careers – Pertinent Observations

Impossible careers

A month ago, I had this idea that rather than squatting and deadlifting super heavy, I should learn “olympic lifts” (snatch, clean and jerk). I’d even made up my mind that I’ll ask one of the coaches at my gym to offer personal training during the summer so I can learn it.

And then, randomly, 2-3 weeks back, I decided to do some new exercises, and decided to do snatch grip overhead squat (something you need to do while you’re doing an olympic snatch). And that’s when I realised I would struggle.

I’ve mentioned here a couple of times that I have incredibly long arms. What I had not realised is that I have long enough, and a torso short enough, that it is physically impossible for me to snatch with a barbell.

Really.

So in the snatch, you need to use a wide grip and bring up the barbell, and at the same time thrust your hips forward to make sure the hips hit the barbell. The momentum of you having sharply pulled the barbell off the floor, and the hips hitting it, means that the barbell will go upwards, and you squat down and catch it overhead.

The key is that your waist needs to precisely hit the barbell when you thrust your hips forward. If the bar makes contact higher, your stomach can’t convey the same momentum that the waist can. And if the bar makes contact lower, well, let’s not get into below-the-belt stuff here.

And so your snatch grip on the barbell is determined by the width you hold it at so that the bar is exactly at your waist. You see professional weightlifters, and they usually hold the barbell well inside the ends (apparently short arms are a huge advantage in professional weight lifting). Most people in my gym also hold their snatch grip well inside the ends of the bar. Just that I can’t.

I got this photo taken at the gym today to demonstrate this:

I tucked in my shirt to show where my waist is. Notice that I’m holding the bar in the widest possible position. Yet I’m unable to get the bar to my waist. So with my body proportions, if I were to try and snatch, I would be putting myself in grave danger.

The reason I’ve told such a long story here is to illustrate that your choice of profession or game or sport highly depends on who you are. If, for whatever reason, I’d decided when I was young that weightlifting is cool and I want to specialise in that, I would have NEVER made it.

A lot of times, we make the mistake of going for “cool stuff” (or worse, forcing our kids to do something that we think is cool), without realising if we are cut out to do the cool stuff -whether we will like it, enjoy it and be good at it. And sometimes, driven by “inspirational stories”, we push ourselves too hard to get the cool job or college admission or whatever, without realising we may not have the aptitude for it at all.

Now that I tried to find my snatch grip, I know better than to take personal training for snatching. Yes, I should still be able to clean – though every time I’ve tried to learn, I’ve found it to involve too much coordination between my limbs (just like swimming, something else I’ve never managed to learn though my long arms should make me good at it).

I guess I should just stick to my strengths, and just deadlift and chill.

Two steps back, one step forward

In his excellent piece on Everton’s failed recruitment strategy (paywalled), Oliver Kay of the Athletic makes an interesting point – that players seldom do well when they move from a bigger club to a smaller club.

During his time in charge at Arsenal, George Graham used to say that the key to building a team was to buy players who were on the way up — or, alternatively, players who were desperate to prove a point — but to avoid those who might see your club as a soft landing, a comfort zone. “Never buy a player who’s taking a step down to join you,” Graham said. “He will act as if he’s doing you a favour.”

This, I guess, is not unique to football alone – it applies to other jobs as well. When someone joins a company that they think they are “too cool for”, they look at it as a step down, and occasionally behave as if they’re doing the new employer a favour.

One corollary is that working for “the best” can be a sort of lock in for an employee, since wherever he will move from there will be a sort of step down in some way or the other, and that will mean compromises on the part of all parties involved.

Thinking about footballers who have moved from big clubs and still not done badly, I notice one sort of pattern that I call “two steps back and one step forward”. Evidently, I’m basing this analysis on a small number of data points, which might be biased, but let me play management guru and go ahead with my theory.

Basically, if you want to take a “step down” from the best, one way of doing well in the longer term is to take “two steps down” and then later take a step up. The advantage with this approach is that when you take two steps down, you get to operate in an environment far easier than the one you left, and even if you act entitled and take time to adjust you will be able to prove yourself and make an impact in due course.

And at that point in time, when you’ve started making an impact, you are “on the way up”, and can then step up to a club at the next level where you can make an impact.

Players that come to mind that have taken this approach include Jonny Evans, who moved from Ferguson-era Manchester United to West Brom, and then when West Brom got relegated, moved “up” to Leicester. And he’s doing a pretty good job there.

And then there is Xherdan Shaqiri. He made his name as a player at Bayern Munich, and then moved to Inter where he struggled. And then he made what seemed like a shocking move for the time – to Stoke City (of the “cold Thursday night at Stoke” fame) in the Premier League. Finally, last year, after Stoke got relegated from the Premier League, he “stepped up” to Liverpool, where, injuries aside, he’s been doing rather well.

The risk with this two steps down approach, of course, is that sometimes it can fail to come off, and if you don’t make an impact soon enough, you start getting seen as a “two steps down guy”, and even “one step down” can seem well beyond you.

Prodigy

Sometimes I wonder if being a prodigy is more of a curse than a blessing. The sense of having “achieved something” fairly early in life leads to a lowering of objectives, not being excited by anything, and a sort of satisfaction of having “arrived” that reduces motivation to do anything else in life.

A few prodigies keep up the fight and make a successful career for themselves as adults (eg. Sachin Tendulkar). Most fall by the wayside. And find it struggle to come to terms of having become ordinary. And find being an adult incredibly hard, and then get into all sorts of issues.

