7 Unpopular Ideas About Work
My most recent two Medium.com articles offered some unpopular ideas. Here’s another set. These pertain to work.
Choose a career quickly. Generally, the benefit of taking extra time in hopes of finding the “right” career is outweighed by the benefit of getting started in a quickly emerged front-runner. A person doesn’t consider that career at random. The choice probably amalgamates multiple factors. For example, it may be a career that uses words or data, or vice-versa, and a career for which you have an “in.” Such a boost can help launch you toward a successful career more than sitting longer on the sidelines. Too many career-seekers wait for the perfect career to drop like manna from heaven only to end up waiting for Godot.
In hiring, prioritize simulations over interviews and references. Interviews poorly predict job performance because, for example, weak candidates are more likely to invest in interview coaching while strong ones are more likely to believe they can succeed without it.
References also are larded with invalidity. Even weak, fired employees can often wangle a strong reference in exchange for agreeing not to file a wrongful termination lawsuit. And I know someone who couldn’t muster even a marginal reference, so he had his girlfriend pretend to be his former employer: “Oh yes, John was a wonderful employee!”
Employee selection should be based heavily on candidates’ demonstrating how they’d do on the job’s common difficult tasks. For example, a software engineer should be asked to do short coding challenges, an executive should run a mock contentious meeting.
Self-employment is overrated, government employment underrated.
Self-employment is difficult and harder than ever: increased regulations, reporting requirements, employee rights, and a panoply of tax burdens. Although I’m a mere one-person “business” — a career counselor — I must pay Oakland’s business tax atop California’s ~10% income tax and, of course, the even higher federal income tax plus self-employment tax and property tax. (Of course, there’s also sales tax, tolls, gas tax, etc., etc., etc. I don’t keep a dollar until after midyear.) And as always, the self-employed person must be a self-starter and able to solve lots of problems without having to pay someone. It’s easy to romanticize self-employment, especially a start-up as cool with a prospect of an exit making you rich, but the odds of that approach the lottery’s.
Unless you’re a star, corporate jobs also are no picnic. Companies fill ever more positions part-time/temp, with few if any benefits. And pressure is usually to do more with less and faster.
Nonprofits claim to care about worker rights but often fill their slots with as many volunteers as possible, thereby skirting even the minimum wage law. When they do pay, it’s usually low. “Don’t you believe in the cause?!”
For most people, government jobs, especially federal, are the best deal. The feds care less about the bottom line — They can and do just raise taxes or print more money even though that makes everyone’s dollars worth less. So there’s greater chance of a federal job being full-time, benefited, with lots of vacation days, holidays, even a pension, plus unsurpassed job security. And many if not most government jobs are unlikely to have a get-it-done-yesterday ethos. Plus, once you’re a government employee, if you want to change jobs, you get preference over outsiders.
Marketing is a net evil. Sure, if you create a great new product, you need to build awareness but that’s only a sliver of what’s spent on marketing. Most marketing dollars are spent on products whose word-of-mouth isn’t good enough, often because there are better or cheaper alternatives, so marketing has to goose potential customers.
Top executives unfairly get a bad rap. I’ve had many executives as clients, and counter to the colleges’ and media’s portrayals, most of them work long hours and use their considerable intelligence and drive to bring good products to people at a fair price while being ethical with employees. When they have to make layoffs to serve shareholders (mostly people like teachers, cops, and social workers, not millionaires) who are saving for college or retirement, they’re usually pained. If I may be honest, I like most executives more than I do many people who are in supposedly more “virtuous” professions. Many of the latter are hypocrites, preaching redistribution while doing what’s expedient for #1.
Corporations unfairly get a bad rap. Without corporations, I wouldn’t have a keyboard ($20) to type this article, a monitor ($100) to view it, a website to promote it, a fine webcam ($69) and microphone ($69) to make a YouTube of it. You, the reader also need a monitor, keyboard, and perhaps speakers. The chairs that you and I are sitting on were made by a corporation. I chose from dozens on Amazon (a corporation) to find a highly rated one I really like ($129.) Corporations’ profit (a dirty word according to colleges unless it’s the tuition or research overhead they charge) pays for employees to support their families and as mentioned, to give a return to shareholders, modally people like you and me, not fat cats. For every millionaire shareholder there are dozens of people trying to stay afloat.
The high school and college curriculum provide very suboptimal preparation for career. The curriculum is driven by university professors who erroneously believe that their field’s esoterica is essential for all students. Their “high standards” are reinforced by educators’ fear of laxity, for example, being noncompetitive with the Chinese, who always embarrass the U.S. in international comparisons.
What counts for career preparation and indeed for citizenship is not “covering” masses of content such as the ubiquitous superficial survey of world and U.S. history. That’s inimical to what matters: critical thinking, logical writing, and public speaking. I’d rather see my child spend an entire year studying just the economic, ideological, scientific, and political factors that led FDR to not enter World War II until after millions of Jews were killed. In such a course, they’d spend lots of time debating and writing persuasive essays, with the teacher providing important feedback on their reasoning and communication. In taking such a course, students would have taken a helluva bigger step toward career and life competence than from years of the typical flitting across millennia of history from the Peloponnesian War to the Afghanistan War.
Similarly, in English, I’d replace the typical 1,000 pages of literature per year with a few trenchant essays and short stories, with those readings triggering short, rigorous, carefully critiqued student essays, and socratic classroom explorations.
There’s no more evidence that quadratic equations, stochastic processes, etc. transfer to improved general thinking skills than there was for Latin. Here’s an example from the vaunted Khan Academy, teaching a mere elementary algebra lesson, the introduction to quadratic equations. You remember that, don’t you? You use it all the time, don’t you?
There are far better things to do with the years that high school students spend taking such math courses. How about a course explicitly on critical thinking. That’s hard to teach yet critical. That justifies time.
I’d forgo foreign language. Fact is, if not learned very early, even the required four years of high school foreign language is unlikely to get you far past tourist-speak. I’d replace foreign language courses with real-world experience. Yes, it can be the public-service kind but I’d also give kids the choice to work at the elbow of someone in a for-profit. As mentioned, profit should not be a dirty word. It’s the engine that enables us to live with less pain than in having to endure the Soviet Union’s long bread lines.
Forgive me but I’m feeling frustrated these days at how little impact my ideas have had. The emotion going through me as I’m writing this is that it will be no different. I hope I’m wrong.
I extemporized on these seven ideas on YouTube.
You can reach career and personal coach. admitted know-it-all, and author of many books, Dr. Marty Nemko at mnemko@comcast.net
