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More buildings are being converted into apartments in the U.S. than ever before, and it’s not just old offices that are finding new use. After the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted relocation patterns and work arrangements nationwide, suddenly vacant city office space seemed like prime real estate for housing. But it’s actually hotels more than any other building type that are driving the spike in conversions now: Hotels made up 37% of all apartment conversions in 2024, followed by offices at 24%, industrial at 19%, schools at 8%, and other at 12%. New sourcing to meet newfound growth This shift in sourcing comes at a time when a record number of converted apartments are hitting the market. 24,735 such units were completed in 2024, according to a new report from the property management and apartment listing site Rent Cafe. That’s up about 50% from 2023, when 16,513 apartments were converted. That trend is expected to continue. There are currently 181,000 apartment conversions currently in development, according to the report. While office-to-apartment conversions are on the rise, some office buildings present design challenges that stand in the way of adaptive reuse, like utilities that aren’t wired for multifamily residential use, or a lack of windows, which would fail to meet residential codes for bedrooms. The process for redesigning a hotel into a residential space is much more streamlined by comparison, as it already has a base infrastructure of single unit residences, much like the apartment complex it will become. That similarity suggests that converting the space would require less rewiring, less HV/AC installation, less tear downs, and less time and money for the developer. Hotels under pressure The rise in hotel-to-apartment conversion is driven less by design, though, than by economic factors. The American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA) said in its 2025 report that U.S. hotel industry is experiencing a period of stagnation because of operating costs that are growing faster than related revenue as travel patterns normalize post-pandemic. Some hotel owners, then, are choosing to sell. According to the Rent Cafe report, most of the hotels that converted were more vulnerable to market uncertainty. Hotels that cater to the wealthy are doing just fine, though, which makes sense considering the K-shaped recovery from the pandemic recession. People who can’t afford their rent can’t afford to travel either, and the buildings that once made up the infrastructure of these industries are adapting to the times. Hotels that once catered to middle-class travelers are now making a play for middle-class renters.
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E-Commerce
The 9-to-5 is fading, replaced by a fragmented cycle of early logins, late-night pings, and weekend catch-up. Microsofts latest Work Trend Index shows the infinite workday is no longer an edge case. Its the norm for many knowledge workers. Unfortunately, it seems the pandemic-era triple peak work patternmorning, afternoon, and an evening spikehas stuck. After-hours activity is rising. Meetings after 8 p.m. are up 16% year over year, and by 10 p.m. nearly one-third of active workers are back in their inboxes. Weekends are not off-limits: Among those working weekends, about 20% say they check email before noon on Saturday and Sunday. During the week, prime focus windows are being eaten alive. Half of meetings land between 9 and 11 a.m. and 1 and 3 p.m.the very hours when many people are naturally sharpest. What feels like productivity is quietly fueling burnout, chaos, and replaceability The risk is fatigue and focus. When communication never sleeps, neither does context-switching, a leading cause of mental exhaustion. Microsofts telemetry finds employees are interrupted, on average, every two minutes during core work hoursadding hundreds of pings a day among heavy-communication users. Its no surprise that nearly half of employees (48%) and more than half of leaders (52%) say work feels chaotic and fragmented. Samantha Madhosingh, a leadership consultant and executive coach with a background as a psychologist, says the issue is exacerbated by flexi-working while working remotely and trying to do it all. She says remote working makes it difficult for folks to have the strong structure and boundaries around their workday. And I see people really struggling. Theyre struggling to remain organized, to stay focused, and to not burn out. At Lifehack Method, weve seen this up close as we coach busy professionals to reclaim their time and do meaningful, fulfilling work. When new clients arrive, most are drowning in what feels like normal work like an overflowing inbox, constant notifications, and a booked-up calendar. Well ask them, Whens the last time you had two uninterrupted hours to do your actual job? The answer is usually nervous laughter. But when they