This post summarizes some of my thoughts on the differences between school /education vs work/career. I hope it is relevant to those who are similarly making this transition. These generalizations obviously stem from my personal experiences and your mileage may vary. The title/subtitle is from this John Mayer song.
Solo Effort vs Team Work
At least under the education systems I have undergone, it is fair to say that doing well in school is mostly a matter of individual effort, mixed in with a smattering of so-called ‘group work’. Most work, on the other hand, is a team sport.[1]
There is a lot to be said about whether schools have succeeded in emulating the collaborative nature of work (my view: mostly no), and I have nothing much to add to that. The social nature of work also explains why likability is so important (both as a hiring criterion as well as a status to maintain in the workplace - see no. 10 on this list). People are happier and probably perform better working around people they like. I too will not expound too much on this.
Rather, I wish to focus on the implications of ‘work as a team sport’ on communication and leverage. These points are not original, but worth drawing attention to nonetheless.
My recent work experiences highlighted the fact that communication is not a trivial task. We have to transmit information from one human mind to another human mind using lossy medium like text, speech, facial expressions, PowerPoint slides and so on. People obviously bring different contexts to the table. The main difference between school and work, as I see it, is that the audience you are communicating to at work is potentially much larger and authority/hierarchy plays a much larger role. To the latter point, I have seen way too many casual suggestions by a higher-up transmute into an official diktat pursued at all costs, whether because of innocent misunderstanding or willful misinterpretation.
I also find myself thinking much more in terms of leverage. ‘Work as a team sport’ means you cannot do everything on your own (unlike most school assignments). So, in my mind, I divide work activities into high-leverage and low-leverage. The naive thing is to only do things with high-leverage. But just as leverage in finance is a two-edged sword (you magnify both your gains and your losses), so does leverage in an organizational context. Giving talks and establishing policies may be high-leverage activities, but any mistakes/inaccuracies/misunderstandings risk getting compounded.[2]
All of this is a long way of saying, having sat in meetings that took up way too much time of highly paid people, I think I now better appreciate Jeff Bezos’ 6-page memo rule/ban on PowerPoint and communicative strategies.
Certainty vs Ambiguity
Formal education offers a straightforward deal: jump through these hoops (score x points, get y credits, do z extracurriculars etc.) and you will get admitted (or graduate).[3] The requirements of assignments, the scope of the syllabus, and so on are spelled out relatively clearly.
In contrast, ambiguity permeates the workplace. Instructions given on Day 1 might be rendered outdated by developments on Day 2. Client demands are like shifting sands. A slight hyperbole would be to say that you can ‘finish’ school assignments, but you can almost never ‘finish’ work.
This has two implications.
First, it is up to the knowledge worker to properly set his/her priorities. The Pareto principle, which states that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes, applies strongly to knowledge work. This non-linearity between effort and outcome is a huge difference between school and work.
Second, judgment becomes important in an ambiguous environment. It is a common criticism of Singaporeans that we only do well in structured environments. This is especially concerning if we realize that tasks with clear rules and quantifiable outcomes are most vulnerable to automation. Being comfortable with questions with no clear-cut answers and operating under uncertainty are probably going to be even more important skills in the future, skills that are worryingly difficult for formal education to teach.
Gaussian vs Power Law; Mediocristan vs Extremistan
Building off the idea of the Pareto principle, schools are also unnatural in the way the bell curve is incorporated into everything. In primary and secondary education, every subject is given more or less equal weight. GPAs average your performance across different classes. You don’t experienced runaway success based on single trait.
In the real world, comparative advantage is key. This means a marginal advantage in relative terms can lead to overwhelming advantage in absolute terms. To use a stylized finance example, if you are able to (demonstrably) achieve 20% rate of return when everyone else can only achieve 15% rate of return for the same risk, capital will flock to you disproportionately. (A similar example from tech: the ‘marginally better’ iPhone capturing the lion’s share of profits in smartphones.)
In this way, schools reward all-roundedness in a way that the market does not.
Age Segregation vs Age Mixing
I only recently realized how segregated society is, not by the usual race, gender, etc., but by age.[4] As a (relatively) young person, I have resisted the idea that deference should be given to older people simply by virtue of their age, but I realize that for the most part I have been surrounded by other similar young people who have a vested interest in thinking that way.
In any case, the workplace is much more age-diverse than schools, though different workplaces value seniority vis-a-vis meritocracy differently, and learning to work alongside people from different stages in life with different priorities is, again, one obvious difference between school and work.
Three graphs of salary across time for a given position, from High Output Management, with different emphases on seniority- vs merit-based salary.
In general, I have come to the view that more age-diversity is a good thing (if simply as an antidote against mimetic crises). There is much more to be said but I will simply gesture at education being a huge driver of age-segregation in society and that age-diversity (e.g. hanging out socially with people from signifiant different stages of your life) is an opportunity to gain some much-needed wisdom and perspective on life.[5]
[1] Freelancers are the exception that prove the rule, notwithstanding the rise of the so-called ‘gig economy’. I recall reading a Coasean theory-of-the-firm argument that the size of firms has gotten bigger as information technology, improvements in logistics etc. reduces the cost of coordination (internal transaction cost), allowing ever larger groups of people to work together. However, this has to be balanced against the same technologies reducing external transaction cost, which would suggest that firms should become smaller. Relatedly, the average lifespan of companies has been decreasing (inference: bigger companies adapt more slowly and die more easily?).
[2] One personal obsession of mine is to observe how organizations enforce their infosec policies. I have become quite skeptical of mandatory trainings/quizzes by HR and lengthy publications with detailed rules and subclauses. In practice, most people simply imitate their peers.
[3] To be sure, there are careers that offer similar levels of certainty (‘Do x no. of years and you will get y position’). The college-like atmosphere of Google is probably a part of its draw. I submit that these are outliers and the substantive part of these jobs are similarly ambiguity-filled.
[4] There is a lot to be said here about how young the average worker in Chinese tech companies is. I think this youth is great in terms of optimism, energy, and openness to change. I suspect there are downsides too, such as reinventing the wheel, using sheer long hours to solve problems, delaying family formation and so on.
[5] Speaking from personal experience, I found the student-to-work-adult transition much less anxiety-inducing after I realized much older people often do not ‘have it all figured out’ either.