only to a new product but to existing ones, including its biggest-selling model, the Charge 2, which tops several reviewers' lists of best fitness trackers.

Fitbit is also bringing another feature, called Sleep Insights, to all seven of its devices that track the duration of sleep. Insights are simple tips, based on data people's devices collect, to help them get better sleep. An example, provided by Fitbit:

There seems to be a strong correlation between your sleep and your runs. The last 10 weeknight logs show that you had 20 mins more restful sleep on days you ran vs. days you didn't.

With Stages and Insights, Fitbit is making the case that fitness depends not just on being active, but on relaxing. "We're beginning to understand that sleep is as important to health as diet and exercise," says Dr. Nathaniel Watson, a University of Washington professor and president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, who is also not affiliated with Fitbit. "These consumer sleep technologies, I think, are playing a role in getting people to understand that."

It's about time. More than a third of Americans don't get enough sleep, according to U.S. government research, and the resulting tiredness trims $411 billion worth of productivity off the U.S. economy every year, according to research by the Rand Corporation. (It's not just America: Japan loses $138 billion due to sleepiness.) The list of possible ailments caused by poor sleep is long and troubling, including hypertension, diabetes, depression, obesity, and even cancer. We are stealing time not only from slumber but from longevity.

The Heart Of Sleep

Can Fitbit's new technology really judge sleep stage accurately and provide enough insight to help users get healthy? Sleep science experts from the University of Arizona, Johns Hopkins University, and Stanford University consulted on the development of Sleep Stages, and Heneghan has a good track record in the field. But they won't present their research until the SLEEP 2017 conference in Boston in June. "Even where companies try to get the edge on their competitors by publishing studies they have undertaken, most of these studies don't even get published in the first place because they are not of good enough scientific quality, and are rejected by journals," says Espie. (He is also CMO of Big Health, a company that provides online sleep quality assessment and guidance.)

The updated Fitbit app for Android, iOS, and Windows—which the company says will be available in the spring—wasn't ready for me to try. With neither published findings nor anecdotal experience, I could ask outside experts only if a fitness band's optical heart-rate monitor, with help from its accelerometer, would be enough to distinguish sleep stages accurately. In principle it would be, says Watson.

The conventional way to measure sleep stages would involve a trip to a sleep lab and wiring the patient up to a number of devices, most notably an electroencephalogram (EEG). Wakefulness and the different stages of sleep, as well as transitions between them all, have distinctive brainwave patterns that the EEG can measure. For instance, the transition from light to deep sleep (called N3) is marked by the appearance of high-voltage, low-frequency delta brainwaves. Newer research shows that cardiovascular changes provide similar signals. Deep sleep is also marked by minimal heart rate and blood pressure, for instance. A 2013 paper by researchers in Austria, Brazil, and the Czech Republic pulls together studies in the field to show these parallels between brain wave and cardiovascular signals.

It's plausible that sleep can be assessed using heart rate variability, says Watson. Sleep involves interplay of control by the body's fight-or-flight (sympathetic) and resting (parasympathetic) nervous systems. And the role of each varies with sleep stage. This interplay also affects heart-rate variability. "It makes sense from those perspectives," Watson says. "The only obvious concern is, you have to prove it."

Fitbit's Heneghan says that the company has done that. Fitbit did two years of research and development on Sleep Stages. It recorded people sleeping for hundreds of nights outfitted with both Fitbit's heart-rate sensor and sleep-lab gear like EEGs and devices that measure blood oxygen levels, muscle activity, and heart rate. Fitbit used machine learning technology to distinguish patterns in heart-rate variability (HRV) from the sensor that correspond to changes in sleep stage as measured by the full suite of sleep lab devices.

This is familiar territory for Heneghan, who cofounded a company, BiancaMed, that measures respiration rate to monitor sleep. Stanford professor Allison Siebern, who consulted with Fitbit, has used optical heart rate sensors in her research.

Sleep Stages is based on the variability of heart rate: how steady it is over time. Heneghan sketched out a rough example for someone with an average resting heart rate of 60 beats per minute. "In deep sleep, you're maybe going to see plus/minus four beats-per-minute variation over a few minutes, so it's really pretty regular," he says. "When a person is in dreaming or REM sleep, I'd expect to see much more like plus/minus 10 or 15 beats per minute."

