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Ask HN: Career advice and what skills gave you the most leverage

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Ask HN: Career advice and what skills gave you the most leverage

#1
Hi all, new to posting but not to the forum. But, I’m struggling with my career, where to do next, and I’m throwing a line out for anyone that may have their own lessons learned to share.

For context, I’m a project manager in the EV charging infrastructure space. Nothing to do with software, as I’m primarily involved with the physical installation. I’ve been a PM for the better part of a decade in different industries and find myself a bit stuck in the ‘crisis of meaning’ stage.

I’m good at my job, but it’s not fulfilling and although I’m senior level I still haven’t broken through the $100k ceiling. Though, I do live in a medium cost of living area.

So, what am I asking? Well, I want to shift over to a position that will allow higher earnings and decent personal growth. Maybe it’s a unicorn job to get money and fulfillment, but the search continues. Given the housing crisis and crazy prices, I just feel I need to do what I can to increase earnings. Like most people, I just want to comfortably afford a modest house.

So, to all the high earners out there, do have any general advice? Any top of mind jobs I could chase, given my PM background?

I realize how broad this post is, but I’m desperate for a thread to follow and an outside perspective. Thanks

Re: Ask HN: Career advice and what skills gave you the most leverage

#2
I'll be brief and say the key to many successful careers has been to focus on data. Software, infrastructure, and everything digital is just scaffolding and piping to move and transform data in one way or another. So if you find some kind of data you enjoy working with or interpreting, then you can become an expert in that kind of data (the domain) and the problems and solutions that are related. Best of luck!

Re: Ask HN: Career advice and what skills gave you the most leverage

#3
Job hopping comes with significant salary raise, that's usually the point. If your hop doesn't come with 20%+ raise, you just hopped wrong. After 1.5-2 years repeat. It compounds.

It's not really skill dependent. I mean of course you need some skill, but the point is that the raise comes for the skill you already have, why the employers are willing to shell out more.

Re: Ask HN: Career advice and what skills gave you the most leverage

#4
Disclaimer: Probably not highly compensated by hackernews standards (ie I'm still working), but I am well above the threshold you cite. Have been doing this since ~1993, and ... I wouldn't change anything. Had a few wins along the way

You say you are a PM - have you done both greenfield (aka "primary software construction") and looking at how to deploy/tune a canned application (like Salesforce)? I think they are materially different skills. How deep are your personal tech skills? I tend to see the very best PM's become CEO's pretty rapidly, so that is one path.

For me the most impact came from "rushing to the unglamourous stuff." Documentation, testing, build and deployment pipelines, security and compliance (which are not the same thing), and then building bridges to other functions, which helped me be the 'voice of the customer,' over and over again.

As an IC, I've been a coder (initally perl, later c++, then python), network engineer (cisco bgp/load balancers - pre cloud era), data center manager, biz apps steward (jira, confluence, sfdc, hris), database admin. As a manager I've managed dev teams, SRE teams, data science teams, and product teams. Getting involved in sales engineering and direct customer support also helped a lot.

They talk about "T" shaped people, but if you can have depth in multiple areas and have a framework for understanding black box (ie $largeVendor [ie Oracle] is used for $UnchangeableMissionCritical application - how are you going to work with it?) stuff, then you can level up from a "mere" PM to an "Agent of Organization Wide Change"

Re: Ask HN: Career advice and what skills gave you the most leverage

#5
Job hopping is the best way to improve wage growth, as others said.

I will paraphrase something an old boss said to me, which is that the fact that you're asking about ways to improve puts you heads and shoulders above most people. There's tremendous value in focusing on growth -- personal and professional -- and spending a lot of time introspecting and thinking a lot about how to be a better person, a better team mate, a better leader. You'll get it wrong, you'll mess up, but the act of thinking about it is going to give you some advantages over most people you interact with.

