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Get the most recent info and news about Chatty Kids on HackerNoon, where 10k+ technologists publish stories for 4M+ monthly readers.

Chatty Kids is an educational web platform built to help children learn to read (and speak) English. It works on mobile, tablet and computer. We have the world’s largest online levelled book library for children with global copyright from Pearson Education and Oxford University Press. We monitor a child's progress by recording them reading books; we collect data, analyse and deliver real teacher feedback. Australian owned and built on new technology that integrates content, activities, teacher management, machine learning and natural language processing. A global corporate structure with entities in Hong Kong and China with trademarks in place. Our Chinese platform is live on a Chinese domain www.chattykids.cn hosted in China on Aliyun with our partner, Alibaba. Schools all over the world use Chatty Kids to teach their students to read and speak English. Teachers can quickly configure their class and create structured courses to meet curriculum objectives. Students access the educational content at home or on the classroom, parents connect to the student account and access real-time reporting tracking their child’s progress.

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Do you also want to learn NLP as Quick as Possible ? Perhaps you are here because you also want to learn natural language processing as quickly as possible, like me. Let’s start. The first thing we need is to install some dependency 1. Python >3.7 https://www.python.org/downloads/ 2. Download an IDE or install Jupyter notebook To install Jupyter notebook, just open your cmd(terminal) and type pip install jupyter-notebook after that type jupyter notebook to run it then you can see that your notebook is open at http://127.0.0.1:8888/ token . 3. Install packages pip install nltk : It is a python library that can we used to perform all the NLP tasks(stemming, lemmatization, etc..) NLTK In this blog, we are going to learn about Tokenization Stopwords Stemming Lemmatizer WordNet Part of speech tagging Bag of Words Before learning anything let’s first understand NLP. Natural Language refers to the way we humans communicate with each other and processing is basically formatting the data in an understandable form. So we can say that NLP (Natural Language Processing) is a way that helps computers to communicate with humans in their own language. It is one of the broadest fields in research because there is a huge amount of data out there and from that data, a big amount of data is text data. So when there is so much data available so we need some technique through which we can process the data and retrieve some useful information from it. Now, we have an understanding of what is NLP, let’s start understanding each topic one by one. 1. Tokenization Tokenization is the process of dividing the whole text into tokens. It is mainly of two types: Word Tokenizer (separated by words) Sentence Tokenizer (separated by sentence) nltk nltk.tokenize sent_tokenize,word_tokenize
example_text = print(sent_tokenize(example_text))
print(word_tokenize(example_text)) import from import "Hello there, how are you doing today? The weather is great today. The sky is blue. python is awsome" In the above code, we are importing nltk. In the second line, we are importing our tokenizers library , then to use the tokenizer on a text we just need to pass the text as a parameter in the tokenizer. sent_tokenize, word_tokenizfrom nltk.tokenize The output will look something like this: [ , , , ] [ , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ] ##sent_tokenize (Separated by sentence) 'Hello there, how are you doing today?' 'The weather is great today.' 'The sky is blue.' 'python is awsome' ##word_tokenize (Separated by words) 'Hello' 'there' ',' 'how' 'are' 'you' 'doing' 'today' '?' 'The' 'weather' 'is' 'great' 'today' '.' 'The' 'sky' 'is' 'blue' '.' 'python' 'is' 'awsome' 2. Stopwords In general, stopwords are the words in any language which does not add much meaning to a sentence. In NLP, stopwords are those words which are not important in analyzing the data. Example: he, she, hi, etc. Our main task is to remove all the stopwords for the text to do any further processing. There are a total of 179 stopwords in English, using NLTK we can see all the stopwords in English. We Just need to import from the library . stopwords nltk.corpus nltk.corpus stopwords
print(stopwords.words( )) [ , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ] from import 'english' ###################### ######OUTPUT########## ###################### 'i' 'me' 'my' 'myself' 'we' 'our' 'ours' 'ourselves' 'you' "you're" "you've" "you'll" "you'd" 'your' 'yours' 'yourself' 'yourselves' 'he' 'him' 'his' 'himself' 'she' "she's" 'her' 'hers' 'herself' 'it' "it's" 'its' 'itself' 'they' 'them' 'their' 'theirs' 'themselves' 'what' 'which' 'who' 'whom' 'this' 'that' "that'll" 'these' 'those' 'am' 'is' 'are' 'was' 'were' 'be' 'been' 'being' 'have' 'has' 'had' 'having' 'do' 'does' 'did' 'doing' 'a' 'an' 'the' 'and' 'but' 'if' 'or' 'because' 'as' 'until' 'while' 'of' 'at' 'by' 'for' 'with' 'about' 'against' 'between' 'into' 'through' 'during' 'before' 'after' 'above' 'below' 'to' 'from' 'up' 'down' 'in' 'out' 'on' 'off' 'over' 'under' 'again' 'further' 'then' 'once' 'here' 'there' 'when' 'where' 'why' 'how' 'all' 'any' 'both' 'each' 'few' 'more' 'most' 'other' 'some' 'such' 'no' 'nor' 'not' 'only' 'own' 'same' 'so' 'than' 'too' 'very' 's' 't' 'can' 'will' 'just' 'don' "don't" 'should' "should've" 'now' 'd' 'll' 'm' 'o' 're' 've' 'y' 'ain' 'aren' "aren't" 'couldn' "couldn't" 'didn' "didn't" 'doesn' "doesn't" 'hadn' "hadn't" 'hasn' "hasn't" 'haven' "haven't" 'isn' "isn't" 'ma' 'mightn' "mightn't" 'mustn' "mustn't" 'needn' "needn't" 'shan' "shan't" 'shouldn' "shouldn't" 'wasn' "wasn't" 'weren' "weren't" 'won' "won't" 'wouldn' "wouldn't" To remove Stopwords for a particular text. nltk.corpus stopwords
text = text = word_tokenize(text)
text_with_no_stopwords = [word word text word not stopwords.words( )]
text_with_no_stopwords
##########OUTPUT##########
[ , , , , ] from import 'he is a good boy. he is very good in coding' for in if in 'english' 'good' 'boy' '.' 'good' 'coding' 3. Stemming is the process of reducing a word to its word stem that affixes to suffixes and prefixes or to the roots of words known as a lemma. In simple words, we can say that stemming is the process of removing plural and adjectives from the word. Stemming : Example loved → love, learning →learn In python, we can implement stemming by using . we can import it from the library PorterStemmer nltk.stem One thing to remember from Stemming is that it works best with single words. nltk.stem PorterStemmer
