Grady Laksmono

RATIONAL NTs, being ABSTRACT in communicating and UTILITARIAN in implementing goals, can become highly skilled in STRATEGIC ANALYSIS. Thus their most practiced and developed intelligent operations tend to be marshalling and planning (NTJ organizing), or inventing and configuring (NTP engineering). And they would if they could be wizards in one of these forms of rational operation. They are proud of themselves in the degree they are competent in action, respect themselves in the degree they are autonomous, and feel confident of themselves in the degree they are strong willed. Ever in search of knowledge, this is the “Knowledge Seeking Personality” — trusting in reason and hungering for achievement. They are usually pragmatic about the present, skeptical about the future, solipsistic about the past, and their preferred time and place are the interval and the intersection. Educationally they go for the sciences, avocationally for technology, and vocationally for systems work. Rationals tend to be individualizing as parents, mindmates as spouses, and learning oriented as children. Rationals are very infrequent, comprising as few as 5% and no more than 7% of the population.

It’s that time of year again… when you count down the days until you are done with studying, when the mandatory cap and gown fittings occur and the graduation tickets need to be ordered, when you look to the future and hope that the education you received in the past four (or five or six years : )) was actually worth the money you spent.  When you leave the safe confines of academia and venture into that crazy world of “your first real job”.

It can be both an empowering feeling and a frightening one all at the same time.  I know that when I was snuggled cozily within the business buildings of the University of Washington, I felt that I was getting the best education known to man.  No matter how many schools were deemed “best, highest salary, highest SAT, most competitive”, I felt satisfied with my choice.  And I still am.

I’ve been out of school for a little over five years now (gosh, that makes me feel old!).  And it’s funny, I never once questioned my education until I entered the job market.  I can recall happily offering up my transcript to the first recruiter who asked my name, gleefully highlighting my steady improvement from sophomore to senior year (and super senior year, yes I graduated in five).  And sadly, no one wanted to see it.

I shopped my transcript around like it was a film script from a USC theater graduate.  I was proud not only of the grades that I had received, but also of the university that I attended.  I still thought that the school you attended somehow proved how smart and talented you would be in the workforce.  Boy, was I wrong.

The purpose of this blog is to invite discussion.  So what I want to ask is;

Why did you choose your college and do you think it has a correlation to your success in the workforce?  Does the school you attended actually matter when you enter the technology workspace?

Now I am all for higher education.  As an employee of Microsoft, I highly value those strategic minds that come to us from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon.  I see value in all education, but I‘m really curious about your thoughts on this question.

I recently watched an episode of 20/20 where they had a great piece called “The Privilege of Education”.  In this news piece, they spoke about how many of the top schools are taking students well below their “bar” based on monetary and political reasons.  Although it’s interesting and that may indeed be the case, I’m not so concerned because my stance is that with the rising cost of education and the increased number of students going to college, one cannot judge a candidate based solely on where he or she received their degree.  You need to measure the merit of the student based on a lot of different factors.

A perfect example is this: I work for what we dub the “National” team within MS college recruiting.  My team sources those candidates that do not attend a handful of schools that we deem “Most Competitive”.  These “Most Competitive” schools are those with the big names, and a lot of the students who attend are SMART, smarter than I could ever dream of being.  But that doesn’t mean that students who DON’T go to these schools aren’t equally smart…if not smarter.

I held an offsite recruiting event last year in the great state of Texas.  I invited students from all of the top schools that I recruit for in the area to apply.  After several hundred phone screens, and five days of onsite interviews, we stack-ranked our top candidates.  At the top of the list was a student from a small school called Prairie View A/M.  Not one of our Most Competitive schools, but he was a Most Competitive candidate.  And he had chosen his school because it made sense for him and given his circumstances, he knew that he didn’t need to pay top dollar to further his education at a big name school.

I’m not saying that top schools aren’t worth it, because in many cases, they are.  What I am saying is that great companies need to look outside the box, and realize that top students/candidates attend schools for various reasons.

I’ve had great candidates who chose to attend community college because they had families, were working full-time, or any number of other personal reasons.  I’ve had great candidates who attended small liberal arts schools because they were confident in their coding ability and knew that they wanted a more well-rounded education.  And I’ve had students who have attended places I’ve never even heard of and that have blown the SOCKS off all interviews.  So much so that their interviewers demand to know how I can find more people like them.