Espie isn't fully convinced about the value of measuring heart rate and heart-rate variability. "There is some evidence in the literature that this may be done scientifically," he says. "But it's not a well-developed procedure, it's not a substitute for measuring [in a sleep lab]." (Fitbit doesn't claim that Sleep Stages matches what a lab can do.)

Angela McIntyre, who tracks wearable technologies at market research firm Gartner, is skeptical about how accurate a fitness band can be. Chest-strap monitors are good at measuring heart-rate variability, she says. They produce those pointy up-and-down lines seen on a hospital monitor. "The kind of data that's being measured from your wrists—the peaks aren't so sharp," says McIntyre. "They're kind of rounded, so it takes a lot of calculating to figure out where is the right peak."

The Stages Of Snoozing

Sleep is about more than quantity. A person doesn't need just seven or eight hours of sleep, but the right mixture of sleep types. Deep Sleep (stage N3) promotes the immune system and muscle growth, for instance; and should make up 10-25 percent of sleep time. REM sleep helps memories form and should be around 20-25 of sack time.

With devices that support Sleep Stages, the updated Fitbit app will show a breakdown of the different sleep types: how they are distributed over the night, the total amount of each type, and how those totals compare to averages among people of the same age and gender. Assuming Fitbit gets the numbers right, how helpful will that information be? "Sleep staging and the amount of different stages that you get is something that's hard for an individual to necessarily influence," says Watson.

Fitbit says that it will make the data it collects more useful by translating it into tailor-made Sleep Insights for each user. This feature was also not available for me to try, so I can only go on a few examples the company provided, such as:

You slept an average of 9hrs 30min this weekend, which is substantially higher than your weekday sleep duration of 5hrs 40min. That swing may be a sign that you're not getting enough sleep during the week.

It's no shocker that people who don't get enough sleep during the workweek might be prone to binge on the weekend. The exact numbers do bring home the magnitude of the problem. However this tip—and other examples that Fitbit shared with me—don't show how, say, a deficit of REM sleep vs. light sleep would influence the insights.

Overall, it's good to get people thinking more about sleep, says Watson. If they see it as a key part of health, people can make lifestyle changes to foster a healthy sleep environment. But he warns of the risk in overthinking it. "Sleep is what happens when the mind goes clear at night," he says. "If you're constantly trying to hack your sleep, you may ultimately be having the opposite effect."

Chances are you are doing one or more of these things. Here's how to notice them and change them.

It's easy to identify other people's bad habits. Maybe your coworker always rushes at the last minute to complete their part of the project, your boss shoots down ideas without even listening, and your partner is horribly disorganized. Recognizing these traits in ourselves, however, isn't quite as easy.

"Many of us are living in [Garrison Keillor's fictional] Lake Wobegon where all of the women are strong, all of the men are good looking, and all of the children are above average," says David Maxfield, vice president of research for the corporate training firm VitalSmarts and coauthor of Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change. "We all feel we're above average, but that's not possible."

Your blind spots for your own bad habits could be keeping you from raises and promotions. In a recent study for VitalSmarts, Maxfield interviewed managers who identified the top five career killers:

1. Being disorganized and unreliable. This person doesn't spend the necessary amount of time planning, organizing, communicating, and coordinating with others. They fail to follow through on commitments and are difficult to rely upon.

2. Doing too little too late. This person procrastinates, misses deadlines, and cuts corners rather than going the extra mile to produce great work.

3. Deflecting blame. This is the person who says, "It's not my job." They don't take responsibility, cling to their job description, and are unwilling to sacrifice personal interests for a larger goal.

4.Being unwilling to change. This person is stuck in the past, complaining about the future, and repeating the same mistakes. They expect others to accept them as they are, dragging their feet in taking on new approaches.

5.Having a bad attitude. This person suffers from cynicism and negativity. They are often the contrarian, finding fault before looking for benefits.

These five habits are common, and most employees report having at least one, says Maxfield. Unfortunately, they also hold you back for two reasons: "They prevent the person from being part of the team, and people with these habits are often unable to change them," he says.

