5 School Habits That Make You Worse at Your Job
Being a good student might make you a poor worker. Here are a few habits and behaviors that might serve you well in the classroom but poorly in the workplace.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I’m Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers and tactical leadership advice.
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I was at the gym last Monday with an ex-coworker. We were lifting weights and got onto the topic of educational startups and the public school system. We observed that many tech workers have dreams of reforming the education system, but so few succeed. That is because of various things, including that government is difficult to work with and many families are used to education being free (as in beer), which makes educational startups particularly challenging to finance.
But we acknowledged that many people think about education reform because school wasn’t exactly organized to meet our growth needs.
Now I think that’s a shame. Most of us spend approximately 17 years in school before we move into our career. Which is crazy when you think about it. That’s so many years.
School can certainly teach some valuable skills and knowledge, but the way it’s organized also teaches us bad habits.
I spent many years interviewing hundreds of college students for internships and full time jobs. I would repeatedly see the bad habits I list below consistently, particularly from the better students. These are behaviors that schools encourage or reward, which will hurt you in your career.
As a personal side note - I really disliked all forms of school. From my earliest memories until I graduated college, I was never able to enjoy class. But what I realized when I graduated was that the core behaviors I rebelled against were (happily) ones that are listed below. Which means I immediately found that work suited my personality far more than school ever did.
1. School says: Put in extra effort to make everything perfect.
I frequently felt like a slacker or a failure in school because I didn’t have perfect grades. I was repeatedly told that I had more potential, and it was disappointing that I didn’t put in more effort.
You see, in school you’re rewarded for putting excessive effort into every task. The school grading system encourages high achievers to deliver perfect work with every assignment and test.
However, school doesn’t reward you for getting your work done more quickly. And it doesn’t reward you for getting more work done. It only rewards quality.
Then these high achievers start working, and they are frequently surprised that high quality is only valued on certain tasks. In fact, being efficient with getting tasks done is more often than not more important.
How could you get schools to imitate this value system? Perhaps things like this:
“This paper is due next Friday. Turn in your paper by this Friday, and you’ll get a 20 point bonus. Turn in your paper by next Wednesday and you get a 5 point bonus.”
Or perhaps what one of my computer science teachers did, but I rarely saw elsewhere:
“Each week we’re going to do a lab, for a total of 10 labs. But for every lab you do after those 10 labs, I’ll give you an additional X points of credit.”
When you have ten questions you need to ask various stakeholders, some employees will fire off ten emails and then move on to their next tasks. Other employees will agonize over the exact wording, phrasing, formatting, and those emails will take them a good 30 minutes.
One of your first jobs out of college is to learn the quality expectations of your work. You’ll certainly need to identify the “A” work, like critical presentations for your VP. But most work falls lower on that scale. And the lower the required quality of your work, the faster you can do it.
This applies to emails, documents, meeting preparation, spreadsheets, and even coding. The engineer that can hack up a quick script in 30 minutes to solve a problem tends to be more valuable to the company than the engineer who spent 5 days writing a beautiful, extensible solution. Yes, beautiful, extensible solutions are sometimes the right answer, but not always.
2. School says: We’ll give you a rubric.
In school, they usually provide rubrics to explain how the teachers will determine your score in their class and on individual assignments. For a class, it will explain what percentage of the class grade is based on assignments, each test, participation, etc. For an assignment, it would explain the precise definition of the project and the success criteria. The general statement is, “Do exactly what we tell you. Nothing more, nothing less, and you’ll be rewarded.”
One of the hardest things for college hires to learn in the office is that there is massive ambiguity around everything. That includes what your job expectations are, what it takes to get promoted, how specific work should be done, and how that result will be measured.
Let’s take a very common request.
"Please give me a regular status update on this."
Do they want a document? A spreadsheet? An email? A detailed update or a brief one? How often? Weekly? Monthly? Do they want a meeting? How soon do they need it to start? Who should be included in the update?
What’s hard is that this isn’t a game someone’s playing with you. They’re not vague on purpose. They usually don’t know the answers themselves. What they’re doing is relaying a need, and they want you to solve it.
This isn’t easy to understand or handle. Particularly with prickly people, it can be hard to learn what exactly they mean by “an update” or “a brief summary”, or other vague terms. More than once I’ve had someone flabbergasted that I didn’t anticipate exactly what they wanted with their vague request.
Regardless of how fair it is, you’ll be evaluated based on how well you anticipated their needs, timeline, requirements, and level of quality. The nice thing is that over time, you'll get better at guessing people's needs.
This is the equivalent of being in school and your teacher saying, “Please write something relevant to this topic and turn it in some time.” But you could lose points if you didn't write long enough or wrote too long, you were too detailed or not detailed enough, you picked a topic the teacher didn’t like, or you turned it in too late.
There’s a reason that work operates this way. As a leader, I might recognize a problem. I see an employee a little over their head on an important project, and I’m nervous that I haven’t seen enough updates to be confident that the project won’t fail.
I could certainly ponder exactly what I need and write down specific requirements. Then I could give those very specific requirements to the employee.
This isn’t the best because:
My time is more valuable than my employees. It’s better that I delegate what I can. And coming up with a solution to my need is an acceptable delegation.
Coming up with those requirements is a leadership and growth opportunity. Perhaps my employee has a specific update cadence that works best for them. Or they invent an update format that works really well with their project.
Considering the price of my time and their growth opportunity, the best solution is to say, “Hey employee, I don't have enough regular info on this project, and it's making me nervous. Solve that, please.” A good employee will learn how to solve those types of problems.
This is a core aspect of the awesomeness of work, actually.
In school, your deliveries usually have plenty of constraints. “This topic, this format, this method, this length, this deadline.”
It lets you know what to deliver, but you’re executing more than creating and inventing.
But when a product manager goes to an engineer and says, “Our website feels slow. Can you speed up things?”
That’s a fascinating problem to solve. The product manager can’t even accurately define what the problem is. What does the engineer need to solve? What is slow? Who is it slow for? How can you measure speed, and what is fast enough? And how valuable is this, and how much time should the engineer put into it?
Experienced employees learn that ambiguity in the workplace signals valuable autonomy, and so future success comes from not being frustrated by autonomy, but becoming motivated to navigate that ambiguity successfully.