What got me in the adult world was "4.0 syndrome". (Well, my actual GPA wasn't 4.0, but close.) Not that I was used to getting great grades and had a rude awakening, because school was a lot more intellectually challenging than 95+ percent of what I encountered in the real world, but that school led me to believe the world was more meritocratic, fair, and straight-forward than it actually is.
For example, some teachers were better than others-- I actually lucked out and had mostly good ones-- but I never had a teacher who went out of his way to be unfair. But I've had more than one manager who was outright scummy. School doesn't prepare you for this, because while there are demanding teachers, unfair or corrupt ones (while they exist) are extraordinarily rare.
Also, in college, you have career coherence. The work that is put in front of you is designed to teach you the basic concepts, so you'll usually learn something from it. The rare cases where this isn't the case are when you have outright incompetent professors. Either way, though, if you do the work you will usually get the knowledge and credibility that you need for your career. Useless, unappreciated busy-work is quite rare in college, but it's common in the work world.
To get anything close to 100% career coherence at work, you have to actively manage your career. If you just do what your manager tells you to do, you're probably looking at 25%, which means you get 1 year of real progress per 4 of work.
In the real world, the deadlines aren't well-tested. They might be unrealistic or make no sense. The work isn't designed to teach you things, and if you graduate past the work you're being assigned and are ready to move on, that comes down more to social skills than anything else. In school, you can skip grades. In work, you actually need social engineering (or frequent job changes) to progress faster than the slow players for whom the typical track is designed.
"4.0 Syndrome" is seen heavily in startups and investment banking analyst programs, because there's a crop of 22-year-olds every year who will meet every "deadline" no matter how ridiculous. They haven't learned that many real-world "deadlines" are just made up times that are often impossible to meet. (In school, they're also "made up times", but there are a large number of people facing the same deadlines, and they'll generally moved if they're really unreasonable.)
It's also a dangerous trait to have, because it can lead you to over-perform at work, which in most office cultures is more dangerous than underperforming because (a) you become a target for adversity, and (b) you lose social polish if you overwork yourself, and social success is more important than raw "performance".
I agree with you. I began my corporate career (explained a few posts below) with the mentality that if I worked hard and worked smart, I would be rewarded. Well, I worked for 3 years, and was only promoted once. That promotion just moved me from the first level to second level developer (in a big company, a promotion essentially just means a raise and title change from <bla bla> I to <bla bla> II). That promotion came with a slightly higher salary, but it also came with ineligibility for overtime pay. As a result, my overall pay-per-hour kinda sank. I didn't care though. I still thought doing a good job would pay off well in the end.
Well, one day I asked my manager for a private meeting and asked for a promotion. I was performing at the level of people several levels above me, and I thought I brought more value to the company than I was being compensated for. What he eventually said echoes in my mind: "Sometimes it's possible for you to grow too fast in your career." The idea that there was some sort of meritocracy came shattering down, and it started dawning on me why they had mediocre software even with so many developers. For those of us doing the actual work, there was no real reward for being the guy with the solution. There was no motivation. This wasn't a place for anyone who expected to be appreciated for hard work. They probably just looked at me and thought, "Hah, that's cute that he's trying so hard."
So I ditched the corporate world, took a slight pay decrease, and now I work for a great startup. The end. ;)
Wanting to avoid this fate is essentially what led me to learn social skills & politics. I literally doubled the profits of one 40-person company and received nothing but a "congratulations."
One of the best things you can do is work out an agreement beforehand. Say, "If I accomplish X, Y, and Z in the next year, that's definitely worth (reward Q)." You probably can't get this in writing, but almost any boss will honor their word after a highly specific agreement. This tactic is (part of) how I got a double promotion just 8 months after joining one of the most bureaucratic companies in the world-where the average time for a promotion was 7 years.
From a manager's perspective, agreeing to a promotion in exchange for a certain level of performance feels like a business transaction. But being asked for a promotion after an employee has accomplished something feels like you're just paying more for the same work. Irrational, but true.
(By the way, if anyone ever wants advice on salary negotiations/corporate politics, I'm always happy to help fellow HNers. My email is in my profile.)
>Say, "If I accomplish X, Y, and Z in the next year, that's definitely worth (reward Q)." You probably can't get this in writing, but almost any boss will honor their word after a highly specific agreement.
I've had that in writing, accomplished X, Y, Z and had the reward refused, seemingly at a whim (in truth, the company couldn't afford to keep the promise at that point in time and used whatever cover they could to not pay the promised reward). However, it did provide bargaining power in the future, though I felt dirty afterwards.
I could probably use the negotiation/politics advice ;)
One thought I would contribute regarding negotiation is that, while you might not get what you want, you can usually get something. If they can't pay you, then ask for a title or autonomy or a better project. These are "free" but can be very valuable, in the long run, for your career.
You almost never get everything you want out of a negotiation, but you can almost always get something.
Reading over that again, I realize 3 years and one promotion is pretty good for some places. At the company I worked for, it was expected to be bumped through early levels rather quickly (or at least so I thought).
As an aside, I know a lot of people here on HN find your comments to be overly aggressive
Many HNers (and this is a hard group to categorize, because there's still a lot of diversity of thought) are still in the honeymoon phase with the positive-sum promise of technology and the startup economy.
