A lot of what we do in life is please gatekeepers. There's a certain amount of sense to that. We need to eat. It's difficult to aqcuire food. The most effective way we have of doing that is with money. And if we don't already have money, we need to get it. Generally that means we need someone else to give us money, and to do that we need to give them a reason, because they would rather keep that money.
The most common way of doing that is work - doing something you probably don't like for half of your waking hours so that you can spend money on what you do like in the other half of your waking hours (and also presumably getting a good bed for your sleeping hours).
But it's not enough to decide that tomorrow you're going to do something you probably don't like in exchange for money. You're not the only one who wants money, lots of people have come to the same conclusion and only a few spots are available, so you need to distinguish yourself from them: "I am even better at doing stuff I probably don't like than everyone else!"
You need a signal that a gatekeeper can easily verify - because there are too many applicants to perform an in-depth investigation into everyone - but also difficult to achieve otherwise everyone does it and it stops being a good signal.
Right now, this is basically your entire adolescense. Your school life is about doing well in exams, to get into "good schools", and then doing well there to get a "good job". But also extracuriculars. And even that's not enough anymore.
Even when you get a job, you'll eventually want one that pays more. So you'll need to find a way to signal to your current and future employers that you're better than other employees and they should pay you more.
When lots of people deal with gate keepers, gate keepers need a way of easily comparing people. This test misses a lot by design. The "if you judge a fish by how well it climbs it will think it's stupid" quote misses the point. It would be way too expensive and time consuming to measure everyone in every single skill then somehow compare people across skills. Therefore the kind of things that result in good signalling to gate keepers are not the same as actually being better - merit. There's overlap, but they aren't identical.
Ostensibly, education is about learning. Becoming knowledgeable and skilled so you're more effective. And some of it is that. If we didn't learn to read or write, or perform basic arithmetic, we couldn't function in the modern world even if we had all the certificates and other signalling stuff to get us in there. But a lot of what it is is signalling, and a lot of signalling has nothing to do with merit - actually being good or knowledgeable or more capable.
Now, there are cases where getting ahead isn't about making gatekeepers happy. For example, let's say you own a farm. And let's say that you know you will sell pretty much anything your produce, and that your main bottleneck is how much you can produce and how cost effective you are.
In this situation, it's knowledge that matters rather than signalling. Better irrigation techniques, fertiliser, transport, ways of eradicating pests, can make you produce more and therefore make more. You could read parts of books and audit university classes, e.g for accounting. Of course, if the point is about becoming more skilled so you can produce more, you'll skip the fluff and the exams. If you're in a situation where you need to please gate keepers, then you almost want to skip the first few years of university and only do the exams.
Many people don't get this:
- That signalling well and being good aren't the same thing
- And that schmoozing and gaming tests doesn't help you in every environment.
Because education is so filled with signalling, many people can't even imagine learning - true learning. Learning isn't something you do on LinkedIn.
There are people who tempermentally don't get signalling. They keep their heads down, and focus on competence, and opportunities go towards less competent people. And there are people who are the reverse. People who have never actually learnt anything to become more skilled, but played the signalling game and got rewarded handsomely for it.
Signalling is often a losing game. Over time, everyone starts singalling the same things, making the signal ineffective. They need to do even more to have the same signalling impact, and the early adopters reap more of the benefits, but the benefits peter out and the work accumulates. You can't be too much of an early adopter however, because then the signal isn't officially recognised.
Often what you get with signalling is essentially no reward if you only do 95% of the work. If you audit accounting classes and manage your farm's accounts better, but don't go to every class and skip the exams, you get over 90% of the value. If you attend all the classes and leave right before the exams then try to get a job, you get almost nothing. No one cares if you sort of have 75% of a degree.
In life you need to recognise what game you're playing, and choose. I think that a life filled with signalling is depressing and meaningless. Never accomplishing anything real, and just convincing people you have. Some people seem to get off on that though, tricking people and getting paid for it. And people often turn the authority that dispenses the test into something sacred that gives them meaning, even if it's made up.
