A Practical Education Read online

Looking back, Crandell remembers enjoying the introduction to programming class. The students were taught SAIL programming—the SAI in SAIL came from the Stanford Artificial Intelligence lab where the language had recently been developed. The introductory class was large; the lectures were held in an auditorium. Outside of class, students typed their coding assignments on terminals connected to large machines in centralized computer labs. This was before the advent of personal computers, and though the machines were called minicomputers, they were “mini” only in that they were smaller than the mainframes that had preceded them. Near the end of the quarter, when class members rushed to complete assignments, the mere act of saving their work could stress the overloaded system, causing it to crash and lose the work. Still, it was technology that gave students the ability to run their code and see the results immediately, a capability that would draw many talented minds to the field of computer science.12

  Two of Crandell’s freshmen suite-mates were engineering students, and both had planned a linear future for themselves: study engineering, get a job, have a career, secure a stable life. No grand plan guided Crandell, however. A course on comparative religion that he took as a sophomore enthralled him. He was introduced to Taoism, Buddhism, Shintoism, and alternative views of Christianity. The course asked the big existential questions: Why are we here? What are we supposed to do with our time here? “It hit me like a train,” he said.

  After graduation, he began graduate studies at Harvard Divinity School, but he discovered that the program was not what he had thought it would be. He was following his intellectual curiosity; his classmates were preparing to head congregations, a prospect that did not interest him. He left and returned to his hometown, Santa Barbara, California.

  When he looked for a job, Crandell’s religious studies major did not match up neatly with available entry-level positions. But as a humanities major who had had abundant opportunities to hone his writing skills, he was hired to be the editor of Center Magazine, published monthly by a nonprofit organization, the Center for Democratic Institutions, for its forty-five thousand supporting members.

  The center’s staff used an outside firm to manage the subscriber lists and handle the printing of the address labels each month. The firm charged the center about $1 annually for each of the member-subscribers. As Crandell settled in to his new job, he saw that the outside firm did very little for the $50,000 it received each year. Were the center to purchase its own minicomputer, for a fraction of what it paid for a single year’s service fees, and manage the labels itself, it would capture significant savings. The programming class that Crandell had taken as a student had not prepared him to write the program and handle the computer’s administration by himself. But it had succeeded in stripping away the aura of mystery that enshrouded computers, and he could accurately gauge the size of the task were it brought in-house. As reluctant as the senior staff members were to embrace what seemed like a risky project, they were persuaded by Crandell’s mantra: we can do this ourselves for much less. The center purchased the machine and realized the savings as promised.

  During the day, Crandell worked as an editor; at night, he was the bass player in a rock band. But he fell in love with a woman who was a full-time graduate student and who had a young daughter, and he felt the need to increase his modest income. He decided to learn how to program at a professional level. His father introduced him to an acquaintance, Roger Marcus, an experienced programmer who offered to mentor him. Marcus was employed by CompuCorp, a manufacturer of pricey dedicated word processors, computers that only ran word processing software. They were expensive—CompuCorp’s basic machine cost $10,000 and required the separate purchase of a $3,000 printer—but the ability to correct words at any time and save and retrieve documents led offices to replace electric typewriters with such machines. CompuCorp was located in Los Angeles, but Marcus was not offering a formal company-sponsored internship. The arrangement was wholly informal: Crandell would use a spare machine that Marcus had in the basement of his Santa Barbara home.

  “We work in assembly language,” Marcus told Crandell, who said, “Fine!” not having any idea what that meant. Assembly language is a “low-level language,” meant to move bits in and out of particular storage places in a particular chip. Programming in assembly is demanding and exceedingly tedious. Today, most programming is done with a “high-level language,” which insulates the programmer from having to know hardware details. But Crandell had no fear of assembly because “I didn’t know what I didn’t know.”

  Crandell spent about six months studying and coding in the evenings and on the weekends, mastering the Z-80 assembly language. The effort got him the entry-level job he had sought: he was hired by CompuCorp. It was at the company’s lowest salary rung, but it was a significant raise for him. He remembers that when he interviewed for the job, he had heard someone in the room say, “Well, he’s got one thing going for him. He doesn’t have a degree in computer science.” Crandell was not sure what that referred to—perhaps arrogance that the recruiters had observed among computer science majors—but he drily observed about his own religious studies major, “At least it’s a plus!”

  He landed at CompuCorp just as the IBM PC was arriving and rendering dedicated word-processors like CompuCorp’s obsolete. CompuCorp, however, could not bring itself to make a less expensive version of its word processing software for the PC market and threaten its single-purpose machines. Crandell saw that those machines would soon disappear, whether CompuCorp acted or not. Crandell decided to leave the company and create word processing software for the IBM PC that would reproduce features in Compu-Corp’s software. He was a one-person startup. He got a copy of Peter Norton’s manual All About the IBM PC, taught himself the C language, and created his own software. He took the bold step of moving out of his office at home—a closet—into an actual office, a converted motel room that cost $250 a month.

