Attention Job Seekers - Here's Some Advice You Can't Use

This has been making the rounds due to its comical allusion to The Grapes of Wrath as a path to prosperity. But really?

There are phases to the building of the business that works today.

1. Come up with the idea
2. Flesh out the idea quickly
3. If it involves computer programming, find someone to program it. You may even be able to use something like WordPress to launch your business with a blogging platform and the correct plug ins
4. Find a paying customer.

The new path to prosperity is to start a blog? Oh, wait, I guess the answer is in choosing "the correct plug ins". Right....

If my idea is more complex than one that can be launched through a blog, where can I find cheap, competent programmers who will transform my "idea" into "paying customer(s)"? Most really good programmers are employed, doing their own thing, or charge a premium price per hour. And the bad ones? They'll take your money, give you an unusable product, and call it a day. Assuming they don't try to steal your idea.

This guy's other business idea is to gamble on hiring the candidate who "feels right" regardless of qualification - so maybe he thinks the path to prosperity is to team up with an untested, uncredentialed programmer and "take a chance".... (Or perhaps he means that you should bluster your way through interviews for jobs you're not qualified to get, because between offering to work for reduced pay and "incentives" and being "risky", eventually an employer is going to see you as the best long-term bet?)

I'm also wondering what ideas we're talking about? Come up with the idea for the next Facebook or Groupon, then build it using WordPress plugins? Make and sell crafts? (If so, a better approach may be to sell through auction sites or Etsy.) Seriously, what does this guy think he's talking about?

Eventually you may be on to something big. Or, at the least, you will have a nice lifestyle business you can operate. Plus, if you run your own show you don’t have to worry about big corporations or Wall Street. Get big enough and they’ll be your client you won’t be theirs.

You may be onto something big, or not. (I would love to hear this guy's examples, and surely he must have dozens, of this model in action.) And then you can have a nice "lifestyle business" (whatever that is... perhaps beer money) that you can transform into something so big that big corporations and Wall Street will become your clients! "And all I have to do is... act naturally."

Look, I'm all for entrepreneurship and self-employment. But let's approach it from a real world perspective.

"If Only Everybody Were Like Bill Gates and Me"

Under the headline, "Will Dropouts Save America?", Michael Ellsberg suggests that college is overrated.

I typed these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook — invented, among others, by the college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by the degreeless Sean Parker.

Ellsberg complains,

American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees. But we don’t have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren’t traditional professionals, but start-up entrepreneurs.

I'm all for having schools teach kids to be more entrepreneurial, and to prepare themselves for a more complex job market in which there will likely be a rising expectation that top performers will stay at the top of their game throughout their careers. But let's be honest. Most people aren't interested in starting businesses, working slavishly around the clock during a building phase, postponing reward and risking failure. Most people are content with 9-5 and a salary. It's true, as Ellsberg argues, that K-12 education (and, for that matter, college education), including business school, does little to teach "skills or attitudes that would ever help you start a business". Historically, though, there was no reason to believe that employers wanted those skills taught - to the contrary, the basic structure of K-12 education is designed to turn out quiet, compliant, orderly factory workers who can sit in rows for hour after hour and quietly follow instructions.

It is also fair to note that if you met Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or no doubt most or all of the other people Ellsberg mentions, back when they were thirteen years old you would have noticed that they were different from their peers. At thirteen, Jobs was corresponding with David Packard, head of HP, to try to get free computer parts and was sufficiently impressive that he got both the parts and a job. Mark Zuckerberg's interest and aptitude in programming was sufficiently manifest by the time he was eleven years old that his parents hired a tutor for him. As high schoolers, Bill Gates and Paul Allen started a company that ultimately built and sold a computer to the City of Seattle to count vehicles. If you find a kid like Jobs, Gates or Zuckerberg, you have a decent chance of turning that kid into a high-performing member of the tech world. But if you find a kid who is not like Jobs, Gates or Zuckerberg, while you might be able to shape him for a different field or career, you're not going to turn a kid who "hates math" into a kid who will literally fall asleep on his keyboard while writing high level computer programs. Personality factors in. It's difficult to imagine Bill Gates being happy working for somebody else. And even if you recognized his brilliance and contribution, it's difficult to imagine being an employer responsible for the care and feeding of a Steve Jobs. Odds are, a lot of tech world geniuses and giants used to bring home report cards lamenting, "Doesn't play well with others."