But for me, and hopefully many others, there's something exhilerating about actually being good at something and optimising it regardless of what someone else thinks. Using science to increase crop yields.
This is why, when people ask me for advice about learning to program, I ask them if they want to be good at programming or get a job as programmers. One person I said this to laughed "what's the difference". For him learning is passing a test. But if you learn programming to get good at it, and you're working in some other industry, you can increase your productivity to automate something you're doing. If you're making your own company and you're better at programming, you can make a better app.
Starting your own company is extreme. But you can see the benefits by working at a smaller company. I read an interesting article about someone who quit his job at Google, because the promotion process was fundamentally at odds with being better. They're a big company, and they can't see what you're doing. He was advised to stop trying to fix things right away, and instead document how broken they are, talk to a bunch of people, and make sure his name is there. Once he fixed a problem with the error reporting pipeline, and so it looked like his contribution increased errors.
I call this conspicuous coding "hey look at me!", rather than actually coding. At a smaller company none of this is necessary, you can literally see what everyone is doing. There's no faceless committee to make a case to.
It's a great article: https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/. He then went on to build his own products, and eventually turn a profit, living by his own wits, so to speak. He wrote a lot of interesting articles about that. It's been 7 years since then and he writes a review every year. Of course, with a startup there's marketing, which is arguably a form a signalling. Even the UI kind of is, but I think making a startup succeed is more about merit than getting a promotion at a large company where it's mostly about putting on the right kind of show rather than being better. Although there are plenty of grifter entrepeneurs and luck plays a large role.
But anyway, back to knowledge and signalling. If you come across a learning resource, would you use it if no-one knew you did? If you wouldn't, your focus is signalling. If you would, then your focus is knowledge.
Let's say there's a global pandemic and you can't attend classes, and your teacher gives the class A's. Most people would celebrate that (provided that the rest of the country didn't also get A's otherwise it would be like no one did). But our farmer would not be happy, and if they paid for these classes they would ask for a refund. An A doesn't increase their crop yields. Better techniques would, which they could have learnt if the class was taught.
Most people see the dilgent student at school who is making flashcards, mind maps, practicising past papers, and reading through the curiculum as the responsible good person. And the kids who are skipping school, partying, not paying attention to classes and taking drugs, as irresponsible and short-sighted. On my framework it would seem to be the opposite: that the diligent students are actually focused on something kind of deceptive over becoming more skilled. So how do we square that?
Well, there's a third kind of person, a kid who has their own projects or interests that require knowledge. They spend their time reading things that often aren't in the textbook, they're not partying and they're not concerned with exam technique. They will study things in their curiculum to the extent that it overlaps with what they're pursuing, and in a way that doesn't optimise getting the best grade.
But, the third kind of person is very rare. They're crowded out. And they all live in a world where they're told that the right thing to do is to be diligent in their studies, so the third kind of person feels like they're engaging in a sort of vice The first kind of person wants to do the right thing and do what they're told is the right thing, and the second kind want to rebel.
It's like religion - being religious doesn't make you a good person. But a good person who lives in a religious environment will be diligent about being religious because they believe it's the right thing, and a bad person in a religious environment who believes that being religious is the right thing but doesn't care, will do whatever. But a good person in a non-religious environment will pursue moral philosophy and try to understand and follow that.
I'm the third kind of person. I was mostly interested in programming during the last few years of my school days, and would spend a lot of my time trying to get better at that. But I would grudgingly attend to my studies to get the piece of paper so I can get hired. It wasn't the optimal way to get good grades, but that time has made my programming skills what they are today, and had I focused primarily on my studies I would not have been able to strike it on my own making my own software. Even after I got a job I experienced the conflict between focusing on things that would get me a promotion vs actually becoming a better programmer.
Hopefully, by now I've convinced you that these two concepts are real, different, occasionally in conflict, and have different utilities in different situations. That self help ideas like "be so good they can't ignore you" are wrong, or at least drastically oversimplified.
So the question is, given this state of affairs, what should you do?
