One of the biggest Aha!! moments I had happened when I created my first company and realized how important joining people of different personalities together is in order to make them prosper. Making teams instead of solo work.
For example a very good designer or visionary could see the forest but finds it very hard to face each individual tree. There are other people that can't see the forest by themselves but are extremely efficient working on tree after tree.
You just join them together and magic happens.
It is a terrible thing that our educational system favors so much individualism, even when most important work(Nobel prices, great products or services) are done in teams.
When someone starts too many projects but finish none, for me is a symptom that he simply can't finish it alone. In my company I have gotten practice on making people finish things.
This is probably the biggest thing Silicon Valley has, there is always someone who can help you and you help her too.
It may seem that US educational system favour individualism, but there are no indications that it has any significant consequences. Google failed to find correlations between performance at college and performance at work [1].
Also there are schools where children are free to do anything during school time including entering/leaving any lecture or activity at will at any moment. Yet there are no indications that on average it makes those that attend such schools any worse in a later life [2]
It's not that academics are not a useful precursor to work, but that the academy and the company are evaluating people on apparently orthogonal metrics. Which in itself is a really interesting result.
No kidding. I once read an article where a lady at Google was giving resume advice for how to stand out and get hired by an awesome company, like Google. She gives her own resume as an example, and after one glance I'm frankly pissed off.
Why? Her resume shows she graduated college at age 12. Well Hells bells, señorita, if I was a genius like that getting hired at Google would be (more of a) cinch for me, too.
Individualism, as a behaviour and a way to relate with peers, is learned in elementary and high school. Passivity and the wilfullness to perform task for a reward are learned in elementary school. Relations with peers mostly develop in teenage years.
It is very unlikely that this decade of taming has no impact whatsoever on future working behaviours, and not explaining (at least partly) the american individualism you speak of. Competing for grades through individual work, the traditional school model imported from Western Europe, might indeed breed individualism and competition. As could a ruthless school environment of punishing and policing could steer a children toward antisocial behaviours.
Mainstream educational theories suggest project-based education as a way to teach teamwork, but critiques suggest it can be distressing and yield lesser results with students already struggling with learning school knowledge.
TL;DR: The studies cited does do not prove the point: it is very unlikely that schooling has no impact on working behaviours.
The point is not that schooling has no impact on future life. Rather that what is taught in school has no impact. Children learns from behaviour of teachers and each other. This knowledge stays. Particular topics that school system thinks it teaches does not stay. Witness widespread functional illeteracy despite apparent ability to read in school.
Children learn from everything, but what will have the most important impact is hard to assess. Most variables that can explain educational achievements and results are highly multicolinear, so saying this has an impact and this has none is really, really hard, maybe impossible. To make an arithmetic metaphor (yes, some school knowledge stick ;) ), I prefer < and > to = and != for social sciences assertions. Even if we like discrete categories because it is makes bold and satisfying statements, using them is always a reduction in precision. Just like in math I guess.
To tackle the question of widespread functional illiteracy, it is necessary to open the Pandora Box of social inequality, as it is generally accepted that the most important variable to predict school performance is the parent's (mother's) level of education.
Good point. How many people with actual bad grades even make it to Google?
Yet, even if they just found that the difference between 99% grade and 100% grade did not translate to the workplace, that's an interesting result. It's not something I would have guessed at with confidence.
>> It is a terrible thing that our educational system favors so much individualism, even when most important work(Nobel prices, great products or services) are done in teams.
> It may seem that US educational system favour individualism, but there are no indications that it has any significant consequences. Google failed to find correlations between performance at college and performance at work
These aren't incompatible ideas.
You can drill into kids the idea of the lone genius fixing the world (Newton, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, political figures like Thomas Jefferson and FDR) ignoring the history and vast apparatus that supported them, and you can fail to teach them how to effectively work in teams.
As long as you don't grade these things directly (which would be extremely difficult anyways), you wouldn't expect a correlation between a student's opinion on individualism and their grade.
The thing is that one cannot. Or at least there are no idications that those drills have any significant effect on a later life fading away pretty quickly a year or two after school/college. At best during those drills children learn from teacher behaviour, not words. I.e. they learn how to force others to do things they do not understand or need.
