Month: September 2019

So are diplomas really meaningless?

There was an interesting discussion among my businessmen and executive-level friends about their hiring practices, whether or not they actually looked at the diplomas and transcripts of their applicants. Some said they shunned graduates of big name schools as they tend to have bloated egos and unrealistic expectations of high salaries even before having proven anything in terms of performance. Some said that they looked at the school as a measure of the applicants’ ability to do assigned work — whether desirable or not — meaning, the more difficult the school, then the more compliant and obedient the graduate was.

One remarked that the school could be an initial indicator of the applicant’s intelligence and ability, but that was only as a first impression — and only one part of the hiring decision and not a sure ticket to acceptance. Many have experienced being burned by high expectations of graduates from supposed top schools only to be underwhelmed by their performance (or lack of it). Quite a few also remarked that they had employees who were high school graduates but were top performers in their field.

What was interesting as I surveyed the group, was that those who were employees in high positions were the ones who valued diplomas and degrees more, while those who were the owners themselves couldn’t care any less. They just wanted people who could get the job done, diploma or none.

The owners were an interesting mix. Almost none of them were top achievers in school. A good number of them were troublemakers and underachievers in school. Many admitted to cheating or bribing their teachers just to get a passing grade. Yet, these were the ones with the highest incomes and biggest businesses in the group.

Is this just a fluke or a is it a microcosm of a pattern we see around the world?

Almost everyone today knows that Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg never had a college degree before building their empires, but did you know that the following people also don’t have diplomas?

1. Walt Disney – dropped out of high school at 16, founder of the Disney Corporation.
2. Ray Croc – worked as a salesman, partnered with the McDonalds brothers and eventually bought them out to build the multi-billion global franchise.
3. Oprah Winfrey – took a job at a local television station while in her sophomore year and never looked back.
4. Michael Dell – sold computers from his dorm room while he was a premed student and eventually dropped out because he was already making $80,000 a month.
5. Matt Mullenweg – discontinued his political science degree and started WordPress.
6. Larry Ellison – dropped out of not one, but two colleges. Later created a database for the CIA and named it Oracle.
7. Lady Gaga – left college to pursue a career in music. Think she made the right choice?
8. Ralph Lauren – did two years of college, joined the army, then became a tie salesman, then eventually experimented with his own designs.
9. Ellen Degeneres – left college after one semester, worked restaurant and customer service jobs, did a lot of stand-up comedy in small bars and coffee shops.
10. Brad Pitt – ‘nuff said.

Of course, the takeaway here is not that dropping out of school is the way to success. These people still had to endure a lot of challenges and hardships along the way, but they were meeting these on their own terms. They were following their own paths in pursuit of their own measure of success, not another person’s or institution’s measure — which is essentially what a diploma is.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

“Fix it,” I told the job applicant, then started my timer.

I was interviewing applicants for a computer technician position. Before I asked them about their background and the usual interview questions, I put them in front of a computer unit that I had purposely sabotaged — nothing too difficult to fix — a loose memory chip here, a disconnected cable there. In order to get to the next stage of the interview, they first had to successfully power up the unit.

I expected the guy in front of me to be the fastest out of the entire batch of applicants I had for the day. After all, he had a very thick resume filled with certifications of attending this or that seminar, on top of his college transcript and diploma. I thought this guy must be good.

It turns out he was one of the worst.

He spent close to an hour inspecting the unit, fiddling with this and that, but he never got it to turn on. Finally I had to tell him to give up as I couldn’t spend all day just waiting for him. The guy who got the job didn’t have a thick resume, just a normal kid with a pimply face. He fixed the unit in less than 10 minutes and is now my senior technician. He continues to learn and grow and can now fix things that I don’t even know how to fix.

Many years back, I applied for a teaching job in a prominent college in Manila. I thought to teach some graphics editing with Adobe Photoshop, which I had been using for many years — as a hobby, but also professionally to produce fliers, logos and so on to personal clients. But the interviewer took one look at my degree and said, “Oh you’re a computer science graduate. You can teach web programming.”

And I said, “No, the web was very new when I was already a senior in school. I never got to study it. I don’t even know HTML.” (HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language — the basic building block of all web pages). The interviewer just smiled and then asked me to do a demo teaching session.