I’m passionate about this discussion partially due to the emphasis that Google has on where someone goes or went to school.  Many of my candidates have been turned away from Google just because of the school name on their resume.  So, I suppose I should offer up a ”thank you, Google”!  It’s the year 2007, and I think I’m benefiting from working at a company that isn’t biased about where you went to school.  Some of the smartest people I work with and have hired have emerged from the most unlikely of places.

I’d like to hear from you - those of you who went to the small schools and succeeded big time, and others who have an opinion on the topic. Share with the rest of us why you are/were happy with your decision, and the impact your school choice has made on the type of worker you will be in the future.

- Janelle
Microsoft Recruiter

 The Portrait of the FieldMarshal Rational (eNTj)

Of the four aspects of strategic analysis and definition, it is marshalling or situational organizing role that reaches the highest development in Fieldmarshals. As this kind of role is practiced some contingency organizing is necessary, so that the second suit of the Fieldmarshal’s intellect is devising contingency plans. Structural and functional engineering, though practiced in some degree in the course of organizational operations, tend to be not nearly as well developed and are soon outstripped by the rapidly growing skills in organizing. But it must be said that any kind of strategic exercize tends to bring added strength to engineering as well as organizing skills.

As the organizing capabilities the Fieldmarshal increase so does their desire to let others know about whatever has come of their organizational efforts. So they tend to take up a directive role in their social exchanges. On the other hand they have less and less desire, if they ever had any, to inform others.

Hardly more than two percent of the total population, the Fieldmarshals are bound to lead others, and from an early age they can be observed taking command of groups. In some cases, Fieldmarshals simply find themselves in charge of groups, and are mystified as to how this happened. But the reason is that Fieldmarshals have a strong natural urge to give structure and direction wherever they are — to harness people in the field and to direct them to achieve distant goals. They resemble Supervisors in their tendency to establish plans for a task, enterprise, or organization, but Fieldmarshals search more for policy and goals than for regulations and procedures.

They cannot not build organizations, and cannot not push to implement their goals. When in charge of an organization, whether in the military, business, education, or government, Fieldmarshals more than any other type desire (and generally have the ability) to visualize where the organization is going, and they seem able to communicate that vision to others. Their organizational and coordinating skills tends to be highly developed, which means that they are likely to be good at systematizing, ordering priorities, generalizing, summarizing, at marshalling evidence, and at demonstrating their ideas. Their ability to organize, however, may be more highly developed than their ability to analyze, and the Fieldmarshal leader may need to turn to an Inventor or Architect to provide this kind of input.

Fieldmarshals will usually rise to positions of responsibility and enjoy being executives. They are tireless in their devotion to their jobs and can easily block out other areas of life for the sake of their work. Superb administrators in any field — medicine, law, business, education, government, the military — Fieldmarshals organize their units into smooth-functioning systems, planning in advance, keeping both short-term and long-range objectives well in mind. For the Fieldmarshals, there must always be a goal-directed reason for doing anything, and people’s feelings usually are not sufficient reason. They prefer decisions to be based on impersonal data, want to work from well thought-out plans, like to use engineered operations — and they expect others to follow suit. They are ever intent on reducing bureaucratic red tape, task redundancy, and aimless confusion in the workplace, and they are willing to dismiss employees who cannot get with the program and increase their efficiency. Although Fieldmarshals are tolerant of established procedures, they can and will abandon any procedure when it can be shown to be ineffective in accomplishing its goal. Fieldmarshals root out and reject ineffectiveness and inefficiency, and are impatient with repetition of error.

I’ve shared one interesting from Microsoft on the previous post. While looking around Google’s technology, I’ve found that this is interesting!!! You will know it when you watch the video

Do you like Space Invaders? I’m currently working on the 3D Space Invaders for my first project and adventure with XNA. I’ve learned so much on my way through. Though, there are many things that I still need to learn.. The book that I ordered just came today, so hopefully this book can help me speed up for the next level - Physics! Currently, I’m just using simple Physics to calculate the Rocket’s momentum…