The Strange Online Kerfuffle About Work

I’ve had it on my radar for some weeks to write a post about the subject of work, but I haven’t gotten around to it before now because I’ve been really busy…well…working.

Now Christopher Rufo has stirred the pot on X about the very subject I had intended to write about, and there has subsequently ensued a kind of online firestorm on the right-ish side of the social media divide.

Here’s an example of one of his posts:

After Rufo posted, Rob Henderson weighed in to observe that aspirational elites were acting like working at Panda Express was beneath them. Henderson and Rufo provoked push-back from multiple directions, including this piece from Johann Kurtz.

Kurtz says:

The best white collar jobs - those which pay well enough to buy a house and start a family - require your CV to tell a strong and coherent story, featuring good grades, good schools, good internships, good skills, and good personal projects.

One false step in terms of how you spend your time can have serious ramifications. Tempers are high because the young understand exactly how fragile their situation is.

For a wildly different point of view regarding whether white-collar jobs “require your CV to tell a strong and coherent story,” or whether such jobs require a degree at all, you might visit the Thiel Fellowship — entrepreneur Peter Thiel’s program to encourage young people who have good ideas to skip college entirely and start building a business.

Then, the Librarian of Celaeno got into the act, somewhat taking exception to Kurtz’s response, and made bold to declare that “Work is a curse; toil is the inheritance from our fallen forebears.”

The Librarian, whom I enjoy reading and often agree with wholeheartedly, is wrong on this point. Work is not a curse, nor is it an artifact of the fall. Work preexisted the fall and was a responsibility of humanity before everything went sideways. What the fall did was cause the Earth itself to start resisting man’s efforts to provide for himself. So work itself is by no means a curse, but the non-cooperation of the created world has made our work more difficult.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that my own actual life experience suggests Thiel has a far better grasp of the possibilities than do those who are trapped by belief in the indispensability of college degrees for white-collar jobs. Kurtz is right to this extent: a polished and shiny CV does represent one tool for opening certain kinds of doors of opportunity. But it is far from being the only way to professional success. In terms of delivering real value to an employer, one’s actual skills matter far more than one’s credentials. My own experience has been that demonstrable skills are, at the end of the day, far more valuable than any formal credential or sparkling CV.

When my middle son was debating whether to get his doctorate, which he ended up doing, my advice to him was to only do it if the learning itself was valuable to him. I told him not to do it merely for the credential. Learning and developing expertise are the things that count.

My own misgivings about this entire online debate revolve around the ignored presumption, made by the resumé proponents, that degree holders are ipso facto skilled and able to create value or, at least, more employable than those who lack formal credentials. What gives me pause is that many (Most? Not sure.) degree holders in 2025 lack hard skills. What Panda Express and Chipotle are offering, though looked on by some with disdain, is the opportunity for individuals who lack hard skills to nevertheless be employed in roles that allow them to earn a living. The argument that someone with a shiny CV will tarnish it by working at Chipotle studiously avoids the elephant in the room: If their shiny CV was truly an indicator of skill, they would not need to be considering Chipotle.

The issue facing young men and women (IMO) is not that there are no opportunities, but that they are not being prepared for the opportunities that are there. I am not the only one who has noticed this.

I want to suggest that there is something that precedes and lays the groundwork for professional success. Something that paves the way for the accumulation of knowledge and skill as a necessary precondition for professional achievement. That ‘something’ is for someone to develop a genuine interest in subjects outside of himself.

I have long been a fan of the old TV show My Three Sons. It ran in the 1960s and early 70s and starred Fred MacMurray as a widower with three sons. There is a lot about that show which fascinates me, including how the evolution of the subject matter in the episodes reflected the evolution of the culture through the 1960s. But for our purposes in this post, the thing to watch is the extent to which the boys maintained genuine interests that they pursued. Especially in the early years of the series, the boys were constantly tinkering with old engines, repairing cars, rewiring stereos, and building structures of various kinds in the backyard or the garage. One of the striking things that characterized these interests was that they were often unrelated to the boys’ entertainment or self-expression. The boys were interested in things that were inherently useful, complex enough to require concentration and patience, and which would yield some practical benefit if the boys were able to get the thing built or working.

Developing a genuine interest in things of practical value is a very different pursuit than the pursuit of a credential. Such interests may indeed lead to pursuing a credential. But there is a very big difference between having an actual interest in something and merely having an interest in credentials.

Theodore Dalrymple has written about the impoverishing effects of parochial interests. In his book, Life At the Bottom, he writes about the way “education as entertainment” has constricted the worldview of the underclass, and imprisoned them in a universe animated almost entirely by self-enjoyment.

