I think one of the major purposes of selecting employees based on a college degree (aside from proving intelligence and actually learning skills) is to demonstrate ability to concentrate over extended periods (months to years) on boring or low-stimulation work, more specifically reading, writing, and calculation tasks that are close analogues of office work. A speedrun of a video game is very different. The game is designed for visual and auditory stimulation. You can clearly see when you’re making progress and how much, a helpful feature for entering a flow state. There is often a competitive aspect. And of course you don’t have to read or write or calculate anything, or even interact with other people in a productive way. Probably the very best speed runners are mostly smart people who could be good at lots of things, because that’s true of almost any competition. But I doubt skill at speedrunning otherwise correlates much with success at most jobs.
I think their is another important reason people are selected based on a degree. When I was at school their were a lot of people who were some combination of disruptive/annoying/violent “laddish” that made me (and others) uncomfortable, by deducting status points for niche, weird or “nerdy” interests*. A correlation (at least at my school) was that none of those people went to university, and (at least at my university) no equivalent people of that type were there. Similarly I have not met any such people in the workplace. College/university filters them out. It overlaps with class-ism to some extent. Maybe to overstate it wildly you could say that employers are trying to select so that the workplace culture is dominated by middle-class social norms.
OTOH, I have a hunch that the kinds of jobs that select against “speed run gamer” mentality are more likely to be inefficient, or even outright bullshit jobs. In essence, speed-running is optimization, and jobs that cannot handle an optimizer are likely to either have error in the process, or error in the goal-choice, or possibly both.
The admittedly small sized sample of examples where a workplace that resisted could not handle optimization that I witnessed were because the “work” was a cover for some nefarious shenanigans, build for inefficiency for political reasons, or created for status games instead of useful work/profit.
I think optimizer-type jobs are a modest subset of all useful or non-bullshit office jobs. Many call more for creativity, or reliably executing an easy task. In some jobs, basically all the most critical tasks are new and dissimilar to previous tasks, so there’s not much to optimize. There’s no quick feedback loop. It’s more about how reliably you can analyze the new situation correctly.
I had an optimizing job once, setting up computers over the summer in college. It was fun. Programming is like that too. I agree that if optimizing is a big part of the job, it’s probably not bullshit.
But over time I’ve come to think that even though occasional programming is the most fun part of my job, the inscrutable parts that you have to do in a vacuum are probably more important.
I mostly agree with you, though I noticed if a job is mostly made of constantly changing tasks that are new and dissimilar to previous tasks, there is some kind of efficiency problem up the pipeline. Its the old Janitor Problem in a different guise; a janitor at a building needs to perform a thousand small dissimilar tasks, inefficiently and often in impractical order, because the building itself was inefficiently designed. Hence why we still haven’t found a way to automate a janitor, because for that we would need to redesign the very concept of a “building”, and for that we would need to optimize how we build infrastructure, and for that we would have to redesign our cities from scratch… etc, until you find out we would need to build an entire new civilization from ground up to, just to replace one janitor with a robot. it still hints at a gross inefficiency in the system, just one not easily fixed.
I think one of the major purposes of selecting employees based on a college degree (aside from proving intelligence and actually learning skills) is to demonstrate ability to concentrate over extended periods (months to years) on boring or low-stimulation work, more specifically reading, writing, and calculation tasks that are close analogues of office work. A speedrun of a video game is very different. The game is designed for visual and auditory stimulation. You can clearly see when you’re making progress and how much, a helpful feature for entering a flow state. There is often a competitive aspect. And of course you don’t have to read or write or calculate anything, or even interact with other people in a productive way. Probably the very best speed runners are mostly smart people who could be good at lots of things, because that’s true of almost any competition. But I doubt skill at speedrunning otherwise correlates much with success at most jobs.
I think their is another important reason people are selected based on a degree. When I was at school their were a lot of people who were some combination of disruptive/annoying/violent “laddish” that made me (and others) uncomfortable, by deducting status points for niche, weird or “nerdy” interests*. A correlation (at least at my school) was that none of those people went to university, and (at least at my university) no equivalent people of that type were there. Similarly I have not met any such people in the workplace. College/university filters them out. It overlaps with class-ism to some extent. Maybe to overstate it wildly you could say that employers are trying to select so that the workplace culture is dominated by middle-class social norms.
OTOH, I have a hunch that the kinds of jobs that select against “speed run gamer” mentality are more likely to be inefficient, or even outright bullshit jobs. In essence, speed-running is optimization, and jobs that cannot handle an optimizer are likely to either have error in the process, or error in the goal-choice, or possibly both.
The admittedly small sized sample of examples where a workplace that resisted could not handle optimization that I witnessed were because the “work” was a cover for some nefarious shenanigans, build for inefficiency for political reasons, or created for status games instead of useful work/profit.
I think optimizer-type jobs are a modest subset of all useful or non-bullshit office jobs. Many call more for creativity, or reliably executing an easy task. In some jobs, basically all the most critical tasks are new and dissimilar to previous tasks, so there’s not much to optimize. There’s no quick feedback loop. It’s more about how reliably you can analyze the new situation correctly.
I had an optimizing job once, setting up computers over the summer in college. It was fun. Programming is like that too. I agree that if optimizing is a big part of the job, it’s probably not bullshit.
But over time I’ve come to think that even though occasional programming is the most fun part of my job, the inscrutable parts that you have to do in a vacuum are probably more important.
I mostly agree with you, though I noticed if a job is mostly made of constantly changing tasks that are new and dissimilar to previous tasks, there is some kind of efficiency problem up the pipeline. Its the old Janitor Problem in a different guise; a janitor at a building needs to perform a thousand small dissimilar tasks, inefficiently and often in impractical order, because the building itself was inefficiently designed. Hence why we still haven’t found a way to automate a janitor, because for that we would need to redesign the very concept of a “building”, and for that we would need to optimize how we build infrastructure, and for that we would have to redesign our cities from scratch… etc, until you find out we would need to build an entire new civilization from ground up to, just to replace one janitor with a robot.
it still hints at a gross inefficiency in the system, just one not easily fixed.