My pal AK writes about higher ed topics. I am behind with my RSS, and just now spotted his piece Cut the Bull: the Demise of the Baccalaureate has been Greatly Exaggerated, critiquing a story from Inside Higher Ed by Ray Schroeder about how colleges could change to better support workforce readiness—I was pulled in. This is a topic that never fails to hold my interest. I thought I’d respond to a few of the original author’s points, as well as some of AK’s critiques.

In Schroeder’s piece he frames the problem with,

Enrollments at American colleges and universities have been on a decade-long skid. This past year, enrollments dropped by 600,000 or 3.5 percent. While some of those drops may have been prompted by the pandemic, the trend is clear—fewer and fewer students are entering college.

I’m not sure if 3.5% is a lot, let alone a lot during a pandemic, given all the restrictions that are being placed on education at this time in the interests of public health. But I read this and ask myself, how is the issue of college affordability and student debt not even acknowledged in this statement?

AK starts his critique with the following passage,

Ray asks (and answers): “Are we teaching the competencies and emphases that will be required to thrive in 2025? I fear not”

My answer is “colleges probably believe they do” and that they compete for students on the applicability of their curriculum in preparing their students for the future. Whether or not they are achieving said goal, in a healthy institution, should constantly be debated.

AK continues on to address Schroeder’s theme of moving academic records onto the blockchain,

There is nothing out there that prevents people from creating their own learner record (“transcript”). In fact, things like LinkedIn, CVs, and other means already exist to document your learning. We don’t need blockchain for it.

The thing blockchain could bring here is verifiability. No employer wants to call universities to verify if someone actually holds a degree from them. So they mostly trust the résumé, and applicants have known to falsify them.

That said, I mostly see blockchain as a solution looking for a problem… yet it is a solution with tremendous promise, once it matures from this Wild West stage, especially with its horrific environmental footprint.

AK shifts to job requirements,

The idea that a college degree isn’t required at high-tech companies (and by extension companies in general) is a myth.

It’s more and more common in design and development roles at tech companies that you’ll see “BA or equivalent experience” in job listings. I know successful developers who did not complete a college program, and have advanced their careers based solely on their body of professional work. The trick is how do you get industry experience without getting it in school? Some applicants complete online coursework and create personal, pro-bono, and solo consulting work to demonstrate their abilities to perform the role.

Finally, Ray says: “It seems that the “clients” of higher education—both the students and the employers—recognize that the baccalaureate is too long and all too often teaches dated material rather than preparing students for the future […]”

I think this is a poor combination of multiple things each with grains of truth. Based on what I’ve observed in the tech industry, in tech and design, colleges cannot typically keep up with the latest tech skills in their courses. Last I heard, the fastest a college course can have its curriculum adjusted and approved is 2 years. For a developer, that’s going to be stale knowledge.

But, there is an enormous body of work that is evergreen, and I think colleges should focus on that—more on this in a moment.

[Schroeder] Shorter, just-in-time sequences of courses could better address the emerging needs

One thing colleges could consider for degrees that service faster moving industries is to put your evergreen core education courses into 3 years for your BA, and then provide a fourth year that follows something akin to the “tech bootcamp” model, which goes all-in on industry-specific skill building. Perhaps the bootcamp is on-campus, perhaps its in another location. Perhaps it is co-run with industry partners.

I cannot handle people equating a college degree with job training. Whenever you join a company they are going to have particular methods that new employees need to learn. No school will produce a new hire that will be ready to contribute at 100% within their first month of employment. This is not the intent of college.

My team recently hired a new, but well-experienced designer who will start with us soon. We have been planning future projects with his contributions in mind, and we cannot expect him to perform to his full potential for… a while! We are fooling ourselves if we think recent graduates should be able to be immediately impactful. My company has what appears to be a fantastic internal “boot camp” specific to the industries we serve and the toolset we work with. On our team, we have an “early career professional”—the IBM jargon for someone who is in their first professional role after college—who participated in this 6-week intensive, and he had high praise for the program.

Many, perhaps most, companies are not setup to be able to train new hires at this level. As such you may see unreasonable requests from hiring managers. It’s a core requirement of companies to avoid spending their money, so they’re going to try to externalization all costs. That said, I think students would benefit from getting all the life-improving benefits of a traditional college experience and to be ensured that when they start in that first gig, that they have some experience with the latest trends in their field.

Perhaps we could split the difference and businesses could hire students who show promise after 3 years, and pay for their 4th year if a student focuses on a role the employer needs.