ps = PorterStemmer() example_words = [ , , , ] w example_words:
    print(ps.stem(w)) earn
earn
earn
earn
Here we can see that earning,earned earns are stem to there lemma root word earn. from import ## Creating an object for porterstemmer 'earn' "earning" "earned" "earns" ##Example words for in ##Using ps object stemming the word ##########OUTPUT########## and or 4. Lemmatizing usually refers to doing things properly with the use of vocabulary and morphological analysis of words, normally aiming to remove inflectional endings only and to return the base or dictionary form of a word, which is known as the lemma. Lemmatization In simple words lemmatization does the same work as stemming, the difference is that lemmatization returns a meaningful word. Example: Stemming histori history → Lemmatizing → history history It is Mostly used when designing chatbots, Q&A bots, text prediction, etc. nltk.stem WordNetLemmatizer
lemmatizer = WordNetLemmatizer() example_words = [ , , ] w example_words:
    print(lemmatizer.lemmatize(w)) ----Lemmatizer-----
history
formality
change
-----Stemming------
histori
formal
chang from import ## Create object for lemmatizer 'history' 'formality' 'changes' for in #########OUTPUT############ 5. WordNet WordNet is the lexical database i.e. dictionary for the English language, specifically designed for natural language processing. We can use wordnet for finding and synonyms antonyms. In python, we can import wordnet from . nltk.corpus Code For Finding Synonym and antonym for a given word. nltk.corpus wordnet
synonyms = [] antonyms =[] syn wordnet.synsets( ): i syn.lemmas(): synonyms.append(i.name()) i.antonyms():
            antonyms.append(i.antonyms()[ ].name()) print(set(synonyms)) print(set(antonyms)) { , , , }
{ } from import ## Creaing an empty list for all the synonyms ## Creaing an empty list for all the antonyms for in "happy" ## Giving word for in ## Finding the lemma,matching ## appending all the synonyms if 0 ## antonyms ## Converting them into set for unique values #########OUTPUT########## 'felicitous' 'well-chosen' 'happy' 'glad' 'unhappy' 6. Part of Speech Tagging It is a process of converting a sentence to forms — a list of words, a list of tuples (where each tuple is having a form ). The tag in the case is a part-of-speech tag and signifies whether the word is a noun, adjective, verb, and so on. (word, tag) Part of Speech Tag List CC coordinating conjunction
 CD cardinal digit
 DT determiner
 EX existential there (like: “there ” … think of it like “there”)
 FW foreign word
 IN preposition/subordinating conjunction
 JJ adjective ‘big’
 JJR adjective, comparative ‘bigger’
 JJS adjective, superlative ‘biggest’
 LS list marker )
 MD modal could, will
 NN noun, singular ‘desk’
 NNS noun plural ‘desks’
 NNP proper noun, singular ‘Harrison’
 NNPS proper noun, plural ‘Americans’
 PDT predeterminer ‘all the kids’
 POS possessive ending parent’s
 PRP personal pronoun I, he, she
 PRP possessive pronoun my, his, hers
 RB adverb very, silently,
 RBR adverb, comparative better
 RBS adverb, superlative best
 RP particle give up
 TO to go ‘to’ the store.
 UH interjection errrrrrrrm
 VB verb, base form take
 VBD verb, past tense took
 VBG verb, gerund/present participle taking
 VBN verb, past participle taken
 VBP verb, sing. present, non d take
 VBZ verb, rd person sing. present takes
 WDT wh-determiner which
 WP wh-pronoun who, what
 WP possessive wh-pronoun whose
 WRB wh-abverb where, when is 1 -3 3 In python, we can do pos tagging using nltk.pos_tag nltk
nltk.download( )
sample_text = nltk.tokenize word_tokenize
words = word_tokenize(sample_text)
print(nltk.pos_tag(words)) [( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , ), ( , )] import 'averaged_perceptron_tagger' '''
An sincerity so extremity he additions. Her yet there truth merit. Mrs all projecting favourable now unpleasing. Son law garden chatty temper. Oh children provided to mr elegance marriage strongly. Off can admiration prosperous now devonshire diminution law.
''' from import ################OUTPUT############ 'An' 'DT' 'sincerity' 'NN' 'so' 'RB' 'extremity' 'NN' 'he' 'PRP' 'additions' 'VBZ' '.' '.' 'Her' 'PRP$' 'yet' 'RB' 'there' 'EX' 'truth' 'NN' 'merit' 'NN' '.' '.' 'Mrs' 'NNP' 'all' 'DT' 'projecting' 'VBG' 'favourable' 'JJ' 'now' 'RB' 'unpleasing' 'VBG' '.' '.' 'Son' 'NNP' 'law' 'NN' 'garden' 'NN' 'chatty' 'JJ' 'temper' 'NN' '.' '.' 'Oh' 'UH' 'children' 'NNS' 'provided' 'VBD' 'to' 'TO' 'mr' 'VB' 'elegance' 'NN' 'marriage' 'NN' 'strongly' 'RB' '.' '.' 'Off' 'CC' 'can' 'MD' 'admiration' 'VB' 'prosperous' 'JJ' 'now' 'RB' 'devonshire' 'VBP' 'diminution' 'NN' 'law' 'NN' '.' '.' 7. Bag of words Till now we have learned about tokenizing, stemming, and lemmatizing. All of these are the part of the text cleaning, now after cleaning the text we need to convert the text into some kind of numerical representation called so that we can feed the data to a machine learning model for further processing. vectors For converting the data into vectors we make use of some predefined libraries in python. Let’s see how vector representation works. sent1 = he a good boy
sent2 = she a good girl
sent3 = boy girl are good 
        |
        |
  After removal of stopwords , lematization stemming
sent1 = good boy
sent2 = good girl
sent3 = boy girl good  
        | |     calculating the occurrence of each word
word  frequency
good boy girl | |    according to their occurrence the sentence
         | f1  f2   f3
        girl good boy   
sent1 sent2 sent3 is is and or ### Now we will calculate the frequency for each word by 3 2 2 ## Then according to their occurrence we assign o or 1 in ## 1 for present and 0 fot not present 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 ### After this we pass the vector form to machine learning model The above process can be done using a CountVectorizer in python, we can import the same from sklearn.feature_extraction.text. CODE to implement CountVectorizer In python pandas pd
sent = pd.DataFrame([ , , ],columns=[ ])
corpus = [] i range( , ):
    words = sent[ ][i]
    words  = word_tokenize(words)
    texts = [lemmatizer.lemmatize(word) word words word set(stopwords.words( ))]
    text = .join(texts)
    corpus.append(text)
print(corpus) sklearn.feature_extraction.text CountVectorizer
cv = CountVectorizer() X = cv.fit_transform(corpus).toarray()
X [ , , ]
array([[ , , ],
       [ , , ],
       [ , , ]], dtype=int64) import as 'he is a good boy' 'she is a good girl' 'boy and girl are good' 'text' for in 0 3 'text' for in if not in 'english' ' ' #### Cleaned Data from import ## Creating Object for CountVectorizer ## Vectorize Form ############OUTPUT############## 'good boy' 'good girl' 'boy girl good' 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 Congratulations, Now you know the basics of NLP. Like👋 & Don’t Forgot to share your views via Community.