start putting up strategic boundaries, the turnaround is dramatic. Heres how to set new boundaries around the infinite workday so that you can not only survive but thrive. What Frontier Firms do differently Some 53% of leaders say productivity must climb, yet 80% of the global workforce reports lacking the time or energy to do their jobs. That mismatchrising demand versus human bandwidthcreates a capacity gap that organizations are racing to close. Microsofts Frontier Firms, which are early adopters deploying AI across the org, report better sentiment and headroom: 71% of workers at these firms say their company is thriving (versus 37% globally), and 55% say they can take on more work (versus 20% globally). Many leaders plan to upskill existing employees (47%) and use AI as digital labor (45%). Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella repeatedly posted on LinkedIn in August 2025 highlighting new AI tools that free people from drudgery and give them more time for highimpact work. He wrote that GPT5 integrated into Microsoft 365 Copilot has become part of his everyday workflow, adding a layer of intelligence across apps, and praised the new =COPILOT() function in Excel that lets users analyze, generate content, and brainstorm directly in the grid. But AI is only part of the fix. It can automate tasks, but it cant make your choices for you. Your scarcest asset isnt talentits time. Go a month without clear goals or let each week fray into constant notifications, and you quietly become easier to replace. Thats because reactive work, jumping at every @mention or ping, keeps you busy without moving the needle. Push back on norms for big results Teams that tame the infinite workday reject the normal flow of work and actively redesign their calendars. For example, Shopify periodically purges calendars of recurring meetings with more than two people. Meta and Clorox have meeting-free days. Dropbox has core collaboration hours, a four-hour block of synchronous time across its workforce that relieves the pressure of all-day meetings and lets employees decline meetings outside this window. GitLab runs on asynchronous workflows (a favorite trick here at Lifehack Method) to reduce urgency and alleviate stress. If youre not in a position to flip the switch company-wide, here are some individual power moves: Swap meetings for screencasts. Most 30-minute info-transfer meetings could have been an email, or at least a shorter meeting. Record a Loom or Clipchamp, send it off, and let people listen at 1.5x speed. Boomyou just gifted yourself and your team back half an hour. Trade 1:1s for weekly office hours. You become more accessible, employees get a pressure valve for urgent problems, and you solve a pile of small issues in two to five minutes instead of bloating everyones calendar with half-hour blocks. The best leaders use office hours as a speed bump. If someone really needs a private 1:1, theyll earn that time after showing up in office hours first. Set a win-win communication policy. Uncertainty kills productivity. People dont need instant replies, they need predictable ones. Instead of winging it (aka defaulting to chaos), publish a simple rule: I check email at 9 a.m., 12 p.m., and 3 p.m., or I dont take meetings on Mondays because Im with clients. The magic is in the head-nodding clarity. People stop expecting and start respecting. Close the floodgates. There should be moents when people can reach you and moments when they cant. Otherwise, youre drowning 24/7. The best way to enforce those on/off cycles? Plan your week in advance. If you dont, the week will make a (bad) plan for you. Which leads to the next suggestion: Make weekly planning a ritual, not a wish. Pros dont win with fancy hacks, they win by doing the boring basics consistently. Thousands of our clients at Lifehack Method use weekly planning as their tip of the spear. If you want to win the week, youve got to plan the week. Prioritize your physical and mental health, before its too late. Madhosingh warns that work cannot take over your entire day and life. For a lot of people, thats what ends up happening. They dont know when to stop. Ultimately, your brain or your body will shut you down. . . . People end up really physically ill and sick because theyre not taking care of themselves. The infinite workday isnt your destiny If you dont set boundaries, your tools will set them for you, and theyll always choose chaos. Thats why the most competitive professionals and companies in 2026 wont be the ones who can stay logged in the longest. Theyll be the ones who deliberately carve out time for deep work, compress their collaboration windows, and enlist AI to strip away drudgery. The infinite workday is real, but its not inevitable. You can either accept it as the new default, or treat it as the wake-up call it is. Leaders who redesign their calendars, enforce boundaries, and invest in human focus will not only outlast the chaos, theyll outperform it.