  The Crandell Development Corporation, as he called his tiny startup, eked out an existence, principally by selling the software to a distributor who paid Crandell $150 a copy and rebranded it for retail sale in Europe for $495 a copy. Crandell hired a programmer to help, then other employees. His little company eventually grew to ten employees before Microsoft introduced its Office suite, bundling the most popular software applications, including Word, into one low-priced package. When Office appeared, demand for high-priced word processing software such as Crandell’s diminished.

  Crandell next found an opportunity in developing LaserFAX, software that he licensed to forty other companies to give a PC the functionality of a fax machine. He sold his company to JetFax and became a vice president. Eventually the company would be renamed eFax and would merge with its major competitor, but Crandell left the merged company before it went on to multi-billion-dollar success as J2 Global (“I wrongly thought fax would die much sooner than it did,” he says, looking back.) A short spell as a consultant was followed by stints as chief executive at two more startups.

  After Amazon in 2006 launched AWS, Amazon Web Services, which offered computing cycles to anyone for minimal cost, paid for with the same credit card used to buy books at Amazon, Crandell joined with Thorsten von Eicken and Rafael Saavedra, both engineers, to found RightScale in 2007, which initially offered software tools to AWS customers to manage the computing resources that they rented from Amazon. As competing cloud services were introduced by Amazon’s competitors, RightScale expanded its own offerings, giving its customers “cloud portfolio management” that handled many cloud providers simultaneously. These were highly technical services sold primarily to chief information officers of large companies.

  Listening to the narrative of Crandell’s professional career, one can hear a receptiveness to wondrous things that has ranged across topics, such as when he explored Saint Anselme’s ontological proof of God’s existence, the subject of his senior thesis at Stanford. Or when he discovered how he could use SAIL programming in the introduction to computer science
class to create a rudimentary stick figure on the screen who, with the help of a randomizing function, would stagger along an unpredictable path like a drunken sailor. Later in life, he had not lost that ability to marvel: when Amazon offered to the public the ability to rent Amazon’s own computer infrastructure, at low prices that were unheard of in the industry, he called the moment “mind-blowing.”

  Crandell’s career in the software industry shows the creative efflorescence that is seen when an industry is young, still in the earliest stage of the life cycle, still welcoming to individuals who may lack particular credentials. Today, many parts of the software industry are now closed to the enterprising amateur. Would Crandell hire for a software engineering position someone like himself, essentially a self-taught programmer? He says the software world today is different from when he entered. Now a standard query is, where did you get your degree in computer science? But he says he still looks for the engineer who is a self-learner who will put in the hard work to continue learning.

  And there are positions in his company for those without a technical background. The day before we spoke, he had interviewed a candidate for a position as “customer success manager,” who would work with customers on the one side and RightScale engineers on the other to resolve problems. This particular candidate’s major was environmental studies, but he had the curiosity that Crandell prizes more than knowledge in a particular intellectual domain. “If he’s willing to log the time and do the equivalent of reading Peter Norton at night, I’m all over that,” Crandell said. “I think the people skills are actually harder to learn than the domain stuff on the technical side.”

  When Crandell is asked what advice he would offer to college students looking for a first job, he suggests that they concentrate their searches on smaller companies and startups. These work environments are more open to contributions from the youngest members of the team.

  The Major Decision included the testimonial of another religious studies major, Gary Fazzino, who had graduated in 1974 and was working at Hewlett-Packard as a government-relations manager. “My professors at Stanford forced me to learn how to think—the most basic skill of all—through dialogue, reading, and long writing sessions,” he said. This sounds generic, but Fazzino had a good story to tell of his experiences, taking on new subjects about which he knew nothing. He recalled writing a paper on Confucian thought and receiving a distressingly poor grade. “After I picked myself off the floor,” he said, he listened to his professor’s criticism that the paper failed to acknowledge the different elements of Asian thought that formed the context of Confucianism. Fazzino devoted the following months to intense study of Chinese history. “As crazy as it may seem, such an exercise has helped me both in political life and in my work,” he wrote his alma mater. “My effectiveness is measured by my ability to communicate the world of government to citizens and engineers. I must try to understand the people I’m dealing with and the background they bring to an issue before I can hope to succeed.”13

  The phrase “as crazy as it may seem” anticipated a skeptical reception to his contention that his religious studies major had any bearing on his current work as a manager at Hewlett-Packard. “As crazy as it may seem” could have been affixed to every testimonial that Stanford collected for The Major Decision. All were attempts to convey that the students’ experiences in the world of work demonstrated that their liberal arts studies had proven to be utterly practical.

