It's a Good Time for Weirdos // BRXND Dispatch vol 101
Big companies want you to choose a title. AI says you don't have to.
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Author’s note: This week we’re sharing a piece Noah originally published on the Alephic blog over the holidays. We wanted to include it here in case you missed it.
Paul Graham, on the absurdity of career planning:
The educational systems in most countries pretend it’s easy. They expect you to commit to a field long before you could know what it’s really like. And as a result an ambitious person on an optimal trajectory will often read to the system as an instance of breakage.
I closed the BRXND conference in September by saying it’s a good time to be a weirdo. Big companies have long struggled with multi-hyphenate employees. If you’re a designer-who-codes or a strategist-who-builds, you’ve spent your career being forced to pick a lane.
AI changes this. Now you can exercise each of your hyphens to a degree that was unimaginable five years ago. A 30th percentile coder becomes 70th percentile with the help of AI. In the process, they don’t lose their other competencies; on the contrary, they can now amplify those even further.
As usual, big companies will bring up the rear in recognizing this. Bureaucracies crave standardization, and titles provide that. Charlie Munger put it bluntly: “Some of the worst dysfunctions in businesses come from the fact that they balkanize reality into little individual departments, with territoriality and turf protection and so forth.” At the same time, I think the path for hybrids to create value is more straightforward than it ever has been. Small companies will figure it out first, and the large ones will follow. This means opportunity for both the weirdos and the companies willing to employ them.
Graham writes that the system “is designed on the assumption that you’ll somehow magically guess as a teenager.” He’s right, and AI only brings this absurdity further into focus.
Over the last thirty or forty years, we built a higher education system in which not only do you have to choose a major early, but if you change your mind, you’re punished by having to go to more college. This was always ridiculous and, as far as I understand, also runs counter to the ideals of a liberal arts education. We kept the language but gutted the practice.
Many people should probably go to trade school. Many don’t need hugely expensive universities. But school also needs to change. And like many things, AI isn’t forcing that change as much as shining light on how broken the current system already is.
AI is a mirror, but it’s also an amplifier.
If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.
Noah and Claire
FINALLY! The weird shall inherit the earth.