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E-Commerce
In recent years, leading artificial intelligence labs and startups have released AI software designed for tasks of ever-growing complexity, including solving PhD-level math problems, reasoning through complex questions step-by-step, and using tools like web browsers to carry out intricate tasks. The role of AI engineers in making that happen is well-documentedand often well-compensated. But less publicized is the role of a growing army of freelance experts, from physicists and mathematicians to photographers and art critics, enlisted by companies specialized in AI training, itself a multibillion-dollar industry. Those companies say human wisdom is essential to create sample problems, solutions, and grading rubrics that help AI improve its performance in a wide range of fields. As long as AI matters, humans will matter, says Aakash Sabharwal, vice president of engineering at AI training company Scale AI. Scale AI recently made the news when Meta announced plans to invest $14.3 billion in the companyand hired away its then-CEO Alexandr Wang to lead a new Superintelligence lab focused on AI research. But the company remains a top player in the field, recruiting expert AI trainers in a wide variety of subjects and building digital environments Sabharwal compares to flight simulators for AI, where humans can help machines learn everything from sending business emails to writing code. “Way more PhDs” The modern AI training industry grew out of earlier work to create labeled training data teaching computers to identify objects in photos or spot social media posts in need of moderation. The early days of how people thought of this industry was what you’d call commodity labeling, like cat/dog, cat/dog, cat/dog, says Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of AI training company Invisible Technologies. More recently, as generative AI models became available, human workers helped steer the software to correctly answer questions about topics like high-school level mathematics and communicate with virtual fluency in a variety of languages. Companies like Scale and Invisible have also built relationships with big businesses to help them fine-tune AI technology that can deliver insights based on their own needs and internal data. And now, as leaders of AI companies regularly boast of their chatbots prowess at tackling advanced math and science problems, human experts are working behind the scenes to test their limits and push their knowledge levels forward. You’ve seen a real change in the seniority and expertise set of the expert pools, says Fitzpatrick. Way more PhDs, way more masters [degrees]. Hyper-specificity Exactly what training firms provide to AI companies varies from task to task. It can include a mix of AI prompts and ideal answers, rubrics for evaluating AI responses, and corrections to the AIs current best attempts. Trust is also an implicit part of the product: As Holger Mueller, a principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research, points out, it has taken some time for big businesses to trust AI companies with their own dataincluding for fine-tuning purposes. And many AI training companies decline to publicly share a list of clients, citing confidentiality, with even training workers often not told exactly which companys AI theyre working to improve. Another big part of what training firms deliver is access to vetted pools of experts, and the promise that they can produce training data in even obscure areas on short notice, which is critical given the AI industrys pace of growth. Its not unusual for a client to expect Invisible to line up 50 experts in, say, computational biology overnight, with the expectation theyll deliver usable training data within a week, Fitzpatrick says. Despite reports that some AI companies have begun directly hiring experts themselves to train their systemsOpenAI has reportedly hired more than 100 former bankers from top Wall Street institutions to help teach its systems to do at least entry-level financial analysisFitzpatrick and other training company leaders say the specialized nature of their work, involving managing both technically sophisticated training platforms and large numbers of human workers, generally makes it hard for AI labs to do themselves. The vast majority of our work is hyper-specific experts for short sprints at a time, he says. It’s a complicated thing to do in house. That means that Invisible, which announced a $100-million funding round in September, along with its competitors, have all also devoted time to building robust recruitment and evaluation pipelines for human expertsoften complete with AI tools of their own to speedily screen and onboard those experts and assess their progress. And clients are likely doing their own assessments of the data they get back. Its not unusual for AI companies to solicit training data from multiple companies and compare the results, Fitzpatrick says. Intellectual curiosity The market for freelance experts with the time and knowledge necessary to train AI in obscure fields is, itself, naturally competitive, with training company executives boasting of their expert contractors credentials the way college presidents might brag about a new class of elite undergrads. One AI training company, Mercor, currently has listings posted seeking recreation workers at $60 to $80 per hour, a bilingual Spanish marketing expert at $20 to $60 per hour, legal experts at $90 to $120 per hour, and Ireland-based general practitioners in medicine at $160 to $185 per hour, among numerous other listings. And in many areas of knowledge, the bar steadily rises to get assigned to projects, according to Mercor product manager Osvald Nitski. Software engineers are