Dropping Out of the Tech Lab at IE University

In my first semester in IE University, I got to know that there is a Tech Lab in which you will work with an actual company to solve their problem through technology. Initially, it seemed like a fantastic opportunity to learn and practice my programming skills. More than that, it seemed ideal for getting “real-world” experience to put on my CV and building connections with people in the industry. Those connections would be only the people who I would directly work with at those companies, but then those connections would compound into a bigger and more powerful network. Powerful in the sense that it would one day help me get a job or an opportunity through a high-quality introduction or referral.

Therefore, I joined the Tech Lab as soon as I could. In fact, the demand was so high I waited in an annoying digital queue for hours to be able to sign up before it got full. Many of my firends and classmates also joined. Many of my friends wanted to join but couldn’t get in before it had gotten full. I was happy and excited that I had gotten in on time. I was excited to work with an actual company and solve a problem with my coding skills.

My experience in the first session was much worse than I had expected. The first thing that the instructor had us do was to set up our Linkedin profiles. He told us how important it was to use certain keywords in our profile and CV to pass the AI screeners companies use to make hiring decisions. That put me off. Those are the wrong things to focus on. As freshmen teenagers who want to get into tech, we should focus on acquqiring the skills to be able to build things. They can be digital like websites, apps, algorithms, and smart contracts or physical like circuits, robots, components, etc. The skills that are necessary for us to be able to solve problems through technology. Hopefully, we can get good jobs or opportunities because of our competence, skills, and ability to solve problems. That’s what we should focus on. Not what keywords to use in our CV that will supposedly increase our odds of getting a job. CV keyword optimization is useless for the employer. In the end, the employer is financially incentivized to hire the most competent candidate for each job.

The instructor himself is a sales and consulting guy, not a tech guy. He talks about tech but from the consulting viewpoint, not a tech viewpoint. Instead of a tech lab, it feels like the consulting lab. That’s not something I want.

I believe that there’s a place for consulting in the world. Companies of certain size need some outsourced guidance on making certain decisions and that’s where consultants come in. After all, it wouldn’t be a huge lucrative industry if there wasn’t a strong demand for it. But, I don’t think such a big percentage of students should strive for getting into consulting. There are many different reasons for this belief but I’ll dedicate a whole other blog to it. This blog is more concentrated on my decision to drop out.

In making the decision to drop out of the Tech Lab, I’m essentially making a bet that its perceived benefits won’t be as valuable to me as the time, energy, and focus that it will consume from me. There’s a good amount of uncertainty in this bet but I’m fairly confident about the decision. Here’s why:

When analyzing the supposed benefits, they broke down into 1. Real-world experience. 2. Networking and professional connections. 3. An interesting item on the CV.

Real-world Experience

Real-world Experience is appealing to university students because they know it’s something that will be useful when trying to find a job. But, it’s a vague term. There are many kinds of “real-world experience”. Does that mean actually building a solution for a real company? Or does that mean navigating the corporate bureaucracies and politics? Or could it mean spamming Linkedin connections to “build a network”? All of them can be labeled real-world experience. The expectation I had in signing up was the first one: actually building a solution that could/would solve a problem for a real company. I believe that’s the type of real-world experience you want. That’s what employers would be looking for. However, I found out that it would likely be the other types of “real-world experience”. I’m not saying that doesn’t exist or isn’t useful. I’m saying that it’s the wrong thing to focus on. That’s an unwanted side-effect that you would have to deal with, not the main part of your career.

Networking and professional connections

Pretty much every successful person I know, in different areas and at different scales, has the same opinion on networking. Naval Ravikant, Paul Graham, and Pieter Levels, just to name three, say that you gather a network by becoming interesting and building interesting stuff. At that point, you have built the credibility for yourself to access a high-quality network. It’s not through grinding your Linkedin profile and using certain keywords, or spamming Linkedin connections, or even going to conferences. The most effective way is to build useful and interesting things. Sadly, the instructor focuses more on “networking” than enabling us to build that interesting stuff.

An interesting item on the CV

Fortunately, I have been fairly active professionally so I don’t have to find things to fill my CV with. Quite the opposite, I have to cut some important stuff. But, I thought that working on an actual problem for a fairly big company and the results obtained from that could defenitely be something interesting since it would show other employers that I worked on something in a real big company. That’s unlike anything else on my CV. Most of them are personal projects or freelance work. However, after thinking about it a bit more, I realized that the CV is also some kind of game people play the same way they use Linkedin. I realized that if I actually don’t learn meaningful lessons and gain experience from this, then that time has gone to waste. And that time is much more valuable than an item on my CV. I believe it’s not even that good of an item. It’s very mediocre at best. I don’t want to work at big consulting companies. I want to work at innovative startups / tech companies that move fast and build products people love. This item on my cv might be interesting for the consulting gigs, but definitely not for the innovative companies. I think it would actually be a red flag.

Those were the 3 reasons I signed up for the Tech Lab at IE. Soon, I saw that my initial expectations and thoughts were misguided and realized it wasn’t going to be the great experience I had come to expect.

So, after a few sessions of slides about tech and doing nothing productive, the deadline for dropping out approached and I decided to drop out. Before that, though, I thought it through very thoroughly.

Making the Bet

I was giving up the 3 reasons I signed up for: “real-world experience”, potential contacts and network, and a potentially interesting item on the CV. All of these together, could be the key to getting a good job in Spain, or some equivalent career opportunity at this current stage (being a university student). Potentially, I could come to regret my decision of dropping out, if knowing that one person, or that item on my CV would have gotten me a job I otherwise didn’t get.

I’m betting that the chance of that happening is very small. I’m betting that with the average 3-4 hours a week I save up by dropping out, I can build my own projects or collaborate with others on good ideas. After a year, I would have worked on at least more than 5 projects (my own or collaboration) and would have a lot to show for it. If one of them took off and started getting business traction, then that would be far more valuable to the companies I want to work at, than a pseudo-tech internship, if you can even call it that, at a bank or consulting firm. Even if none of the projects took off, I still have more to show my skills and abillities, than a made-up consulting probelm.

In short, I’m betting that my time is far more valuable than whatever the Tech Lab is offering. I could be wrong, but I thought it through and made a decision. I dropped out and got to work.