It’s not that the entrepreneurial spirit is too great among American graduates.
Is it about money?  Or entitlement?  Or attitude?
I’ve had several parents (make that helicopter parents) ask me to help their children get jobs….
Why would anyone hire an adult who’s still using a parent to get them a job?  Why isn’t the grad taking the initiative? Does this point to where the problem lies?  No, we can’t ALL grow up to be president.
Are some American grads unemployable, or just not employable at the level they’re willing to accept?
Babs Ryan
International product developer, global trends forecaster, author
America’s Corporate Brain Drain

Interestingly, I’ve only recently heard the helicopter parent term.  However, in my own past…

• One of my first jobs out of college, we hired someone who looked good on paper.  He did fine work from Monday through Thursday.  On Friday, he left for lunch…and that was the last we saw of him.  The following Tuesday, his mother called me to tell me that her son wouldn’t be returning.  I wasn’t the man’s boss, by the way.  His boss was, however, asked for a job reference a few months down the road.
• At a different job, many years later, I had a boss whose mother would visit regularly and even sit in on our meetings.  We never knew why, since it wasn’t her field and she had no input.  We were a little reluctant to confront the boss about bad ideas, though, with his mother at the table, so maybe that explains it.

As Ms. Ryan points out, it’s impossible to take these people seriously, no matter what their age.

Fitting with the generational theme, I also received  comments from two recent graduates.

As a recent college graduate (May 2009) I thought it was extremely important to get a job quickly after college, no matter how much it paid. I was offered a job in March of 2009 before I even graduated and never thought twice about asking for more money. If he claims American graduates want to get rich quick and don’t have a rigorous enough education, I feel he is generalizing.

Overall, I feel new graduates should learn the ropes of any industry rather than thinking they will immediately get rich quick.
Alison Parsells
Communications Specialist
Tipton Communications

Alison also makes the point that classes in the United States are crammed full of students from the very countries Nayar seems to prefer.

Last but not least for this week:

I believe that an entrepreneurial spirit is common to all Americans, and with the burden of student loans (coupled with the dismal economy and poor employment rate my graduating class has entered into), I find it no surprise that most graduates are seeking to “get rich quick.”  Can they really blame us?

While some may mistake these attributes for pride and disregard for procedure, I believe that American graduates are simply demonstrating the drive and enthusiasm necessary to endure in a competitive economy, a mechanism for survival.

Kristin Davie
Career Quest

Thanks again to all.

Kristin’s thoughts probably mirror my experience best, by the way.  I’ve watched managers hire substandard programmers over better-qualified candidates, simply because the kid sold computers out of his basement one summer and listed it as a business.  Sure, none of them lasted in the job  (and no, no person mentioned above was one), but the initiative and business sense is attractive in a company that needs help.

But I want to talk about that more another day, and this is already running long.

Oh–also in the generational vein, several indignant people (I assume young) gave me the standard media line that Generation Y is superior because they’re ambitious, impatient, and technically savvy.  None of them seemed to realize that the first two points were Nayar’s complaints, and the third (especially in a technical industry) isn’t particularly relevant.

Such is life, I guess.

In the coming weeks, I’ll come back to that idea, though, and talk some about initiative and business sense on a résumé.  I’ll also return to the management dissection series.  And who knows?  Maybe I’ll get back to the “smaller, more readable articles” idea.

Ready?  Basically, since:

• I’m an American programmer,
• The criticism doesn’t really apply exclusively to programmers,
• eManagr is about removing the burdens of process, and
• Everybody else is screaming about these comments,

I might as well gripe, too.  At least admit that it’s better than another Michael Jackson tribute.

So here’s the key part (paraphrased), more concisely:

Americans looking to enter the tech field are preoccupied with conceiving the next big thing and getting rich, Nayar maintains. They’re far less willing than students from developing economies like India, China, and Brazil to master the “boring” details of tech process and methodology–ITIL, Six Sigma, and the like. [here]

All right, first of all, someone should explain to Mr. Nayar that this is about as classy (and correct) as announcing

• the Chinese are great at math and playing the violin,
• Blacks are strong and run fast, or
• Jews are greedy.