now required to have either experience in some niche programming language or incredibly strong scores on competitive coding challenges, Nitski says. We’re now sometimes sourcing named individuals, because the bar that needs to be met is so high that there are limited number of people in the world who actually meet it. Mercor, which on Octoer 27 announced a $350 million Series C round at a $10-billion valuation, says it pays more than $1.5 million per day to its experts, with average pay above $85 per hour. More than 30,000 experts are signed to Mercors platform, according to the company. And while the pay no doubt motivates experts, many of whom are working full-time in their fields, to enter the AI training arena, some are also motivated by intellectual curiosity and the desire to help hone software they hope can one day assist in their work or tackle outstanding problems. “A harder problem” Alice Chiao, an emergency medicine physician who serves as an expert for Mercor, says she hopes that AI can automate some of the drudgery, like charting and scribing, of medicine and thus help doctors better connect with their patients. She says her AI training work includes asking the systems to answer medical questions that may have stumped her in her practicethe kind of puzzling scenarios that pop up when real-world patients differ from textbook examples. We input these things and try to see where a model might fail, she says. And then we create an ideal responseyou know, based on this finding, I would have ranked this differential diagnosis higher. Chiao emphasizes that she doesnt anticipate the AI she trains replacing her or her fellow physicians. Rather, she sees the technologys assistance helping to restore a level of human interaction thats often disappeared from medical practice. I do not think that training the AI is training a replacement, she says. I think that it has the significant potential to enhance the patient-physician relationship, which has eroded to a point where most physicians are not happy with the quality of patient-physician conversation and dialog that they get anymore. Another AI training company, Micro1, focuses on talent in finance, medicine, law, and engineering fields, says founder and CEO Ali Ansari. Average rates paid by the company hover around $100 an hour, though it varies between subject areas, with about 70% of experts making between $70 and $210 per hour, he says. Micro1, which in September announced a $35 million Series A round at a $500-million valuation, also operates an AI recruiter that can vet potential candidates and even help share job listings on platforms like LinkedIn. Finding talent is a critical part of its operations. Part of the companys goal, Ansari says, is to make sure that in-demand experts will not only perform well at a certain training task but have a good time doing it. We want to be able to predict how much an expert will enjoy a certain job as well, which is, in fact, actually a harder problem, he says. A social calling One expert that works with Micro1 is Mark Esposito, a professor of economics and public policy at Harvard University. He now serves as Micro1s chief economist but began his association with the company by training AI to answer policy questions. Thats something he sees as important in ensuring AI doesnt give misguided advice to users looking to make important decisions. You don’t want any policymaker to be dealing with information that is grossly incorrect, he says. So that’s why I think there’s a bit of a social calling for this, in making sure that youre really training models ethically, because they might really help people make a decision in the real world. Edwin Chen, CEO of AI training company Surge AI, speaks to a similar sort of calling, saying hes dreamed of helping craft artificial general intelligence (AGI)essentially, truly thinking machinessince he was a child. Instead of playing the startup game, we’re a lot closer to a research lab, he says. And the only thing that matters to us is whether we succeed in building AGI. Still, the company recently boasted its making more than $1 billion in annual revenue, and Chen says pay rates for some of the experts it works with can reach as high as $500 per hour, with the company website citing contributions by Supreme Court litigators, Oxford linguists, Navy SEALs, and Olympic athletes. The proportion of specialized experts among the AI training workforce has grown over time, but people with more general knowledge still contribute as well, Chen says. Thats unlikely to change, he adds, since AI tools do need steady training on even basic problems. And even if AI continues to do better with hard problems and take on more roles, itll still need human guidance, as standards for its performance will continue to grow. This means AI is unlikely to make its human teachers obsolete any time soon. As they get used more and more, the capabilities increase, the applications increase, and so it’s no longer okay for models to be at 80% accuracyyou need to be at 99.99999% or whatever it is, Chen says. And at the same time, as the models get smarter and smarter, you always need humans to steer and align them. Historically, some AI training companies have faced complaints from less-expert training contractors of unpredictable hours, difficulties getting paid, and other issues familiar to gig economy workers. Others, including Scale AI, have since said theyve taken steps to address complaints or otherwise emphasized their commitment to fair pay. And in general, work in the AI training field seems likely to grow as long as businesses continue to invest in deploying AI, as training companies expand into enterprise work and even work with robotics companies to help AI understand how to move about in the physical world.