Five years ago, the Guardian identified the “best young player from each Premier League club“, and they’ve kept at monitoring the progress. Five years later, the results aren’t encouraging.

Out of our 20 players from the English top flight in that 2014-15 season, only three are playing at Premier League clubs now: Marcus Rashford, Dominic Solanke and Hamza Choudhury.

That may not sound very impressive but some others are at Premier League clubs but on loan in the Championship. Six of the 20 are playing second-tier football (five in England and one, Harley Willard, in Iceland) so nearly half are playing at a very high level. On the other hand, two of the 20 – as far as we are aware – are not playing football any more.

While it is natural for parents to push their kids and get them to “achieve something” at a young age, such achievements in most cases don’t result in any lasting advantage as adults. Instead, children who achieve something get labelled as “prodigies” or “gifted” or “talented” and these labels only seek to increase pressures on them as they grow up, rather than helping them build sustainable careers.

OK I might be ranting so I’ll stop here.

Housewife Careers

This is something I’ve been wanting to write about for a very long time, but have kept putting it off. The ultimate trigger for writing this is this article about women with children in Amazon asking for backup child care at work. Since this hits rather close home, this is a good enough trigger to write.

Quoting the article:

“Everyone wants to act really tough and pretend they don’t have human needs,” says Kristi Coulter, who worked in various roles at Amazon for almost 12 years and observed that many senior executives had stay-at-home wives.

(emphasis mine)

While this might be true of Amazon (though not necessarily for other large tech companies), it is true for other careers as well. The nature of the job means that it is impossible to function if you even have partial child-care responsibilities. And that implies that the only way you can do this job is if you have a spouse whose full time job is bringing up the kids.

Without loss of generality (considering that in most cases it’s the women who give up their careers for child-rearing), we can call these jobs “housewife jobs”.

Housewife jobs are jobs where you can do a good job if an only if you have a spouse who spends all her time taking care of the kids.

The main feature (I would say it is a bug, but whatever) of such a job is usually long work hours that require you to “overlap both ways” – both leave home early in the morning and return late every night, implying that even if you have to drop your kid to day care, it is your spouse who has to do so. And as I’ve found from personal experience, it is simply not possible to work profitably when you have both child-dropping and child-picking-up duties on a single day (unless you have zero commute, like I’ve had for the last eight months).

Housewife jobs also involve lots of travel. Whether it is overnight or not doesn’t matter, since you are likely to be away early mornings and late evenings at least, and this means (once again) that the spouse has to pick up the slack.

Housewife jobs also involve a lot of pressure, which means that even when you are done with work and want to relax with the kids, you are unable to take your mind off work. So it turns out to be rather unprofitable time with the kids – so you might as well spend that working. Which again means the spouse picks up the slack.

Sometimes a job may not be inherently stressful or require long hours, but might be housewife because the company is led by a bunch of people with housewives (the article linked above claims this about Amazon). What this means is that when there is a sufficient number of (mostly) men in senior management who have housewives taking care of kids, their way of working percolates through the culture of the organisation.

These organisations are more likely to demand “facetime” (not the Apple variety). They are more likely to value input more than output (thus privileging fighter work?). And soon people without housewives get crowded out of such organisations, making it even more housewife organisations.

Finally, you may argue that I’ve used UK-style nurseries as the dominant child care mechanism in my post (these usually run 8-6), and that it might be possible to hedge the situations completely with 24/7 nannies or Singapore-style “helpers”. Now, even with full time child care, there are some emergencies that occur from time to time which require the presence of at least one parent. And it can’t be the same parent providing that presence all the time. So if one of the parents is in a “housewife job”, things don’t really work out.

I guess it is not hard to work out a list of jobs or sectors which are inherently “housewife”. Look at where people quit once they have kids. Look at where people quit once they get married. Look at jobs that are staffed by rolling legions of fresh graduates (if you don’t have a kid, you don’t need a housewife).

The scary realisation I’m coming to is that most jobs are housewife jobs, and it is really not easy being a DI(>=1)K household.

Scott Adams, careers and correlation

I’ve written here earlier about how much I’ve been influenced by Scott Adams’s career advice about “being in top quartile of two or more things“. To recap, this is what Adams wrote nearly ten years back:

If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.

Having implemented this to various degrees of success over the last 5-6 years, I propose a small correction – basically to follow the second strategy that Adams has mentioned, you need to take correlation into account.

Basically there’s no joy in becoming very good (top 25%) at two or more correlated things. For example, if you think you’re in the top 25% in terms of “maths and physics” or “maths and computer science” there’s not so much joy because these are correlated skills. Lots of people who are very good at maths are also very good at physics or computer science. So there is nothing special in being very good at such a combination.

Why Adams succeeded was that he was very good at 2-3 things that are largely uncorrelated – drawing, telling jokes and understanding corporate politics are not very correlated to each other. So the combination of these three skills of his was rather unique to find, and their combination resulted in the wildly successful Dilbert.

So the key is this – in order to be wildly successful, you need to be very good (top 25%) at two or three things that are not positively correlated with each other (either orthogonal or negative correlation works). That ensures that if you can put them together, you can offer something that very few others can offer.

Then again, the problem there is that the market for this combination of skills will be highly illiquid – low supply means people who might demand such combinations would have adapted to make do with some easier to find substitute, so demand is lower, and so on. So in that sense, again, it’s a massive hit-or-miss!