Lemieux: Tech leaders must unprogram workers from school-style solo homework habits
Jean-Michel Lemieux · Jean-Michel Lemieux: Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | E1129 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Mar 20, 2024 · at 22:42
Jean-Michel Lemieux, former CTO of Shopify, explains why software teams need to unlearn school-taught habits of isolated work and instead embrace shortcuts, prototyping, and fast feedback.
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“So you've, we've got, like, 21 years indoctrinated in getting a homework assignment, going away, and coming back. And then we're like, we throw you into the workforce, and we're like, by the way, now your job is to cheat as much as you can. I'm gonna give you assignment, And you could cheat. You better cheat, right? You better be looking at shortcuts, trying to find other ways of doing it and cheating, right? And I think as we're building companies, it's getting people in the mode of like, these aren't homework assignments where you get it perfect and you go, wait, you've got to cheat, right? You've got to build prototypes. You've got to look at other people. You've got to get feedback. You've got to put it in the wild and see if it doesn't break right away. There's like so many things that we've got to do when we actually build things in the real world and real companies that We've got to unprogram from all these people who are in school doing homework assignments and trying to get an A plus and not cheating.”
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