Thank god the Wall Street Journal is encouraging critical thinking, and more importantly fostering the discussion by putting articles like this out for everybody to read /s
On a more serious note, I don't believe this is true. In every place I've been, school, university, corporate jobs, the "critical thinkers" always got marginalised. This was the case even if they were truly nice people who cared - i.e. not abrasive and argumentative, just different. This is often called "difficult", because most managers and HR can't be bothered to actually engage with that person. So isn't that people can't do it, just the lesson is "you're better off if you don't say it". Political correctness also doesn't help IMO.
A chapter from The Originals talks about that. Specifically a junior CIA agent who got sidelined for her suggestions and ideas, only to have them taken seriously once she was senior enough.
nailed it. corporations can't handle grassroots change, so the values which promote grassroots change are denigrated even when those same values are enshrined at higher positions.
I think you're absolutely right. What I find really funny about this, at least in software development, is the "adoption" of the "agile" process they want to strive for which puts the majority of authority into the hands of the people doing the work. In the meetings talking about how wonderful it is, they are all on board, until they realize when they try to put it in place, and suddenly they realize they aren't in control. Then, they blame the process for failing them.
> In every place I've been, school, university, corporate jobs, the "critical thinkers" always got marginalised.
Because while they get things done, they challenge the status quo.
When I've worked for large companies, the #1, #2, and #3 products of the company were management politics. Actually shipping anything was #4, maybe #5. Critical thinkers looked at that and went "we could do better", and got punished for it.
in a large company, if the main products are management politics, as you say, a capable critical thinker ought to be able to dominate that game, instead of focusing on relatively unimportant priorities like "shipping".
if someone tends to get marginalized, by definition that means they are ineffective at "getting things done".
>in a large company, if the main products are management politics, as you say, a capable critical thinker ought to be able to dominate that game
There's often no point. The main currencies of corporate politics are power, fealty, loyalty, power in numbers and image.
You can use your critical thinking to spin a good story but building coalitions takes time and demonstrating loyalty takes time. In a company on a downward trend is investing that time worth it? Probably not. Is it worth it if your best quality is that you're a reliable kiss ass? Maybe.
If shipping is priority #5 you'd likely do better getting out and moving to a company where it's #1 or #2 where critical thinking skills are more directly rewarded and you don't have to spend 5 years kissing the ring of an idiot boss in order to win political arguments.
> in a large company, if the main products are management politics, as you say, a capable critical thinker ought to be able to dominate that game, instead of focusing on relatively unimportant priorities like "shipping".
Um, they do exactly that? Upper managers are notorious for spending most of their time playing politics and very little time delivering product.
person i was responding to was defining "critical thinkers" as the ones who get sidelined and punished for challenging the status quo and focusing on priorities that are secondary (in fact not even secondary, #4, #5) to the purported main product of large companies, which is political gamesmanship.
so, alleged "critical thinkers" in this context are just the frustrated losers who think they are the one who get things done (which everyone thinks of themselves), but who actually focus on the wrong things to get done, while also rendering themselves ineffective even in that effort.
You're definition of "get things done" is Orwellian in its inanity...
Edit: as per your notion that critical thinkers should apparently just play the game better, rather than...I don't know...think critically/critique it.
please read the comments i am responding to. the comment i am responding to is positing that in large companies, the main product is political game-playing (i do not necessarily believe that this is true), stating that delivering and shipping what people typically think of as "product" is #4 and #5 at best (again, i think that is a distorted generalization).
at the same time, the comment i am replying to posits that "critical thinkers" are the effective people in an organization who are really the ones who get things done. at the same time stating that these people who get things done are sidelined, punished and rendered ineffective by the organization. at the same time stating that these same people are the ones who are focused on low-priority items in that organization.
i agree with you, taken together, those statements are rather inane.. not only that but also wildly inconsistent, an ironic example of sloppy critical thinking.
i do not know where you get the impression that critical thinkers "should" play the game better. i am stating the obvious (which apparently isnt), that you would expect truly effective critical thinkers to be very good at focusing on the main priority within an organization, which based on the definitions defined by the previous commentor, is not "shipping product", but rather playing the game better. i disagree with that conclusion, but it is a consistent conclusion that follows assumptions that i also think are flawed.
in fact, assuming the negative assumptions about large organizations are valid, truly effective critical thinkers in such an organization would be able to see thru typical "mission statements" about delivering great product and service yada yada ... and instead focus on the accumulation of individual power and influence, if that is the main purpose of any human group. "the true organization man is the one who is most skeptical [aka critically thinking] about the organization"... or something like that.
anyway, critical thinking and emotionalism (bitterness and resentment about the unfairness of it all) would seem to be mutually opposed.
critical thinking and Machiavellianism are orthogonal. if you read the comments i am responding to, you'd see that those comments are the ones which are making the assumption that critical thinkers are non-Machiavellian, which is just as inane as the idea that critical thinking should be Machiavellian in nature. perhaps the problem is that for most people it is more emotionally satisfying to believe themselves as non-Machiavellian critical thinkers, thus confusing the two as related somehow.
consider two fundamental properties of critical thinking: asking the right questions, and objectivity. in a large organization that was defined (not by me) as having politics and power-playing as the main priority, then the person who thinks they are "getting things done" as long as those "things" do not involve icky political managerial dynamics ("selling my soul"), never thinking to question their own personal biases of "just because i like to put my head down and work on shipping product, is that the right thing to get done?", would seem to in fact not be engaging in critical thinking at all.
again, my reply is responding to (not supporting) the nonsensical proposition that critical thinkers (as ill-defined by other commentors) are more effective than Machiavellian actors, even as they are supposedly marginalized (aka rendered ineffective) within large organizations.
i can understand why that line of thinking is confusing, because it is.