The Basics Of Natural Language Processing in 10 Minutes

In software engineering, remote working makes a lot of sense since, most of the time, you only need a computer and an internet connection to perform your duties. So there are fewer reasons to force people to sit in a predefined office everyday. Consequently, it has become an important feature of a lot of IT jobs, even in Belgium, while it is definitely not the most forward looking job market. That said, most of the time, the remote working offer only apply to a part of the week (1 or 2 days a week seems to be the most frequent proposition here). Nevertheless, it definitely is getting a hold in most companies. There is a lot of good to say about remote working, and I see a lot of rabid defence of the practice. I agree with most of it. That said, I have been working remotely for a little more than 5 years now, and I now must acknowledge that it does not come without stress. This might come as a surprise for some, but in the end, I think that remote working has taken some toll on me over the last two years, especially when I went almost fully remote for a year, from June 2016 to June 2017. So, what can make remote working stressful? Dehumanisation If you are working remotely, communication tends to stick to structured channels: the chats, the daily standup, maybe a few global meeting (retrospective, company status) every other week, Jira for the tasks and bug reports and lots and lots of emails. This works well to accomplish structured tasks, but you might definitely feel disconnected from the company sometimes. The fact that most of this communication happens in written form, or in front of groups makes them unsuitable for small talk or more informal information. This can hamper your work, as just chatting about the atmosphere at work can deliver very important information about the smooth progress of projects, but most importantly, it can prevent you to feel as part of a community. Also, written exchanges are more prone to misinterpretation, even with people you know very well. Not to mention that, if you already spend your day typing on a keyboard to accomplish your technical programming tasks, it might become annoying to have your communication done in written form too: you might end up feeling like a text processing machine. So, after some time working remotely, it happened multiple times to me to miss the coffee chats, previously felt as unproductive wastes of time. I felt detached from the team, especially when the teams I worked with were made of multiple people working in the same office/place, and seeming to have fun. Interruptions and multitasking When working remotely as a developer, the chat (usually Slack or Hipchat) quickly becomes your lifeline to the company: that is the way most people will try to contact you. And to me, being responsive on the chat accomplishes the same as being on time at work in an office: it gives an image of reliability. It also implies that if you do not really want to give the impression that you are taking a lot of breaks, you might find yourself checking your notifications a lot while taking lunch for example, while if people had seen you working the whole morning, or if you were just talking with colleagues at that point, you would not feel the need to be so responsive. I actually often realized that other colleagues working remotely were criticized because they were not answering very quickly on the chat. A part of the problem is that on a chat, people do not see you physically, so they cannot really estimate if you are at a good moment to be interrupted. So, you are interrupted a lot, and if you are a bit like me, you feel forced to answer quickly. So, you interrupt your work a lot. And in case you do not know it: interruptions are loathed by programmers, since it is really bad for their productivity as it breaks their focus. The other problem with this remote chat setup is that people do not know if you are already speaking with somebody else. I cannot count the number of times where I have been juggling three different conversations at the same time, which, to me, can become stressful, especially when I do have tasks to finish by the end of the day. Also, I must mention that there are also often “leisure” chats, created to host non-work stuff (usually, a lot of memes) that can become very, very chatty. At least, I feel that it is really sane to mute these chats most of the time, but when you come back, catching on everything that was said can be a daunting task, while it might be your only opportunity to have some “office spirit” that you are missing by being a remote worker. Overworking There are two types of obligations you get when you are taking a job: , where you commit to give a certain result by a given date. Typically, for a developer, accomplishing a sprint with a given set of bugs/features to develop. Obligations of results where you mainly commit to spend some of your time everyday on your work, and you just give the results you managed to produce over that time. Obligations of means, I am not naive, and I know that in the end, in software engineering, most jobs are really about results (you get fired in the end if you produce nothing), and not means, but in remote working, since people are not seeing you work, you might feel more obliged to show results everyday, even if it forces you to work way past 8 hours a day. As an example, I cannot count the number of times where a configuration problem or a customer call took me a few hours of my day, but I still felt forced to finish the task I committed to do on that day, so that nobody could assume that I was slacking off instead of working. I feel that if people had seen me in front of my computer all day, I would have felt more relaxed about deciding to finish the task the next days. will This leads to two things for me: being really appreciated for the reliability of my output, and … being seriously overworked. According to Jason Fried from Basecamp, this is the true challenge of managing remote workers: . people who work too hard In the end, this all amounts for me to the question of trust: your employer trusted you a lot, allowing you to work on your own terms , and in exchange, I have always felt compelled to actually work a lot more than if I was in an office. Being a stay at home dad When you spend a good part of your time at home, your family sees you as more available than they should. Even if you have places dedicated to work that should be forbidden to your kids, it is still tempting to come ask you “just a little something”. Especially for kids, it