[FRIAM] !RE: A million tech jobs unfilled

[Eric Charles]

A related anecdote, with an attempt to generalize and hypothesize after:
Last year I started working for the Marine Corps, doing data analysis
related to hiring and training, and serving on several committees that make
high-level decisions regarding hiring and classification testing. One thing
that made the position appealing, and which has made the job pleasurable
thus far, is that the Marine Corps is seriously strapped for personnel and
funding at all times. And by "all times", I mean more than long enough for
it to be baked into the personality of the individuals and the
organization. Even under the most generous proposed expansions of resources
(under a pro-military President and a retired Marine Secretary of Defense)
the Corps will still be strapped. Most Marine Corps Generals "wear several
hats", meaning that they do 3-5 things for which all of the other services
have dedicated generals. And this drifts down to most of the middle ranks
of civilian and active duty employees. Thus, though they have to run their
searches for civilian employees through the regular government hiring
system, in which each job shows a fairly narrow specialty, what they need
for almost all of their positions is a polymath, who is comfortable owning
a couple of core jobs, and frequently being put into teams doing vaguely
related jobs.

All of the officers I work with (Captains and Majors) had completely
unrelated jobs, before they were ordered to get a masters degree and then
work in my Division for 3 years, after which they will go back to their
unrelated job. And even then, their Masters training was, at best,
peripherally related to the tasks they have now (degrees in Organizational
Research or Human Resources Management). Thus, while there is still a
strong culture of telling people to "stay in your lane" when things get
adversarial, most peoples' "lanes" are much wider than they would be in
equivalent organizations. There is also no ability to maintain the illusion
that you can get exactly the person you want for any open job, making
flexibility a plus. This forces an environment in which 80% and 90%
solutions are viewed positively, and in which many tasks are understood
as "safe-to-fail" (given proper contingency planning and advanced notice
to higher-ups).

The situation that I am currently enjoying is an artificial result of
being the Marine Corps being a relatively large (~200,000 employee)
organization, which lacks independent control over many of the
organization's decisions (because the legislature, and the Department of
the Navy control many aspects of operations).  While I am confident I was a
solid first choice for the hiring manager (compared to others who applied
to the narrowly focused job announcement), it is somewhat of a miracle that
my resume made it through the HR gauntlet to reach her desk.

Attempting to generalize from that:
Polymaths would presumably be more crucial to a personnel-strapped
organization. I'm not sure it matters whether that is normal operating
procedure, or if it is due to an unanticipated shortage (e.g., due to
unexpected growth, or an unexpected exodus). The inverse of that
observation is that silos and narrow specializations would thus seem to be
the natural purview of more mature and/or resource rich organizations. (And
this fits with Roger Barker's excellent studies of small vs. large
organizations, as well as much research since.)

However, we all know that is being increasingly challenged in experiments
wherein organizations try to see how big a corporation can get while still
keeping a "start-up mentality". I suspect that a big chunk of succeeding in
such experiments is - somehow - maintaining an environment in which
polymaths can be common. As has been well-discussed above, growing
bureaucracies have natural tendencies that make it harder for polymaths to
get hired. Presumably it is also harder for their contributions to be
recognized and rewarded (e.g., recognitions that go to singular
contributions, rather than diffuse contributions), and the challenges
created by bureaucratic territoriality. It would be interesting to know if
any of the start-up-4'eva organizations have put in place mechanisms to
specifically counter those HR and reward challenges.

One would also hypothesize that the number of polymaths would correlate
well with which organizations survived personnel-strapped phases. This
requires, even for large, well-siloed organizations, having more polymaths
than it seems like you might need under for "normal" operation.





-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician
U.S. Marine Corps
<echarles at american.edu>

On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 10:24 PM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
wrote:

> Steve writes:
>
> "Following your own principle (if I understand you correctly) of
> diversity, every organization needs a few polymaths, but too many and it is
> likely to lose coherence?"
>
> Polymaths attract people that want to be better and do good work.   These
> people and those that work with them live in the space of ideas and
> accomplishments.  In a big organization, the polymaths aren't the ones that
> need to hire people -- the candidates are standing in line often with their
> own funding.   Then there are non-polymath professorial delegators that
> need people to do work for them, and individuals with narrow skills that
> want that work.   I think Owen was talking about working in the first
> situation, and others are remarking on the reality of the latter and how
> odd it is to drift between the two.
>
> Marcus
>
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