Change is hard because we often go to denial, says Maxfield. "We find a way to blame our boss instead of listening to him or her," he says. "In fact, from our research we found 87% of employees say they have bosses who have prevented them from getting the pay, promotions, or other opportunities they wanted because of a concern they've had about their performance."

It's also hard to change because we don't know how. "Managers aren't very specific about the changes they want to see," says Maxfield. "(In our research we found that) 70% of employees who were aware that their boss was unhappy with their performance, couldn't tell you what they were doing wrong or how they were going to change it."

How To Change

If you're concerned you have a bad habit that's impacting your career, it's time to be honest with yourself, says Maxfield. "Be willing to say, 'This is me; I do this sometimes,'" he says. "The first step is to accept that it's our problem and own it," he says.

If you're not sure, get outside opinions. Few of us are insightful enough to recognize what is holding us back, and if you want to be good at changing, you have to ask for feedback, says Maxfield, adding that there's one caveat: "Make it safe for others to give you their honest frank perspective," he says. "Be open and receptive to what you're about to hear. Getting negative feedback is as precious as gold and as rare."

Once you understand the problem, ask yourself if you really want to change. If something is not worth doing at all then why change, asks Maxfield. "You might say, 'I've gotten by with this habit and I don't want to change,'" he says. "You can consider switching jobs or employers."

Deep Dive Into Fixing The Problem

If you decide this is something you are willing to change, become a scientist, says Maxfield. "You are your own subject," he says. "Get a clear definition about the behaviors around the problem."

For example, if you're disorganized and unreliable, but not 100% of time, identify when it does happen. "Maybe you have trouble saying 'no' or you try to say 'no' and eventually back down and agree to more than you can realistically do," says Maxfield.

Identifying the time, place, and circumstances circumscribes the problem. "It makes it smaller and easier to get your head around," says Maxfield.

But don't beat yourself up over having bad habits: "Most of us develop ways of doing our job and living our lives," says Maxfield. "As the job changes and as life changes, sometimes these habits aren't robust enough to keep up with changes. I think all of us fall into this, but it's a case of what got you here won't get you there."

Snap, Google, HTC, and others are making virtual reality mainstream and more immersive than ever.

Virtual reality has been around for decades, but 2016 was the year millions of consumers got their hands on the technology for the very first time. Though the headsets are still bulky and ugly, they're giving people breathtakingly immersive digital experiences. At the same time, thanks to Pokémon Go, there's never been more focus on augmented reality, and Snap is taking that technology from smartphones to sunglasses. Get ready for both VR and AR to take off in 2017 like never before.

Click on a company name to learn more about why it made the list.

01. SNAP
For giving users control of their own augmented reality

02. GOOGLE
For using VR to measure your living room

03. FACEBOOK
For gathering IRL friends in VR

04. NVIDIA
For providing the power to process VR

05. NIANTIC
For introducing Pikachu to the real world

06. HTC
For developing the industry-leading VR system

07. SONY
For baking VR into PlayStation

08. WEVR
For giving A-list directors VR cameras

09. NEXTVR
For enveloping viewers in live events

10. OSTERHOUT DESIGN GROUP
For using smart glasses to augment industrial work

This article is part of our coverage of the World's Most Innovative Companies of 2017.

Sonos's new Playbase addresses the most glaring problem of home theater sound bars: Most of us don't mount our TVs on the wall.

Like many consumer products, Sonos's newest smart speaker began with plenty of consumer research. But in studying the way that people live and interact with entertainment technology at home, the company discovered a fact that seemed to undermine its own approach: Most people—a full 70%, by Sonos's count—do not mount their television sets on the wall, preferring to sit them on top of a piece of furniture instead. It's a statistic that contradicts the popularity of home theater sound bars like Sonos's own Playbar, which tend to be designed with the wall-mounted setup in mind. At the same time, it suggested an opportunity.

After countless iterations, testing and retunings, the Sonos Playbase was born. The 58-millimeter-high device doesn't look much like a speaker, but it packs all the sonic fidelity of other Sonos products like the Playbar and Play:5. The new Wi-Fi-enabled speaker, which starts shipping on April 4th, takes on a somewhat odd, oblong, flat shape designed to sit comfortably and inconspicuously beneath most standard television sets.