To tie it together, I think college is still a relevant and special experience. There’s a reason it continues to exist after hundreds of years. We should do whatever we can to make sure every student—for whom college is the right choice—has the opportunity to attend without financial penalty.

I think some people who are too heads down in the high-tech industry (and perhaps other industries? I can only speak to my observations) undervalue the non-industry-specific skills a student learns in college… composition, scientific thinking, presentation skills, working on deadlines independently, and a general understanding of society. Students aren’t getting a lot of ethics courses in high school, for example. Goodness knows with AI, data mining, “free services”, and a myriad of privacy concerns, we could use more people who understand ethics, in tech. This is not to say college is the only way for every person to find their way to the type of career I have. Fortunately, Ray concedes this point in his piece,

There is still room for the liberal arts in developing critical perspectives, thought processes and essential skills and abilities.

Thanks, Ray. In closing, I agree that we should always be examining the relevance of coursework in higher ed, and we should change with the times. But retrospectives also seek to identify what things we should continue doing, and I think there’s still a lot of good happening in higher ed.

This week, my parents sold their mom-and-pop hardware store, Christiansen Hardware, after ~27 years. In 1994 they bought Brown’s Hardware from my mother’s Uncle Louis and Aunt Betty.

My father worked as a salesman for my great uncle’s wholesale distributor, Masback Hardware Company, which operated out of Manhattan, and later New Jersey. When Uncle Louis started the store in 1972 it resided in the building next to Christiansen Hardware’s current location, which is today is The Bowerbird. A previous hardware store was there before, W.L. Thrall and Son, who was a customer of my father’s wholesaler. My father helped my uncle reboot the business.

This business is actually how my parents met. My mother tagged along with her aunt and uncle when they were visiting New York City for an industry show that my father was also attending. At the time she was a buyer for Bonwit Teller in Manhattan. Little did she know she’d be meeting her future husband. Little did she suspect that many years later she would be running this business. Upon moving to Connecticut, she would help Mystic Aquarium set up one of the first gift shops in any aquarium, and then worked for The Limited Corp… until they purchased the store in ‘94–so she always had retail operations in her toolset.

I was almost 15 when my parents bought the store in October 1994. By this time, Brown’s Hardware had moved across Halls Road to the building next to the plaza where The Hideaway Restaurant resides. I worked there most days after school and most days in the summer. I saved money –yes, they paid me something, perhaps a little above minimum wage–and with that I remember buying a used Saab 900 Turbo (still my favorite car I’ve owned), bought my first pro-level drum set (which I still use 25 years later), and saved some cash for college, with which I would buy my first Apple Computer (a “Blue & White G3” if that means something to you). My friends had jobs at the hardware store, too, on and off.

After a year or two, my parents moved back to the other side of Halls Road, into the Old Lyme Marketplace, and next to what had become The Bowerbird. At one point, I think we all thought I would join my parents in the business, but after a few years of working there, it was clear that hardware wasn’t the right path for me. You see, I’d found this thing called the Internet, and once I’d decided not to pursue drumming for a living, I decided designing digital things was what I was best for. To this day, I’m barely handy around the house, so helping other people fix up their homes was probably never in the cards.

My parents are one of the few that kept an independent, literally-mom-and-pop hardware store running as the era of Big Box retail emerged in the late 90s, with the onslaught of Home Depot and Lowes who would move into communities and have price wars selling products at a loss, and below what my parents could even buy at wholesale, running smaller companies not backed by Wall Street investors out of business across the nation. My parents pared back the staff, and eventually ran the store by themselves, with the part-time help of their friend Laurie McGrath. Even through the pandemic, my parents never closed the store. They masked up and sanitized the store frequently. When vaccines were available, they were first in line. The store remained open 6 days a week.

Now a new family, the Talericos will be taking the reins after today. I hope they become part of the community the way I know my parents have enjoyed being in Old Lyme. It was a nice place to grow up. And you could always find out what was happening in town, Saturday mornings at the hardware store.

My kids enjoyed visiting the store. I think it’s a little weird for my kids, too, for their grandparents to finally be retiring. My dad will turn 80 in 2022. I think it’s well overdue that he’s not working 6 days a week! And my mother, who’s a few years younger, she deserves it perhaps even more, given how much time she’s spent with my dad 6 days a week!

Now my parents will turn their attention to the next act in their lives. While they planned their retirement savings, they haven’t actually planned what to do with it! We have joked that Amanda and I have planned more of our retirement (aka “the Maine project”) than my parents have for theirs. As someone who’s encouraged them to explore their options for at least 10 years, I feel like the dog who has caught the car he’s been chasing… I’m in a little bit of shock that the day has come. Now what?