No, it's not confusing, it's just wrong. You're confusing objectivity, which is understanding how a situation really works, with a moral imperative to take advantage of every situation.
You're also implying that Machivellianism works better for individuals and corporations.
There's absolutely no evidence to support that position, and plenty of evidence to refute it - not least the incredibly stupid and destructive decisions made by corporate "winners" for reasons of political advantage which regularly sink companies and damage their own employment prospects.
If you were truly engaging in critical thinking you'd be able to understand this. In fact all you're doing is projecting the inverse of your own emotional biases onto people who not only have different motivations, but are modelling outcomes as a whole more effectively than you are.
The key question is the size of your predictive horizon. Just because someone is effective at small-scale politics doesn't mean they understand likely outcomes from a broader perspective.
In your system "critical thinkers" would be just as effective in absolutely any political system, including bureaucracy for its own sake, and North Korean dictatorship.
Clearly both of those have fundamental inefficiencies and stupidities which severely limit their practical effectiveness. Playing the game may be expedient if you're trapped inside them, but the inefficiencies and stupidities can only ever be mitigated by individuals who understand what's wrong with them, not by those who conform to them for personal gain.
> There's absolutely no evidence to support that position, and plenty of evidence to refute it - not least the incredibly stupid and destructive decisions made by corporate "winners" for reasons of political advantage which regularly sink companies and damage their own employment prospects.
In engineering terms, optimizing for local maxima doesn't mean you get the global maxima.
i.e. managers playing political games over crap "win" in the short term. And sink companies in the long term.
I know people who worked at DEC. They said it was a great company when it was focussed on products, and on engineering. Then at some point, "professional managers" took over. Management then became focussed on politics and infighting. And... DEC died.
> If you were truly engaging in critical thinking you'd be able to understand this. In fact all you're doing is projecting the inverse of your own emotional biases onto people who not only have different motivations, but are modelling outcomes as a whole more effectively than you are.
That sounds right to me.
The immediate labeling of people as "frustrated losers" shows that his reaction is emotional, and not rational.
> You're also implying that Machivellianism works better for individuals and corporations.
my position is exactly the opposite of stating that Machivellianism "works better". in fact the comments i have been responding to, and disagreeing with, were making that case, not me.
(in any case, the opposite of "works better" does not mean "works worse")
those comments assumed the following (il)logical connections: a) critical thinking = non-Machiavellian behavior, b) critical thinkers are supposedly the most effective in "getting things done", c) yet, critical thinkers are supposedly the most likely to be punished and rendered ineffective, d) Machiavellianism is rewarded (aka "works better") in big companies, e) because critical thinkers focus on priorities that are relatively unimportant in large companies, such as "shipping product"
not only are some of these points individually suspect, but taken together they are inconsistent and make no sense at all.
It's a generalization, but it's based on my experiences. It's not wholly wrong.
> the comment i am replying to posits that "critical thinkers" are the effective people in an organization who are really the ones who get things done.
Critical thinkers are usually the people who want to get things done. They might be effective, if the organization lets them be effective. Or, they might be entirely ineffective if the organization is pathological.
> at the same time stating that these people who get things done are sidelined, punished and rendered ineffective by the organization.
You're reading a lot into a simple comment.
> at the same time stating that these same people are the ones who are focused on low-priority items in that organization.
You've read too much into my comments.
In a pathological organization, the high priority items are management politics. Those politics are the daily work product of the majority of managers. The way a manager gets recognized or promoted is via playing the political game. actually shipping something is a lower priority.
> i agree with you, taken together, those statements are rather inane.. not only that but also wildly inconsistent, an ironic example of sloppy critical thinking.
Well, no. You didn't understand my comments. So you constructed a straw man version and attacked that. Genius!
> i am stating the obvious (which apparently isnt), that you would expect truly effective critical thinkers to be very good at focusing on the main priority within an organization
Only if you believe that critical thinkers enjoy playing the political games, and that they're good at it. My experience is that the people most focussed on political games are utter shit at engineering, and shipping product.
> anyway, critical thinking and emotionalism (bitterness and resentment about the unfairness of it all) would seem to be mutually opposed.
You can engage in critical thinking, while at the same time being upset that people treat you like shit for engaging in critical thinking. The two are in no way mutually exclusive.
Sure, but that's sad. Q: Why not get everybody involved with #1-#5? A: Because that's more effort for management, and they'd have to trust their staff. (Sometimes it depends on how well you go about this, aka. soft skills, but often there's no way to sell it other than get involved with company politics for 2+ years)
I'd also argue that at large companies, getting stuff shipped isn't usually the hardest part, not stagnating is. "How could we do things better" can be a pretty huge and valuable question in large places.
i think command and control management structures have a lot of benefits at scale. Maybe at scale a company's competitive edge is essentially about executing on information, and information asymmetry, which is why things like trust and politics are more important than shipping efficiently. Just an idea.