"Designers are a little bit uncomfortable with a design being underneath something," says Sonos VP of Design Tad Toulis, of the Playbase's unusual form factor. "But every other solution ended up like a game of Twister, where you were always upside down on some dimension of the problem. When you're fighting that hard for something, there's probably something telling you you're approaching it wrong."

Like the other speakers in Sonos's lineup, the Playbase comes in either black or white. The idea, as is often the case in product design, is to allow the speakers to almost be invisible, fading into the background while the consumer focuses on what really matters: the sound. Or, in this case, the sound combined with imagery on a large screen.

"When you're drinking a really great glass of wine, it's the wine," says Toulis. "You're not like, this was a really great glass. Your focus is on what you're swallowing and tasting. We have the same thing. You should be digesting the sound and the music."

The development of the Playbase comes at a crucial—and, it might seem, somewhat counterintuitive—time for the company. After the surprisingly explosive success of Amazon's Echo (and quick proliferation of voice-controlled smart speakers), Sonos finds itself under competitive pressure.

While the Echo is not focused on high-fidelity or multi-room wireless audio the way that Sonos is, this new category of speakers nonetheless caused the company to rethink its priorities. Sonos, which is now led by CEO Patrick Spence after longtime chief executive John MacFarlane stepped down earlier this year, is now focused on building integrations with voice control providers, starting with Amazon's Alexa platform. It's also working on building out a developer platform of its own to make third-party integrations easier to develop down the road. As the company's executives are quick to point out, the Playbase is just one of the projects its engineers and designers have been focused on over the last several months.

Packed inside the Playbase's thin profile is a 10-driver speaker system that creates a very wide, immersive soundstage that's optimized for both music and movies. Naturally, the Playbase pairs wirelessly with other Sonos speakers like the Play:5, Play:1, and Sub, allowing home theater audio freaks to splurge and set up a wireless surround sound system if so desired. Since it relies on Sonos's proprietary, Wi-Fi-based infrastructure rather than standard audio inputs and outputs, the Playable can't be paired with speakers from other brands. Still, even without add-on speakers the $700 Playbase (priced the same as the Playbar) does quite a bit of justice to the film audio and music on its own—and like other Sonos speakers, it can be automatically tuned to an individual room using the company's iOS-based acoustic tuning feature TruePlay.

The high-fidelity sound of the Playbase is owed, at least in part, to Giles Martin. For the last few years, the recording engineer and son of the late "fifth Beatle" Sir George Martin has worked for Sonos as the company's sound experience leader, working with its acoustics team to ensure that Sonos products adhere to the exacting standards of the creativity community. Historically, that has meant taking Sonos's music-focused speakers like the Play:5 to record producers like Rick Rubin (who sits on the company's board) and Radiohead's Nigel Godrich, among many others. But with the Playbase, Martin's job was a bit more complicated. Not only did hit records need to sound ideal, but so did the more multifaceted and nuanced audio of Hollywood films, complete with not just music but dialogue and sound effects as well. For Martin, the challenge was ensuring that the device's 10 speaker drivers fire the right sounds in the right directions across a wide range of home entertainment scenarios—whether you're listening to Adele or watching Mad Max: Fury Road.

To do that, Martin had to track down the people who mixed and engineered the audio for Hollywood blockbusters—like Max Max's Chris Jenkins and The Revenant's sound mixer, Jon Taylor—and get their feedback on how the Playbase represented their work.

"It becomes very precise," says Martin of the process of working with film audio engineers. "Jon Taylor said that in The Revenant that the river needs to sound angry. This voice needs to come from here. There's a drum in the opening battle scene and he was very particular about how that drum should sound. You'll talk to effects specialists about explosions and things like that."

Much like interfacing with record producers, working with Hollywood sound editors involves a lot of back and forth, lugging speaker prototypes to film studios and people's offices and typically leaving with a list of complaints and demands, which are then balanced with the scientific constraints of the acoustics team and the aesthetic preferences of Toulis and the design team.

"Generally, if you tick all those boxes, you wind up with a product that works for everything," says Martin.