For me personally, I think one of the best skills you can develop is the ability to problem solve. I'm an engineer, so I think about problems through a certain lens, but for PMs, it's equally important. It's not just about how to arrive at a solution, but how to determine whether you're even looking at the right problem. It's something that I thought came naturally to me, but I spend a lot of time running scenarios in my head about how I might solve the real-world problems I see in front of me. For example, if a particular system is slow, I run through scenarios on how to speed it up or decouple certain features to enable concurrency. If customers are dropping off in a funnel, I brainstorm scenarios through which I can proactively alert us that something is going wrong, or perhaps how to add additional telemetry to give us more signal in the noise.

One axiom out there is "bring solutions, not problems," and so constantly practicing the the problem solving is something that has served me very very well. My solutions aren't always the best, but the muscle memory is very ingrained and I can iterate very quickly with people about what possible solutions are, more so than many of my peers.

In a similar vein of this, like, is the problem the right problem to solve? Just because something is a problem doesn't mean it's an _important_ problem. For example, my CEO is asking me to do something that will make us $100,000, and she says it's really important. But our company makes $400 million dollars a year in revenue. Is an additional 100K going to move the needle? Nope, not even a little bit.

So is that the best use of our time? No. That doesn't mean we shouldn't build the feature, but it does mean that we are probably not solving the correct problem. By reframing "doing the thing" as "building a tool to automate the thing," then I can 10x, 25x, 50x the leverage the company has to do these 100K revenue tasks.

I don't always win this argument, but it's a good exercise to go through at any rate.

Anyway, that's some stream of consciousness stuff for you. Hope it helps. Best of luck!

Re: Ask HN: Career advice and what skills gave you the most leverage

#6

Job hopping comes with significant salary raise, that's usually the point. If your hop doesn't come with 20%+ raise, you just hopped wrong. After 1.5-2 years repeat. It compounds. It's not really skill dependent. I mean of course you need some skill, but the point is that the raise comes for the skill you already have, why the employers are willing to shell out more.

Very true. I job hopped a few years ago and came to a startup. I took a small pay cut, but it came with options and other perks. If the options hit, it’s still two to three years out. Tempted to purchase what I’ve vested and job hop again. Though I would eventually like to stay somewhere awhile and mentor. Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Career advice and what skills gave you the most leverage

#7
Try to find a place that actually teaches commission sales. As in once hired they send you out somewhere for two weeks or more of training.

The skills they teach have been very helpful in getting better pay than co-workers and early promotions. You may have to apply the skills for a few weeks or months with actual customers. The deep end is car sales. 12hr days and the bottom sales person gets fired.

Second option would be trying to find somewhere that will apply for you to get a security clearance. High job security and a good bonus pay on top versus without it.

Re: Ask HN: Career advice and what skills gave you the most leverage

#8
post #5

Job hopping is the best way to improve wage growth, as others said. I will paraphrase something an old boss said to me, which is that the fact that you're asking about ways to improve puts you heads and shoulders above most people. There's tremendous value in focusing on growth -- personal and professional -- and spending a lot of time introspecting and thinking a lot about how to be a better person, a better team ma…

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Re: Ask HN: Career advice and what skills gave you the most leverage

#9

Disclaimer: Probably not highly compensated by hackernews standards (ie I'm still working), but I am well above the threshold you cite. Have been doing this since ~1993, and ... I wouldn't change anything. Had a few wins along the way You say you are a PM - have you done both greenfield (aka "primary software construction") and looking at how to deploy/tune a canned application (like Salesforce)? I think they are mat…

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Re: Ask HN: Career advice and what skills gave you the most leverage

#10
This is more of a meta skill, but "learning to learn" was a game changer for me. For a long time, I had approached learning in a set and done kind of way, i.e. I'd read and immerse myself on a new topic, declare I'd learned it and move on. But I realized that was not only wrong, but it was blinding me to my shortcomings. I took a few courses, and started testing myself regularly on new topics to overcome that blindspot. YMMV!
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