On hyper-specialization

Hyper-specialization is our culture's answer to: How do we get incompetent people to perform as if they were? Forget teaching people. Now we just specialize them. It's where UX writing comes from.

Instead of gathering a squad of intelligent, well-rounded professionals, we collect a posse of hyperspecialized arrogant morons and a cherif to whip them up into obedience. Said Cherif is often called a manager. It's usually a person with no real skill hired by other people with no skill.

Underneath this strange choice lies our unwillingness to learn. It hides behind a wall of lame excuses and garbage like: "I can't do ALL this design by myself and also be expected to write and code".

I know the root of this plague. It's those damn 5 years of university.

It stands to reason that if you do 5 years of uni after 4 years of the equally useless high school, you would think that you're done learning. "I finished my studies" declares the moron.

I plan to recruit me a bunch of enterprising 16-year-olds. Before they're 18, they'll be so good as to tempt you to fire your incompetent-as$ design team and start your own high-end child labor operation.

Life is much easier when we truly want to learn the things that we need to learn. 16-year-olds are usually very eager to learn, unlike your lame designers.

This is why, I respect entrepreneurs and engineers the most. They understand, though mostly by obligation, that they can't stop learning. They're never even tempted to. They pick up new tools or techniques all the time. They have that child-like ability to just learn as they go. They never say: "Oh, I don't know this one". They say: "Hold on, I'm reading the documentation"

6-months before their graduation, most university students are less useful than that blue IKEA bag, except more arrogant and full of misinformation. We take these specimens into internships where, for the first time in their lives, they learn a thing, sometimes many things. They are amazed. They feel the best they ever felt. Could it have been like this all this time?

It's hard to admit that you wasted 5 years of your life in school, especially if it's a design school, or worse, a business school. It's hard to admit, that given the same opportunity, a person off the street with comparable intelligence can probably do better given the same internship.

Imagine preparing for a marathon for 4 and a half years only to meet your fat cousin cruising at the 40 km mark. You'd wanna go home and crawl inside a blue IKEA bag.

This is why people can't learn past the age of 22. They buy these dumb-ass Notion templates and webinars and e-books and newsletters and do everything except actually learning a thing.

People who resist this don't understand opportunity cost. Unfortunately, they also can't learn that either.

The moral of the story is: if you're a designer and you don't know how a flexbox works, you should learn. It's easy, even if you're a moron.