Of the generations of children who grew up with these pedagogical methods, it is striking how many of the more intelligent among them sense by their early twenties that something is missing from their lives. They don’t know what it is, and they ask me what it could be. I quote them Francis Bacon: “It is a poor Center of a Man’s Actions, Himself.” They ask me what I mean, and I reply that they have no interests outside themselves, that their world is as small as the day they entered it, and that their horizons have not expanded in the least.

“But how do we get interested in something?” they ask.

This is where the baleful effect of education as mere entertainment makes itself felt. For to develop an interest requires powers of concentration and an ability to tolerate a degree of boredom while the elements of a skill are learned for the sake of a worthwhile end.

People who most enjoy their work, in my experience, have an interest in the work or subject matter for its own sake. And when someone really enjoys his work, he is almost always professionally more successful. There is something liberating about developing interests in things whose primary value is unrelated merely to one’s own self-expression or entertainment. Having an interest in something that draws you out of yourself and into that thing, for the value of the thing itself, is transforming.

Credentialism eclipses genuine interests whenever your concern for an impressive resumé outweighs your concern for your actual skills. Is it learning and skill, or is it status that you crave?

In his book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis describes an initially loathsome, craven young boy, named Eustace Scrubb, this way:

Although he didn't care very much about any subject for its own sake, he cared a great deal about marks.

Economist Bryan Caplan raised the question of credentialism this way:

Would you rather have a Princeton diploma without a Princeton education, or a Princeton education without a Princeton diploma?

And the people at the 1517 Fund, a venture capitalist group that backs college dropouts, propose this helpful exercise to assess whether you have genuine interests or are primarily motivated only by your resumé:

Imagine you could study physics with Einstein or playwriting with Shakespeare. But part of the deal is you could never say who you studied with or for how long. Or, you could just have a PhD from Harvard. Which would you choose?

Demonstrable skills are vastly more important to professional success than any credential. (There are, of course, some careers -- e.g., medicine -- in which rigorous enforcement of credentialing is a matter of public safety. I'm not, in this post, addressing those kinds of exceptional cases.) All of the handwringing over the resumé-effect of spending time working at Chipotle or Panda Express is, based on my own experience, missing the point.

In 1981, I was working 60 hours per week at a fast oil change business, spending my days underneath cars draining oil and transmission fluid. I used to wash my hair in grease-cutting laundry detergent before I left work every day because it would otherwise require so much shampoo that it was economically out of reach for a grease monkey like me. It was also the year that personal computers first appeared, and due entirely to a work-related injury, I happened to have access to one during my recovery. I developed a fascination with computers as a result, along with an insatiable desire to understand how they worked. My friends would tease me at that time because whenever I wasn’t underneath cars draining oil and changing filters, I was reading books about computers.

Four years later I was writing code for one of the largest IT services companies in the world. No credentials. No formal training. Just some modest accomplishments and a demonstrable skill. I had, at that time, what was perhaps the most unimpressive resumé in the galaxy.

More than forty years later I’m still fascinated by computers. I wake up every day looking forward to building things and unraveling the complexities of modern systems. I have even been privileged to make my own modest contribution to the two largest supercomputers in the world. The software I wrote just last year is used by several of the world’s largest technology companies. And I still have no formal credentials. Just an abiding interest in understanding how computers work, and in building things that are useful.

The danger of getting caught up in resumé polishing is that the form can begin to loom larger in your mind than the substance. The desire for credentials can start to crowd out the importance of actual skills. Millions of young Americans are mired in student loan debt. Many of them have resumés showing college degrees, yet still find themselves lacking actual quantifiable skills.

An obsession with credentials can even lead you to lose your own sense of agency, as if what you yourself can do is less professionally decisive than how someone perceives your CV. This is a gigantic trap. And, in some cases, can lead to professional failure.

“...long-term poverty is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values, one that is continually reinforced by an elite culture searching for victims. This culture persuades those at the bottom that they have no responsibility for their actions and are not the molders of their own lives.” - Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom

My own advice is to worry less about your CV and more about your actual skills. If Panda Express will pay you a living wage, even though you lack demonstrable skills, then jump at the opportunity. If you don’t want to work there the rest of your life, then use all of your spare time to develop demonstrable skills that will allow you to make a change. If, after working at Chipotle for a few years, you have used your time well and are now skilled at, say, building beautiful custom furniture, no one will care that you have also spent a lot of time making burritos. Your own agency and actual skill matters far more than your credentials, or lack thereof. You need not go through life hand-wringing over the credentialed loftiness of your CV.

Develop genuine interests. Build demonstrable skills. Create real things of value. Create a body of great work. In such circumstances, your resumé will generally take care of itself.