Specialization and aptitude
Recently, I had a college intern start working for me. One his first day, we went and had lunch together. We talked a bit, and he confessed he wasn't really sure about what he wanted to do with his life. In a sense, I can certainly sympathize with that, but on the other hand, I'm not sure I can really help with that either.
The reason I can't really help is that I work at a large company. Large companies tend to be much more into specialization. I, for example, am responsible for leading the change management team. You know how when something worked yesterday, but it doesn't today, the first question asked is, "Well, what's different?" All we do is track what's different. Any time someone changes something, they submit a form, get approvals and then report that they changed it successfully (or not). We take all those change requests and track them and report on them.
Our fearless intern has been given the task of checking the scheduled change log for dubious changes.
While it's important (to me), I don't feel like it's going to really help him understand what he wants to do with his life. He may know he hates making nifty excel spreadsheets (or that he likes it), but given that change management is a fairly specialized discipline, that doesn't help him understand what he likes either.
Sometimes, I feel that we're overspecialized. I see that in a lot of things really, not just my work. A recent post on collecting just gave me one of those "huh?" moments. Evidently serious collectors don't even unbox the toys they collect. I've also seen comic collectors who buy two copies of every comic. One of bag and 'collect' and one to read.
When you look at it in terms of specialization, it makes sense. After all, some collectors will eventually want to sell something. When you sell, your buyer will want it to be in good condition. Back before collecting was a formal hobby (I speculate), you'd sell something you had that someone else wanted. Sometimes it would be in good shape, sometimes it wouldn't. So people would take better care of stuff they planned on reselling, and as more people did so, the standards would go up, which led to a feedback loop terminating in people buying things then lovingly putting the untouched boxes inside other boxes where they are sealed away from dangerous radiation.
I prefer to think of it as sucking the fun out of collecting, but that's probably why I'm not a serious collector.
Specialization, however, leads to sucking the fun out of things. When I was in college, I took 2 philosophy classes. I thought it could be interesting, but I hated it. I remember from Philosophy of Science a rather heated discussion about 2 different schools of thought. The difference in between these two schools of thought, however, was how they felt about a hypothetical case that could never happen. It was some parallel world quantum weirdness, and if the parallel worlds that we could never see existed, you were in school X, and if you felt the parallel worlds that we could never see didn't exist, you were in school Y. I was in school WTF and stopped being interested in philosophy.
Looking back, however, I find the more I have to do office politics, the more I think it's useful to understand philosophy. I've run across some of those 'school WTF' choices and had to make decisions.
The problem is that while my simple understanding of philosophy gets me by, someone who studied philosophy full time has a much deeper knowledge and could easily nitpick me to death on any point I could possibly bring up. I respond to attacks on my lack of knowledge by ignoring these people.
The other part of my thought is on aptitude.
When you play MMOs, the first thing you probably see is a choice of race and class (or profession or whatever). You have to decide what you want your character to be able to do. Of course, what you do changes constantly. If you play in the lower level game, flexibility might be a good thing. The ability to have a character that can start doing 'X' but when 'Y' is needed, you can do that, and 'Z' too. You might even think you're a better player than that person that only does 'W'. The reality, of course, is that in the "end game", you have to just do 'W', sometimes on a timed schedule for hours on end.
There was a thread on the WoW shaman boards discussing exactly that. Some people play shaman because of the flexibility. They're good at balancing things, doing what needs to be done. The complaint was "I didn't play a shaman so I could spam resist totems and lesser healing wave all day."
The response was, "Raiding isn't about being flexible, it's about doing your job perfectly"
Which is true. After all, a raid is 40 people working in unison, trying to stretch the limits of what can be done. Shaman can tank almost as well as warriors? That's great, but we've got warriors to tank. Shaman can AE almost as well as mages? Well, the mages are impressed with your DPS numbers, but they still are better. Are you proposing that we take 10% off the efficiency of the raid so you can have fun doing different stuff? I think not, we have first kills and e-peen to think about. Start spamming lesser healing wave and keep it up until I tell you to stop.
Obviously, I'm not in the school that likes raiding.
But there are lots of people who do like it.
Now, you might find you have an aptitude for a game because you enjoy it as a n00b, but once you get into the 'end game' it's so different you find you hate it. Or you could struggle as you learn the game, but once you get into the end game, you find you are the master of it.
Which, of course, brings us back to the question of 'what do I do with my life'.
I think we should do something with our lives that we like, but more importantly, something that we're good at.
In a sense, anyone can do anything. It's not rocket science, even the rocket science. Given enough time and training.
But if you're good at something when you start out, that doesn't mean that you'll be good at it 'professionally'.
I, for example, liked doing phone support (which was my first professional job). But that was at a small company. When you look at real call centers, it's evil and soulless work. You have a supervisor who monitors your phone calls, plus every statistic you can imagine relating to every call. ACD (Average Call Duration), first call resolution, abandon rate, average hold time.
