Why firms don't want you to be brilliant at your job
bbc.com
bbc.com
-Top large corporations reward interpersonal skills and getting along more than brilliance, causing top employees to seek employment elsewhere.
-The advent of the internet has heightened the communication gap between the generations, making it hard for "partners" and "new associates" to communicate.
The author didn't provide evidence for much of what she claimed, and did not build towards a conclusion. More, the above themes did not seem like new news to me. Also, the first two themes did not clearly related to the third. The article felt like meandering observations -- which is fine insofar as it goes, but, while I enjoyed the read, I wanted more to conclude it. Maybe I'll find that here in the comments?
The reason why top employees don't treat large corporations as 30-year destinations is because it is clear they will downsize us at the drop of a quarterly revenue. It isn't "brilliant" employees who recognize this, but all employees, and workers have quite reasonably responded by withholding all loyalty from their employer and behaving as if they are autonomous agents in a free market, which in fact they are.
This works out well for people in tech who are even moderately competent because it gives us mobility, but pretty badly for everyone else. However, just as corporate management took the lead in losing money by treating long-term, highly knowledgeable, high-skill employees as disposable parts, they are going to have to take the lead by realizing that employee turnover is enormously expensive and it's only going to get worse as new generations enter the workforce with the express intent of exploiting their employers for all they're worth.
It would, after all, be positively immoral for a worker to do anything else in the modern corporate environment.
This really struck a chord with me, with the rhetoric of the last few decades that it is a company's (and management/board) moral obligation to shareholders to do everything in their power that is not expressly against the word of the law to maximize their profits.
In a similar vein, a worker is morally obligated to his or her "shareholders" (him/herself, family, etc.) to maximize his or her financial (or other, personal) gain.
Without pensions, there is not really a point in staying in one place too long anymore. Studies show that it's pretty common after two years in the same place you'll end up effectively losing money.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2014/06/22/employees...
Maximize your short-term gains, but then you lose long-term - what a "big surprise".
I don't see how this will self-correct. Corporations are genetically predisposed to think short-term, and the tendency is only getting worse in the new reality.
Personally I think a big reason is that the promotion is dead. There's a palpable sense in every large organization I've worked for is that working hard simply won't get you rewarded and that there's a hard glass ceiling on your ability to rise through merit.
I've found this to be true when I look at my own earnings as well. I have never experienced a significant jump in earnings or responsibility except by switching jobs. Never. I've worked very hard in some jobs, but I have never been rewarded for it except through an ability to cite my present work as a springboard to somewhere else.
I found it surprising when I worked for a company (more than number years ago) that was primarily a retailer preferred to hire externally for new store managers instead of hiring from its pool of mostly college educated sales staff.
You can argue that if your business model is so good that you don't need to innovate to stay in business then by all means milk it for what it's worth but that doesn't feel like a long-term strategy. Microsoft and friends have R&D departments that rival the best research institutions in the world and they pay a premium for it. If some of that was a natural byproduct of their core business operations then maybe they wouldn't need to pay a premium for it.
For a sufficiently large business, it's important to be stable/robust -- that is, to be able to withstand change. A business that's heavily reliant on individual brilliance across the board has the disadvantage of potentially collapsing if enough brilliant people leave without training equally brilliant replacements.
Yes, you want some brilliant people specifically in R&D / innovation. You want brilliant people overseeing the entire system. Brilliant people in key positions might improve your overall efficiency by an order of magnitude on a particular project -- but you don't want the whole project to fall apart just because Joe moved out of state or Jane went on long-term maternity leave or Jake was hit by a bus.
Microsoft does have a world-class R&D department, but they also have a lot of average code monkeys and average janitors and average HR people.
It's easy enough to understand this applied to fast food, but I get the impression other industries would rather not believe it to be true.
Thing is, I think it's clearly evidenced in tech by every "I went through two days of interviewing on algorithms and distributed systems to hack on PHP boilerplate?" story. Tech might go to the trouble to select for brilliance, but they aren't necessarily using or paying for it.
Further it's readily admitted by folks like a16z [1].