If you’re in the area, my parents are continuing to run the store through the end of December. In the final week or two, the plan is for my parents to work along side the new owners to teach them how everything works today, before they take it in whatever direction they have in mind for the next generation of small town hardware store on Halls Road, in Old Lyme. If you’d like to, stop by and wish them well!

Frosty autumn morning

The last month has been full of music. Before I get into all the new-to-me stuff I came across, I want to make sure you’re aware of one my favorites from the last few years. 🎵

Have I told you about Lydian Collective? I discovered their funky jazz-fusion trying to find more music like the Monument Valley and Alto’s Odyssey soundtracks. Todd Baker worked on both sound tracks which led me to the band he plays in, Lydian Collective!

While you can stream them on your streaming service of choice, or watch them on YouTube (definitely check out their performance with an orchestra), as an up and coming group, they still use Bandcamp. They made a version of their album Adventure available which each instrument removed. If you’re a fan and play one of their instruments, you can buy a copy with sheet music and play along.

Fantastic music I’ve come across the past month:

• Scary Pockets—I never considered their whole catalog would be on Apple Music.
• Scary Pockets + Larry Goldings = 3 Scary Goldings albums
• A new Scary Goldings album is coming soon with Mono Neon on bass and the legendary John Scofield on guitar!

Scary Pockets started as a YouTube project of funk covers of pop songs. It is the brainchild of Ryan Lerman and Jack Conte. You may be familiar with Conte—he is the founder and CEO of Patreon.

• The Fearless Flyers (spin off of Vulfpeck and Snarky Puppy)
• Nate Smith amazing drummer, plays with The Fearless Flyers, also is a bandleader in his own right with some incredible contemporary jazz. Discovered it was his face staring at me from the Jazz tile in Apple Music’s search section. Now I know why. Drummers will want to checkout three Zildjian videos on YouTube of Nate playing at Berklee School of Music.
• Cory Wong & Dirty Loops - both together and separate. Here’s a video of them playing a complex cover of Thriller from the afore linked album. (Cory Wong also plays in The Fearless Flyers with Nate Smith.)

It’s that time of year where parents look up how to do double digit multiplication and long division, to make sure they remember how to do it before they help their children remember how to do it. Homework should be a relic of the past.

I somehow found my self discussing “Drums + Space” with my manager’s boss today in a 1 on 1, and I did not initiate the topic. A small subset of you will know what this means. It was a delightful diversion. 🌹💀🐻🐢

Summer flowering.

If you’re having a tough day, and perhaps your tools are letting you down, take solace in the story of Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, the recording of which is the best selling album of piano music, all time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_K%C3%B6ln_Concert —quite remarkable all around.

Closing in on 9 inches of rain for July, according to my rain gauge. #mawx

…every piece of advice is a starting point, a proposition for you to say “Yes” or “No” to. And each piece is only useful in that it gets you to take action, while soothing negative emotion and minimizing risk.

You figure out your own way by constantly starting and adapting. Everything is a new starting point for you to try and keep, or to try and discard.

Other people’s rules or principles are good, but creating your own for yourself is better.

—The Right Way Fallacy, Herbert Liu

It’s terribly easy to sit back and look up things on the internet for inspiration, instead of just doing something, anything.

I’ve been trying to get one blog post per weekend done, in order to jump start my habit. Instead, Herbert suggests I should try 15 minutes a day.

Over-optimization is a problem.

foundational UX work doesn’t […] lend itself to predictable, repeatable processes […] by definition it deals with unknown, slippery, hard-to-define problems […]

The holism necessary to do foundational UX is antithetical to the assembly-line chunks of user behavior agile requires.

Design coverage in Fast Company is hit or miss, but early advocate for UX Jesse James Garrett shared a clear-eyed take on the state of the UX profession.

Businesses are trying to hyper-optimize their development processes because engineers are expensive, and good ones hard to get at any price.

Agile development sells businesses hope that they can make every minute of every two week sprint productive. What businesses are missing is Agile only works if there’s no uncertainty. It only works if you do the pre-work to break the well-understood tasks down into intelligent pieces.

Agile doesn’t accommodate the people and processes that deal with uncertainty. Internal measures of employee productivity (“velocity”) assume all problems are the same. But the world your products exist in is messy.

UX processes allow a business to investigate uncertainty. They allow you to understand what problems to solve, and discover the most likely ways to solve them successfully. Ideally, these processes are not the sole domain of “designers” but involve many roles, as everyone impacts the user’s experience with your product. The more broadly the holistic knowledge of the problem is held, the better each role can benefit to the outcome.

