July 26, 2005

Jean, Stop Working for the Man!



Max Vadukul

Why hiring is obsolete -- after working for a year, I've learned my lesson. I don't want to get up at 6:00 AM to get to work and come back at 8:00 PM so my boss doesn't give me the evil eye! I don't want to listen to the guy in the cube next to me making faux witty banter on the phone! I don't want to see the VP's Maserati parked in the parking lot just once a month or at all!

Excerpted from the article:

"Most organizations who hire people right out of college are only aware of the average value of 22 year olds, which is not that high. And so the idea for most of the twentieth century was that everyone had to begin as a trainee in some entry-level job. Organizations realized there was a lot of variation in the incoming stream, but instead of pursuing this thought they tended to suppress it, in the belief that it was good for even the most promising kids to start at the bottom, so they didn't get swelled heads.

"The most productive young people will always be undervalued by large organizations, because the young have no performance to measure yet, and any error in guessing their ability will tend toward the mean.

"What's an especially productive 22 year old to do? One thing you can do is go over the heads of organizations, directly to the users. Any company that hires you is, economically, acting as a proxy for the customer. The rate at which they value you (though they may not consciously realize it) is an attempt to guess your value to the user. But there's a way to appeal their judgement. If you want, you can opt to be valued directly by users, by starting your own company."

3 comments:

Robonosto said...

Does working for the man today necessarily mean settling into the province of the mediocre? It really depends what industry you're in and whether your studies prepare you to be a "net producer," don't it?

Miss J said...

yeah -- if it's a block in the way of self actualization. but, who knows ... some of us are self actualized through working for someone else and making them a lot of money. which def occurs in most industries that are not, hmmm ... necessarily altruistic.

Miss J said...

kinda like in kurosawa's ikiru -- that girl who finds ultimate fulfillment working for a wind-up toy factory.