  In the years that have passed since The Major Decision was published, the labor market’s preference for vocational majors has only become more pronounced. The students’ shift toward the vocational reflects their reading of the labor market and the preferences of future prospective employers. Attempting to sell the liberal arts to undergraduates is premature without employers themselves moving away from the vocational majors. Today, if asked, employers will squirm away from admitting that their preferences have changed, and they will affirm their fervent wish to hire college graduates who have the “soft skills” that liberal education ideally bestows. Ninety-two percent of executives surveyed by the Wall Street Journal in 2015 said that soft skills were equally or more important than technical skills, and 89 percent of these respondents said they had a difficult time finding candidates with those skills.14 Corporate America’s recruiting activities, hiring decisions, and compensation and promotion practices tell a different story, however.

  This book seeks to persuade employers to take another look at their hiring practices by reminding them that there is no less need today than before for graduates who have demonstrated an omnivorous hunger for knowledge, who have honed communications skills, who can justifiably claim that their coursework helped them learn how to think. Rather than extolling the virtues of liberal education, as many other authors have already done and done well,15 I have elected a different approach: spending time with Stanford graduates who received a liberal education recently, who did not go on to graduate studies, and who with only a bachelor’s degree in hand found their first professional positions. The oral histories of their individual experiences are sufficiently detailed to show, rather than tell, the usefulness of their education.

  The graduates’ stories, which compose about half of the book, may provide some encouragement to current students who are contemplating majoring in the liberal arts but have not yet made “the major decision,” and to their concerned parents as well. I make no claim that the stories constitute a statistically sound sample. Students who have not landed happily could not be expected to be willing to share their experiences. The group portrait is also unrepresentative on the employer side. By definition, the only employers who appear here are the enlightened ones—or the managers dwelling in nooks within less-enlightened organizations who welcomed the liberal arts majors whom I was following. But the stories serve an important purpose in showing to the skeptical what is possible.

  I was purposely selective in assembling this gallery in one respect. I decided to focus on the students whose majors were as far from vocational as it is possible to get: those in the humanities. I also restricted my attention to students who had found work in positions that had no apparent connection to the major; no English majors who took positions in corporate communications or music majors who became music teachers. I wanted to show real-life examples of what advocates for the liberal arts claim, that the liberal arts, in the phrasing of Michael Crandell when he was a newly minted graduate himself, are “general preparation for work in some field that you may not even know of now.”

  Using the frame of a single campus, we can also follow the history of job searches by soon-to-graduate students and the advice dispensed to them, the changing attitudes of prospective employers, and the methods they used to winnow job applicants. By including the past as well as the present, we can see that at an earlier time, the appreciation of a liberal education was shared by employers as well as students.

  I do not hide my sympathies here: I am an advocate for liberal education and I am happy whenever I hear of a liberal arts major who finds a congenial employer. I graduated from Macalester College, a small liberal arts college in St. Paul, Minnesota, but did not go through the harrowing job search that the graduates I follow here undertook. I double majored in history and East Asian languages and cultures, planning on going directly to a PhD program in modern Chinese history. I arrived at Stanford in 1976, having been accepted before graduation, so I never had to peer at the terrifying blankness of the day after graduation without a job. This book project gave me the chance to speak with students with much stronger constitutions than I had as an undergraduate, and to experience secondhand what I had not encountered myself. These students show that obtaining work immediately after graduating from college provides an informal form of graduate education.

  My six years at Stanford overlapped a bit with Michael Crandell’s years there, and we must have spent time during the wee hours in the same computer lab, though we did not know it then. In 1982, I completed my PhD
in modern Chinese history and discovered there was no job waiting for me in the field. I took a position teaching U.S. history at the Colorado School of Mines, and a few years later I obtained a teaching position at San Jose State University in an unlikely place for a modern China historian: the college of business, where I have remained ever since, teaching courses on strategic management and business-and-society. I taught myself programming, and I’ve written books on technology companies (Microsoft; Google), on venture capital (Benchmark Capital; Y Combinator), and on inventors and entrepreneurs (Thomas Edison; Steve Jobs). For nine years, I wrote the “Digital Domain” column on technology businesses for the New York Times. How I learned on the job is a long separate story, which need not detain us, but I suppose it shows how my liberal education had bestowed “general preparation for work in some field that you may not even know of now.”

  CHAPTER 2

  THE NEW EDUCATION

  HARVARD WAS FOUNDED as “New College” in 1636, the first college in the North American colonies. Its longevity has seemed to be a defining strength: Harvard has been the preeminent institution of higher learning forever, the supplier of presidents and titans nonpareil, the possessor of an endowment of such unfathomable magnitude that it seems capable of making any administrator’s wish come true. Harvard has always presented itself as an institution without peer.

  Until now, that is.

  Stanford has caused imperturbable Harvard to wonder aloud whether it has not only been matched, but perhaps even passed, by an arriviste. Stanford, the new New College, adopted a model different than Harvard’s, providing the full menu of disciplines but treating engineering as primus inter pares. In 2014, Harvard all but officially disclosed that it was concerned that it had fallen behind Stanford when the Harvard Crimson published a long, at times anguished, feature story: “Seeing Red: Stanford v. Harvard.”1