is hard to compartimentalize their home. Actually, it is hard for me too … This can make video calls a bit stressing, when you are talking with a customer for example, and your kids end up just appearing behind you on video. Here is the most well known example of this: I also know some people have problems resisting the need to perform home duties, like cleaning the kitchen, for example. This has never been too much an issue for me, but on the other hand, this created tension with my wife from time to time, since it was difficult for her to understand how I could have left a dirty dish the whole day on the dining room table while I was actually at home. Answer: I was working and avoiding interruptions… Loneliness. Working at home can mean a lot of loneliness. I do enjoy being alone quite a lot, but even for me, after two weeks of only seeing colleagues through my screen, and then my family at night, I end up feeling quite sad. I miss feeling integrated in a community of pairs. Social networks might help you fight that loneliness a little, but on the other hand, pausing only with social networks is not different enough physically from working on your computer. Moreover, it is also well known that spending more time on social networks rather tends to make you . less happy than the opposite In the end, I really started to hate being alone most of the time and have felt it to be quite bad for my mental health and my mood. This is a phenomenon. well documented One of the most recommended way to fight this is to work in . To me, they are a mixed bag: they cost some good money (that your employer might agree to pay, or not), and often ask for commitment (you usually need to register for at least a month). They can create social link (and for me, they created a lot of work opportunity, especially the B ), but at the risk of feeling a bit too much like a vacation camp, with activities everyday (cooking, massages, meet ups, …), to force people to socialise. coworking spaces etacowork Notice that I have been to coworking spaces where there was no socialisation, and gave up rather quickly, since it seemed rather pointless to go somewhere to avoid loneliness, and then not talk to anybody all day. So, I am ambiguous on the subject of forced socialisation. Another problem with coworking spaces is that you might introduce long commute times in your life again, then work with headphones all day to avoid being distracted, barely taking a break because you lost time commuting, and feeling awkward for not having spoken with anybody while being there for the community. Not to mention that video calls are more difficult to do in these settings, since you usually lack a place to be alone, there is always a bit of noise, and people might be annoyed by your call. Moreover, sometimes, there are things that you do not want to say in front of strangers… Stress to decide where you work everyday. This might be just me, but not knowing where I will be working everyday, and having to think about which hardware I need to take with me (example: keyboards, DVI adapters, chargers) has led to a lot of problems, by removing the predictability of being all the time in the same office. Also, notice that I think that working in coffee shops is a bad idea, at least for full days. There is usually too much noise, and I do not like feeling obligated to take something to eat/drink every hour (your mileage may vary), and the chairs are bad for your back… . You never leave “work” When you work remotely, you do not leave your working place at night. On top of that, if you work with people in different timezones, you might end up communicating a lot with people while your day is already over (I did that for months when working with people based in New York or SF). It often makes a lot of sense, since otherwise, you might have too few time to communicate with your team, and this can really hamper the progress of a project, but it means that there is no time in the day free of working concerns, which again, is bad for your mental health over the long run. Also, working at home does not leave you time to cool off while coming back home from work. For me, the ideal duration of a commute is 15 to 20 minutes. That leaves you some time to walk, and so, do at least a bit of physical exercise, and to change your thoughts a little bit. There were a lot of evenings where I ended up going from a video meeting to a family dinner in 30 seconds, and I must says that it is not always easy to give a good attention to my kids in such occasions. Career risk Working remotely makes you less visible in your company. If you intend to have more responsibility in your job over time, this can end up being a problem. I worked for example for a company where I felt that people “in the office” were preferred for promotions. So, you have to consider that too when working remotely. On a more humorous note, you have to consider than working in your sweat pants for years, unshaved and without too much time constraints might make you unfit to go back to work in an office. You might suffer from some degradation of your social skills: See the whole comic about working at home here: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/working_home Conclusion Globally, I have enjoyed working remotely over the last few years, and it has been a boon to my family and my wife while my kids were small. I do think it made possible for my wife and me to pursue our careers without too much hassle, as I was more available to take care of the kids when they were sick, which happens a lot in the infancy years. This flexibility came to me at the price of catching up on work in the evenings and weekends, but it was still very much appreciated. Remote working also allowed me to join teams of great quality that I would not have found in my local job market and to work on ambitious projects. So, all in all, I am still a great fan. On the other hand, after more than 5 years of remote working, I have to say that it really took a toll on my mental comfort sometimes, and that had some unwanted impact on my family relationships, mainly irritability on my side. Before you experience it, it might seem as the perfect solution for your life, but as I tried to explain, there are a lots of unforeseen ways in which it can create stress. To summarize, the main problem for me is to feel like a text processing machine, receiving mails, Jira tickets and chat messages as input and writing code as output, without the human interactions needed to make it more meaningful. I do not like becoming a kind of a . remote developer black box

