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Position on the board of directors of a publicly traded (tech) company, can't get more "trophy" than that.
- Minimal actual work
- “Lavish” lifestyle: lots of travel and networking
- Fairly influential in the industry
- Can get paid $10-50K/year for attending a few meetings per year, per company board
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The quality of talent at VC backed businesses could actually be quite abyssmal. I have even companies where directors of entire orgs never worked as an engineer and it's laughable how little some of these people actually know about the field.
Well, as they say it's about who you know not what you know.
Imagine two cvs. One has 10 years of experience programming and 2 "managing" a team of software devs. The other 10 years of experience "managing" and knows nothing about programming. Guess who they would hire?
This is because the system is top down. More often than not top directors are old and understand nothing about technology. So they see engineers as threatening and scary and they prefer to hire people they "understand".
Most people managing a software developer team can't read code so everything eventually becomes super political because the manager is guided by impressions and things like the name of the PR ans such.
Its like hiring a blind man to supervise a group of painters. Then managers feel super insecure because they don't understand things very well even if they try with metaphors. Insecure managers tend to be very aggressive and toxic
This is such a sad industry.
I don't think that Product Manager is exclusively a trophy job, if at all. It takes quite some skill to manage a product properly, maintain healthy product boundaries, create a sensible roadmap, combat feature creep, etc. A product manager's skill set can make or break a product.
I agree - as a Product Manager in my third role it is not all that easy and can be in some companies really frustrating. I would say a great data scientist/ head of data science with the freedom to operate would be even more of trophy job in my view.
I get the feeling that "tech evangalist" is a pretty sweet gig, provided that you can find somebody who will pay you to do it ;)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, you’d be surprised how much damage a janitor can do (me remembering the time the cleaning guy at my dad’s lab accidentally tipped over a whole shelf of mice)
Wasn't there a story recently about a janitor ruining 20 years of research or something?
I know recruiters working half the year making $500k from beaches in the Caribbean.
Still?
I know recruiters working half the year making $500k from beaches in the Caribbean.
Recruiters suck, but they do provide value.
That definition of "trophy job" is one that I can agree with. However, I can't think of any tech job that I'd consider a "trophy job" by that definition. Am I weird?
A very well known tech company I briefly contracted for employs a Futurist. I’d put a negative sign on his substance rating. Not only is it a bullshit job, he has a segment in the all-hands meetings, taking a slice out of everyone’s fortnight with his drivel.