Don't confuse critical thinking with disruptive behavior. I often think the current approach is dumb, but I also accept I don't know everything. So, I generally just toss an idea out there, give it 15-30 seconds of support and move on.
People that dig in even if they are correct and I agree with them are much harder to work with. Further, doing something even if it's a poor solution is often better than continuing to look for the right solution.
Disruptive behaviour in school is often caused by boredom. In a professional setting, I guess it could also be for ego/political reasons.
But if somebody is thinking along and asks genuinely good questions, it isn't usually for ego reasons - they want to learn. I think it's worth pursuing: either a) you find somebody knows why it was done a certain way, and it's good to spread that knowledge (and get to know other people in the org) or b) everybody has left/forgotten why it was done that way, and it's good to increase/regain that knowledge.
By the way, acceptable answers for doing it a certain way include "politics", "time pressure", and "we didn't know any better". These are way better than "don't know", because they're valuable knowledge. "Don't know" can also easily translate to "we don't understand the risks, so there's no way you're going to be allowed to change this".
"don't know and we'll never know/don't care" is the easiest way out. My advice to anybody who keeps hearing this is start looking for your next job - this place will never care about personal development and helping you grow.
Disruptive behaviour is caused by frustration, and frustration in school is often caused by boredom (it's not like there are many other sources compared to the workplace).
The problem with workplace politics is that there are usually two kinds of critical thinking: thinking that boils down to "we are doing OK, but we could do better if we did X" which is the type of critical thinking everyone loves, and then there's "we are doing something obviously wrong and we need to stop", which is literally critical thinking and is invariably risky (it's criticising people, often management).
Organisations always say they want independent and critical thinkers, but they hardly ever do. They want yes men who will cheerlead for the side. That's tough on people who genuinely care about an organisation or want to see it succeed because strange or dysfunctional behaviour (ignoring customer feedback for example) can easily occur in almost any workplace, and sometimes there's no positive or upbeat way to say "we should probably listen to our customers" or "maybe that process you just put in place is a waste of time", or whatever the problem of the day is.
Keep in mind that one thing every manager/owner hears day in, day out, all the time, is advice on how he's doing everything wrong and here's how to do it better. It isn't surprising that this eventually gets tuned out until there's good associated evidence that this particular person should be listened to.
Every one of us is sure we know how to do our manager's job better than he does. There are threads every day on HN (including this one) on this. Is it any surprise that managers tend to tune it out after a while?
If a manager makes a decision having weighed the factors, and some team members disagree, but it's an arguable thing (corporate strategy for instance) and the difference is mostly one of opinion, sure, I agree. Constant criticism of that will get tuned out.
There's also cases where something is just clearly dysfunctional. For instance, if the CEO is constantly talking about how the firm needs to move fast and innovate, but installing a new piece of software on your workstation takes six months and involves three forms, it's fair to say that isn't a difference of opinion (all parties want to move faster and innovate more), that's a failure of execution. Someone, somewhere, clearly feels that this bureaucracy is worth it, but they probably can't defend that given the firm's priorities.
You can phrase that as "this process is great, but we could make it even better" if you want to be as well-loved as possible. My experience has been that this usually leads to an answer of the form "thanks, we're glad you love our service, unfortunately we have many other things we're doing right now kthxbye" - i.e. when nothing is bad and everything is merely a proposed improvement, improvements that might be even slightly threatening to anyone just get ignored entirely. And you can't complain because everything is peachy, right?
> Keep in mind that one thing every manager/owner hears day in, day out, all the time, is advice on how he's doing everything wrong and here's how to do it better. It isn't surprising that this eventually gets tuned out until there's good associated evidence that this particular person should be listened to.
When I was younger I played the game of fitting in. I remember one time at a company this guy wanted to improve our process (process improvement and Lean was a big buzzword at the company at the time) by introducing automated testing to augment our completely manual and inefficient way we were doing testing. He fought the good fight but was eventually labeled a black sheep and got "managed out". I learned a lot about what companies say they want and what they actually want from that experience.
The second type is generally better dealt with indirectly so it becomes the first type. Daily stand up taking 1 hour every day. If you say it's a waste of time let's cancel it then people look bad. If you say, we are wasting time let's get faster then management is rarely going to complain.
Do we really need 30 people in this meeting? What if we had someone send out the meeting notes? etc.
Granted, this assumes people want to get actual work done.
I dislike that passive-aggressive dynamic of converting the second type of thinking/feedback to the first. And that dynamic generally has a name: "politics". I've been on teams where I had to use rhetoric to convince a (non-technical) manager that following standard design practices like low coupling/high cohesion, etc. results in more robust software.
What's sad about that whole political dynamic is that it wears people down to the point they just don't care anymore. They're tired of people (often management) who can't make a decision due to political pressures ("I don't want to be the manager who has any project 'fail.'"). This often leads to decision makers succumbing to the sunk cost fallacy. But as long as there are status reports and it looks like work is getting done, then the process continues.
I don't really like politics, but 10,000 years ago people in mud brick huts where taking politics and today people in mud brick huts are still talking politics. If nothing else politics works and ignoring things that work just make your life harder. Also of note, mud brick huts have been around for a really long time.
I understand completely. You have to find the place whose politics interest you as much as the work. That's very difficult (pretty much impossible) to gauge during an interview. You really need someone on the inside to give a complete view.