Again, how are you measuring this correlation? If it's not something that's measured, you don't have any numbers to correlate with.
You could equivalently say that scores in any particular subject in school don't correlate with success after school, which is usually true. But it doesn't follow that net success wouldn't change if that subject was taught better: not only would you be teaching different techniques than is measured in that correlation, but you also have network effects when more people are trained in something.
An easy example of this is the topic at hand: software development as part of a team, which many schools don't teach (or don't teach well), but is a skill picked up quickly (hopefully) when entering a job with more than a handful of developers. I'm not talking pair programming or anything specific, just generally being able to develop software with other people.
Here you have something that isn't measured at many schools and is important to success at many companies. So you'd find no correlation between the two, but better developed experience would undoubtedly help the worker and the team in that situation (whether or not that's a skill best learned in school vs on the job is a different question).
> At best during those drills children learn from teacher behaviour, not words
Your apparently data-based argument is wandering into gut feelings, but this is what I was talking about. If a teacher lionizes Albert Einstein for single-handedly saving humanity from 19th century luminiferous aethers and inventing the atomic bomb, the idea that progress is only made by hermit inventors is going to continue to propagate. People are born to be math geniuses, they don't have to work at it, etc.
As a part of development team one learns precisely from behaviour of others when one is not a subject of a learning drill. The book in [2] from my comment above was rather convincing that this the most effective way to learn. And such learning does not imply that one learns team work, as one could learn habits of a single most harizmatic person, not from the whole team.
As for teachers lionizing something, then consider that in Soviet Union in school and university one was constantly subject to drills about Communist Party. It did not help the idea to survive at all.
for me is a symptom that he simply can't finish it alone
It's tough to be a finisher, in just about anything. The Bible calls the concept of finishing "perseverance". So whether it is running a race, a personal project, spiritual patience... it's just tough to finish anything.
You get to that point where you've got most of the validation you wanted from doing something, but there's still energy to be invested or an obstacle to overcome.
I think the art of finishing lies in realizing that what is of true value is the doing of the work... Not so much the outcome or end goal that you desire from the work, but the faithful daily investment of energy towards that goal... That's what really matters, because if we're honest, we don't really control whether or not we finish something.
Upvoted because you're generally correct, but it's too easy to take this advice and turn it into "my project has external value because I invested my time and energy into it". Because that's the labor theory of value and it breeds jealousy and discontent, as people who worked smarter than you reaped more rewards.
Part of the problem that most capitalist societies deal with is that value is perceived largely through how much money it is worth, which is an external measure of value. The insight is that we cannot allow our internal measure of worth to be dictated by how much it's externally worth; we have to define that internal sense of worth by and for ourselves. We have to be able to say, "this project is worth something to me because I invested my time and effort into it, and if it's not worth something to you, that's OK too, because I don't get to dictate to you what something is worth to you just because I devoted my energy to it, but in the meantime, my energy is worth something to me, and as such devoting my energy into a project makes it worth something to me, and that makes the daily effort Good."
It is a terrible thing that our educational system favors so much individualism, even when most important work(Nobel prices, great products or services) are done in teams.
Just to be clear this sounds intuitive but there's no underlying truth to how good work is done. John Nash and Tesla were crazy and were also at times very solitary thinkers. On the other hand, Edison was hailed as a creative genius but much of his work was done in a team laboratory setting.
I am incredibly glad that the US fosters the individualism it does. You're probably able to make that comment on this message board because of it. That's not to say it doesn't have (major) flaws with people thinking they are the next coming of Alexander because they built a web app and forgetting the role that groups play in building individuals. However, I would absolutely hate to try and force creativity through a force socialization - we need more ways of thinking and doing and not less.
I think even your wording says a lot:
moments I had happened when I created my first company and realized how important joining people of different personalities together is in order to make them prosper.
When someone starts too many projects but finish none, for me is a symptom that he simply can't finish it alone. In my company I have gotten practice on making people finish things.
You are one type of thinker - but even here you are tempted to push that way of working onto others because it's the way to get things done (valid!). On the other hand, some people's productivity will plummet when they are forced to work and hate even the sentiment of joining people of different personalities together is in order to make them prosper - you could see someone hearing that from above resenting it.