With the industry audio gurus satisfied, the new speaker is now ready to find its way onto consumers' entertainment units, where Toulis hopes it will practically disappear altogether.

"That's what good design does," says Toulis. "It can still be elegant. I have some nice pieces of furniture, but they're comfortable. It's not like they're beautiful and uncomfortable. When I'm in it, I'm not thinking about how it looks. That's the role of design."

GeoVisual Search from Descartes Labs allows users to find matches around the world to any feature in a satellite image.

There's a single wind turbine near the intersection of 760th St. and Quincy Road in Massena, Iowa. It's just one of thousands of them located around the country. What if you wanted to know where the others are?

Or what if you were looking at the solar farm near the intersection of New Mexico State Road 26 and New Mexico State Road 27, outside Deming, New Mexico and wanted to know where others are located?

Finding these things would be tantamount to being able to search Google Earth for objects or structures—not something Google currently enables. So how would you do it?

Thanks to a new tool from Descartes Labs—a New Mexico startup providing AI-based analysis of satellite imagery to industry, academia, and government—finding every corn field, sports arena, wind turbine, smokestack, or any other object visible on satellite imagery, is as easy as clicking on one you know about and letting some machine intelligence take over.

Launched today, GeoVisual Search lets anyone run an automatic query on one of three collections of satellite imagery—one for the U.S., one of the world, and one for China—in order to look for the location of just about any feature that's identifiable in one of those collections.

While the best reason to use the tool is that it's "really cool," Descartes Labs CEO Mark Johnson says, the business case is that when the company has talked to its customers about GeoVisual Search, "they get really excited, and they start brainstorming ideas on how to use geospatial imagery and machine intelligence for their business."

More practically, the tool has a wide range of uses, beginning, Johnson says, with allowing those who need to know these kinds of things to see how things change around the world. For example, he says, you could run a query on windmills once a week and look and see how their numbers and locations differ over time.

Johnson said there have been previous, small-scale attempts at such a search tool, including one done by a team at Carnegie-Mellon University that let users query images across seven U.S. cities.

"It's cool to look at San Francisco, but San Francisco is [just] 50 square miles," Johnson says. "We thought, 'How do we do this for the entire planet?'"

The answer is by breaking the map of the U.S., China, or the world into a large number of tiles, employing a number of neural nets to evaluate a similarity score across each tile, and then quickly providing the tiles that are judged by the system to be most similar to the one originally searched.

The system uses the neural nets to look for "thumbprints," Johnson explains, and then tries to find the closest matches.

The trick isn't just finding the proper matches. It's also providing them quickly. While the tool returns plenty of false positives—results that look similar to what's being queried, but aren't actually the same—it does an admirable job of delivering a list of quality results almost immediately.

Those results are terrific in the case of very distinct objects, like wind turbines, and a bit less impressive when searching for things like stadiums or suburbs.

But Johnson isn't bothered by false positives. He even gets a bit excited talking about how a query for suburbs returns some results that are actually river channels running through mountains.

It does also return numerous actual locations of suburbs, and even with the errors, Johnson thinks that's impressive, particularly given that the tool is capable of running these searches without ever being shown what a suburb is, or a smokestack, or a wind turbine, and so on. The system simply finds the results by comparing the contents of thousands of tiles to the contents of the original tile. And quickly.

Johnson isn't particularly worried about the privacy implications of the tool, since the imagery is from public satellites. Still, he does acknowledge that the ability to quickly analyze the imagery, which is updated daily, is something that's never before been possible.

But ultimately, what the tool allows for is clicking on, say, a house and finding visually similar houses around the country or the world. There's not much danger in that, Johnson argues.

"Hopefully, people will use this for the good of the planet," he says, "and not for nefarious purposes."

It doesn't matter if it's intentional or not, no one should have to deal with a daily stream of slights.

Can you guess what would make 6 out of 10 employees leave their jobs?

If you said a bad boss, you'd only be partially right. In a study of over 1,000 U.S. adults conducted by the Center for Generational Kinetics and Ultimate Software, respondents reported that a lack of emotional safety at work would make them quit a job immediately. Company culture often starts at the top and gets reinforced by managers, so it's not hard to see how a toxic culture could breed an environment of harassment, intimidation, and generally offensive behavior.