The other problem with that is it makes it hard to put in place a systematic improvement process. A formal failure analysis process is a wonderful thing that can rapidly drive improvement, but to have such a thing you must first be able to say "that was a failure, let's analyse it". In a highly PC environment where nobody ever fails at anything, everything is always wonderful and the only possible change is to become even greater, it's hard to be fully honest with yourselves.
Here's an example from my own career: I once worked at software firm which routinely sent customer feedback to a black hole. Literally, there were forums where customers could talk to each other, and feedback forms on the website, yet either nobody read them at all or there was someone in customer support who theoretically read them but actually didn't.
I discovered that when I tried to use one of the company's own web forms to report a technical issue with one of their products. When nothing happened, I started asking around. The email thread I started (which was plenty polite: just asking who owned this form and whether my feedback was being processed) quickly got like 20 people CCd onto it as everyone tried to pass the buck and eventually it became clear that whilst it had perhaps once been connected to something, the form had at some point stopped being monitored and nobody had noticed, in fact, the feedbacks weren't even being stored anywhere. We were literally throwing customer feedback in the bin.
Eventually, after asking the question of who was actually responsible for this process and who was going to fix it maybe four or five times (lots of people appeared to be involved in nebulous ways and nobody was willing to take responsibility), I pointed out that this seemed like a fairly serious failure and perhaps there should be a post-mortem of some kind, which was a routine occurrence in other parts of the firm.
This suggestion went down like a lead balloon, as you may imagine. I don't recall if the issue was ever fixed: at some point I ran out of energy and stopped caring. This is how engineers get a reputation as being awkward and difficult: they exist in a world where things work or they don't, and there's no shame in writing a bug because we all do it, but when your software is buggy you're expected to admit that and fix it. Lots of people in fluffier job descriptions don't exist in such a world and interpret any hint that they might have actually ... failed ... as hostile and threatening.
I've found the best tactic, being an underling, is to perform the critical thinking for management and continuously improve your area of work.
As a funny and relevant anecdote, I used to process returns for an e-tailer and we had a particular type of refurb product that had a different part numbers on the box, in the firmware, and on the back tag. One day when I had the shop running full bore, I stopped for a few hours while the boss was out, grabbed a piece of paper, then spent some time in a thought experiment reverse-engineering the manufacturers supply chain to find out why. I discovered they had specs for these devices for a particular market, models a through z, and wanted to refurb to those specs to maximize profits. We got the cobbled together unique items that met no spec. I went to the manufacturers website, pulled up a list of PN's by model series, and plug and chugged until I got a valid warranty on every unit with 3 different PN's.
We also had a lot of mis-shipped, mis-picked, mis-recieved, and mis-advertised product. I asked the guy building the SKU's and Ad's for a spec sheet and then grabbed a factory service manual, and by my logs, discovered the issue was they didn't have the right ports on the side listed. The guy doing the SKU's made a change in how he advertised product, the throughput of devices coming through my shop dropped 80% within 3 weeks. I then had time to do things like assemble reciepts for a dozen AV Head units, find and send skids of them to an ASP, get them repaired and sent back, and restocked. Then we discovered we had someone stealing product. All of those fixes resulted in about $400k a year in savings for a $20 million a year company.
How did the CFO Find out about all this? We were selling to a liquidator anything I couldn't fix. They gave us 55c on the dollar of book value when I started, then 35c, then 25c, then 15c, then 5c. Finally nobody would take the garbage I was producing; literally if I had one liquid damaged item I'd use the parts to repair anything and everything else I could and I even did crazy things like using lego's to replace screwable-pegs inside of TV's using 2-part epoxy. So one day about a year after I started the CFO wanders down to the warehouse to see what's going on, and finds 15 skids of absolute garbage.
He then turns to my boss, the warehouse operations manager\account manager, and begins yelling "WHAT THE !@!@# ARE YOU DOING? WHY HASN'T THIS BEEN SOLD? WHAT HAPPENED TO THE LIQUIDATOR!" and on and on and on. Apparently, nobody in corporate had performed any quantitative analysis. I had with a 200 meg excel 2003 document that would tell me what was coming in and how much it was.
I was saving him $400k a year. The cheapskate gave me a buck an hour raise for the effort, what a crok. They kept me around as the company shrunk from 200 employee's to 20 and went through bankruptcy. On the other end they were going to use my refurb shop since that was the only profitable side of the org entertainingly enough. I eventually left the place entirely.
The problem in America is that there's a boat-load of executive managers who have no critical thinking skills themselves, so their employee's see that fact, and see decisions are made subjectively or arbitrarily, and they are demotivated or as I call it, they catch "IDon'tGiveAShazbotItus". Lots of people catch the terminal version of that disease; doesn't matter where they go, they will never give a shazbot because they've been lied to so many times. You just cannot work with someone who has no critical thinking skills. There's no striving for continuous improvement and no rewards for it either. My entire career has been about doing bad things to computer and even worse things to executives; I have lost count of the number of people I've gotten fired, including executives.
After-all, if some schmuck with 1 IT certification in a warehouse can save you $400k a year at a 20 million a year company, and the CFO doesn't notice where it's coming from. That's either incompetence or abuse.
I agree with you, but it often leads to people with a clue getting repeatedly ignored by those without a clue. Which then leads to people feeling ignored/undervalued, particularly after the things they're ignored about go awry.
