Back when I joined Intel Corporation in the early eighties the concept of Intel Culture was very real for us employees. I don’t mean the laudable corporate platitudes about respecting everybody and caring for the planet that are standard today; back then Intel was a small company that had yet to win the IBM PC processor contract, and the culture it embodied was the sort of stark “frontier culture” that as an Israeli I could easily identify with. It had originated with Andy Grove, who was then a forceful presence in the company, and it was all about personal responsibility, “constructive confrontation” and getting results no matter what the obstacles.
And the first element in this culture that I met from day one (well, day two, after taking new hire orientation) was the expectation that I jump in the water and start swimming. I was skilled enough in technology, but had never worked in a wafer factory (“fab”, as they called it); yet the day I showed up for work at Livermore my boss introduced me to a real problem in the manufacturing line and charged me with characterizing it. I suppose someone did show me how to don a bunny suit and go in the clean room, but from there I was entirely on my own. I could ask for help and advice if I felt I needed it, but that was my call (and the helper’s call whether to bother – I had to convince them to give me their time). Of course many of these coworkers were very new themselves – the boss who had assigned me my problem had joined the company only two months earlier… and was likely thrown right into the water himself.
This idea of throwing new employees in the water and letting them swim is in stark contrast to the idea that green recruits needs to be coddled, trained, coached, mentored, and so on, until they gradually grow into their new job and new environment. It is an extreme variant of “on the job training”. And it carries the obvious risk of failure: the training might fail; the recruit might fail – either in the task at hand, with whatever costs, or in the long term, by failing to integrate and ending up resigning or being fired. That would not be good.
But oh, the advantages!
First, being thrown in the water can be scary (for both the thrower and the throwee); but it shows a level of trust in the employee that has profound implications. It gives the new hires a feeling of empowerment, which helps them to spread their wings and to develop a “Rosh Gadol” (Big head) attitude. Trusted employees are happier, more effective, and they develop a deep loyalty to the company.
Then there’s the fact that the experience of facing large, real life problems early on and on one’s own develops in the employee skills that no amount of supervised training can give. They learn to problem-solve; they learn to seek help and collaborate with other employees, and while they’re at it to form bonds of friendship with them; they learn to fail and try again.
And they bring into the game their own unique approaches and ways of thinking, grounded in their past work in other companies and disciplines. Their solutions to the real problems will be very different from those they’d otherwise be taught by people around them that are used to “the way we do things around here”. I remember my work on that first problem I was assigned at Intel: it introduced, successfully, concepts from biological lab techniques that I’d absorbed at my previous forensic science job…
Lastly, this method can – somewhat ruthlessly – separate the recruits worthy of the job from those who aren’t. Ideally the latter should have been weeded out in the recruiting process, but there’s nothing like a swim in cold water to validate who can survive under harsh conditions. And at Intel in those days, which was struggling for its very survival in the face of fierce competition from Japan, we couldn’t afford to let any but the best remain on our team.
It felt great to know I’ve been one of the survivors… and how I got there.
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