The best is the enemy of the good
When you retrain professionals from other fields to become programmers, you notice an interesting pattern. People who have already worked somewhere are very willing to retrain. And the longer their experience outside IT, the more diligently they study. But students sometimes, frankly, slack off.
After talking to both groups, you can find that students cling to the very end to the belief in “magical employment” that awaits them right after graduating from university. Next, for those who still haven’t taken off the rose-colored glasses ...
A guide to the real world
Each of us has needs. The need for family, friends, a home, a job, hobbies, … But right now I’d like to talk about one of the most important and always relevant needs — the desire to live well and earn good money.
Most people have this need. And almost everyone tries to satisfy it through work, a profession, and a career. And it seems perfectly logical to achieve this goal through professional development and self-actualization. Who among us wouldn’t want to become a top-class specialist, an international-level professional: recognition, respect, high income, great opportunities — it sounds wonderful.
So what’s the action plan for all these millions and billions of future top-class workers? Quite often, it looks like this: finish school, prepare for university, get into university, study, graduate, find a good job, work, build a great career, retire with honors.
This plan only seems correct, but it isn’t. The difference between a correct plan and an incorrect one is that a correct plan gets you to the goal, while an incorrect one does not.
The plan described above ignores so many real-life factors that it’s hard to decide what to call it: primitive, outdated, or simply wrong. What does this “most common success plan in the world” fail to account for? Competition...
Competition
1. The winner takes all
The top 5% of specialists receive 50% of all the money. The top 20% of specialists receive 80% of all the money.
Some companies look for an employee who is better, while others look for someone cheaper. The former aren’t afraid to overpay, but they want to get the very best for the money they have. The latter want to pay the smallest possible amount for the minimum level of quality that will satisfy them.
You will start your career/professional journey from the far left side of the chart. And the best place to be is on the far right side. You have a long road ahead. You need to move as quickly as possible at least into its right half. A specialist on the right side of the chart differs from a specialist on the left side by having experience—quality experience.
While you are in the left half, the number of specialists like you in the labor market is much larger than the demand for them. That means it’s a buyer’s market (the employer). And you have to compete with others like you for the most miserable job opening.
But as soon as you gain enough experience and move into the right half, the rules of the game start to change. Demand begins to exceed supply, and salaries begin to rise. Five years of good experience can turn into a tenfold salary increase. So think, look around, and learn.
But even better is to make it into the top 5% of specialists. Then your fees will be limited only by how much money your clients/employers have. Want to hire the very best—pay more than everyone else. Just like at an auction.
A smart and hardworking person can make it into the top 20% of specialists in five years. And in the next five years—into the top 5% of the very best specialists. Here, of course, you need to do a lot of self-education and change jobs often. Sometimes you even have to work beyond reasonable limits.
But you don’t need to work a lot (for a long time). The best specialist doesn’t do more work—he does the work better. Better than anyone. That’s why you can’t replace him with ten average workers.
If in a presidential election you get 48% of the votes and the second contender gets 47%, you did not get the support of the majority, and you did not outperform your competitor by a factor of two. You beat him by one—just one percent! But you become president and get everything, while he remains nobody and gets nothing.
2. The loser gets nothing
If you have ever applied to a university, you may have encountered a situation where they accept 200 people, but 2,000 want to enroll. Out of 1,000 applicants with a competition of 10 people per seat, only 100 will become students; the remaining 900 get nothing.
What do you think will happen when you graduate from university and start looking for a job? Competition will increase many times over!
Suppose you graduate this year from the law faculty in Berlin. Let’s say Berlin has only 10 universities, which together produce 1,000 lawyers each year. The market has two openings with a salary of $80,000 per year, 8 openings with a salary of $40,000, and thirty openings in government organizations with a salary of $20,000.
Disaster 1: 1,000 “lawyers” and only 40 openings. That is, only 40 out of 1,000 lawyers will get a job in their profession, and the other 960 people who spent five years studying at university will go work as “sales managers.”
Disaster 2: You are one of the 40 best graduating lawyers—what are your chances of getting a job? Much less than 100%, because there’s also nepotism, family professions, getting hired through connections, etc. Most of these 40 openings will be taken by the sons, nieces, and grandchildren of top managers at those very companies.
Disaster 3: You are the best graduate of your year, but you still have no real practical experience. And for the good openings in the market, people who have already been working in the field for 3–5 years will also apply. They have accumulated experience and reputation and built connections. So you may have to start from the very bottom.
Disaster 4: You will have to spend about three years working “unpaid” jobs for experience, while also doing self-education, and only then will you be able to compete for good openings—with prospects, future valuable experience, and high pay. This is exactly the stage that should have taken place at university. But if you studied at an ordinary university, now you will have to do all of this yourself.
3. You have nothing
All you have is a diploma, and in most cases it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on in the eyes of your future employer. Most often, the employer knows the “real price” of your diploma and its microscopic value compared to real experience.
Do you have a higher education? Who doesn’t? There are a lot of people with higher education. It guarantees nothing. It’s like a certificate that you’re not an idiot, that’s all. Universities don’t provide any cutting-edge skills. Usually, in one year on a real job you will learn as much as in four years at university. That’s life, whether you want it or not.