This is what I deal with at my current position. There's a lead engineer who is working in a domain he has no knowledge of. The system being built, while having a somewhat sound, if not outdated, conceptual foundation, has not produced gainful/tangible results for almost three years. I told my manager that I strongly believed the system would never work, or be usable in production even if it "looked like" it worked. My input was ignored despite my demonstrated knowledge of the domain.
We had that conversation a year ago, and the system still doesn't do anything useful. The team morale is pretty low. Three levels of management are updated weekly on this project, but none of them seem to think anything is wrong. Because I don't have "lead" in front of my title, it seems my input isn't worth anything.
Anyway, it was nice to vent.
Also, I'm looking for another job. Any companies out there want a critical thinker who isn't afraid to deliver honest feedback? :)
That was the point I was trying to make when I said "not abrasive and argumentative, just different". Maybe I should have said different perspective.
Incidentally, I find working with people with different perspectives hugely helpful when problem solving, although you can see how vastly different perspectives can also cause problems in understanding. I suspect there's a sweet spot, depending on your role/company/environment.
Oops. Maybe I don't understand "contrarian" as well as I should.
Wikipedia says "A contrarian is a person who takes up a contrary position, especially a position that is opposed to that of the majority, regardless of how unpopular it may be", which to me reads like a reactionary thing. People with different views, that's just how they think. They don't do it for kicks to antagonize people. Right?
The way I think of 'contrarian' is someone who takes an opposing position strictly because it is in opposition to others, and not due to sincerely help beliefs or the actual merits of the position.
But I think I should apologize to you and the parent post. I just saw an opportunity to come off as being a little clever. I have no idea if the parent poster was actually trying to be contrarian or not. And while I'm just trying to boost my ego, here you are still actually trying to have a meaningful conversation and to understand where others are coming from. Good on you, that's truly admirable. I wish I did the same more often.
Thank you for reminding me why I read HN comment sections. I appreciate this sort of earnest, well-intentioned dialogue. It is unfortunately not so prevalent on the wider web.
I have a different understanding, it's not resistance for resistance sake, it's the willingness to dissent when you disagree. The first thing that pop to my mind is a book by Christopher Hitchens called "Letters to a Young Contrarian". While he enjoyed arguments he did not argue for argument sake for a position he did not hold.
We need contrairian people as a balance to people who think they are infallible. Both should be a small percentage of society with the remaining majority willing to change if needed.
The WSJ isn't encouraging critical thinking here - it's making self-described "critical thinkers" feel like they're important and valuable people, thus convincing them to read the WSJ.
I made a similar observation, critical thinking seems to be something undesired and it easily gets suppressed. However I truly believe it can work but it needs some sort of personal communication strategy. For example timing is critical. An obvious example is when shit hits the fan and coming up with reasons what could have been done better in the past. It's better to postpone that when things are fixed.
But when working with people that generally dislike critical input, one needs to combine this with other things. Like saying such criticism only 1:1 (never in meetings), staying cool and thinking out things before saying them. Sometimes it's better to not answer certain people instead of giving a half baked answer that can be used for attack ground.
As an employee, your primary goal should be to make your boss happy: and any changes or initiative will hurt your career. If you are young you might make mistake, but people are not stupid they learn from their mistakes.
So you have to go the point where your "boss" are customers / users of your product. Then critical thinkings works well.
> In every place I've been, school, university, corporate jobs, the "critical thinkers" always got marginalised.
In my experience, there is a specific experience threshold at which critical thinking switches from being an annoying trait of a young and garrulous employee to the most valuable asset a more senior person could have.
There seems to be a trend in management towards an unwarranted belief in the effectiveness and importance of superficial quantitative analysis, and two complementary myths that go along with the trend: a) any number you can assign to something is significant; b) anything you cannot assign a number to is not significant.
Anyone approaching recruiting with this mindset is neither using critical thinking, nor likely to hire people who can.
It's almost as if we have regressed in some ways to the "principles of scientific management" (Frederick Winslow Taylor) with our focus on quantitative over qualitative (and not balanced between the two).
This is not just a trend in management. Many, many people labor under the assumption that if you throw enough (or any, for that matter) math at something you must be doing science, and therefore it's inherently better than the alternative.
I mean, how many times have you heard "Well, sure, it's not exact, but it's better than what we have" in reference to some model that was made up from a pile of assumptions? No, no, no, it's not better than the alternative, it's exactly the same, that's the entire point! Just because you threw some statistics at it doesn't mean you're any better off than you were before.
And often there are titanic struggles to manage noise. I mean changes of 1% with sample sizes of 200 or so (education). I especially cherish 'business systems' that produce percentages accurate to two decimal places.
There has been an uptick in user of discredited techniques to screen in recruitment, stuff like MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), lots of pseudo science without measuring validity.
It seems like HR have been told to find people with soft skills and so they manufacture something that will give a rating and then rank candidates by that.
Google 'mtbi validity'. It is very possible HN readers are INTJ because they see e.g. introversion as one of their traits -- but it doesn't mean it is true! Poor construct validity is one of the problems. For example, if I ask you, "Are you creative in how you solve problems?" the answers may only slightly correlate with creative problem solving.
Atleast on hacker news, the test is fairly consistent. There have been several surveys here.
> lack of statistical analyzability
That is the academic psychologist's problem.