Joiners seem to intuitively believe that fostering joining by compelling joining is an unalloyed universal good. (Yes, I'm looking at you paired-programming advocates!) It takes some observational skill -- and empathy! -- on their part to come to the conclusion that not all meatbots are built alike in this regard.
> It is a terrible thing that our educational system favors so much individualism, even when most important work(Nobel prices, great products or services) are done in teams.
Does our educational system favor individualism? My entire educational career was spent battling against enforced collaboration and group work, aka, get the smart kid to teach the rest of the dubs and do their work for them.
Fostering love of solo work and resentment of collaboration might be a side-effect of such practices, but somehow I don't think that's the intention.
It is a terrible thing that our educational system favors so much individualism, even when most important work(Nobel prices, great products or services) are done in teams.
I bet the one-room school house fostered the prosperity you mentioned.
Cooperative learning is what I think you are describing:
> It is a terrible thing that our educational system favors so much individualism, even when most important work
Do you recall doing group projects in school ever? I do. They're poorly designed by faculty, most of whom have little experience other than working alone all day in front of a class of 30.
Individuals are graded as a group, so the group average quality affects your individual grade. And with little way of enforcing norms, the group average effort also affects your individual grade. A clever shirker will reveal themselves early enough to motivate their teammates into covering their missing contribution.
There's techniques to mitigate this, but I'd say 1 in 10 faculty cares about this, 2 in 10 heard that group work is critical to industry and the other 8 just figure grading 6 group projects is easier than grading 30.
> Do you recall doing group projects in school ever? I do. They're poorly designed by faculty, most of whom have little experience other than working alone all day in front of a class of 30.
And they are poorly executed by students because they don't really have anything like a job at stake.
I don't do group classes when I teach. There is no way for me as the "manager" to actually impact the group dynamics. So, grading 6 groups is WAY harder than 30 individuals.
However, I make sure that assignments build on one another. By the end of the semester, practically every student curses themselves for how crappy the code they wrote at the beginning of the semester was.
Nothing drives home why you should write better code than being both the producer and consumer of crappy code.
Good points, but there's some value in learning the averaging effect that much. About the crucial importance of choosing good teammates. About the limitations of the individual in overcoming a bad team.
I don't think there is anything wrong with favoring individualism (lets say 70% individual work, 30% group work) in education. You can get great work done in teams only if each indiviual is good enough to work independently. That is one of the reasons why startups are able to get so much done with their first (small) batch of (talented) engineers.
I wish I could just super underline your point on favoring individualism. We have systems built to make the best individuals that we can, and wonder why it is hard to join teams later in life.
We'll even have times where we put people in teams, but then they still get judged individually. Completely ignoring that a failed team is just that, a failed team. Not a team of failures.
> It is a terrible thing that our educational system favors so much individualism
I have no idea where you got that idea from. Everything is set up for everyone to do exactly the same thing in exactly the same way with group projects where everyone passes or everyone fails with no regard to the individual effort put into it.
A huge (the primary?) purpose of the educational system is not to teach people how to do things, but rather to rate and rank them for comparison. As an instructor there's always a conflict, you want to provide an accurate ranking of ability/knowledge/etc in the subject in the form of grades but you also want to push the students to learn and do interesting work, unfortunately it's impossible to do the first with groups, and often it's impossible to do the second without them.
Yes! A lot of the time people can't finish things because they don't know or can't decide what to actually do next. Having another person around to validate decisions or even just make them can be a great help. Bringing people together who will listen to and respect each other is the skill of team building.
For example a very good designer or visionary could see the forest but finds it very hard to face each individual tree. There are other people that can't see the forest by themselves but are extremely efficient working on tree after tree.
You just join them together and magic happens.
It is a terrible thing that our educational system favors so much individualism, even when most important work(Nobel prices, great products or services) are done in teams.
When someone starts too many projects but finish none, for me is a symptom that he simply can't finish it alone. In my company I have gotten practice on making people finish things.
This is probably the biggest thing Silicon Valley has, there is always someone who can help you and you help her too.