I have to admit, this title is sort of click-bait because it’s unexpected and is likely to trigger my achiever friends. But there is some merit to it in this short post.
These thoughts came to me as I was thinking this morning about career selection and the economics of career growth. Standard weekend morning fare, I suppose.
The way that I came about this term ‘strategic underachievement’ was in thinking of a few key individuals I’ve known. In particular, I have a friend who’s father was a CFO for many years. I guess I never did catch if it was for a small, medium, or large company, but I think it was somewhere between medium and large. While the position of CFO is a very high position and one that typically characterizes success and achievement, he faced some major obstacles with employment during the years following the recession, and now much older in age, has had even greater difficulty finding employment at his level. He is the sort of guy who did save a lot of money, so it’s not a tremendous concern, but he really didn’t want to retire yet: he wasn’t ready for that. Sadly, his achievement actually seems to be an ingredient in the recipe of his struggle to find consistent employment. (Imagine if he hadn’t saved any money and was now facing systemic unemployment!)
I thought I had another direct example, but I managed to forget.
Achievement can be detrimental when it is highly coupled. And by that I mean, in our modern societies success is typically defined by high specialization and performance in a very narrow field of study. For the individual above, this was finance. When you begin to “achieve” at a “high level”, you are, in a sense, putting all your eggs in one basket, and you better not drop that basket! While high specialization can lead to very high rewards, it is also inherently unstable. The only reason any job ever exists is because there is a demand for it [and let’s not talk about bullshit political appointments, that’s different]. It absolutely does not matter how skilled or talented you are, if the demand decreases or disappears, you may find yourself out of a job.
However, the more highly skilled you are, typically the more time and effort you have invested in that skill. What do you do when that skill is no longer in demand? You will wasted a great deal of time becoming highly proficient in something that no longer matters!
See, we often treat achievement as an end in itself. But really, the more important end is sustainable income. I’m not trying to glorify money, don’t get me wrong. But think about it. If you want to achieve at a job, the most important element is the ‘job’ aspect. Sure, you can be one of those YouTube chain-reaction creators who score some views for doing something highly skilled and only kinda-cool, maybe that’s your definition of achievement. But for now, I’m simply talking about achievement in the framework of a larger structure typically measured outside of ourselves, which is how most people see things when it comes to careers and employment. There’s really no achievement on the job without the job.
And let’s think about it another way. Which is better: doing really great at your job for a few years, or doing pretty well at a job for as long as you require employment? Some people are going to have different answers to this. But I will tell you that society doesn’t pay attention to the nuance. Better faster stronger, right? Achievement is being your very best!
Until the demand for your best disappears and you’re out of a job. OH, but that doesn’t fit the narrative! Tough shit. Society was never very good at communicating the truth.
So, I have friends in this field and I promise this is not meant to be demeaning. But think about professors. Faculty openings are few and far between. Very rarely can you just quite your job in one location and go to another. Typically, you are at the mercy of where the openings are at. However, you may have spent 10 years gaining expertise in your field. But let’s say you teach a popular subject and there’s high demand for the job. This drives the pay down, as there is very likely somebody else willing to undercut you. In a sense, you’ve achieved a lot, and in another sense, you’ve achieved very little. Now, I don’t want to pass judgement on that, only you can really decide whether you feel achieved or not or whether that even matters to you. But make no mistake, usually professors are admired for their success in learning, but their extreme learning hasn’t necessarily helped them.
Now, let’s consider Associate’s degrees. Some families snub their noses at Associate’s degrees because they aren’t Master’s degrees, and only Master’s degree confer true achievement. Hmph! Except I know plenty of smart people with Associate’s degrees who are either earning more or are more consistently employed than people with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. Define achievement again? (there are plenty of legitimate reasons to get a Master’s degree, I’m just picking on people who think they are inherently superior)
Moving away from degrees, consider jobs in general. Even in programming, the salaries tend to bottom out around the 10-15 year mark. Only your super experienced software architects with 20 years of experience really get a better leg up, but again, dedicating 20 years of your life to one subject can potentially be problematic. You see, a mediocre senior developer with 10 years of experience who is easy to get along and does the job pretty well can be more employable than a senior developer with 20 years of experience if the price is right. If you just thought you could keep going through your career earning greater and greater sums of money, you might be disappointed. Because at a certain point, 10 years of experience gives you enough to be very effective, and 20 years of experience might only make you marginally more effective. But if you think your 20 years of experience will give you 2x the salary of someone with 10 years of experience, you’d probably be dead wrong! Ageism happens here, too, where older developers are often assumed to be less in touch with the technology of the time. Quite frankly, I’ve seen this to often be true. Being willing to accept a lower salary plays to your advantage here. Extreme achievement won’t actually accomplish very much in this case, as the marginal gains are much smaller, and many of these gains are not necessary for developing a quality software product.
This is a short post just to get the juices flowing. See, society treats achievement as good in itself, but you have to realize that every “level” of achievement has its trade-offs. Economics is all about trade-offs. In some circumstances, underachieving can actually have a better payoff, whether that involves more free time, more steady employment, less stress, or more money for less effort. These are important things to consider.