4 ms·

What got me in the adult world was "4.0 syndrome". (Well, my actual GPA wasn't 4.0, but close.) Not that I was used to getting great grades and had a rude awake

What got me in the adult world was "4.0 syndrome". (Well, my actual GPA wasn't 4.0, but close.) Not that I was used to getting great grades and had a rude awakening, because school was a lot more intellectually challenging than 95+ percent of what I encountered in the real world, but that school led me to believe the world was more meritocratic, fair, and straight-forward than it actually is. For example, some teachers were better than others-- I actually lucked out and had mostly good ones-- but I never had a teacher who went out of his way to be unfair. But I've had more than one manager who was outright scummy. School doesn't prepare you for this, because while there are demanding teachers, unfair or corrupt ones (while they exist) are extraordinarily rare. Also, in college, you have career coherence. The work that is put in front of you is designed to teach you the basic concepts, so you'll usually learn something from it. The rare cases where this isn't the case are when you have outright incompetent professors. Either way, though, if you do the work you will usually get the knowledge and credibility that you need for your career. Useless, unappreciated busy-work is quite rare in college, but it's common in the work world. To get anything close to 100% career coherence at work, you have to actively manage your career. If you just do what your manager tells you to do, you're probably looking at 25%, which means you get 1 year of real progress per 4 of work. In the real world, the deadlines aren't well-tested. They might be unrealistic or make no sense. The work isn't designed to teach you things, and if you graduate past the work you're being assigned and are ready to move on, that comes down more to social skills than anything else. In school, you can skip grades. In work, you actually need social engineering (or frequent job changes) to progress faster than the slow players for whom the typical track is designed. "4.0 Syndrome" is seen heavily in startups and investment banking analyst programs, because there's a crop of 22-year-olds every year who will meet every "deadline" no matter how ridiculous. They haven't learned that many real-world "deadlines" are just made up times that are often impossible to meet. (In school, they're also "made up times", but there are a large number of people facing the same deadlines, and they'll generally moved if they're really unreasonable.) It's also a dangerous trait to have, because it can lead you to over-perform at work, which in most office cultures is more dangerous than underperforming because (a) you become a target for adversity, and (b) you lose social polish if you overwork yourself, and social success is more important than raw "performance".

therealarmen 14y ago
Well put. College is a constrained optimization problem, and real life is not. The only way to figure that out is to live it. As an aside, I know a lot of people here on HN find your comments to be overly aggressive, but I love them. Keep it up.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  As an aside, I know a lot of people here on HN find your comments to be overly aggressive Many HNers (and this is a hard group to categorize, because there's still a lot of diversity of thought) are still in the honeymoon phase with the positive-sum promise of technology and the startup economy. I believe in these things very strongly, but I'm also old and experienced enough to know that we, the good guys, have real enemies. They aren't stupid, and they're not weak. We seem to think we can out-compete them by being smarter, more productive, and earnestly working toward a better world. We act is if we'll be able to peacefully render them irrelevant and that they won't know what is happening (or care) enough to fight. Well, perhaps. Time will tell. I am not yet at the point of saying we need to take AK-47s against our corporate masters (please don't do that; your aim probably sucks and weapons are nasty things even when used well). However, I am also not optimistic enough to believe that they will surely opt for graceful decline and let us build this better world that we want. Perhaps they will, content to be very rich (in a world whose prosperity begins to dramatically increase, probably around 2025-40, rendering them less relatively wealthy and powerful) but increasingly irrelevant. Perhaps they won't. My experience with the upper class is that they are mean-spirited, ethically depraved people. Their weak point is that they underestimate us, because we're less than human to them, and because they see us as intellectually inferior. However, if we underestimate them, then we are making the same mistake. Most of my HN "enemies" (and that's too strong a word, because I don't dislike them and they don't know me) are Googlers who were shocked when I exposed unethical management, in a very visible way, in October 2011. When you wave a whistle in the public ("whistle" as in whistleblowing) some people act as if you're waving a gun, and especially those who can't stand to hear the truth about their utopia. This reaction is ridiculous, because a lot of the people who get up in arms and fight whistleblowers have nothing to fear. They are too in love with the Woodbury with the quaint coffee shops, not the real Woodbury with the fascistic Governor and the zombie gladiator fights. What's sort of amazing about whistleblowing is that you don't get the worst opposition from the powerful people you are exposing. They know they're doing wrong and will often make some concessions (but rarely enough). The mindless and often vicious opposition that you get is from other peasants who are shocked and upset at what appears to be going down. In the Philippines, this is referred to as the "crab mentality", whereby crabs in a bucket prevent each other from escaping and they all die. That's what you see when subordinate employees go to the mat to defend unethical managers who wouldn't lift a finger to do anything for them.

therealarmen 14y ago

Well put. College is a constrained optimization problem, and real life is not. The only way to figure that out is to live it. As an aside, I know a lot of people here on HN find your comments to be overly aggressive, but I love them. Keep it up.

michaelochurch 14y ago
As an aside, I know a lot of people here on HN find your comments to be overly aggressive Many HNers (and this is a hard group to categorize, because there's still a lot of diversity of thought) are still in the honeymoon phase with the positive-sum promise of technology and the startup economy. I believe in these things very strongly, but I'm also old and experienced enough to know that we, the good guys, have real enemies. They aren't stupid, and they're not weak. We seem to think we can out-compete them by being smarter, more productive, and earnestly working toward a better world. We act is if we'll be able to peacefully render them irrelevant and that they won't know what is happening (or care) enough to fight. Well, perhaps. Time will tell. I am not yet at the point of saying we need to take AK-47s against our corporate masters (please don't do that; your aim probably sucks and weapons are nasty things even when used well). However, I am also not optimistic enough to believe that they will surely opt for graceful decline and let us build this better world that we want. Perhaps they will, content to be very rich (in a world whose prosperity begins to dramatically increase, probably around 2025-40, rendering them less relatively wealthy and powerful) but increasingly irrelevant. Perhaps they won't. My experience with the upper class is that they are mean-spirited, ethically depraved people. Their weak point is that they underestimate us, because we're less than human to them, and because they see us as intellectually inferior. However, if we underestimate them, then we are making the same mistake. Most of my HN "enemies" (and that's too strong a word, because I don't dislike them and they don't know me) are Googlers who were shocked when I exposed unethical management, in a very visible way, in October 2011. When you wave a whistle in the public ("whistle" as in whistleblowing) some people act as if you're waving a gun, and especially those who can't stand to hear the truth about their utopia. This reaction is ridiculous, because a lot of the people who get up in arms and fight whistleblowers have nothing to fear. They are too in love with the Woodbury with the quaint coffee shops, not the real Woodbury with the fascistic Governor and the zombie gladiator fights. What's sort of amazing about whistleblowing is that you don't get the worst opposition from the powerful people you are exposing. They know they're doing wrong and will often make some concessions (but rarely enough). The mindless and often vicious opposition that you get is from other peasants who are shocked and upset at what appears to be going down. In the Philippines, this is referred to as the "crab mentality", whereby crabs in a bucket prevent each other from escaping and they all die. That's what you see when subordinate employees go to the mat to defend unethical managers who wouldn't lift a finger to do anything for them.