Yes.  I’m going there.

Do you feel that knot forming in your stomach?  Good.  Then I’ve cleared the air enough to talk about something more productive, processes.

I have to admit, I’m somewhat torn when it comes to processes, because so many of them are harmful and even more are misapplied. When we have them, we also tend to treat processes more like religion than tools.

The technical term for most processes is scientific positivism, the idea that technological miracles will reliably appear wherever proper procedures are honored faithfully, regardless of the talent of the participants.  This is the principle that Vineet Nayar espouses, even though he has probably never heard the term.  As Auguste Comte put it (in French in the early 1800s), “from knowledge comes prediction; from prediction comes action.”  Later, that “action” became more knowledge.

Depending on your field, I’m sure you’re familiar with these processes-as-life approaches.  Off the top of my head, there’s

• Agile Development,
• Six Sigma,
• ISO-9001
• …obviously, I could go on.

What interests me most about processes is that they all derive from simply documenting how successful people work.  Somehow we assume that they must apply to every situation, and that they free management from the burden of needing intelligent, self-guided employees.  Unsurprisingly, especially when you consider that the Agile creators and their ilk are rule-breaking geniuses in their fields, this doesn’t translate to the real world.

Worse, these proccesses also represent overhead for employees.  They now follow (and document their following of) the process.  They must document deviations to the process.  Team members must coordinate to approximate continuity in the process.  And to facilitate the communication and coordination, we need managers and managers of managers.  I can’t find the reference, but I’ve read that nearly one quarter of American workers have some managerial responsibility!  As I like to put it, we end up feeding the machine, and it’s awfully expensive and tiring, as Freder shows us.

However, despite all these problems, you also can’t get much accomplished as a cowboy or a prima donna.  It’s certainly harder to manage a project with such people on the team, because coordination is substantially harder.  We’ve all worked with them (or been them) and wondered how they stayed employed.

As you might guess, I believe that the solution lies between the two extremes, as it often does.  There’s a kernel of truth in the positivist approach, after all–while The System won’t ever be smart enough to replace the judgement of live workers, processes make each of us less error-prone.  Builders use jigs; artists use stencils; programmers use languages.  Those tools exist to make work more consistent and precise.  Likewise, many of us use checklists as we work to avoid making stupid mistakes.

Lightweight processes can automatically resolve the easiest mistakes to make, but need not be slavishly followed in cases where they take more time/effort than they save. That frees the worker up to, well, work, rather than manage.

In addition, measurement and tracking can turn most jobs into a predictable science. Instrumenting a process so that its speed, quality, and effectiveness can be measured is very useful.  Further, tracking that information over time makes a project easier to manage, as long as it’s useful information.

And hey, what a great opportunity to plug the main site!  Pure coincidence, I assure you.

This is exactly what we do at eManagr.  We provide you with a minimal process.  You tell us:

• How long tasks will take and
• When you’ve started and stopped work.

That’s your process.  The rest is up to us.  From that, we handle the metrics and analysis:

• Prioritize work,
• Predict project completion, and
• Predict performance on upcoming projects.
• Bug-tracking and
• Stronger team interaction are upcoming, as well.

The goal is to handle that process, so that you can get to work.  Be creative or a detail guy.  Since I already brought up Metropolis, I’ll paraphrase Thea von Harbou‘s epigram.  The mediator between system and intelligence must be a good manager (cough–or eManagr).

[Now I'm going to really go back to that management piece, probably rewriting and springboaring off of many of these ideas.  Unless something new comes up.  In case it runs late, go read some comics that won't disappoint you.]

So, what does everybody else think about Mr. Nayar’s disinterest in American programmers?  Have you faced similar issues in your field? Most importantly, how do you think we should fix them, if at all?