What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?

The fourth grade girl stepped up to the webcam. “When you were our age, did you know that this was what you wanted to do when you grew up?” I’m a LinkedIn software engineer in our New York City office, and she was in a classroom in the Grapevine-Colleyville independent school district in Texas.

What a great question! When you’re a kid, adults expect you to have a good answer for, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Seems only fair for the children to turn the tables. So, what did you want to be? Astronaut? Fire fighter? How’d that work out for you?

Nobody who knew me when I was in fourth grade would be surprised that I am now a software engineer.

But when I was in fourth grade, could I have imagined working for LinkedIn? Well, no, because there was no LinkedIn. There was no such thing as a “social networking service.” There were no “internet companies.”

When I was a kid, my job, my industry, the whole world of technology that I currently work in didn’t exist.

One of our educational priorities is to give children more preparation for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) because we know there is an increasing demand for those skills.

If you start out in a STEM career, what sort of industry or technology will you end up working in 20-30 years later? Who knows? Probably something that doesn’t exist yet.

When I was finishing my degree in computer science, I went in search of my first job as a full time software engineer. I sent out resumes, and I contacted a number of recruiters. I reached a point where I had two job offers, and I had to make a decision.

One offer was from an employee benefits consulting firm. The company had a mix of actuaries who came up with the benefit plans and programmers who wrote the code to implement them. The most memorable part of the interview was when I met one of the senior developers.

He described how the company had invented this certain kind of benefit plan, and their job is to build a custom application for each client. “It’s basically the same application over and over, with minor differences,” he explained.

He paused for a moment, straightening his tie, which was part of the company’s required business attire. He lowered his voice and said to me, “I’ve been here five years. When you first get here, there’s a lot to learn, but for the last two years, I don’t think I’ve done anything new. I’m still here because there are nice people here, the pay is good, and they treat us well.”

I don’t remember that guy’s name, and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what management had wanted him to say, but sir, wherever you are now, thank you!

I took the other job.

In recent episode of the Freakonomics podcast on the topic of productivity, guest Charles Duhigg, author of “Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business” cites an MIT study where they looked at the effect on profits of the number of many simultaneous projects a worker is involved with. They found that some people were missing out on opportunities because they were working on too few projects while others were working on so many projects that they could not give enough attention to each project. The optimal number of projects was somewhere in the middle.

But the study also found that kinds of projects was much more significant to a worker’s productivity than the number of projects. You might have thought that a worker who worked on a bunch of similar projects would be the most productive, doing the same thing over and over, faster and faster.

What the study found was the opposite. Duhigg points out that the most productive workers were the the ones who were seeking out new and different kinds of projects, because each project taught them something new.

They were not able to handle as many projects because it takes more time to learn than to simply execute. But over time, the more you learn, the more productive you are.

“To learn takes more time than simply to execute. And yet it turns out that over time, the more you learn, the more value you add, and, as a result, the more productive you are.”

-- Charles Duhigg

The recruiter didn’t fully understand why I said no to the job offer. He pointed out that the company was using the latest hot technology. “All the action is in client-server,” the recruiter said, “those are the skills you’re going to need to get your career started.”

It turns out that mindset was completely wrong. About three years after I turned down the job, the consulting firm underwent a series of mergers that ultimately absorbed and disbanded their operation. The tools that they used had their moment and were eventually supplanted by newer technologies.

The skill that one needed to acquire was not any one specific language or platform. The most valuable skill that is used over and over is the ability to acquire new skills.

I didn’t say all of this to the fourth grade class, but I let them know that in my case, I could never have set out in advance to do what I do now because it hadn’t existed back then. The best you can do is to try lots of things to find what you enjoy doing and can get good at.

The key is to realize that trying and learning new things is an ongoing part of the process.

What about you? Are you doing now what you originally set out to do? Has learning been an ongoing part of your career?

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Thanks for reading. Please like and share. You can find my previous LinkedIn articles here (https://www.dhirubhai.net/today/author/davidpmax).

Cover art: Coding hangout with coder @davidpmax and @GESkillebrew #gesshineon #HourOfCode