Chaos is opportunity: If you want to learn a lot of things and gain a lot of responsibility quickly, work in an organization or area where the roles and processes are poorly defined. You'll be given responsibility for anything you take on and don't screw up, and you can use that experience to either move up in the organization or move to another organization that's maybe a little less chaotic.
What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?
51–60 of 218 posts
Re: What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?
#52[deleted]
Re: What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?
#53Value all parts of compensation that you cannot easily sell at zero. Options? Zero. RSUs for a private company? Zero. Promises for future raises? Zero. Actually: any promises - zero. (Promises on signed paper may sometimes be worth more than zero) Always remember that the place you work at has no (and owes no) loyalty to you. Calculate accordingly.
This. Seriously, if you're young or new to the domain and is reading and may get yourself justifying things, STOP. This is the best advice you'll ever have.
Re: What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?
#54This fell short, I was looking for something edgy.
For example: It pay$ to change jobs early in ones career. If you stay longer than 2 years out of some missplaced loyalty youll miss out of some quick dollars. Tons of caveats but in general it works. Now caveat it seems to peak around your 5 or 6th switch.
Source: All my mates and I have switched at the cadence and weve averaged a 15% increase in salary
Re: What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hindsight is 20/20. It’s all about what the right decision was with the information available to you at the time, not what decision would’ve had the best outcome in retrospect.
Making the right decision at the time but later finding out it was the wrong one just seems like a proclamation that it's better to be lucky than smart. I get what you're trying to say, which is finding solace knowing you did what made sense given the scenario at hand, but it ultimately says you can do the right thing and be punished and do the wrong thing and be rewarded. That said, I still agree with OP - it's good…
If you play poker, you know that, for any given hand, you can make the right play but still lose. But you’ll come out net positive by repeatedly making the right play.
You don’t get to play as many hands in your career as you do in a session of poker, so if you’re optimizing for income, generally speaking you should go for a job that gives you the highest guaranteed income rather than work for startups with, say, 1% odds of netting you significantly more than you would get at FAANG, for example.
Re: What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?
#56Value all parts of compensation that you cannot easily sell at zero. Options? Zero. RSUs for a private company? Zero. Promises for future raises? Zero. Actually: any promises - zero. (Promises on signed paper may sometimes be worth more than zero) Always remember that the place you work at has no (and owes no) loyalty to you. Calculate accordingly.
Cool, I have $1500 to wire for free. Do you want it?
You just agree I'm now the owner of everything you mentioned. (All your stock options etc). No other obligation on your part. $1500 for free.
What's your email? Oh wait. Turns out you aren't going to agree with what I just proposed as you don't actually value them at $0 hence not interested in trading $0 for $1500. Basically you're full of shit. (Lying.)
If you weren't lying you would take me (or anyone) up on that offer - but obviously it's not true.
For comparison if I happened to have a scratch off ticket I found on the ground that wasn't scratched off yet, I'd be thrilled to instantly trade it for $1500 to anyone, since I value it lower than the time it would take to scratch off. (I personally wouldn't spend 24/7 scratching off and trying to interpret/redeem tickets, even if I had a free supply.)
So you see it is easy to see if you're lying or not.
Re: What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?
#57Value all parts of compensation that you cannot easily sell at zero. Options? Zero. RSUs for a private company? Zero. Promises for future raises? Zero. Actually: any promises - zero. (Promises on signed paper may sometimes be worth more than zero) Always remember that the place you work at has no (and owes no) loyalty to you. Calculate accordingly.
Honestly this is bad advice. Sure, you shouldn’t plan your life around striking it rich but if you’re going to take a job thinking the equity comp is worthless then you are probably choosing the wrong company and/or going to negotiate poorly. Late stage growth companies that offer RSUs can be sold on secondary markets, so even though it’s not as easy to sell it is probably not worth 0 unless something is very wrong,…
I'm always torn about advice like this, and honestly I think that everybody who holds a strong opinion about it (on either side) holds the wrong opinion about it.
On one hand, the basic intent behind this advice very true. Liquidity is worth something; the reason people are willing to forego 3% returns on T-bills, 7% returns in the stock market, 9% returns on rental income, or 1000+% returns on startups is because they either need the money now or there's a non-negligible chance of the money not actually being there later when you need it. (Note also that those asset classes - and their returns - are in inverse order by liquidity.) Anyone who tells you that your stock-options are surely going to triple when the company IPOs or that this ICO is going to make you a millionaire or that owning real estate is a guaranteed way to build wealth is selling you bullshit. And it's very useful to be able to see through that bullshit and appropriately discount it.
But OTOH, people who say that you should value illiquid assets at zero are also spouting bullshit. That's clearly wrong: there are people who get rich off of stock options, or RSUs, or real estate, or cryptocurrency. And you're also strictly better off at a company that gives you $100K + 500 RSUs than one that gives you $100K. I know folks who didn't bother to negotiate for RSUs when they joined Google because they either didn't know what it was or valued it at zero; those folks now have a net worth several times smaller than the folks who negotiated for more stock. This is a poor-person mistake: believing that only those things that you can ascribe a cash value to right now have value.
Like most things, it's worth breaking out of excluded-middle fallacies and understanding that your optimal strategy lies in making a best-effort estimate of some very fuzzy and uncertain quantities. You'll be wrong, but you'll do better than either those who value those quantities at zero or those who believe the estimates of the folks who sell these assets.
Re: What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that beneficial to someone's career though? Sure, it shows one's morals and standards, but how does that boost one's career?
Well, among other things it can mean you end up in a situation that more closely aligns with your morals. This has a number of predictable benefits.
That's assuming that your input affects the current situation.
Sure, if you leave the company and go somewhere else, then you're potentially going to find your moral environment. But, there are better ways to find these environments, versus job hopping.
Without leaving, how often will your conflicts affect your situation?
Would like to hear more about the predicted benefits.
Re: What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that beneficial to someone's career though? Sure, it shows one's morals and standards, but how does that boost one's career?
Well, among other things it can mean you end up in a situation that more closely aligns with your morals. This has a number of predictable benefits.
...by force. Although I’m sure Edward Snowden feels good ethically, I’m also sure he has material issues that make him regret (that’s the goal of his ennemies, after all).
Similarly, a middle manager who has to downsize houses because he stopped working on weapons for example, it could be even harder for him because he won’t even get famous for it.
I should know, I’ve made one of those choices in another area.
Re: What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Has to be Amazon or Apple. Probably Amazon due to the skimping on RSUs and bonuses, have heard that they’re upping the PIPs lately
You know, it baffles me that Amazon is the only tech giant[1] that consistently sounds absolutely terrible to work at. (In my experience - YMMV) How do they keep finding engineers? [1] Well, except Intel. You don't hear about them much online, but around here the local office (not sure about others) bait-and-switches employee openings for contractor openings. They don't even pay that well, and no extra compensation e…
People join, build up their resume over two years, and then quit to work somewhere better.