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E-Commerce
One of the most striking aspects of Sarah Wynn-Williamss best-selling memoir, Careless People, about her years at Meta, is the way she portrays Sheryl Sandberg. Contrary to Sandbergs carefully crafted public image as a levelheaded advocate for working women and their families, she is shown to be narcissistic, mercurial, and hypocritical. Whether you see Wynn-Williams’s book as an important exposé of Big Tech culture or a hit job by a disgruntled former employee, its hard to escape the sense that Sandbergs public persona was more fantasy than reality. The image of a fabulously wealthy executive and doting mother living her best life every hour of the day was always a bit over the top. There is clearly something unhealthy about the idealized images that we are constantly inundated with, as well as those equally curated versions that so many feel compelled to post on social media. Beyond the obvious psychological toll, the pressure to project constant perfection undermines the gritty, unglamorous work required to perform at a high level. The value of hacking away Were all familiar with the eureka moment from the movies. The hero, when confronted with a seemingly insurmountable challenge, suddenly stops and has a moment of epiphany. He slams his fist on the tablehe’s finally got it. The camera pushes in tight on his determined face as a montage depicting a frenzy of activity plays out, bringing the plan to life. As anybody who is involved with creative work will tell you, thats a myth. Things dont really work that way. Sometimes you get hit with an idea while driving your car or something, and might stop to write down a few notes. But most of the time youre just hacking away, working and reworking ideas, most of which dont amount to much. Kevin Ashton, the tremendously creative engineer who came up with the idea for RFID chips, put it well in his book, How to Fly a Horse: Creation is a long journey, he wrote, where most turns are wrong and most ends are dead. The most important thing creators do is work. The most important thing they dont do is quit. One of the most useful things anybody ever told me about creativity is that you have to let the muse know that youre serious. You have to be there, every day, doing the crap work until you come across something worthwhile. Most people never do that, because crap takes courage. You have to dare to be crap. The power of doing the minimum One of the best ideas Ive ever had came to me at the end of college. I had been a Division I wrestler, so I never had much trouble staying in shape. But now I was embarking on a professional life that I knew would involve a lot of sitting in an office. I had seen friends who went completely to pot after just a few years. The idea I had was to commit to working out five minutes a daywithout fail. Of course, five minutes a day wouldnt keep me in shape, but it would make sure that I showed up, and thats half the battle. I later learned that Jake Tapper has a similar idea about writing. He commits to writing 15 minutes per day, and hes written a number of bestsellers. The truth is that people dont get out of shape because they go to the gym and dont work out hard enough. They get out of shape because things happen in their lives and they dont go for two weeks and that somehow turns into 10 years. The same is true about writing, learning a language, or almost anything else: Do the minimum and the maximum will take care of itself. Of course, in our hyper-optimized theatrical world, we rarely hear that basic truth. Our social media feeds are full of gonzo workouts, wacky diets, and secrets that will unlock a more successful, fulfilling life. But the truth is that while going extreme might feel rewarding for a few weeks or even a few months, in the long run its consistency that matters. So dont fall for internet hype and FOMO. If you want to achieve something meaningful, think about whats the minimum you can commit to and start there. The more you lower the activation energy, the more consistently youll be able to try new things and push the envelope. Sometimes you need to not be productive Like most people, I occasionally get blocked, which is incredibly frustrating. While sometimes my mind seems to be positively buzzing with ideas, other times I either feel that my brain is stuck in molasses or Im fixated on something going on in my life and no new ideas seem to be able to work their way in. In both cases, Ive found that the best way to get over these difficult periods is to not worry about them and do my best to relax and quiet my mind. Thats more difficult than it sounds, because being blocked can be maddening. But sometimes the most productive thing you can do is to recognize when to stop struggling. My friend Lu Ann Cahn wrote a great book about this called I Dare Me. Hitting middle age and feeling stuck in her job as an Emmy-winning TV news anchor, she set out on a mission to do something new every day for a year. What she found was the simple act of doing something