So, how do you discover something that you'll be good at and enjoy in the long term? Beats me, and it's scary to be in a position where you are starting from scratch and trying to decide.
The reason I can't really help is that I work at a large company. Large companies tend to be much more into specialization. I, for example, am responsible for leading the change management team. You know how when something worked yesterday, but it doesn't today, the first question asked is, "Well, what's different?" All we do is track what's different. Any time someone changes something, they submit a form, get approvals and then report that they changed it successfully (or not). We take all those change requests and track them and report on them.
Our fearless intern has been given the task of checking the scheduled change log for dubious changes.
While it's important (to me), I don't feel like it's going to really help him understand what he wants to do with his life. He may know he hates making nifty excel spreadsheets (or that he likes it), but given that change management is a fairly specialized discipline, that doesn't help him understand what he likes either.
Sometimes, I feel that we're overspecialized. I see that in a lot of things really, not just my work. A recent post on collecting just gave me one of those "huh?" moments. Evidently serious collectors don't even unbox the toys they collect. I've also seen comic collectors who buy two copies of every comic. One of bag and 'collect' and one to read.
When you look at it in terms of specialization, it makes sense. After all, some collectors will eventually want to sell something. When you sell, your buyer will want it to be in good condition. Back before collecting was a formal hobby (I speculate), you'd sell something you had that someone else wanted. Sometimes it would be in good shape, sometimes it wouldn't. So people would take better care of stuff they planned on reselling, and as more people did so, the standards would go up, which led to a feedback loop terminating in people buying things then lovingly putting the untouched boxes inside other boxes where they are sealed away from dangerous radiation.
I prefer to think of it as sucking the fun out of collecting, but that's probably why I'm not a serious collector.
Specialization, however, leads to sucking the fun out of things. When I was in college, I took 2 philosophy classes. I thought it could be interesting, but I hated it. I remember from Philosophy of Science a rather heated discussion about 2 different schools of thought. The difference in between these two schools of thought, however, was how they felt about a hypothetical case that could never happen. It was some parallel world quantum weirdness, and if the parallel worlds that we could never see existed, you were in school X, and if you felt the parallel worlds that we could never see didn't exist, you were in school Y. I was in school WTF and stopped being interested in philosophy.
Looking back, however, I find the more I have to do office politics, the more I think it's useful to understand philosophy. I've run across some of those 'school WTF' choices and had to make decisions.
The problem is that while my simple understanding of philosophy gets me by, someone who studied philosophy full time has a much deeper knowledge and could easily nitpick me to death on any point I could possibly bring up. I respond to attacks on my lack of knowledge by ignoring these people.
The other part of my thought is on aptitude.
When you play MMOs, the first thing you probably see is a choice of race and class (or profession or whatever). You have to decide what you want your character to be able to do. Of course, what you do changes constantly. If you play in the lower level game, flexibility might be a good thing. The ability to have a character that can start doing 'X' but when 'Y' is needed, you can do that, and 'Z' too. You might even think you're a better player than that person that only does 'W'. The reality, of course, is that in the "end game", you have to just do 'W', sometimes on a timed schedule for hours on end.
There was a thread on the WoW shaman boards discussing exactly that. Some people play shaman because of the flexibility. They're good at balancing things, doing what needs to be done. The complaint was "I didn't play a shaman so I could spam resist totems and lesser healing wave all day."
The response was, "Raiding isn't about being flexible, it's about doing your job perfectly"
Which is true. After all, a raid is 40 people working in unison, trying to stretch the limits of what can be done. Shaman can tank almost as well as warriors? That's great, but we've got warriors to tank. Shaman can AE almost as well as mages? Well, the mages are impressed with your DPS numbers, but they still are better. Are you proposing that we take 10% off the efficiency of the raid so you can have fun doing different stuff? I think not, we have first kills and e-peen to think about. Start spamming lesser healing wave and keep it up until I tell you to stop.
Obviously, I'm not in the school that likes raiding.
But there are lots of people who do like it.
Now, you might find you have an aptitude for a game because you enjoy it as a n00b, but once you get into the 'end game' it's so different you find you hate it. Or you could struggle as you learn the game, but once you get into the end game, you find you are the master of it.
Which, of course, brings us back to the question of 'what do I do with my life'.
I think we should do something with our lives that we like, but more importantly, something that we're good at.
In a sense, anyone can do anything. It's not rocket science, even the rocket science. Given enough time and training.
But if you're good at something when you start out, that doesn't mean that you'll be good at it 'professionally'.
I, for example, liked doing phone support (which was my first professional job). But that was at a small company. When you look at real call centers, it's evil and soulless work. You have a supervisor who monitors your phone calls, plus every statistic you can imagine relating to every call. ACD (Average Call Duration), first call resolution, abandon rate, average hold time.
So, how do you discover something that you'll be good at and enjoy in the long term? Beats me, and it's scary to be in a position where you are starting from scratch and trying to decide.