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Ask HN: Career advice and what skills gave you the most leverage
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Re: Ask HN: Career advice and what skills gave you the most leverage
#22 * This might sound trite, but you will make the most money when your company has lots of money. If your company is struggling or its industry is going through a cyclical slowdown, you will typically make less than at a flush firm or in a booming industry, even if you are a top performer. Tactically switching industries midway through my career led me to significantly higher comp longer term (several multiples).
* Become indispensable in the key areas that are most highly correlated with company success. I mean improving the company's bottom line, not working more hours than anyone else. Be focused and direct. These priorities are often broadcast by ownership/the executive team, but sometimes the message gets lost in translation by middle management. Do these things with visibility and measure the difference you've contributed. If your job isn't in the critical path or your job doesn't have enough transparency, move on.
* If you don't have equity, it's not your company. Don't make the mistake of sacrificing your mental or physical health for your company's sake. It's never worth it. Having 'moral' equity instead of real equity is an awful feeling. Instead of holding out, moving on was always the right call for me.Re: Ask HN: Career advice and what skills gave you the most leverage
#23* This might sound trite, but you will make the most money when your company has lots of money. If your company is struggling or its industry is going through a cyclical slowdown, you will typically make less than at a flush firm or in a booming industry, even if you are a top performer. Tactically switching industries midway through my career led me to significantly higher comp longer term (several multiples). * Bec…
These are great pieces of advice, and something I wish I had followed earlier in life. I probably should be following one of them now even.
Re: Ask HN: Career advice and what skills gave you the most leverage
#24Job 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.
This is a common but unfortunately very narrow perspective. Frequent lateral moves can inch you upwards but asymptotically to a limit. If project manager's in OP's area make $90K, no amount of job hopping is going to making him a $350K earner. Agree all else equal, better earn $95K than 90K but the better bet is to break out of that range. Just lateral moves won't get you there. You need a different strategy.
At least in my experience, you need the job hop to get the change shift of role, industry, or promotion as well. I would be doing my previous bosses' job and then some, and show it in review cycles, only to get the 'yeah you're right, just wait a bit longer, we'll figure it out' over and over again. Leaving for another company was the only way it happened.
Re: Ask HN: Career advice and what skills gave you the most leverage
#25* This might sound trite, but you will make the most money when your company has lots of money. If your company is struggling or its industry is going through a cyclical slowdown, you will typically make less than at a flush firm or in a booming industry, even if you are a top performer. Tactically switching industries midway through my career led me to significantly higher comp longer term (several multiples). * Bec…
Where is this from?
Re: Ask HN: Career advice and what skills gave you the most leverage
#26Your project management skills translate well across industries. If your desire is to get into software PM because there is more money there then start applying for those roles, expand your network to people that work at companies that have those roles and maybe take people out for coffee to see if/where you may have gaps to close before they would hire you.
Another angle might be to look into software companies in the EV sector, ones that build apps based on the charging infrastructure. Pivoting into running projects for them would probably be the most straight forward path to doing PM work on software and not physical install of hardware.
Re: Ask HN: Career advice and what skills gave you the most leverage
#27* This might sound trite, but you will make the most money when your company has lots of money. If your company is struggling or its industry is going through a cyclical slowdown, you will typically make less than at a flush firm or in a booming industry, even if you are a top performer. Tactically switching industries midway through my career led me to significantly higher comp longer term (several multiples). * Bec…
Be careful about that second point. I have seen people posit themselves into positions of critical design decisions only to position the business around their core strengths. That is toxic. It will buy you increased job security for a time, but if your strengths are out of alignment with common sense it’s only a matter of time before you and your team are crushed by tech debt. An example is imposing all business logic goes in Kubernetes because you good at Kubernetes. Be aware that you will likely encounter this at least once in your career.
Re: Ask HN: Career advice and what skills gave you the most leverage
#28[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Career advice and what skills gave you the most leverage
#29* This might sound trite, but you will make the most money when your company has lots of money. If your company is struggling or its industry is going through a cyclical slowdown, you will typically make less than at a flush firm or in a booming industry, even if you are a top performer. Tactically switching industries midway through my career led me to significantly higher comp longer term (several multiples). * Bec…
Be careful about that second point. I have seen people posit themselves into positions of critical design decisions only to position the business around their core strengths. That is toxic. It will buy you increased job security for a time, but if your strengths are out of alignment with common sense it’s only a matter of time before you and your team are crushed by tech debt. An example is imposing all business logi…
The second point hasn't really helped me much, I opened a new line of business basically doubling my groups revenue. I spent almost three years trying to convince my boss to stop leaving all sort of money on the floor and actually pick it up. It took a while but then he finally got it and ran with it, the only problem is I am the only one with the skill set to actually do the work, the rest of the group is still living in 2008 and being told what a great job they are doing (IMHO they are ripe to be off shored). Now the wok is spinning up and I'm still the only person that has the skill set but there are no rewards for that skill set aside from management telling me I have to teach everyone what I know (and that's not going to happen)
Re: Ask HN: Career advice and what skills gave you the most leverage
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Be careful about that second point. I have seen people posit themselves into positions of critical design decisions only to position the business around their core strengths. That is toxic. It will buy you increased job security for a time, but if your strengths are out of alignment with common sense it’s only a matter of time before you and your team are crushed by tech debt. An example is imposing all business logi…
The second point hasn't really helped me much, I opened a new line of business basically doubling my groups revenue. I spent almost three years trying to convince my boss to stop leaving all sort of money on the floor and actually pick it up. It took a while but then he finally got it and ran with it, the only problem is I am the only one with the skill set to actually do the work, the rest of the group is still livi…
Incidentally becoming the single point of failure isn't the problem. The problem is an ethics violation of intentionally positioning yourself before the cost and maintenance considerations of the application.
If, in your example, you become the single point of failure because nobody else wants to engage in modern practices to increase the durability of the application then its a management problem. The way to think about that is: that by changing direction are you reducing time and cost of delivery? If so you have become that single point of failure by pushing for greater ethical considerations.
Beware though, everybody especially people who are ethically wrong, will claim their way is better. The differentiator is measurements: speed of delivery, speed of refactor, degree of risk, speed of labor, quantity of dependencies, compile time, load time, and so on.