Without it, those expensive engineers are building expensive guesses. Efficiently.

Pickering Wharf, Salem, Mass.

I was listening to Ezra Klein interview Jeff Tweedy, about creativity and creation, and Jeff’s latest book, “How to Write One Song”. Ezra mentioned a concept he attributed to Natasha Lyonne, the “talent to use your talent”.

…she talked about this idea of having the talent to use your talent. That there is the talent to do the direct thing — screenwriting, or songwriting, or comedy, or whatever it might be — and all these things around it that allow you to use that, and that often what is not there for people is the talent use the talent.

Someone may be talented in their art, but there’s an additional layer that is critical to success. Being able to use that original talent productively. You may be a fantastic song writer, but if you have a desire to share your art with the world, and have no skill in doing so, your songs will remain your personal hobby. I don’t see this exclusively as marketing, but also professional skills that might include networking, effective communications, keeping meetings, being punctual, being trustworthy.

The thing that struck me about the quote is that I think we have all met someone who is phenomenal at something, but we wouldn’t actually want to work with them, despite their talent.

I asked myself, “am I more talented at my work skills than I am at design?” Those tangential skills come more easily to me, but there are days where I stare at the screen, and the solutions just don’t flow out of me. Perhaps that’s just being self-critical and of course design is the hard part?

My kids are home all summer because my wife works in K-12 public education. They just returned from strawberry picking. My daughter just delivered some of the harvest to my desk. This doesn’t happen in a corporate office. #wfh

Massachusetts finally has the iOS/Android Exposure Notifications enabled. The emergency orders were lifted before this was enabled. I’d love to know how that came to be. In the meantime, neighbors: a few taps, please:

Enable MassNotify on your smartphone - Mass.gov

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to do whatever I wanted to do for the morning. I had been telling myself I hadn’t been creating in the last few years because I have young kids. I should finally rebuild my portfolio site! I can write something of value on my blog that I started up again several months ago, but has gone silent in the last few months?

My wife had headed out of state for a weekend visit. My kids activities had slid out of my way, and they were all entertaining themselves. I knew I had several hours where I could do whatever.

I pulled out my MacBook Pro. I logged in. I stared at the screen, with no apps open. And nothing poured out of me.

I just stared at it. I felt helpless. I am a designer. I make stuff for other people during the week. I have a list (an actual collection of ideas in an app) of a dozen little projects I could work on. Nothing.

Lately, I’ve been finding my eyes don’t focus as well as they used to, are a bit dry, and get a bit sore after staring at screens projecting light into them all day. This disincentivizes me even further… as most of my creative ideas are computer-based, as that was always the medium I worked best in.

Today I had a similar opportunity. All I could massage out of it was this blog post questioning my creative situation. Have I completely run dry of motivation for side projects? For digital hobbies? Is it simply a dry spell thanks to our collective exhaustion from the pandemic, and my personal exhaustion as a parent of elementary and middle school-aged kids? Will it return, or should I seek other pursuits? A parallel idea that I should get back into playing music with other people—instead of merely drumming along with recordings—has been bubbling up strongly for the past 6 months. Maybe that would relieve the guilt I feel over my internal identity as a creative person going mostly unfulfilled? Should I simply resign to the fact that all my creativity in a given week is consumed by my day job?

I don’t have the answers to any of these right now. I’m trying to practice grace with myself.

(Forgive the fact that I published this without an editing pass. I’m sure it’s atrocious.)

I’m no Chelsea fan, but I can really get behind Christian Pulisic on the pitch for the Champions League 🇺🇸⚽️🇪🇺

“Life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research.” —Carl Jung

New AppleTV 4K arrived this afternoon. I looked at the instructions in the box, which read, essentially, “You plug it into your TV, dummy.”

Conspiracy theory: my dog is constantly under foot in the kitchen because she hopes I trip on her and drop my food on the floor.

Change my mind.

Spring is in the air! No—quite literally I see so much pollen, floating debris, etc. flying outside my window right now that my throat is getting scratchy just thinking of going outside.

First day back on the trails for 2021, and I sure did miss it.

Had a 2hr presentation to my manager’s new boss today about our product. The entire time this one robin was defending his territory by head-butting his own reflection in my glass sliding door 1ft from my desk. Started at 8:30am, still going at 2:30pm🤦🏻‍♂️

Finished season 2 of For All Mankind last night. Still thinking about Tracy and Gordo 😬.

Plum Island, Mass., this past Saturday.