I believe in these things very strongly, but I'm also old and experienced enough to know that we, the good guys, have real enemies. They aren't stupid, and they're not weak. We seem to think we can out-compete them by being smarter, more productive, and earnestly working toward a better world. We act is if we'll be able to peacefully render them irrelevant and that they won't know what is happening (or care) enough to fight. Well, perhaps. Time will tell. I am not yet at the point of saying we need to take AK-47s against our corporate masters (please don't do that; your aim probably sucks and weapons are nasty things even when used well). However, I am also not optimistic enough to believe that they will surely opt for graceful decline and let us build this better world that we want. Perhaps they will, content to be very rich (in a world whose prosperity begins to dramatically increase, probably around 2025-40, rendering them less relatively wealthy and powerful) but increasingly irrelevant. Perhaps they won't. My experience with the upper class is that they are mean-spirited, ethically depraved people. Their weak point is that they underestimate us, because we're less than human to them, and because they see us as intellectually inferior. However, if we underestimate them, then we are making the same mistake.
Most of my HN "enemies" (and that's too strong a word, because I don't dislike them and they don't know me) are Googlers who were shocked when I exposed unethical management, in a very visible way, in October 2011. When you wave a whistle in the public ("whistle" as in whistleblowing) some people act as if you're waving a gun, and especially those who can't stand to hear the truth about their utopia. This reaction is ridiculous, because a lot of the people who get up in arms and fight whistleblowers have nothing to fear. They are too in love with the Woodbury with the quaint coffee shops, not the real Woodbury with the fascistic Governor and the zombie gladiator fights.
What's sort of amazing about whistleblowing is that you don't get the worst opposition from the powerful people you are exposing. They know they're doing wrong and will often make some concessions (but rarely enough). The mindless and often vicious opposition that you get is from other peasants who are shocked and upset at what appears to be going down. In the Philippines, this is referred to as the "crab mentality", whereby crabs in a bucket prevent each other from escaping and they all die. That's what you see when subordinate employees go to the mat to defend unethical managers who wouldn't lift a finger to do anything for them.
I completely agree with this statement. Nowhere in school are you prepared or told that you will have to manage your career, and no one will do it for you. I think that's the biggest thing left off of this list. Schooling is 12+ years of following steps and getting to the next one is an easy, clear, and direct path that's been laid out for you. The real world has no such thing, often the are not clear paths to get up to the next step, you have to figure this out yourself.
I think another big change from school to working life is that it is easy to get stuck in a "rut", in the sense that life is sometimes the same, day in and out, for months or even years. Yes, in school you are busy and frequently work hard, and often don't have all the time you like. But no matter what, in 4 months, everything is going to be different. Different classes with different people in different buildings. You will meet new people and make new friends and do different work. If you're in a social group in college, some people graduate and leave and new people come every year. It keeps things interesting. The real world doesn't change things up that often, and sometimes that sucks. A lot. I think variety is the spice of life, and I thrive on new and evolving friendships and intellectual problems. Being in a static state can be a drag, but is very very common for most workplaces, and that can spread out to the other activities in your life as well.
So I guess the two items I'd add to the list are:
* nobody is going to tell you how to advance, it's up to you to manage your career/future
*Things such as friendships and workloads can/will become more static, learn how to cope with this, or learn how to mitigate it.
I remember when I was in 7th grade and realized that the working world would be like being in one class for 8 hours and it was somewhat of a panic moment.
Well, it's more accurate to say that the classes aren't defined. You have to create the structure by deciding what's important to you, and you may face opposition from managers who think they know better than you do when it comes to what you should be doing.
If I were running a company, the default assumption would be that employees are autonomous and the manager's role would be advisory, as in, "If you don't know what to work on yet, <X> would be a good place to start. I'll introduce you to the team."
For example, some teachers were better than others-- I actually lucked out and had mostly good ones-- but I never had a teacher who went out of his way to be unfair. But I've had more than one manager who was outright scummy. School doesn't prepare you for this, because while there are demanding teachers, unfair or corrupt ones (while they exist) are extraordinarily rare.
Also, in college, you have career coherence. The work that is put in front of you is designed to teach you the basic concepts, so you'll usually learn something from it. The rare cases where this isn't the case are when you have outright incompetent professors. Either way, though, if you do the work you will usually get the knowledge and credibility that you need for your career. Useless, unappreciated busy-work is quite rare in college, but it's common in the work world.
To get anything close to 100% career coherence at work, you have to actively manage your career. If you just do what your manager tells you to do, you're probably looking at 25%, which means you get 1 year of real progress per 4 of work.
In the real world, the deadlines aren't well-tested. They might be unrealistic or make no sense. The work isn't designed to teach you things, and if you graduate past the work you're being assigned and are ready to move on, that comes down more to social skills than anything else. In school, you can skip grades. In work, you actually need social engineering (or frequent job changes) to progress faster than the slow players for whom the typical track is designed.
"4.0 Syndrome" is seen heavily in startups and investment banking analyst programs, because there's a crop of 22-year-olds every year who will meet every "deadline" no matter how ridiculous. They haven't learned that many real-world "deadlines" are just made up times that are often impossible to meet. (In school, they're also "made up times", but there are a large number of people facing the same deadlines, and they'll generally moved if they're really unreasonable.)
It's also a dangerous trait to have, because it can lead you to over-perform at work, which in most office cultures is more dangerous than underperforming because (a) you become a target for adversity, and (b) you lose social polish if you overwork yourself, and social success is more important than raw "performance".