Here’s a career and business idea that seems to be bubbling up in America right now… Your credentials don’t matter. Your career sequence doesn’t matter. And your career choice doesn’t matter.
All that really matters to have a solid, high-paying career is to be really freaking good at whatever you do.
Over at Slate, a pharmaceutical chemist critiqued the idea that “America needs more scientists and engineers.” He argues that we don’t need more scientists – we need better scientists.
Scientists who are really freaking good. Mediocre American scientists don’t have a job – they aren’t needed. Mediocre work doesn’t work anymore – and what remains can be done by cheap Chinese scientists. See the full article here.
Over at The Economist, Babbage discussed a group of programmers who are “tenXers.” In other words, programmers who, through insight, versatility, and sheer productivity create 10x the amount of code that an average programmer can create – in less time, with better accuracy. Read the full article here. Here’s a quote of a quote from the article…
In his delightful guide to recruiting top talent (“Smart and Gets Things Done”), Joel Spolsky, a company founder and ten-x programmer himself, as well as a former paratrooper in the Israeli army, wrote in 2007 that the trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they strive, they will still produce something mediocre. “Five Antonio Salieris won’t produce Mozart’s Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years.”
And this trend applies to every field now. Mediocre doesn’t cut it. And if mediocre is needed…well there’a a few million Indians, Chinese, and Filipinos who can do mediocre.
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