Understanding the Assignment

2026-04-20 ~1000 words

Attendance Policy

In my junior year of college, I took a microeconomics class. The class was mostly freshmen and it was really boring. Really boring. The pace was excruciatingly slow, and lecture was redundant with the assigned reading¹.

That wasn’t such a big deal though. I had developed a coping strategy for classes that weren’t useful: not going. In the engineering department, skipping class was generally accepted, except for a few well-known exceptions.

Microeconomics was a bad class with a bad prof, so after attending a few classes to verify this, I just stopped going. I did okay on the midterm and was on track for an A- or B+ in the class, if I recall correctly.

When the final rolled around, I showed up and felt like it went fine. So I was very surprised to get my end-of-semester course grade a week later: C. I would have had to seriously bomb the final to fall that far from a B+.

I emailed the prof to ask what happened (quite respectfully), and he responded:

Your final Average was 85. I contemplated a more severe penalty for excessive absences (the course outline indicates that a grade of F is possible) I settled on one letter grade.

I shot back a reply that 20-year-old me thought was the pinnacle of incisive commentary, ending with:

[students] would expect course grades to reflect their mastery of the material and not the frequency of their attendance.

Ha! Burn!

Naturally he sent back a longer message this time, letting me know that class attendance was important “for many reasons” and continuing:

…no one person in life, in the classroom or on the job is above the rules. If you plan to make your own rules in the workplace, it most likely will not bode well for you…

I believe that you can be a fine young person. Whether you like it or not, you need to mature a bit.

When I think back to this situation, I remember the professor as being a million years old, ineffective as a lecturer, and a condescending dick in this email exchange. Returning to it more than ten years later, I think he actually showed some restraint and even had a point, but was in fact a condescending dick.

The prof was saying, basically, that I didn’t understand the assignment. It wasn’t to get a good grade on the tests. It was to demonstrate the ability to follow directions while showing the requisite knowledge of microeconomics, because both are valuable and necessary in the workplace. An admirable goal, honestly.

But in the real world, a lot of rules aren’t worth following – because they’re both silly and unenforced. I had mistakenly expected his attendance rules to be unenforced and I was wrong. But in the real world, silly rules often are unenforced!

In this sense, the prof was the one who didn’t understand the assignment, because one of the most important life skills is detecting and navigating (i.e. ignoring) dumb rules that don’t matter so you can focus on what really helps you achieve your goals².

Rules Are Often Malleable

So what’s the point? Besides that I’ve remembered this story for way too long³.

Well for starters, policies in the workplace aren’t like college attendance policies. If you work at a healthy organization and build trust with your managers, you can often get bad policies changed. To take a topical example, if you work at a software engineering firm that isn’t allowing AI agents, you should make a case to leadership to change the policy. Really effective employees don’t necessarily break rules, but they don’t just accept bad ones either.

And that’s what it means to understand the assignment. The “assignment” in the workplace isn’t to blindly follow rules⁴, it’s to be effective at your job.

The Temptation of Quantifiable Goals

More broadly, it’s important to select the right assignment in life outside of work, when you are fully in charge of what it should be. If you don’t, you’ll likely end up targeting the wrong assignment, something “easier” because it’s clearly quantifiable, like maximizing salary or prestige.

Hopefully your real goal is something like maximizing your life satisfaction while having a good impact on the world. Recognize that as the assignment, and consider it when making big life choices around how to allocate your time and where to drive your career.

Insofar as salary and prestige benefit your personal satisfaction (or benefaction), they can be decent proxies. But for most people, they frequently diverge from satisfaction-optimization, like when considering soul-sucking jobs. And yet I see people taking these jobs. They’re not understanding the assignment.

Know what you really want and take the actions that lead you there. It sounds easy, but if you look at people around you, it’s clearly not.

Redundant at best, really. I remember that lectures usually covered just a tiny fraction of what we’d read in the book. ↩︎
For example, my college goal was to play the maximum amount of pickup sports and NHL 2015 while still graduating with a reasonable GPA. What can I say… not all goals are worth chasing. ↩︎
This isn’t the only run-in with a teacher over policy that has lingered in my memory; I was also responsible for laptops being banned in my Marketing class because I was reading Grantland. ↩︎
There are exceptions – some rules just have to be followed. But most rules aren’t like that, especially at smaller firms in less-regulated industries. ↩︎