> 89 / 100 fortune 100 companies use it internally
A lot of people hear recommend blindly investing in s&p 500. I trust fortune 100 companies more than psychology associations and bloggers.
> college board chose not to use it
Yes. Because it is one static test that can be memorized to produce desired result by test taker. But if one takes it for their own understanding, there is no reason to cheat (and it becomes useful)
Not convinced that these two blog posts and 1 white paper opinion piece count as discrediting mbti.
I will look for a meta review.
In the end, I think personality testing, similar to iq testing is not politically correct. But it can be useful, as a self test atleast.
Companies prefer to use it but keep the process non transparent. They like the flexibility of being able to say "personality fit" without the transparency of a test because one it doesn't open up liability and two the test is gameable in an adversarial situation.
Atleast I haven't seen any claims of racial differences in mbti, which might make it useful as a way to find engineer / rational types in underrepresented groups in software.
The article, especially some of the examples, seems abusive to low-wage employees. How many of us would give a job description that said 'this is not a preparation for a slow motion contest' a second glance?
The meat and potatoes of the article is mostly just complaints to be honest. A lack of candidates is always the go-to excuse for managers and executives when explaining poor productivity or vacancies. Job seekers will gladly tell you that the pay stinks or that they just flat out don't want to work for a company.
Dig deeper and ask the managers and executives to show how they reward and retain employees with these skills.
I work for a >10,000 employee health care system as a physician. What I have seen is that the front line workers are considered disposable, and should be grateful for a job. The superstars ( always nice, compassionate, and excellent at their jobs) are not recognized by management and so when raises are given, everyone gets them, including the lazy ones. This disappoints the worker bees, and leads to incredible turnover and more frustration for us physicians. Unfortunately, a lot of the attributes of a great employee cannot be quantified on a spreadsheet so the MBAs running my organization have no clue how to compensate people. Instead, they just lump everyone in the same pile so the workers get frustrated bc they work twice as hard as the lazies, but make the same amount.
I've tried to talk to executives about this, but I think it's essentially to deaf ears - bottom line is the most important, so they can get their bonuses.
It leads to disenchantment and then, over many years, inability to get hardworking / intelligent people to enter front line professions.
Smart people will recognize that their hard work will never be acknowledged, so they switch careers. Others, who cannot get jobs elsewhere, or pivot, are stuck working there.
Not sure what the solution is, but it's just an observation.
This is called the Peter Principle [0]. Unfortunately, the system is kinda unfixable. If we promote based on achievement in your last job, then at some point you can become unpromotable in your current job as you just aren't suited to it or some other reason. If we want to get rid of the Peter Principle, an inherent 'bug' in a merit based system, then you have to radically change how promotion is decided. Your front-line workers are victims of management that is affected by the sclerosis of the Peter Principle, and they themselves are as well as they are unpromotable and have 'failed' at the merit based system (namely, the internal politics of the Hospital).
Still, it sounds like management just wants to hire/fire at a whim, as it keeps wages down and there tends to be a glut of nurses out there that can be replaced. Again, this is a feature of supply/demand and the job market. Also, if you did raise wages based on 'merit', then you would get the front-line people trying to snipe each other over the money and promotion would become based on internal politics and 'he-said-she-said' stuff. It all comes down to the money.
> Not sure what the solution is, but it's just an observation.
You're constrained (enabled) by the competitive strategy your HCS employs: cost leadership (e.g. Wal-Mart), differentiation (e.g. Apple), or focus (e.g. Southwest Airlines). [0] Strategic focus allows companies to better align their incentives with culture, and it seems to work better.
If your HCS doesn't fall in one of these categories, compensation's even more difficult to solve. On HN, you'll hear a lot of large tech companies (targetting differentiation) claim to have solved ranking and performance compensation when a simple look at Glassdoor and critiques of the trade-off call these claims into question.
The bottom line is that executives have a set budget to allocate and never enough data, yet they also have to make a decision. Thus, you can only get a good (bad) solution and never a perfect solution.
What about Amazon? It seems like they're pursuing both the differentiation and cost leadership strategies.
Of course, they're the world's largest retailer by market cap, so they can afford to do both. And usually I don't even look elsewhere for a product, because I figure that they have either the lowest price or close to the lowest, and will deliver it the fastest. So I guess more differentiation?
If I had to pick one, I'd say cost leadership. Amazon grew through cost leadership, and that's still the company at its core as it a) achieves high asset utilization b) keeps costs low, and c) controls most of its supply chain. What might seem like AMZN using a differentiation strategy is actually just focused cost leadership in mid-up market segments.
Is the issue unionisation? It sounds like the answer is no.
The solution is probably to switch to a competitor that does set pay levels individually. In the event that there are none, perhaps take a leap and set up a competitor that does? If it's as big a problem as you say, presumably lots of talented physicians would beat a path to your door.
I really don't give a shit if I'm being paid more than my fellows, hard-working or no. The only thing I care about in my pay level is: am I making enough to support my family in a decent lifestyle? This means I'm comparing against the cost of living, NOT what my coworkers make - I only care about my relative wage insofar as it indicates how most people are getting by.
What I'm more interested in, as a smart person, is that my work is recognized as valuable, given the resources it needs to succeed, encouraged, improved upon, aided.
Merit raises are an effect of recognition. The fact everyone got the same raise meant there was no recognition for hard work. It's the wrong job for someone who wants to do better than bare minimum. I'll speculate and suggest that the department is doing good enough and they're not paying attention to performance metrics.