"Thus software itself becomes the driving force of leveling the ability to write software to solve problems. This is a good thing: As software becomes a high-impact, low-skill trade, we decouple the technical ability and experience needed to write tricky software from the ability to solve problems for people."
1: http://a16z.com/2014/07/30/the-happy-demise-of-the-10x-engin...
Anyone who choose to take a job accepts this.
Real brilliance - creativity - requires you to embrace the unpredictable. That section of society are the inventors, who are willing to face long odds and do what they want.
The system works only for its survival. It is not interested in giving you a wholesome life.
Merica!
> Rather than reward brilliance, it prefers skills that graduates can't see - good judgment, a nice way with clients, and an instinct for when to bite your lip.
This is a curiously cynical perspective. "Brilliance" alone doesn't necessarily create value or pay the bills. The combination of high IQ and low EQ can be harmful to customer relationships and co-workers. The corporate world values soft skills just as much if not more than raw intelligence because soft skills can often make or break a business.
Notwithstanding the fact that a lot of young employees overestimate just how clever they are and stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that smart ideas won't always be viable in the real world, instead of pretending that "brilliance" is some sort of panacea that companies should cling to regardless of the cost, the author should consider that pragmatic, well-rounded employees who can perform consistently might be better contributors than the brilliant, intense employees who become disillusioned whenever they don't get their way.
Citation?
The last I read about it[1], it turned out that EQ is vastly overrated, accounting for only 1% of overall job performance, whereas IQ accounted for 14%. That's more than an order of magnitude.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20140930125543-692440...
"EI positively predicts performance for high emotional labor jobs and negatively predicts performance for low emotional labor jobs" (from the paper linked in the article you cite).
In my experience, nearly everyone vastly overestimates their own EQ.
Anyway, I don't think the parent was talking about actual "EQ," which is a term of art that has a specific definition and measurement tools (as refenced in that article).
I think he was just saying the people who believe they are much more brilliant than all their coworkers can be hard to work with, which can cause harm to a large organization.
Of course, you need the raw cognitive power to solve problems. But at the high-end of consulting, clients already assume this to be this case (otherwise they wouldn't be spending $200+/hour for people fresh out of college). What clients are looking for is more akin to a 'trusted advisor'[1]. Someone they can trust and rely on.
Yes, you can be socially awkward and still get the job done. But you probably won't be considered when the next opportunity arises; what people value are relationships. If you've got that (and you have the technical chops), clients will tend to keep calling you back for years to come. Or perhaps mention you to their peers.
For anyone considering working independently, I highly recommend David Maister's books. He writes clearly on earning trust, the art of listening, providing advice, establishing relationships, and so on.
This is really what separates the engineers who can command top dollar for their skills in the marketplace--versus those who are viewed as just another number on a spreadsheet to minimize (in the eyes of management at most large companies).
[1](http://www.amazon.com/The-Trusted-Advisor-David-Maister/dp/0...)
I say, if you're enjoying yourself at one company, learning a lot, and moving up, why not keep it up?
Not to mention once you have a family / kids, me thinks you are much less likely to jump.
"The main thing that had struck him so far was that people seemed to get dimmer the higher they went in the organisation. I asked if he had any explanation for this and he said it was self-selection.
Really smart people don't stay at the institutions they have fought so hard to get into. The best leave within two or three years - the slightly less good stay a bit longer, and only the also-rans and the terminally unimaginative are in for the long haul."
Also, I used to work in consulting firm, so by this definition, all of the partners are also-rans and terminally unimaginative - I'd say some partners fit this definition, but many others were bright-eyed, bushy tailed, and full of interesting ideas / perspectives.
In partnerships, this is even more accentuated by the fact that there is division of power by design, so even if a visionary leader appreciates a vision you still have to convince the partnership which is mostly a matter of PR rather than quality of idea. I can relate to the graduate, but the fact is a brilliant graduate will be too anxious to demonstrate their skills which does not help them see the reality. It is not a matter of personal skills, there are brilliant people sprinkled in the organisation at different levels, but a matter of organisational culture that builds on commoditising ideas.
In a big organisation the skills are averaged out and it is the greatest common divisor that can be commoditised. There are more brilliant partners than graduates but the aggregated soup is tasteless. And by the time you are a partner you make enough money to not care about the spice you add to the soup but about the measured KPIs that make up your contribution (sales.)
