Work is a Verb The weekly newsletter by Remote work news and advice for landing your next remote role. Jim Coughlin Founder, Remotivated # 52 This week The underrated luxury of finishing a thought You've answered every message, helped a colleague find something and made it through two calls. Now you can get back to the thing you were working on this morning. First, you just have to remember what you were thinking. The questions were quick. Getting back into the problem takes a little longer....
3 days ago • 3 min read
Work is a Verb The weekly newsletter by Remote work news and advice for landing your next remote role. Jim Coughlin Founder, Remotivated # 51 A commute to the same Zoom call You make the commute, swipe your badge and find a desk. Then you put on headphones because the person you're meeting is in another office and the person beside you is on a different call. The company gets to count you as back in the office. Your team still meets on a screen. In a new paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of...
10 days ago • 3 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by The pile is at the famous names. The better job often isn't. Last month Hilton told Fortune that about 12,000 people applied for 72 internships this year. Its chief human resources officer, Laura Fuentes, was candid about what that does to the people on the other end: "[With] the volume that our recruiters are receiving, it's nearly impossible to respond and manage that pipeline." About ten days later, the National Federation of Independent Business published...
25 days ago • 4 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by Flexibility shouldn't be a one-way street Their employer trusts them to get work done on the road, unsupervised, through long weeks and delayed flights. However, that trust stops just before they open their front door. Between work trips, office attendance is required. That's the situation a real Work is a Verb reader described in a reply to my welcome email. They asked to stay anonymous. Between trips, they want a little room to recover the time that work...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by "Show Me, Don't Tell Me." Last Friday I spoke at the Remote Rebellion virtual job fair. The speaker right before me was a recruiter, and near the end of her talk she said this: Don't tell me you use AI. Show me a workflow that you built... Don't just tell me you're a fast learner, tell me about the things that you didn't know six months ago that you know today. The talk I was about to give made the same argument from the other side of the table. We had never...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by Uber's Office Rule Did Not Change. Its Exemptions Did. On September 2, Uber told about 10 percent of its roughly 34,000 employees that their jobs were gone. In the same memo, they told the people who were left where they would be living. Global teams move to New York and San Francisco. Regional teams go to designated regional hubs, local teams to country hubs, tech teams to tech hubs. Managers sit with their reports "wherever possible, particularly for...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by The jobs exist. The candidates exist. The match is failing. Heat Geek installs heat pumps. This summer it opened eight roles, enough to grow its headcount by more than a quarter, and its chief operating officer told the Financial Times the entry-level jobs needed to be “filled yesterday.” The graduates she wanted were, in the FT’s words, nowhere to be seen. “We know exactly what we want,” Holly Foster said. “The struggle is communicating that … what we’re...
2 months ago • 5 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by Cut First, Measure Later In early June, Meta's chief technology officer shared some surprising numbers on the company's internal processes. Changes to the software platforms and infrastructure employees use inside Meta were up 220% year over year. Changes that actually resulted in new or upgraded features reaching Facebook and Instagram users were up only 36%. Meanwhile, major technical and security incidents—including service disruptions and possible data...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by The 48-Hour Search Monday morning: coffee, a clean spreadsheet, and a weekend's worth of saved postings. By Wednesday night, every open tab has your name on it. For two days, every click moves the search forward. Then the batch is submitted, and the next move on every application belongs to an employer. In the December 2025 revision of their NBER working paper "Application Flows", economists Steven J. Davis and Brenda Samaniego de la Parra analyzed 125 million...
3 months ago • 3 min read