Your pay level relative to everyone else is the principle way the company acknowledges the value of your work. If I am making the same amount as a total underachiever, it signals that the company either doesn't care about my work or thinks I am also an underachiever.
"For most of the first eighteen years of his life, George Platen had headed firmly in one direction, that of Registered Computer Programmer. There were those in his crowd who spoke wisely of Spationautics, Refrigeration Technology, Transportation Control, and even Administration. But George held firm. He argued relative merits as vigorously as any of them, and why not? Education Day loomed ahead of them and was the great fact of their existence. It approached steadily, as fixed and certain as the calendar – the first day of November of the year following one’s eighteenth birthday. After that day, there were other topics of conversation."
I think this is a dangerous and fruitless line of reasoning. It halts the conversation. It makes it harder for management to be introspective. If you look at critical or creative thinking as an inherent skill [1] rather than as a measurable outcome of the right kind of environment and incentives, how can you create and improve a workplace in which your people think critically? [2]
I find that bad managers sometimes use the 'lacks critical thinking' criticism as an out for their own ineffectiveness. It's certainly not wrong for managers to delegate, to expect a high level of performance from their employees, to ask for creativity and mental agility in the face of a respectful amount of uncertainty. But when you combine vague goals and sparse planning with ego, bad managers wrongly attribute an employee's failure to correctly 'guess their will' to poor critical thinking skills.
It's natural for managers (myself included) to go into self-preservation mode when they've failed to give their employees enough direction, but the reality is that it's a relationship. There is, and there should be, push and pull. Sometimes the manager doesn't give enough direction or doesn't plan well. Sometimes the employee does some lazy thinking. Each needs to have enough humility and honesty to say, "I screwed up. How do we solve this and what can we do better in the future?"
If you want to make every decision from the top so that your employees never have to divine your will, you better be a planning savant. If you're a mortal like the rest of us, you need to figure out how to give your people just enough guidance to do their best work, and sometimes that means admitting you haven't given enough.
1. It may be inherent, but that's kind of beside the point. Wouldn't you want to keep the door open to improvement anyway?
2. Actually, the only way to do it is addressed in the article: search for 'critical thinkers,' whatever that means to you, in your hiring process.
> It's natural for managers (myself included) to go into self-preservation mode when they've failed to give their employees enough direction, but the reality is that it's a relationship.
It is for people who's #1 priority is themselves and not the team or the company at large, and doing the right thing.
This is purely anecdotal, but I've seen a shift in behaviour where even people with these soft skills appear less willing to take the risk of using them. Too much focus of "must look like I'm working hard", so rush things through without sense checking and that type of thing. Getting away with it often then means it becomes a way of working so the skills don't develop and people (one assumes) hope for the best in regards to getting caught!
Employers don't want critical thinking, they want compliance and results. They might say they want more soft skills, but what they mean is they want someone to solve their problems and make them look good.
Usually, that means a yes man. This kind of article is delusional naval gazing.
I work for a fortune 100 and critical thinking is highly valued on my team. One thing that I've observed is that expressing critical thinking without communication skill comes across as being argumentative. If you find yourself frequently arguing a point but no one is convinced, assuming you are actually correct on the issue, then you probably just have weak communication skills.
Another thing I've noticed is that no matter how compelling the argument it's also near impossible to get people to take action to change things that are deeply entrenched even if they agree with you.
Most organizations only recognize negative intercessions as praiseworthy, and categorize positive intercession as "business as usual" to be expected, even if sometimes the positive intercession is much harder.
"No!" moments are much valued in corporate culture these days.
People think this promotes the propagation of critical thinking across an organization. Perhaps ironically, the opposite is true. By tuning everyone to say, "No!" and rewarding them as such, it actually limits the impact of the actual important "No!" moments because everyone is competing for these accolades.
Most corporate culture does not reward people for following orders or improving upon someone else's idea. It's a legacy of the strict hierarchy all our organizations descend from (or a consequence of the apathy that more modern "matrixed" organizations breeds in its mid-grade baseline employees, who are taught not to overly invest in a given project).
My experience is mostly in the other direction. While C-level executives out of their depth (which seems to be most of the time when it comes to technology) tend to have quite a few 'No!' moments, maybe because it gives them a sense of control, they don't like hearing No from anyone else.
In fact, expressing doubts about the wisdom of pushing ahead with a project, even one already failing, is seen as very poor behaviour, like you have just farted in front of everyone. Likewise, identifying risks is often seen as negativity, rather than a foundation principle of review.
People who subsequently roll out one of these failed ideas are often publicly rewarded. In contrast, the people who develop the alternate system that is actually used tend to be ignored.
My observation is not applicable to C-levels and other people in positions of extreme power. It really only occurs when an org develops a middle-strata of management and executors with finely-cut responsibilities. Truly big companies.
It's interesting the title of the article assumes that critical thinking is a "soft skill". However I don't that's necessarily a great assumption. I think of soft skills as more along the lines of people skills, like communication, integrity, work ethic, etc. If you look at wikipedia article it cites several definitions, none of
which include critical thinking or "problem solving". They are all more long the lines of communication skills, cutesy, and work ethics.
There is also no breakdown of which industries were surveyed. It maybe the firms that hire lots of engineers or other professions that require solving new and different problem frequently were not well represented in the survey.
