Learn Real Good

I approach writing these articles every week with either excitement or trepidation. Sometimes Both. This is a trepidation week. I am more excited about the articles where I crack my knuckles and figure out how to take a five hour long rant on something that I used to deliver over a week and fit it into a single blog post than I am about a week like this one where I have a simple point to make. I almost feel like I could probably say what I need to say this week in one sentence and then drop the mic and walk offstage.

Instead of the previously mentioned mic drop, I am going to start off this article with a question. Why do we value postsecondary education? Woah, right? Postsecondary education is going to be undergoing a radical transformation as a result of the events of 2020. I honestly think it is an acceleration of a trend that was already underway. I do have my concerns about it and also there are things that I value about it.

I read a lot of resumes. I hire for myself, I help my friends hire, and sometimes, I will see a complete stranger working on a resume at Starbucks doing something awful and I feel like I need to give them some constructive feedback about it. I cannot help myself here; it is a part of who I am.

Seeing a degree on a resume exudes a signal about an individual. Where you went to school and what you studied can compress a lot of information into a single line on your resume.

I feel it is important to add that I do not require that someone has a fancy college degree to get an interview. If you do not have it, I have to work a little harder to know what I need to know about you before I can agree to give you dollars in exchange for thinking. I do assure you that I perform that work cheerfully, and I have exchanged dollars for people’s thinking many times as a result. I digress.

Many people right now are attempting to distill the crucial things you learn in a two-to-four-year degree into a crash course over weeks or months. The demand for knowledge-workers is really high, and for every open headcount out there, companies are missing out on tremendous opportunities. This demand is creating a need to accelerate the process, and at the same time,  the current pandemic has put the brakes on people piling into postsecondary institutions to get accredited for joining the labor force.

This is a very unstable state of affairs.

You can quickly assess someone’s abilities to do a particular job with a battery of questions. The frustrating thing for me is watching people who are managers and leaders fall into cognitive bias traps by using these questions to filter out candidates who could evolve into fantastic team members. I will pick on the easiest one of these, especially for back-end software developers.

“This person does not understand Big O Notation”.

You can take this as a tip if you are trying to get a server engineering job, Big O Notation is important, if you already did not know that. I will leave the Googling about reasons as an exercise to the reader. Suffice it to say, if you are not familiar with the math of scaling and why this is important, you should probably look for sunshine jobs, because you might not get consideration for the jobs that leverage the clouds. Yes, I am laughing at my own joke right now.

I do not think this is a completely reasonable approach to take. There is a scarcity of people with great scaling skills, who understand why something that worked fine up to yesterday just bogged down for an hour this morning and now crashes every five seconds. Certainly it would help you right now if you could hire this person, but what about if you have zero candidates available?

So let’s get back to that degree for a minute. Having a degree is a signal that tells me something valuable, other than what it tells the average person who wants to know your grade in Computer Science Scaling 441. The average hiring manager will be looking to fill this role with a “Best-Fit” candidate who has a great grade in CS 441. The problem is that only 10 or 20 people out of every hundred are willing to subject themselves to that level of pain and frustration. Also, the bell curve can only push up so many of them year over year.

What that degree says to me, and is increasingly saying to more people, is that you are willing to make an investment in yourself for multiple years in order to do something very important; you are willing to learn things. Here is where I am really going to bake your noodle. The most important part of that whole process to me is not what you learned during those years, which certainly may be added gravy, but that you spent that time developing your learning skills themselves.

I consider myself a “Best-Athlete” hiring manager.  This is vastly different than a lot of other hiring managers. I make it very clear to people I work with whether candidates are Best-Fit or Best-Athlete. The Best-Fit candidate will show up fully trained and fully qualified to do the job needed right now today. The Best-Athlete candidate is a different person entirely, who has prepared themselves for lifelong learning and is willing to invest the time to get to mastery of things they need to be successful in a new role.

I value the ability to learn very highly. When you hire Best-Fit candidates you are more or less doing management and solving your business problems reactively. When you hire Best-Athlete candidates, you are exercising leadership and solving your business problems proactively.

People who have gone into post-secondary education generally have demonstrated some decision-making skill. Which school do I go to? What major do I take? What electives should I focus on? You can use their degree as a flowchart for their learning potential. The length of a degree also helps to signal their willingness to make an investment in learning, both in terms of time and money. Putting four years of your life into preparatory learning is a powerful statement.

I want to take a moment to stop and acknowledge that this is not a luxury everyone has. I do not want to dismiss the self-learners at all. In fact, I spent multiple years of my career partnered with a high school educated technologist who could dance circles around many of the best educated knowledge workers I have ever met. It is admittedly more work for me to identify that person without the degree. I have successfully found self-taught technical leaders who are lifetime learners that continue to perform at excellent levels to this very day.

So coming back to the original thing I wanted to talk about. Learning is a very important skill to me. It is a very important skill for anyone who I work with. If you are not willing or able to learn, then your long-term career prospects in technology are limited. It is trite to say that the only thing that is constant in technology is change. It is also incredibly true. A multi-year degree is a cheat sheet to me about your ability to learn, just as much as it is something to check off boxes for skills you already have.

This is important because many companies are trying to figure out how to shortcut the learning process and just focus on the skills-development process. Bootcamps are springing up all over that can be done in weeks or months to impart technical skills needed for a very specific job today.

This frightens me a little because investing a few years of your life in learning is important. It also frightens me because if you are only enrolling in learning valuable skills for today you might not pick up enough of a deeper understanding that will give you valuable skills for tomorrow.

There will be some push and pull around this over the coming years. Maybe the answer is to re-enroll in new bootcamps every two years. Maybe the multi-year colleges will survive the 2020 virtual-ification of learning better than I predict. Whatever happens next, I am excited to learn from it, and how it will shape the future of the talent pool.

Thank you again for joining me. I feel like I need to take a moment to share the moral of the story here, like the end of an eighties G.I. Joe cartoon. There are two things to take away from this brief rant about learning: The first is the importance of learning for yourself. The more you learn, the better you will be professionally at whatever you attempt. The second thing is that you should invest time in figuring out people’s learning modes and habits as you recruit them. I hope you dig deeper into uncredentialed candidates to understand what they are capable of learning, especially as we see the impacts of the pandemic on people over the next four years.

As always, blah blah blah socials, blah blah blah sharing. See you next week!