Get a Job, Build a Real Career, and Defy a Bewildering Economy Quotes

“Lazlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, made the following comments in an interview published by the New York Times in June 2013: “One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s (grade point averages) are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore…. We found that they don’t predict anything. What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.” Doing well in college—earning high test scores and grades—has no measurable correlation with becoming an effective worker or manager.  This is incontrovertible evidence that the entire Higher Education system is detached from the real economy: excelling in higher education has little discernible correlation to real-world skills or performance.”
― Charles Hugh Smith, Get a Job, Build a Real Career, and Defy a Bewildering Economy

“It is a central thesis of this book that centralization has reached diminishing returns and is no longer yielding any benefit. Instead, it has become the problem, not the solution; what worked in the past no longer works now. Centralization as a solution has been leapfrogged by decentralizing technologies.”
― Charles Hugh Smith, Get a Job, Build a Real Career, and Defy a Bewildering Economy

“The goal of the education system is for students to obtain a credential rather than skills that are essential in the real economy. The credential is seen as a proxy for knowledge or even wisdom; but a proxy of knowledge is not the same as knowledge embedded in human and social capital.”
― Charles Hugh Smith, Get a Job, Build a Real Career, and Defy a Bewildering Economy

“In this networked world, specialization is no longer a competitive advantage; the competitive advantage goes to those whose work cannot be commoditized or traded.”
― Charles Hugh Smith, Get a Job, Build a Real Career, and Defy a Bewildering Economy