Also, while people like Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg highlight that it is possible to learn high level skills and even to lead a field without a college degree, or that with sufficient interest and opportunity (particularly in relation to an emerging technology) it's possible to enter college knowing more about your field than a lot of the grad assistants and professors who will be teaching you, that's not something we can hope to accomplish on a wholesale basis. We can shift the argument a bit, and make it about how a college degree shouldn't be treated by employers as a baseline qualification, and how they and many of their employees will be better off if they can identify and foster young workers who have tremendous aptitude but lack a formal qualification. But that argument is not so much about what is taught in schools and colleges as it is about how employers could benefit by changing their approach to recruiting, hiring and training employees. And if that's the argument, you can expect employers to resist your message - most employers prefer having employees come, trained, experienced and ready to 'produce', not excited kids with "great potential" but no objectively measurable qualification or experience.

I also don't want to take away from the companies that Ellsberg mentions, but there is a dramatic difference in the contribution of a company like Apple or Microsoft to the economy, job market and the way our society has evolved as compared to a Facebook or Twitter. Neither company employees a great many people, neither has particularly unique or special features or technology, and if either disappeared they would barely register in a monthly unemployment report - Twitter's 300 employees could be lost in a rounding error. It's also fair to note that those companies are comprised largely of employees - there's only so much room at the top. It's not that Twitter and Facebook can't flourish in our economy, or that the proposed valuation of Facebook isn't extremely impressive. But ten years from now talk of "Twitter and Facebook" may sound a lot like a present discussion of "MySpace and ICQ". Small business create a huge number of jobs each year, but huge numbers of jobs are also lost every year through their failure.

I very much agree with Ellsberg that we can do a lot more to support entrepreneurship, to help small business grow and succeed, and to help even those who prefer "a normal job" to adapt to the changing world. I agree that the value of a college degree is exaggerate by the fact that a lot of people who go to college would find ways to become higher-than-average earners without attending college or after dropping out. I agree that we could benefit from teaching students the value of failure, and how to draw appropriate lessons from failure. I also agree that it might be better for the government to find ways to help fund entrepreneurial ventures with some of the money that is presently expended on grants and subsidies for college education. But I think we need to be realistic both in terms of how many students we can expect to transform into entrepreneurs, and how many small companies we can expect to blossom or explode into large companies, as opposed to ultimately failing, remaining small, or selling their technologies or operations to a larger entity.

Staying Competitive in a Modern Employment Market

Thomas Friedman has noticed something that is incredibly new, unless you happened to be paying attention to the of the job market over the past four decades:

Whatever you may be thinking when you apply for a job today, you can be sure the employer is asking this: Can this person add value every hour, every day — more than a worker in India, a robot or a computer? Can he or she help my company adapt by not only doing the job today but also reinventing the job for tomorrow? And can he or she adapt with all the change, so my company can adapt and export more into the fastest-growing global markets? In today’s hyperconnected world, more and more companies cannot and will not hire people who don’t fulfill those criteria.

It's important to note up front that a lot of the work that has to be done, day in and day out, in a typical work place is mundane. Yes, in many industries more mundane jobs (including white collar jobs) are increasingly outsourced to other companies or nations, but few people can claim that they get paid principally or mostly to think and innovate.

I accept the thesis that workers need to be more entrepreneurial, more able to create their own jobs and justify their own compensation, both in the present job market and in the foreseeable future. But the days of finding a job with an employer, then staying with that employer (and perhaps remaining in that job) for an entire career, are long over. I recall hearing in the 1990's that my fellow graduates were likely to change jobs six or more times during a career, and that people were changing jobs roughly every three years. Yes, if we could, many of us would choose Friedman's path, find a sinecure with the New York Times and over a course of decades pontificate about how others need to innovate and change. (Oh - and let's not forget marrying a wealthy heiress.) But for most modern college graduates that has never been more than a dream.