One of the factors that can breed such negative working conditions is microaggressions. The term "microaggression" has been used in academic circles since the 1970s to describe small casual verbal and behavioral indignities against people of color, but has entered more popular use in the last few years to encompass intentional and unintentional slights against any socially marginalized group.

Consider what happened to Ciara Trinidad. "I am a person of color," says Trinidad, who is currently the head of diversity and inclusion at Lever, a recruiting software company. Trinidad points out that as a "part black, queer woman" she's been exposed to plenty of microaggressions." Most notably, Trinidad has been asked by the men she's worked with what she thinks of other women sexually. "They're making me one of the guys," she acknowledges, "But it's a really awkward situation to be in."

Then there's one of Kieran Snyder's earliest experiences at Microsoft. Snyder, the CEO of Textio, a startup that analyzes text performance using AI, recalls that coming from academia with a PhD in linguistics to a corporate setting was "culture shock." In her second week, Snyder saw that the company was offering a math talk. "I walked over a few minutes early," she explains, "And in the room two men were already seated." One saw her and immediately asked if she was looking for the design talk that was being held across the hall. "I had never experienced that before," says Snyder, asserting that she majored in math as an undergraduate. But the men had assumed she was in the wrong room.

Ximena Hartsock, founder of Phone2Action, tells Fast Company that in one of her former positions the company hired someone from El Salvador. "He was very bright," Hartsock says, but new in the U.S. workforce. "He got the typical: 'What are you? Mexican?' Or 'Why do you like country music? You are Hispanic,'" she recounts. Beyond that, Hartsock noticed that coworkers acted "bothered" by his low tone of voice and his timidness. "His respect for authority was interpreted as lack of confidence," she says.

Elizabeth Ames, senior vice president of marketing, alliances, and programs for the Anita Borg Institute, observes that one of the most common microaggressions in the workplace against women and underrepresented minorities is just having people speak over them in conversations and meetings. "Another we hear a lot is when [they] share an idea or comment and everyone ignores it, then the male in the room says it and everyone thinks it's the greatest thing," she contends.

Unfortunate Consequences

As Derald Wing Sue, a professor of psychology at Columbia University and author of the book Microaggressions in Everyday Life, sees it, "Racial microaggressions are the brief and everyday slights, insults, indignities, and denigrating messages sent to people of color." However, Sue points out that the perpetrators are "well-intentioned [people] who are unaware of the hidden messages being communicated."

"Microaggressions can play a big role in employees' productivity," Hartsock argues, "so companies—if they are truly interested in diversity—must invest in building environments of tolerance and respect."

Dealing With Slights Head On

But first, companies need to actually be aware that there is a problem. That's a challenge when microaggressions come from a place of unconscious bias. Which is why Randall Peterson, professor of organizational behavior and academic director of the Leadership Institute at London Business School, says "The most productive response in the workplace is actually to confront the microaggressor."

Ames says there are a variety of ways to handle confrontation. "Using humor helps to diffuse the situation," she suggests. So when people talk over you, she recommends interrupting them back. "I would say 'I know you are super excited to get your idea out, but I wasn't done with mine.'" If it keeps happening, she advises approaching another member of the team or a supervisor privately and explaining what's going on as they may not have noticed. Ames recognizes it's hard not to get defensive if it happens over and over.

In the workplace, Trinidad underscores, "It doesn't benefit anyone to come back with rage." She says the first step is to try to understand what happened and use empathy. "Where do you think that was coming from for them?" she suggests asking. That tends to release the tension. Then, she says, it's important to help them understand how it made you feel. Trinidad asserts that this is not going to work every time, because the microaggressor believes they are right or they simply still can't see why it's a problem.

Ames says the Anita Borg Institute encourages organizations to use some type of employee sentiment survey regularly to see if there are areas where problems like this persist. "Sometimes there just bad managers,' she says, other times it just takes some training and using data to become more aware.

Above all, says Peterson, "The key is to approach the problem with a growth mindset rather than fixed mindset." If you are positive about the prospects for change in the person you confront, says Peterson, "research suggests more positive outcomes for both the perpetrator and the victim of microagressions."