Jason answers a question on how 37signals perceive the relative importance of formal education:
“What we care about is intelligence, curiosity, passion, character, motivation, taste, intuition, writing skills, and the ability to make smart value judgements.
Which echoes a point that I see re-enforced time-and-time again. Formal education is no substitute for quality experience. How one handles the outside-of-box scenarios can be far more telling of experience and skill set, than smart handling of the day-to-day details alone. Jason continues:
“A few of these qualities may benefit from exposure to higher education, but we feel most of them are better learned through practical experience.”
Indeed I dropped out of tertiary education during my second year, as the material being taught had absolutely no relation to real-world environs and was painfully out-of-date. I then bounced around various IT related jobs (on purpose to an extent) in an attempt to gain valuable experience and exposure that I could utilise in future, more structured roles.
Granted, a degree or doctorate might have opened more doors at the outset, but if the decision makers behind those very doors are looking for dynamic, flexible people with the ability to think laterally and make intuitive and experience based choices — and more often than not, they are — then no amount of education (alone) will solve that need.
≡ This is a brief remainders entry relating to the topics of concepts, ethos, links, relationships and written in response to an external article, comment or opinion — refer linked article for completeness and context.
Brendan Borlase is a Systems and Network Administrator living in Adelaide, Australia, having lived, worked and breathed Information Technology for over 12 years. Learn more.
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