Book Review
Title: Thank You for Being Late
Author: Thomas Friedman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Picador)
Date: October 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1250141224
The title of the book comes from a lunch meeting when the other person arrived about twenty-five minutes late. During this time waiting, Friedman says he actually thought about things—it gave him time to reflect. It was a little moment that had a big impact. He started pursuing this line of concentrating and thinking about things, instead of spending all day reacting to digital distractions of all kinds. One thing he thought about was technological advancement and its impact on us.
One theme that pops up often throughout the book is Moore’s Law, “what happens when you keep doubling the power of microchips every two years for fifty years” (38). Friedman provides analysis of many varied examples of these technology accelerations.
The book is also a history lesson and a journey through time, for example, dividing computing into three eras: 1. Tabulating Era (1900 to 1940s); 2. Programming Era (1950s to 2007); 3. Cognitive Era (2007 to 2017 when this book was published).
There was Oracle SQL from IBM in the 1970s, followed by structured-pattern improvements of Hadoop. He revisits milestones such as the advent of Xerox PARC in the early 1980s and a new field at the time called “Search” (57), e.g., Yahoo! and AltaVista.
The mid-1980s brought us memorable devices such as the TeleRam Portabubble that journalists could use to transmit stories to the home office. Soon after, the joys of Tandy laptops arrived (206). Then there was a company called Qualcomm and its late-1980s innovation called the Cell Phone—also when wireless signals via CDMA versus TDMA were sorting themselves out. By the early 1990s a few people had email, and by the mid-1990s everyone had email. In 1995 there was a startup called Netscape (206).
Still, in the early 2000s, people would pay for their eBay purchases by mailing a check (117). The revolution to online purchasing was just beginning.
Getting back to Moore’s Law and the age of technology accelerations—one of the consequences can be seen in the job market. While the book spans many areas of change such as climate and global accelerations this review focuses mainly on employment implications in the technology sectors.
Friedman points to the example of General Electric’s research center in New York. “GE’s lab is like a mini United Nations. Every engineering team looks like a multiethnic Benetton ad … this was a brutal meritocracy. When you are competing in the global technology Olympics every day, you have to recruit the best talent from anywhere you can find it” (95).
Friedman’s “brutal meritocracy” is a direct result of Moore’s Law and its technology accelerations. As a result, “you need to work harder, regularly reinvent yourself, obtain at least some form of postsecondary education, make sure that you’re engaged in lifelong learning, and play by the new rules while also reinventing some of them. Then you can be in the middle class” (219).
In this new intense world of exponential learning requirements, for example, “‘When I walk into a subway and see someone playing Candy Crush on their phone, [I think] there’s a wasted five minutes when they could be bettering themselves” (219). There is no time to waste even a minute, if you want to survive in a technology-related career.
Spending time on the internet, especially on social media, is just another example of a failure to learn. As Friedman puts it, “the Internet is an open sewer of untreated, unfiltered information.” The problem is that students and job applicants who spend thousands of hours on the Internet have not learned the skills to analyze or assess what they see.
“A November 22, 2016 study published by the Stanford Graduate School of Education found ‘a dismaying inability by students to reason about information they see on the Internet … Students for example, had a hard time distinguishing advertisements from news articles’” (378). The lead author of the report, Professor Sam Wineburg, said that “Many people assume that young people fluent in social media are equally perceptive about what they find there—but the opposite is true’” (378). Critical thinking is the missing piece in an alarming number of students and job candidates. Critical thinking requires self-governance and self-discipline. Free time must be devoted to learning and self-improvement just to get by.
At a minimum, to achieve average middle-class employment in technology, the skills needed include strong “writing, reading, coding, math, creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, grit, self-motivation, lifelong learning habits, entrepreneurship, improvisation” (226). When an opening comes along for a promotion, only those showing initiative in the form of advanced degrees, professional certifications, and relevant product certifications, are considered (232). If you haven’t met these “brutal meritocracy” minimum standards, you won’t get the job, or the promotion, and you may never know why you were passed over.
This new paradigm is still mind boggling to many—the cutting-edge ultra-adaptable super-motivated attributes—in order to achieve average employment. One positive aspect to this once-extreme-but-now-normal paradigm, which Friedman points out, is the end of privileged access. The only way to get there is practice. “Practice advances all students without respect to high school GPA, gender, race and ethnicity, or parental education” (244). How do you keep up the practice? Friedman’s answer is Concentration: “Students need to learn the discipline of sustained concentration more than ever and to immerse themselves in practice—without headphones on. No athlete, no scientist, no musician ever got better without focused practice, and there is no program you can download for that. It has to come from within” (245).
Friedman talked to hundreds of technology leaders in researching this book. It displays deep and extensive knowledge in the social, political, and personal impacts of technology accelerations. His writing is conversational and compelling, so it’s a pleasure to read as well as important learning.
Do I recommend this book? Yes, to everyone.