Also, let's face it, not everybody is cut out to be an entrepreneur, or to continually identify and augment their most valuable job skills. People tend not to go the extra mile unless they see clear consequences arising from their failure to do so. I expect that Friedman knows the importance of his employer's website, and that a great deal of energy is put into the technical side. But do I think he's mastered modern technology, above and beyond the word processor? Let's just say, I haven't seen any reason to believe so. I am skeptical that Friedman knows anything about the New York Times' web servers or their management, their CMS or its management or development, or that he plays any significant role in the company's innovations. I'm not accusing Friedman of being a hypocrite, although I am accusing him (if that's the word) of being an extremely lucky man. I'm simply pointing out how even somebody who sees how dramatically the world is changing, and how easily he could be left behind, might nonetheless assume that change is something that only happens to other people, or still not perceive a sufficient incentive to reinvent and expand his own skills.

People Unclear On The Concept

The concept of creative destruction is that innovation and entrepreneurship are what drive long-term economic growth, even though the value of established companies may be diminished or destroyed. George Will doesn't quite get it:

You must remember this: In 2006, the last full year before this downturn, when the economy grew 2.7 percent and the unemployment rate was just 4.6 percent, 3.3 million people lost their jobs to the normal churning of a dynamic economy. This "creative destruction" has human costs but no longer is optional.

George, when there's no innovation behind the crumbling edifices of established industry, they must be propped up with huge government subsidies and bail-outs to keep the situation from becoming significantly worse, and the economy is sputtering, that's not creative destruction. It's just destruction.

Update: Tom Burka's take on things: Democrats To Actually Vote For Own Bill.

Jobs, Jobs and More Jobs?

The government's response to periods of high unemployment traditionally involves extending unemployment benefits. Currently, with maximum extensions, an unemployed person can qualify for up to 99 weeks of benefits. Needless to say, this strains the notion of unemployment insurance as any sort of (compulsory) premium-based insurance.

The structure of unemployment insurance, consistent with the larger structure of our society, is predicated upon a job being something that you get from somebody else. Our nation gives great lip service to entrepreneurship, but very little support for entrepreneurs. One of the benefits of meaningful health reform is that entrepreneurs would be able to obtain affordable insurance, something that ties a lot of workers to their jobs particularly after the age of forty. Entrepreneurs are blessed with the full burden of government regulations and the tax system - self-employment taxes to take the place of the employer's matching taxes. They don't get the tax breaks, credits, etc., handed out like candy to big businesses for "creating jobs". Health insurance comes into play again if they try to add employees, as they attempt to attract workers who want the same quality of coverage they can obtain through group plans offered by larger or governmental employers. It's tough.

Meanwhile, your unemployment benefits may be reduced or terminated if you attempt to start your own business, meaning that for most unemployed workers there's a disincentive to try to make their own work.

Is this sane? Somehow we transformed from a nation where "anybody can get rich" by starting a business to a nation where "everybody expects to get rich" by punching a clock. Pretty much anybody in the nation can recite the bromide, "You don't get rich working for somebody else," er, unless you're a professional athlete or banker, but it doesn't appear to have been internalized. A great many people truly seem to believe that they can work a $10/hour job year after year, and then one day, magically, they'll become multi-millionaires.

At the same time, we're in an era where it's relatively cheap and easy to market a new business through the Internet - if you still keep a copy, take a look at the Yellow Pages, to get a sense of how many businesses have dramatically reduced their investment or abandoned that expensive, traditional medium in favor of websites and online marketing. There are numerous programs available that make it possible to make money through online ventures, and numerous online ventures that help you market products to a national audience. Why aren't we teaching people how to take full advantage of these new opportunities?

If we're facing additional years of prolonged unemployment perhaps, rather than perpetuating the status quo, we should examine how we might boost entrepreneurship, lift the burdens on entrepreneurs as their businesses take off, and try to invigorate the economy from the bottom up. At a bare minimum, don't take away a would-be entrepreneur's modest unemployment benefits (or COBRA subsidy) if she dares to start a business that actually generates revenue. I can't imagine the equation where it's better to keep a prospective entrepreneur idle for up to 99 weeks because there aren't enough jobs, than it is to encourage them to get started with their own business ideas on day one.