differenteven just taking a different route to workrewires and refreshes your brain. So when youre feeling stuck on a project, the best thing to do is often to step away and do something else, at least for a few hours. Meet a friend for coffee, go to the gym, read a book, watch a movie, or do whatever will help you take your mind off of what youre doing. Ive found that once I stop trying to force ideas, they can start flowing again. Learning to muddle through You dont have to go far to fid someone advising you to live your perfect life: from self-help books and TED Talks urging us to find our why to people posting pictures of their spouses and children on social media while praising the perfection and nonstop joy their loved ones bring themand then, strangely enough, announcing their divorce six months later. Compare that to how best-selling author and TV anchor Fareed Zakaria describes his work: Thinking and writing are inextricably intertwined, he says. When I begin to write, I realize that my thoughts are usually a jumble of half-baked, incoherent impulses strung together with gaping logical holes between them. Thats much closer to reality. Whether its writing a book or starting a business, you start off with an idea and that idea is always wrong. Sometimes youre off by a little, and sometimes youre off by a lot, but its always wrong. Your job isn’t to be right, but to embark on a Bayesian process of becoming less wrong over time. Eventually, you get it to the point that it can impact the world. The truth is that the world is a messy place. Marriages are hard. Kids are frustrating. Even stories of incredible success often contain within them tales of heartbreaking desperation. Thats why we need to look at the carefully cultivated images of perfection with a jaded eye, because they will distract us from the necessary struggles required to do something worthwhile. Not all who wander are lost.
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E-Commerce
Amid a historic shutdown, the technology that keeps the government running, has, largely, kept running. Official websites are online. Internal software is mostly working. And security experts continue to monitor potential cyberthreats. But as the 35-day closure stretches on, the situation could grow more dire, several current and former government officials told Fast Company, threatening the systems and teams that help support tax filing, healthcare systems, airports, and a lot more. Without new funding from Congress, government IT offices can, in the short term, keep a number of essential workers in the office and draw on other funding sources, like, for example, earnings from selling services to other federal agencies to stay online. Tech teams often rely on contractors to run their platforms, and those contracts are sometimes paid out in advance, providing an extra source of support. (Those resources vary, depending on the agency.) But such stopgaps will last only so long, experts warned. And as the shutdown drags on, desperately needed upgrades to federal tech systems will fall behind, making them a lot harder to run. Tech workers will start looking for jobs in the private sector instead. Keep in mind that the U.S. government already has a hard time managing its tech. Federal agencies are running behind on upgrading websites, improving software, and providing experiences to online users that are not frustratingly horrible. The government is also chronically short on technology workers, including tens of thousands of cybersecurity professionals. Many of the people who leave the private sector to work on government technology take a pay cut, often under the assumption that, at the very least, theyll have better job security in the public sector. Now the shutdown is slowing down government tech projects and making the prospect of taking a federal job even less appealing. Thats a major threat to the stated goals of the Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency, which include attracting technology talent, improving government software, and increasing the U.S. governments use of AI. Consistent operations are crucial for maintaining a stable and effective workforce across all industries, not just the federal government, Jenny Mattingley from the Partnership for Public Service told Fast Company. When employees face financial uncertainty from delayed paychecks during government shutdownswhich is layered on top of substantial workforce cuts this yearit undermines workplace morale and impedes their ability to perform effectively. She added, These factors collectively foster conditions that make it difficult to attract and keep skilled technology professionals, which hinders technological advancement and modernization efforts in government. How shutdowns impact government tech offices Like elsewhere in government during a shutdown, federal IT offices have to select a handful of workers who are considered essential to keep software running, one current government official told Fast Company. These include people who focus on keeping applications operational