Yesterday a friend had invited me to his friend group.
There was one discussion there about how they were working 12+ hours a day and because of that they don't have time to upskill, to learn new skills, to work on side projects.
Because even if they want to, they are not able to. They literally don't have the time.
Working hours don't leave them time to learn new things and make side projects and because of that they are locked into the companies that they are working in.
They are in a prison of sorts in those companies. Their job creates a loop like this
- You enter a company because you have a certain skill.
- The job demands long hours to perform that skill.
- Those hours prevent learning new skills.
- Your skill profile slowly becomes specific to that company’s stack, culture, and workflows.
- Moving elsewhere becomes harder.
For all this while we have been thinking about education outside of universities, online learning, figuring out workshop formats or any sort of vocational training format for people.
But if a lot of people are working such long hours, how can they even consume that sort of content online?
I thought of edtech, online learning and education outside universities as this sort of mission-oriented thing, like a social justice thing, a liberatory thing.
And the stark reality that I realized after chatting with these people is that outside of universities there is really no mental, no actual time bandwidth for learning things.
It's like that's the only space in which people can pause and learn stuff and that's so sad. It's like people are just trapped.
If they can't afford to take a loan or they can't afford the money to go into these universities, they can't even learn new things and they are stuck in that job.
So it's as if people are locked in forever in just one singular track or one singular kind of job and whatever learning can happen can just happen within that job.
And in that job, if the workflow is very mundane, if the product or service is very mundane, and if there's not much focus on craft or domain knowledge, if it's not really a company that values high quality, people will be stuck being mediocre for a long time.
Raghav Agrawal