A few weeks later, I got the job and to my surprise, learned that they had assigned me a subject where I had to teach HTML. I literally had to grab a fellow new teacher and said, “Hey, you gotta teach me this stuff.” She graciously sat down with me and started typing and talking and showing me enough of the basics and pointed me to a couple of tutorial sites. I quickly scanned through what she shared and organized the key elements in my head.

A few minutes later, I walked into class and said, “Hey guys, let’s learn some HTML.” Little did they suspect that their teacher only learned the material a few minutes ahead of them.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Many parents dream of having their children finish college. They endure hours of preparation and waiting for that brief few seconds when their child goes onstage and receives their diploma, and takes a bow.

That precious diploma — in many families it is a relic of pride, often laminated or framed and hung on a wall. It supposedly certifies a person’s competence and qualification for a job in their field.

When I came back to Davao almost 10 years ago to get involved in our family business, one of the first things I did was to go over our employee application process. My dad had long ago designed a test for applicants to take which involved basic arithmetic — adding long rows of numbers, subtraction, multiplying by 3 digits, division, etc. I remember he made me take that same test when I was just a kid dragged to the office and being bored to tears.

I thought that test was no longer applicable. Who adds rows of numbers by hand anyway? And why would there be a need for that when calculators and computers can do the job faster and with better accuracy?

So I wrote a new set of tests. In my mind, it was simple and would simply serve as a simple baseline check of the skills of the applicants. Any college graduate ought to be able to pass the test, I thought. Heck, even an elementary graduate ought to pass the test.

The first part consisted of having around 5 words per number and all the person had to do was arrange those words in alphabetical order.

This had a practical application. We run a retail drugstore and one of the tasks of the employee was to arrange some products in alphabetical order.

The second part consisted of basic arithmetic. John buys 3 tablets of brand X at 3.25 per tablet. How much does he have to pay? He gives you 20 pesos. How much is his change? Nothing harder than that — just real-life figures with real-life examples.

We used to require that our applicants be college graduates, so over the years, we’ve had hundreds of people with diplomas taking that test and the results are dismal — more than half of those failed.

What does it mean when hundreds of college graduates can’t pass a simple test consisting of items that I would have encountered when I was in sixth grade? What does that piece of paper mean then?

These days, we no longer require that our applicants be college graduates. They come, they get trained, and what makes them succeed will be their attitude, their willingness to learn, and their ability to assess situations and solve problems that come their way.

If they perform and if they are up to the task, I don’t even need to know what that piece of paper says and I don’t need to see their transcript nor their grades.

In the business world, only results matter.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

The beauty of the internet and social media is its ability to bridge the gap between physical and social distance and allow you to connect with your friends and even random people anywhere. It is possible to have real-time conversations and swap jokes with friends on the other side of the planet. You can quickly see what they had for lunch or dinner, or where their family went to spend summer vacation, or read their thoughts about this or that issue.

It’s also great for self-expression. Introverts like me can now get things off their chest by just writing “out there” without feeling the need to confront anyone in particular.

But like all things in life, that beauty also has an ugly side. The impersonal nature of the written word makes it easier for people to spread hate, anger and fear, whether intentionally or not.

I used to get into a lot of online arguments before, particularly when I was trolling religion and politics. I would get into very active arguments with this or that person. I would post sarcastic replies to random people who would also shoot back, and there would be a back and forth firing of replies until one of us got tired of it, or until another topic appeared and stole our attention.

Winston Churchill said “You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks” and Mark Manson said, in less elegant fashion, “Most of us struggle throughout our lives by giving too many f*cks in situations where f*cks do not deserve to be given. ”

Perhaps I’m just getting older. The younger me had more energy, was more curious and experimental, and probably also more conscious of what people thought and said about me. I thought I ought to sound off on each and every issue, and each remark I made ought to be “liked” and one in which many people agreed.

These days though, I don’t really care much. Not that I don’t care about what’s happening around me, but I have decided to focus on what I care about most  — education. As Manson (again) says, “We all have limited number of f*cks to give; Pay attention to where and who you give them to.” I am beginning to feel that limit as I begin to slide off my mid-forties and start the slow march towards the fifties.

The more time and energy I give to other causes and issues and whatnot, the less I have for my passion. So let the dogs bark. I’ll just ignore them and keep going straight where I want to go.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.