In my life, I have spent three years working full-time as a software engineer. Before that, I spent almost twenty as a student in formal education. My education prepared me in many ways for my life and career, and on the whole has been a great advantage. However, the structure of formal education taught me a pattern of thinking that I realized has held me back as a professional. In this post, I’ll examine this pattern, which I name “school mindset”, and how it can be a hindrance in the professional world. I’ll delve into my personal experiences and offer my insights on how to transition from a school mindset to a more effective professional mindset.
Before we dive in, I’ll note that I’m writing from my own experience in professional software engineering, and this may not generalize to other fields.
What Is School Mindset?
Let’s think about the usual structure of school, as the student experiences it. A teacher hands out an assignment. There will be instructions, perhaps a scoring rubric. The student works on the assignment, then submits some result to the teacher by the due date. After a time, the teacher returns a grade indicating the quality of the student’s work. Repeat. If the grades the student is getting are too low, the student can expect some unpleasant conversations with the teacher, the student’s parents, or other authority figures. The effect of all this is that much of the student’s energy is focused on getting good grades. Over time, the lesson learned is that to succeed, the student must carefully follow given instructions. Furthermore, grades cap out at “A” or “A+”, there is a fixed number of assignments in a semester, and while there are often penalties for late work, there are very rarely bonuses for early submission before the imposed deadline. If a student has the good fortune, as I did, not to struggle with their schoolwork, the lesson here is that there is some maximum effort needed, and there will be no further reward for further effort. In teaching compliance, school trains agency out of students.
How Professional Work Differs
Superficially, professional work is similar. Instead of a teacher, tasks are assigned by a manager or team lead or pulled from a shared task pool. The employee works on the task and submits some result to a shared repository. If the submitted work is of insufficient quality or quantity, the employee can expect some unpleasant conversations with their manager. However, there’s one big difference between school and professional work: no one wants the result of schoolwork. The teacher’s goal isn’t to collect 20 mediocre essays, it’s to educate the students (ostensibly at least). We hope that in doing work, the student learns something, but the result of that work may as well be thrown away afterwards.
In professional work, this dynamic is flipped. Whereas the primary purpose of school work is to educate the student, the primary purpose of professional work is to produce the result. Schools are in the business of teaching; companies are in the business of delivering value to their customers. A company may well hope its employees learn on the job, but only so they can do better work later. An employee who prodigiously learns all that can be learned, yet produces no work with this knowledge, provides zero value to the company.
Another important difference is that whereas school has a maximum effort that a given student can usefully apply, in professional work, there is almost always something useful to do. The challenge is not to hit the maximum effort target for one’s assignments, but to usefully allocate limited capacity for effort.
How School Mindset Held Me Back
I’m writing this post because I think it’s the career advice I needed to hear as I was transitioning from getting my degree in computer science to working as a software engineer. Writing code has always come easily to me, and in class, that’s most of the necessary skill. Requirements are clear, or clarified on request by the grading authority, most work is done in isolation, and all that’s needed at the end of the day is to submit code to the teacher. This is not what managers and team leads are looking for.
In professional work, there are problems to be solved, and employees are usually expected to apply creativity in solving these problems, not simply implement clear requirements handed down from on high. In my career so far, I have been too eager to ask for minor design clarifications from my (busy!) team lead. This habit is useful for a student, whose problem to solve is “how do I get the teacher to give me a good grade” and who therefore must be highly sensitive to the idiosyncracies of their local authority. In the professional world, it’s maladaptive, soaking up valuable time and attention without meaningfully improving results.
While a student might occasionally work in a group, a professional almost always does. I grew out of this part of school mindset sooner than others, as I came to marvel at how much more I could do as part of a team than working alone on a personal project. However, at the start of my career, I definitely had an unproductive bias towards creating things from scratch and looking for problems that allowed me to do so, rather than building on other people’s work and looking for any problems I could solve that mattered.
How I’m Unlearning School Mindset
I have spent several months on sabbatical following a layoff, and during this time I’ve followed the writing of several highly accomplished people. There’s a common thread between all of their accomplishments: figure out what needs doing, and get it done. Their work has been as employees, as founders of start-ups, and as philanthropists, and they’ve applied a wide variety of skills, usually learning as they went. In school, assignments are conveniently handed out; in professional work, a key skill is identifying needs.
I also recall two particular pieces of feedback my former team lead gave me in 1-on-1 meetings, that I think were downstream of school mindset and that helped me shift away from it. One was that my comments in reviews of my teammates’ code were often superfluous, about style rather than substance. Part of this is that school tends to care more about style, but more importantly, I was thinking of the code reviews as an assignment I would be judged on, rather than part of the process of creation. My focus was on what made me look smart and industrious, rather than on what was needed to solve problems.
The other piece of feedback was that I needed to shepard my tasks to completion, taking responsibility for getting them done in a timely fashion. In school, there is no difference between on time and early. With this mindset, I would pick up a few tasks, and shift between them when I felt like it, feeling no real urgency as long as I was making visible progess on something. As my team lead explained to me though, in professional work, it matters how long a particular task takes from start to finish. In school, students demonstrate the ability to complete some overall amount of work in some time; in professional work, tasks often create ongoing value after completion, so earlier is better. Furthermore, it’s important for timelines to be predictable when working in a group. Paralellizing work, as a student can do when meeting several independent deadlines, leaves tasks in limbo, marked as in progress but with no real expected time to completion. The common thread in these two pieces of feedback is that doing work isn’t about proving my capabilities, it’s about delivering value.
As we navigate the complexities of the professional world, it’s crucial to recognize the limitations of the school mindset that we may have internalized. Whether it’s the focus on grades over real-world impact or the tendency to seek validation from authority figures, these ingrained habits can hold us back. By shifting our focus from merely proving our abilities to actually delivering value, we can unlock new opportunities and achieve greater success. Society is full of people who need things, and whether you seek money, status, or impact, the surest path is to fill those needs.