and secure. But this approach has flaws, since its relatively easy for a federal agency to lose some critical employees to furlough status while maintaining contractors who are assigned only to less essential tasks. Agencies will sometimes keep a list of employee furlough codes and funding sources, which outline whether theyre exempt from a shutdown or supported by another funding source, another government tech official explained. There might also be a separate list of people who are then recalled from furlough to work without pay, though theyre immediately exempt. The administration seems to be exempting more people from the shutdown than usual in order to blunt the impact of the government closure, the official told Fast Company. Agencies do try to anticipate government shutdowns and plans, a former Treasury official said. Federal agencies dont receive all their funding from congressional appropriations, and sometimes have other funds they can use to keep IT offices open. But as the shutdown drags on, agencies have to prepare for more drastic action. About 25 days into the last government shutdown, the Treasury IT office had begun considering turning off technology platforms used across its employee base, the official said. Projects designed to modernize aging systems, or introduce new technology, are also impacted. A former chief information officer of a federal agency told Fast Company that during the last two government shutdowns, employees focused on core operations, infrastructure, and other support were exempted from the shutdown. But anyone working on new technology development was furloughed. The current shutdown is compounding delays on critical modernization efforts and creating serious impacts that will only grow, the source said. Similarly, a tech official at the State Department said that while they expect the agency to be okaygiven the agencys dependence on contractorsa shutdown can be brutal when there are problems with an ancient government app. There are also latent cybersecurity concerns. Theoretically, the government retains the ability to pull employees for an all hands on deck situation, one official said. But there can still be risks. For instance, during this shutdown, this officials team learned of a vulnerability that had to be patched immediately. While the team implemented the fix, it couldnt communicate with furloughed IT staff who could explain how the update might impact other agency systems. On the one hand, workers are not checking their emails or, more generally, performing government activities, which means theyre less likely to fall victim to phishing attempts, sources told Fast Company. On the other, the shutdown could make the federal government a bigger target. Not paying people could also be a counterintelligence risk, since it becomes easier to offer employees money for information, warned David Nesting, a former White House modernization expert. Shutdown could draw tech workers away Government technology workers, including those who focus on IT, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence, have typically been paid less than what they would otherwise make in the private sector. The highest-level positions denoted on the General Schedule, the main pay guidance for federal workers, have a base of around $162,000; top tech salaries can be several mutiples of that. Federal agencies have also put a strong emphasis on requiring employees to come back to the office. Still, government roles have always had one big advantage: job security. But shutdowns damage the governments reputation as a stable workplace. Just like in the private sector, the most experienced and capable experts are the ones who can find work elsewhere first, Nesting said. There is absolutely a risk that cybersecurity workers will decide, out of necessity, or just getting fed up with the way theyre being treated, that now is the right time for them to consider a career move, Nesting said. This creates a huge challenge for agencies trying to retain cybersecurity talent and persuade potential new hires that this wont happen to them, too, in a year. Kshemendra Paul, a former government tech oficial and public administration expert, speaking in his personal capacity, told Fast Company that the past few administrations have seen a deterioration of the federal budget process, which requires both houses of Congress and the president coming together to agree to fund government activity, making shutdowns more likely. Each shutdown further damages employee confidence. Shutdowns are damaging morale. It increases cynicism, it increases skepticism of change. It makes change initiatives that are aimed at improving cybersecurity, improving information sharing, improving citizen experience, better managing government resources, reducing fraud and waste . . . so much harder, Paul said. They’re already hard to begin with in the government, but then it’s like you are working in a pool of molasses.
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E-Commerce
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