It reads more like a rant, but I am glad to give more details on specifics. Just to address the title, it is not that firms don't want you to be brilliant at your job, it is that they could not care less unless it is a client that focuses on your brilliance. And the situation with clients is very similar but I will not address it here.
Starting my own startup sounds cool and all but it would be too much work for me and I just because I don't agree 100% with a companies policies doesn't make them an undesirable workplace.
Is it the money? Prestige? You think you'll learn more at one of those places than others? Stability?
* Amazon seems to have a reputation for burning employees out.
* IBM seems quite stagnant. They're basically a huge consulting/services company, not very interesting.
* No one really thinks Microsoft can innovate anymore. They're pretty much coasting on Windows and Office, and that's been eroding for a long time. They don't seem to be able to execute anything successfully. Do you know anyone with a Windows phone? Remember the Zune? Do you search with Bing? What are they doing? Desperately trying to do anything to stay relevant, and failing badly. They're on the IBM lifecycle path, but they're not yet just a large services/consulting company. They're still trying to build products, and they just suck. What are your associations with Microsoft right now? When I think of Apple, I think of the iphone/ipod/itunes. When I think of Microsoft, I think of the Windows 8 interface.
One fellow student of mine wanted to work at microsoft so she could develop the next (I forget exactly) which was never developed at MS, they just bought a little startup, slapped the MS name and logo on it, marked the price way up, and went into maint mode (which is really boring).
She genuinely thought they innovate internally rather than thru purchasing startups (aka outsourced R+D)
Some people specifically want to do maint mode work, but she very specifically wanted to develop "new products" like an example I know was merely a turnkey purchased startup.
Also yes they pay well.
On the other hand, there's something to be said for working directly with the main developers in a room with them!
And right now, I think there's at least a perception that the instability of smaller companies is compensated for by a very strong job market, that you can find very smart people in lots of places, and that most of the non-monetary benefits are unlikely to be really worthwhile at least for young healthy people. Leaving basically pay as the differentiating factor.
I don't whole-heartedly endorse the above analysis, but I think it has large elements of truth in it. If my hypothetical 22 year old niece told me she had job offers from Facebook and also from a small start-up, I suspect I'd advise her to take the Facebook job and quit 1-2 years later. But I'm not sure my advice would be correct.
No idea about the short term stay as they always have interesting challenges, but, yes, Facebook is a household name; everybody's used it. It counts for quite a bit in the self-marketing department, even if you _are_ just doing entry level work.
But the point is valid in that we have an industry where every company likes to posture and interview as if they are hiring the top 1% of programmers only to turn around and give them jobs that a well-trained monkey could almost do.
My friend once told me that the most important skill he picked up at one of the big 3 firms is to appear utterly confident in his ideas and proposals when in reality, he had no idea what he was talking about. (then again, these guys will then turn it around and actually learn a crap ton about the industry in the following 2 days by pouring over research)
I'm sure this clip has probably crossed your screen before, but I think that protagonist eventually realizes he has to out-BS the BS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
First of all, as a 22-year-old it's easy to feel like 2-3 years is an eternity. It's also easy to undervalue the attributes that the more senior employees possess, as one simply can't see them.
"Brilliant" and "Best" are not necessary synonyms. The first seems to me to mean standing out from the crowd, thinking differently, challenging the status quo.
Those are valuable, possibly even essential traits. However, one can easily waste a lot of energy spinning wheels trying to do those things at the wrong times -- a mistake I am very personally familiar with.
My sense is this graduate will spend a few years disrupting things a bit with mixed success. In 5-8 years, if they are as bright as they think they are, they'll have a lot of insight on new skills that they weren't even aware of at play in their seniors' interactions. I hope also that the graduate retains most of their original brilliance, so that they can begin to make a serious difference with a matured, balanced perspective on what their peers and seniors have to offer.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Lucy Kellaway writes a humorous column for the FT, the main subject of which is management nonsense.
The twist of this piece is that a new graduate considers her to be one of the dumb management that she has been mocking since the early 1990s (when I started reading her column), if not before.