Author: Editor

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Henry Chen, a former Meta tech lead who was laid off in May. He’s 38 and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. The following has been edited for length and clarity.After I left college, I worked as a DJ for a few years, taught myself to code, and eventually found my way to Facebook.I started at Facebook as a contractor in 2012, and then worked my way up into a full-time engineering role. After more than 13 years with the company, I was laid off in May.I’m grateful for everything…

Free the kneeShorts at the office. Appropriate or not?It’s a heated and long-running debate across much of corporate America, one that Instagram boss Adam Mosseri recently planted his flag in. He said he was “pro” shorts in the workplace, with caveats.”Not all shorts are created equal,” he said. Somewhat dangerously, he added that not everyone can “pull them off.”We decided to test how summer shorts look in our own office. On Friday, 10 Business Insider journalists, myself included, wore shorts to our New York headquarters — much to the chagrin of Editor in Chief Jamie Heller.”I would never,” Jamie said,…

Halloween is getting creepier.The last few years have seen the start of Spooky Season creep earlier on the calendar, with candy and merchandise hitting retail shelves a full three months ahead of the actual holiday.”It’s hard to tell if any of this is actually needle-moving, or if it’s just a testing ground for the actual Halloween period. But it’s definitely something I see in the stores a bit more,” Mizuho analyst David Bellinger told Business Insider.Summerween, as it’s often called, has been growing for more than a decade now. The trend may trace its roots to a 2012 episode of…

Many wealthy parents obsess about getting their kids into a great college, believing it will set them up for life. Drusilla Blackman specializes in helping them achieve that goal.Blackman, a former dean of admissions at Harvard and later Columbia, is the founder of Deans of Admissions, a group of former admissions executives who advise families on how to land their children at top-flight universities in the US and Britain.She spoke to Business Insider this week about how wealthy parents can inadvertently sabotage their kids’ chances at a coveted spot in an Ivy League-level institution, and how they can maximize their…

Every office has them.The employee who treats work like a second home. The one who arrives before sunrise and disappears by lunch. The midweek warrior. The stealth drop-in.As the return-to-office wars have subsided, they’ve left behind a workplace ecosystem populated by distinct species whose routines are shaped by a mix of company policy and personal preference.Business Insider spoke with a half-dozen office workers about how they navigate workplace expectations around office attendance — and why they’ve landed on the routines they have:The 5-day faithfulShaohua Zhou is unapologetically pro-office.The engineering manager, based in San Francisco, spent years working remotely until he…

Your old Ikea bookshelf is part of a growing secondhand market.Ikea has spent five years growing its buyback and resell division, which pays customers for their old Ikea-brand furniture in store credit and resells it at the chain’s stores.In September, buyback and resell will be available in every full-format US Ikea store when the retailer starts offering the option at its Brooklyn store, said Bryan Walker, country product quality manager for Ikea US.For shoppers, buying secondhand has long been a way to save money across a range of products. It’s also become a bigger business over the last several years,…

In his 12 years on the job, Justin Berk, a 44-year-old product manager at an insurance-tech company, had seen his employer get bought and sold twice. All he had received in return was a “pat on the back” at a company meeting.”A pat on the back is nice, but it doesn’t pay the bills,” he said.When KKR sold his company, Integrated Specialty Coverages, to Onex Partners, the company meeting was much more significant: Berk received 30 months of his salary as a cash bonus as part of a KKR initiative to share its private equity profits with workers at its…

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Thomas Flohr, the 65-year-old founder, chairman, and CEO of VistaJet, based in St. Moritz, Switzerland, about his daily routine. It’s been edited for length and clarity.I started my career at a Chicago-based technology firm in 1985 and rose through the ranks. I later acquired most of the company’s European operations through my company, Comprendium Investment.My frequent business travel in the early 2000s exposed me to the shortcomings of private aviation. At the time, I found the private jet experience to be inconsistent and underwhelming. The service quality didn’t match the level…

This first-person essay was written by Sean James, a distinguished engineer in energy systems at Nvidia, where he works on the power and energy infrastructure needed to support AI data centers. He previously spent more than two decades at Microsoft designing and building data centers.Chances are you passed an electrical substation today that delivers power to thousands of homes at hundreds of thousands of volts. It was so unremarkable that you didn’t even notice. Sometime in the past, these marvels of engineering simply vanished into the background.For most of my career, when asked, I told people I built data centers.…

Douglas Craig’s heart was racing, and his adrenaline was pumping.Just a few weeks after finishing his training, Craig and his colleague had to belay a family down an outdoor ropes course during an unexpected lightning storm.Craig’s summer is looking a lot different from his decades as a media executive; he now spends time rescuing people stuck in trees and wearing a harness at an aerial adventure park in Colorado.After being laid off in June 2025, Craig looked for media roles. However, the job cut ultimately became the catalyst for a career pivot, albeit one that came with a pay cut.…