If you are more interested in signalling than acquiring knowledge, I won't judge you too much. People need to make a living, and it's hard. If you don't perceive there to be a difference or don't care then you're lucky, it's much harder to pursue with cynicism. But I'm also not going to advise you. I have different values and you're better off hearing from someone similar.
So for the young people who genuinely want to become skilled in the world, but find many opportunities are mediated by signalling, what should you do?
Well, you should do double duty. You should aim to develop signalling capital so that you're secure in case trying to make it by your own merits doesn't work out. Get your grades and whatever. But you should do it in such a way that it doesn't interfere with you learning. Especially in your youth, it becomes much harder to learn after work. Don't just take it easy as long as your grades are good.
At school and university, time is set aside for the things in your curriculum. At a fixed schedule material in the curriculum will be covered and reviewed. People know not to disturb you if you have exams. You have many people going through the same material with you. You have teachers right there who have taught that material for ages.
You have none of this if you're going off the curriculum. You have to find pockets of time and energy after school, between homework, food, sleep, and friends. Or, maybe after work. And no one understands what you're doing. You're not even getting a certification.
Once you reach a certain age your parents become impatient with you not paying for rent and bills, and expect you to get a job. Doing this after work is tough because it has such a tenuous relationship to making more money.
As a counter example to an earlier point - with signalling you only have to do one thing. You signal to a gatekeeper, and work in an organisation where everyone specialises. If you try to skip the middleman and focus on what you can produce with your knowledge, you're gonna have to do, and therefore learn, everything. And if anything doesn't meet some minimum threshold you get no results. Once you've met these minimum thresholds then you can start to optimise and improve different areas for marginal gain, but the first step is getting off the ground by doing everything and that's hard.
It's also necessary if you want to pursue the skill based approach. In my field it's becoming even more important as Computer Science is becoming more and more watered down in university, and becoming actually competent requires a staggering amount of independent learning.
The skill based approach isn't really a choice. Some people naturally do these things because they like being competent, and justify it vaguely on the basis that it will also make them seem more competent and help them get jobs.
But OK. You invest early in getting enough signalling capital that you can fall back on it, but you also heavily work on being more skilled early on, and keep doing that.
You should also know where you are, and seek situations where signalling is less of a factor. Go for smaller companies rather than larger ones. Look for university courses where you actually learn useful things. Find a job where people use their brains. Maybe even make one.
I'm not sure what I would have done with this advice when I was younger. I sort of did it by accident, but wish I did more. On the other hand, would I have been as motivated if I was as cynical as I am today?
I'm also lucky that I knew I wanted to be a programmer when I was 15. What about the people who are 18 and don't know what they want to be? They have way less time to be skilled enough in any one field that they can use those skills to directly make a living.
With software, at least the jobs I had and from what I can tell from the industry, skill doesn't help you. I was way more skilled than most programmers in the industry, though far less skilled than I wanted to be, and it was just completely ignored at best, although often maligned. What I did at work had very little resemblence to actual programming. If I had known this was the case, I would have prepared for making a company much sooner. Maybe I would have skipped university - since I don't need a degree to hire myself. But only if I had learnt enough about making companies by the time I was 18/19. If not I would have done double duty harder, argued with my friends more when we started projects together to really focus on it.
With my hypothetical future kids, I think I would homeschool them, at a pace way faster than the standard pace, focusing on developing real skills but making sure a little time is set aside for exams and stuff. So much time is wasted at school and it's really arbitary, based on the lowest common denominator. This wasted time makes it feel like a real crunch when you're trying to become skilled later on. What if we didn't teach kids like there were babies and sped up their learning. There are bloody 12 year old chess Grandmasters! Ofc, this would have to be done with a delicate hand - kids are super motivated for their own projects but lost interest when forced.
I think we'd also have to retire the idea that your youth is for travelling and partying and stuff, before getting "serious" in your 30s and getting promoted at work and stuff. That's one pathway, sure, but if you want to be really good at things your youth is the best time.
There are half a dozen follow up articles I could write about this, but I think this essay has done its job. Hopefully you'll be able to analyse the kinds of benefits different life choices and learning resources have, and pursue a strategy that allows you to benefit from you're preferred kind.