The Stress of Remote Working

Do you feel like you’ve exhausted and struck out with the entire available employee pool in Silicon Valley and still have vacant positions at your startup? Maybe you can’t find someone to fill the exact need you have, or maybe the wage demands are impossible for you to meet at this point in your startup. Of course, you’d love to pay your employees what they want, but that’s not always possible in the early stages of your company. What do you do when you’ve run out of local options? If you’re in this position, it’s time to expand your talent search and consider hiring remote workers. But how to broaden your scope? CLICK TO TWEET A startup I recently worked with had a serious challenge that many companies, new and established, face. They were having a difficult time finding quality employees with experience and talent that fit into their payroll budget. In Silicon Valley — as in every other Tech hub around the globe, affordable talent is hard to come by, especially for startups. The founders couldn’t sacrifice anyone else’s income, and they also didn’t want to end up with sub-par employees just to fit into their budget. As a solution, I suggested that they “act” outside of the box by decentralizing the team. In this case, the box was perceived geographic restraints. Instead, they investigated hiring remote workers to fill their vacancies. Many jobs, especially in the tech industry, don’t really need workers to be in an office space to fulfill the duties. While the startup was worried about managing remote employees, they decided to take the plunge. What they found was a larger talent pool at a more affordable price, which was exactly what they needed to continue moving forward with their startup. They were delighted to discover that an engineer from Wisconsin or a designer from Texas was just as talented as the candidates they were considering in Silicon Valley. With their positions filled, they were able to make excellent progress moving forward towards success with their startup. Why Remote Workers Love Joining (Silicon Valley) Startups There are many more benefits than what’s listed, but these are some of the more compelling reasons why you should hire remote workers. 1. They can’t move to you or away from you Many people are tied down by a mortgage, kids in school, or a spouse with a great job. They would love to move to Silicon Valley and work for you, but they can’t. However, by hiring remotely, you are opening up your search to hundreds of people who have great experience that you might have missed out on just because of where they live. An in-office employee moving away has a big impact on both your work culture and your productivity. There are so many reasons why someone would leave a job, and many of them have to do with geographic location. You won’t lose anyone due to needing to be closer to family, leaving because their spouse got transferred or is attending school somewhere, or not being able to afford living in Silicon Valley anymore. When a remote worker moves, the most you need to sacrifice is maybe a few days of vacation to make the move. Otherwise, since they can work from anywhere, you can rely on them as permanent employees. 2. There are plenty of fish in the sea For every one employee who is in your location and could work for your, there are at least 100 more who are not. Restricting your accessible talent pool to your geographic area removes hundreds of quality workers from your search. If you’re creating a tech startup in an area that isn’t tech-centric, hiring remotely would allow you to find developers, coders, or engineers in places like San Francisco and Boston. You can even make your search worldwide to the enormous pool of talented workers from anywhere like the Philippines or France. 3. Remote workers are more productive You might be inclined to think that remote workers would spend less time worker than their in-office counterparts, but the opposite is actually true. In fact, in a recent survey by Global Workplace Analytics, 53% of remote workers reported that they were likely to work overtime, compared to only 28% of in-office employees. With the flexible hours and no commute that remote working allows, it’s easy to see how they wouldn’t mind working an extra hour or two every day. Offices are full of distractions. From impromptu meetings to chatty colleagues, there is plenty happening that can take you away from your work. At home, your workers can focus on their tasks completely uninterrupted. Additionally, office hours are typically set from nine to five, and not everyone is at their most productive during that time. You might have employees that get the most done when everyone else is asleep, or like to bang out their tasks before the sun comes up. Additionally, office workers often equate being at the office as working. It’s impossible to know how many hours your employees are actually working while they are at work, so you need to gauge productivity by what is getting done. Remote workers can’t fool themselves into thinking that they are “working” by just sitting at their home computer, so they tend to be more productive during their work hours. 4. Communication improves When you first start out, the few employees you have know everything. As you grow, it’s impossible to keep that up without top-notch communication, and you can’t rely on overheard conversations of water cooler chats to spread information. You have to work with different channels like Google hangouts, Slack and other type of communication and collaboration platforms to stay in touch. 5. Find more qualified workers Restricting your search to one area or demanding new hires to relocate can dramatically narrow your results. By hiring remote employees, you broaden the talent pool and include a larger number of qualified workers in your search. As an added bonus, remote workers tend to be happier than in-office workers, which can translate into better results. 6. Remote workers save you money As a startup, one of your biggest concerns is budget, and replacing an employee is a cost that you might not be able to handle. It is estimated that an employee making $50,000 per year will cost you 20% of the salary to replace. If any of your positions require high levels of training or education, the turnover cost will be even higher. Remote work can be used as a perk to retain your best workers and avoid having to pay to replace in-office workers. Recruiting new employees can cost you $7000 on average, or possibly more if you use a recruiter. That’s a big chunk of change for startups, and you might not even be happy with who the recruitment agency selects for you. The time it takes to hire someone averages 10 to 12 weeks from job posting to an accepted offer. All of that downtime means there is either no productivity or the job is being diverted to someone else, which is going to cost you money, too. Not having to rent a big office space allows you to save money as well. In fact, a recent study found that switching to telecommuting full time could save your business $10,000 per employee per year in real estate costs. For a startup, that is a huge savings. Utilizing remote workers helps you avoid expenses that on-location working requires like office chairs, office supplies, janitorial services, and utilities. Finally, remote workers are less likely to call in sick or miss work due to inclement weather. Unscheduled absences like these can cost your startup up to $1800 per employee per year. 7. Scale as you grow What happens when you outgrow your current workspace? Moving an in-house team every year or so is expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. With a remote team, you’ll never have to move offices, and your employees can function in a convenient way. CLICK TO TWEET Things to consider before going remote Remote work has plenty of benefits, but there are a small number of challenges to consider, too. 1. Your management style will need to adjust Managing a team of professionals in different locations is not the same a managing an in-house team. You’ll want to make it a point to reach out to each of your remote workers on a regular basis and make an extra effort to stay connected to them so they feel like they are part of the company’s culture. Investing time in your remote workers will make them feel like they are truly part of the team, and they are likely to stay loyal to you, too. You will want to be as transparent with your remote workers as you are with your in-house ones, and give them the same access to information as everyone else. There are different tools like Dropbox and Gdrive that allow you to share information easily. 2. Not everyone is cut out for remote work Not everyone will find the freedom of remote work a way to become more productive. The ability to hire the right people for remote work is key. Certain personality traits and values align well with remote work, and you should look for those things. People who are self-motivated, organized, good and managing time and priorities, and can work independently are ideal candidates for remote work. Since much of the communication done with remote workers is via chat or email, you’ll want them to be good writers. A bad writer can turn a short chat into a long one, which cuts into valuable time and decreases productivity. Find some way to test writing skills in the interview process to weed out the applicants who can’t write clearly and concisely about complex issues. If you are interviewing someone who has not worked remotely before, be sure to thoroughly cover all of the concerns, questions, and possible issues in the interview so there are no surprises once they start working. 3. Hiring will still take some work Although you’re increasing the talent pool you have to work with, it still might take some effort to attract qualified applicants. You may need to spend some time actively recruiting people to apply for positions with you. To find qualified workers, go to job boards where your ideal candidates are likely spending their time. Posting on the big sites like Monster or CareerBuilder for a specific and highly-skilled position isn’t a good idea. AngelList is a good resource for startups to use to find remote workers, and other resources are WeWorkRemotely, Dribbble, and SupportOps. Tools for remote workers and employers In addition to the job boards mentioned above, popular services like Freelancer.com, PeoplePerHour, and Upwork allow startups to find affordable remote workers to complete small tasks or work on specific projects. Sophisticated freelancer management systems are emerging for startups to make it easier to manage remote workers. These systems help create a digital bridge between full-time employees and remote workers to help everyone stay integrated and connected. For communication, things like HipChat, Grape, Google Hangouts and Skype for Business allows you to make face-to-face contact with your remote workers on a regular basis. Having a great human resources information system and some type of shared drive is invaluable with remote employees. Software that allows simultaneous, multi-user editing and collaboration is necessary if you’re using remote workers. CLICK TO TWEET TAKEAWAY Startups can benefit in a number of ways when they take advantage of remote workers. Not only does it open up a large and talented workforce that you might not have access to locally, it allows you to save money and scale as you grow. Find the right marketplaces for your niche and execute on it. (!!) And, the most genuine way of showing virtual appreciation for a writer is to share & tweet . In case you haven’t done it yet … I’m looking forward to it! Thank you for reading/watching this and stay tuned for next week’s post. Originally published at whatittak.es .

Startup Success with a Decentralized Team

The Beautiful and Damned: Book I, Chapter III - The Connoisseur of Kisses

Law Business in London

Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book . Mr. Tombe's Advice here Mr. Tombe's Advice. Alice sat alone for an hour without moving when John Grey had left her, and the last words which he had uttered were sounding in her ears all the time, "My heart is still yours, as it has been since I knew you." There had been something in his words which had soothed her spirits, and had, for the moment, almost comforted her. At any rate, he did not despise her. He could not have spoken such words as these to her had he not still held her high in his esteem. Nay;—had he not even declared that he would yet take her as his own if she would come to him? "I cannot tell you with how much joy I would take you back to my bosom!" Ah! that might never be. But yet the assurance had been sweet to her;—dangerously sweet, as she soon told herself. She knew that she had lost her Eden, but it was something to her that the master of the garden had not himself driven her forth. She sat there, thinking of her fate, as though it belonged to some other one,—not to herself; as though it were a tale that she had read. Herself she had shipwrecked altogether; but though she might sink, she had not been thrust from the ship by hands which she loved. But would it not have been better that he should have scorned her and reviled her? Had he been able to do so, he at least would have escaped the grief of disappointed love. Had he learned to despise her, he would have ceased to regret her. She had no right to feel consolation in the fact that his sufferings were equal to her own. But when she thought of this, she told herself that it could not be that it was so. He was a man, she said, not passionate by nature. Alas! it was the mistake she had ever made when summing up the items of his character! He might be persistent, she thought, in still striving to do that upon which he had once resolved. He had said so, and that which he said was always true to the letter. But, nevertheless, when this thing which he still chose to pursue should have been put absolutely beyond his reach, he would not allow his calm bosom to be harassed by a vain regret. He was a man too whole at every point,—so Alice told herself,—to allow his happiness to be marred by such an accident. But must the accident occur? Was there no chance that he might be saved, even from such trouble as might follow upon such a loss? Could it not be possible that he might be gratified,—since it would gratify him,—and that she might be saved! Over and over again she considered this,—but always as though it were another woman whom she would fain save, and not herself. But she knew that her own fate was fixed. She had been mad when she had done the thing, but the thing was not on that account the less done. She had been mad when she had trusted herself abroad with two persons, both of whom, as she had well known, were intent on wrenching her happiness from out of her grasp. She had been mad when she had told herself, whilst walking over the Westmoreland fells, that after all she might as well marry her cousin, since that other marriage was then beyond her reach! Her two cousins had succeeded in blighting all the hopes of her life;—but what could she now think of herself in that she had been so weak as to submit to such usage from their hands? Alas!—she told herself, admitting in her misery all her weakness,—alas, she had no mother. She had gloried in her independence, and this had come of it! She had scorned the prudence of Lady Macleod, and her scorn had brought her to this pass! Was she to give herself bodily,—body and soul, as she said aloud in her solitary agony,—to a man whom she did not love? Must she submit to his caresses,—lie on his bosom,—turn herself warmly to his kisses? "No," she said, "no,"—speaking audibly, as she walked about the room; "no;—it was not in my bargain; I never meant it." But if so what had she meant;—what had been her dream? Of what marriage had she thought, when she was writing that letter back to George Vavasor? How am I to analyse her mind, and make her thoughts and feelings intelligible to those who may care to trouble themselves with the study? Any sacrifice she would make for her cousin which one friend could make for another. She would fight his battles with her money, with her words, with her sympathy. She would sit with him if he needed it, and speak comfort to him by the hour. His disgrace should be her disgrace;—his glory her glory;—his pursuits her pursuits. Was not that the marriage to which she had consented? But he had come to her and asked her for a kiss, and she had shuddered before him, when he made the demand. Then that other one had come and had touched her hand, and the fibres of her body had seemed to melt within her at the touch, so that she could have fallen at his feet. She had done very wrong. She knew that she had done wrong. She knew that she had sinned with that sin which specially disgraces a woman. She had said that she would become the wife of a man to whom she could not cleave with a wife's love; and, mad with a vile ambition, she had given up the man for whose modest love her heart was longing. She had thrown off from her that wondrous aroma of precious delicacy, which is the greatest treasure of womanhood. She had sinned against her sex; and, in an agony of despair, as she crouched down upon the floor with her head against her chair, she told herself that there was no pardon for her. She understood it now, and knew that she could not forgive herself. But can you forgive her, delicate reader? Or am I asking the question too early in my story? For myself, I have forgiven her. The story of the struggle has been present to my mind for many years,—and I have learned to think that even this offence against womanhood may, with deep repentance, be forgiven. And you also must forgive her before we close the book, or else my story will have been told amiss. But let us own that she had sinned,—almost damnably, almost past forgiveness. What;—think that she knew what love meant, and not know which of two she loved! What;—doubt, of two men for whose arms she longed, of which the kisses would be sweet to bear; on which side lay the modesty of her maiden love! Faugh! She had submitted to pollution of heart and feeling before she had brought herself to such a pass as this. Come;—let us see if it be possible that she may be cleansed by the fire of her sorrow. "What am I to do?" She passed that whole day in asking herself that question. She was herself astounded at the rapidity with which the conviction had forced itself upon her that a marriage with her cousin would be to her almost impossible; and could she permit it to be said of her that she had thrice in her career jilted a promised suitor,—that three times she would go back from her word because her fancy had changed? Where could she find the courage to tell her father, to tell Kate, to tell even George himself, that her purpose was again altered? But she had a year at her disposal. If only during that year he would take her money and squander it, and then require nothing further of her hands, might she not thus escape the doom before her? Might it not be possible that the refusal should this time come from him? But she succeeded in making one resolve. She thought at least that she succeeded. Come what might, she would never stand with him at the altar. While there was a cliff from which she might fall, water that would cover her, a death-dealing grain that might be mixed in her cup, she could not submit herself to be George Vavasor's wife. To no ear could she tell of this resolve. To no friend could she hint her purpose. She owed her money to the man after what had passed between them. It was his right to count upon such assistance as that would give him, and he should have it. Only as his betrothed she could give it him, for she understood well that if there were any breach between them, his accepting of such aid would be impossible. He should have her money, and then, when the day came, some escape should be found. In the afternoon her father came to her, and it may be as well to explain that Mr. Grey had seen him again that day. Mr. Grey, when he left Queen Anne Street, had gone to his lawyer, and from thence had made his way to Mr. Vavasor. It was between five and six when Mr. Vavasor came back to his house, and he then found his daughter sitting over the drawing-room fire, without lights, in the gloom of the evening. Mr. Vavasor had returned with Grey to the lawyer's chambers, and had from thence come direct to his own house. He had been startled at the precision with which all the circumstances of his daughter's position had been explained to a mild-eyed old gentleman, with a bald head, who carried on his business in a narrow, dark, clean street, behind Doctors' Commons. Mr. Tombe was his name. "No;" Mr. Grey had said, when Mr. Vavasor had asked as to the peculiar nature of Mr. Tombe's business; "he is not specially an ecclesiastical lawyer. He had a partner at Ely, and was always employed by my father, and by most of the clergy there." Mr. Tombe had evinced no surprise, no dismay, and certainly no mock delicacy, when the whole affair was under discussion. George Vavasor was to get present moneys, but,—if it could be so arranged—from John Grey's stores rather than from those belonging to Alice. Mr. Tombe could probably arrange that with Mr. Vavasor's lawyer, who would no doubt be able to make difficulty as to raising ready money. Mr. Tombe would be able to raise ready money without difficulty. And then, at last, George Vavasor was to be made to surrender his bride, taking or having taken the price of his bargain. John Vavasor sat by in silence as the arrangement was being made, not knowing how to speak. He had no money with which to give assistance. "I wish you to understand from the lady's father," Grey said to the lawyer, "that the marriage would be regarded by him with as much dismay as by myself." "Certainly;—it would be ruinous," Mr. Vavasor had answered. "And you see, Mr. Tombe," Mr. Grey went on, "we only wish to try the man. If he be not such as we believe him to be, he can prove it by his conduct. If he is worthy of her, he can then take her." "You merely wish to open her eyes, Mr. Grey," said the mild-eyed lawyer. "I wish that he should have what money he wants, and then we shall find what it is he really wishes." "Yes; we shall know our man," said the lawyer. "He shall have the money, Mr. Grey," and so the interview had been ended. Mr. Vavasor, when he entered the drawing-room, addressed his daughter in a cheery voice. "What; all in the dark?" "Yes, papa. Why should I have candles when I am doing nothing? I did not expect you." "No; I suppose not. I came here because I want to say a few words to you about business." "What business, papa?" Alice well understood the tone of her father's voice. He was desirous of propitiating her; but was at the same time desirous of carrying some point in which he thought it probable that she would oppose him. "Well; my love, if I understood you rightly, your cousin George wants some money." "I did not say that he wants it now; but I think he will want it before the time for the election comes." "If so, he will want it at once. He has not asked you for it yet?" "No; he has merely said that should he be in need he would take me at my word." "I think there is no doubt that he wants it. Indeed, I believe that he is almost entirely without present means of his own." "I can hardly think so; but I have no knowledge about it. I can only say that he has not asked me yet, and that I should wish to oblige him whenever he may do so." "To what extent, Alice?" "I don't know what I have. I get about four hundred a year, but I do not know what it is worth, or how far it can all be turned into money. I should wish to keep a hundred a year and let him have the rest." "What; eight thousand pounds!" said the father who in spite of his wish not to oppose her, could not but express his dismay. "I do not imagine that he will want so much; but if he should, I wish that he should have it." "Heaven and earth!" said John Vavasor. "Of course we should have to give up the house." He could not suppress his trouble, or refrain from bursting out in agony at the prospect of such a loss. "But he has asked me for nothing yet, papa." "No, exactly; and perhaps he may not; but I wish to know what to do when the demand is made. I am not going to oppose you now; your money is your own, and you have a right to do with it as you please;—but would you gratify me in one thing?" "What is it, papa?" "When he does apply, let the amount be raised through me?" "How through you?" "Come to me; I mean, so that I may see the lawyer, and have the arrangements made." Then he explained to her that in dealing with large sums of money, it could not be right that she should do so without his knowledge, even though the property was her own. "I will promise you that I will not oppose your wishes," he said. Then Alice undertook that when such case should arise the money should be raised through his means. The day but one following this she received a letter from Lady Glencora, who was still at Matching Priory. It was a light-spirited, chatty, amusing letter, intended to be happy in its tone,—intended to have a flavour of happiness, but just failing through the too apparent meaning of a word here and there. "You will see that I am at Matching," the letter said, "whereas you will remember that I was to have been at Monkshade. I escaped at last by a violent effort, and am now passing my time innocently,—I fear not so profitably as she would induce me to do,—with Iphy Palliser. You remember Iphy. She is a good creature, and would fain turn even me to profit, if it were possible. I own that I am thinking of them all at Monkshade, and am in truth delighted that I am not there. My absence is entirely laid upon your shoulders. That wicked evening amidst the ruins! Poor ruins. I go there alone sometimes and fancy that I hear such voices from the walls, and see such faces through the broken windows! All the old Pallisers come and frown at me, and tell me that I am not good enough to belong to them. There is a particular window to which Sir Guy comes and makes faces at me. I told Iphy the other day, and she answered me very gravely, that I might, if I chose, make myself good enough for the Pallisers. Even for the Pallisers! Isn't that beautiful?" Then Lady Glencora went on to say, that her husband intended to come up to London early in the session, and that she would accompany him. "That is," added Lady Glencora, "if I am still good enough for the Pallisers at that time." About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Anthony Trollope (2006). Can You Forgive Her?. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/19500/pg19500-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at , located at . www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html

CHATTY KIDS

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chattykids.com

11-50 employees

Since 2013

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