It just seems to me the premise of the article isn't that well thought out.
> And yeah they are in short supply because you can't teach them directly.
If you can think critically are you going to get past the HR filters and convince them you are the recruit willing to take a deal that will descend into just a little worse than unemployment? (So your empty shell of a life after they spit you out is devoid of any unused benefits.)
If you want to openly think critically in corporate employment, step 1 is becoming irreplaceable so they can't replace you when you become inconvenient at step 2.
An easier tactic, (employed by the best corporate game theorists that I've encountered) is following directions like a total Svejk, this leads employers to think you lack critical thinking skills. Then more resources are allocated and eventually you have a whole empire of minions.
> step 1 is becoming irreplaceable so they can't replace you when you become inconvenient
It is a hard lesson, but no-one is irreplaceable. Even if it means an entire product/group fails, if you are inconvenient you are gone. Organisations are not rational actors.
> following directions like a total Svejk
I love that book. It would be nice to seen a version in a corporate setting. Instead of a war it could be some behemoth company doing a massive pivot to the cloud, rewriting every bit of business logic in ruby, etc, and its lowly minion who is forever avoiding work with mandatory training courses, and who never pays for lunch because they appear at the smallest meeting which has corporate catering.
>>> If you want to openly think critically in corporate employment, step 1 is becoming irreplaceable so they can't replace you when you become inconvenient at step 2.
Indeed, quite odd to describe "soft skill" as critical thinking skills, ie cognitive skills. soft skill typically is social skill, the type of nebulous skill that while it may have value leaves huge room to interpretation.
The way I see it, critical thinking has a social aspect because an individual has to communicate those thoughts, or else how would we know they're critically thinking?
What we define as "teach" in the west is specifically designed to produce and select interchangeable factory drones with no social skills or creativity. Consider the K12 stereotype of filling out arithmetic worksheets or conjugation of foreign language verbs. Then we stack rank the kids by obedience to authority which usually anti-correlates with creativity and social skills to determine their educational path, and eventually give the "winners" jobs where their management are confused why they have no social skills and no creativity.
Imagine a classroom of employees head down silently circling multiple choice worksheets "circle the correct two characteristics of creativity in each set". That's how we'd "teach". Even worse, we'd probably pick the class teachers by who did the best on the last generation of social skills worksheets.
Meanwhile the creative or socially skilled are going to tend to not have corporate jobs. Or they'll demand more than minimal money.
One of the classic examples was Joe Sutter[0]. He was the Boeing 747 program lead & engineer who sadly died a few days ago.
Boeing management was putting pressure to cut 1,000 engineers from the program. He knew that would cause the program to fail, and he really needed 1,000 more engineers. He thought he was going to get fired that day, but still said what he believed.
The 747 became one of the most successful airliners in history.
"The Collins English Dictionary defines the term "soft skills" as “desirable qualities for certain forms of employment that do not depend on acquired knowledge: they include common sense, the ability to deal with people, and a positive flexible attitude.”"
I think economics is an important part of thinking critically. Does philanthropy do more good than bad? Does affirmative action always get the desired results? Does equality of opportunity lead to equality of outcome? What should be the role of government and how to fund it?
My views on a lot of subjects changed after getting just a rudimentary understanding of economics. While I cannot claim I am a very critical thinker, I am probably a more critical thinker after I learnt economics. And in my view, economics is more science than non-science, and you can grasp it better with more acquired knowledge.
And when they say they want "critical thinkers" what they mean is that they want people who can criticize their coworkers while thoughtfully praising their managers' foresight.
Generally a firm can get workers if they are willing to locate in an area that the workers want to live, that they treat the workers well, and that they offer above market rates in salary.
But, even wealthy firms such as Apple and Google which both have huge profits have conspired to keep engineering and technical wage rates low. There was recently a settlement for the collusion. It had nothing to do with the amount of money the firms had or could spend for talent, just that they wanted to keep the costs down.
So, generally be suspect of these kinds of articles.
For my entire I've been listening to organisations purporting to represent employers slag of the education system for not being sufficiently vocationally-focused - for not just eternally chasing a narrow range of whatever skills will turn out good little technicians at no cost to employers - while denigrating anything outside that narrow focus as basket-weaving. And the political landscape in the English-speaking world has largely gone along with that.
I think it is great that this question is asked by the wsj. Unfortunately the article is behind a paywall. Can someone with access please summarize the article?
If we're relying on all critical thinking skills to come as an unstated side effect of teaching math and elementary science that is sometimes taught alongside creationism then the results are obviously going to be watery.
If on the other hand students were taught just a few formal fallacies and led to analyze just a few arguments and just touched on formal logic while in high school, the nation would be transformed (but I imagine the flyover states would yell bloody murder)
Intelligence testing is considered to be illegal. On the other hand, figuring out how to game a personality test is, in a sense, a test of critical thinking
On a more serious note, I don't believe this is true. In every place I've been, school, university, corporate jobs, the "critical thinkers" always got marginalised. This was the case even if they were truly nice people who cared - i.e. not abrasive and argumentative, just different. This is often called "difficult", because most managers and HR can't be bothered to actually engage with that person. So isn't that people can't do it, just the lesson is "you're better off if you don't say it". Political correctness also doesn't help IMO.
I feel like one of my favorite Mitchell and Webb sketches, "Kill the poor", describes this quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg