10 Lessons from 20 Years in Tech (Tech & People vol VIII)
How to avoid the mistakes I made and make different mistakes
In early 2002 I took my first job in Tech, joining the manual QA team at the once great company of Mercury Interactive. My 20 year career anniversary is a nice opportunity to put together a short list of lessons I learned, in the hopes that they will help those who aren’t as further along in their career journey.
So without further ado… here they are.
1. While you see a chance take it
In the year 1999 I was a 2nd year Computer Science student and I was taking my first real programming class in the university of Bar Ilan, under a Professor Yehuda Schnaps. After the first test of the semester, I got a note from the professor to come see him in his office. I was worried sick about why he could possibly want to see me, but it turned out it was a good thing. He liked my coding tricks, and wanted to offer me a job programming in his startup.
I thought, oh cool, and then politely declined. I had decided to focus on getting the best grades I possibly could, and working a job at the same time would eat into that commitment. There would be plenty of jobs in 2002 when I expected to finish my degree…
Of course, when I did finish my degree the bubble had burst and there were zero jobs, certainly not for new grads. So this decision probably in total set my career back by 5 years. I should have taken Stevie Winwood’s advice and taken the chance when I saw it. Please don’t do as I did.
2. If you can afford to, ignore the money early on in your career
I’ve learned that the first role you take on, or first few years anyway, are really important for what you learn. So if you are offered two jobs, take the one that pays less but will teach more. That’s what happened to me with the QA team at Mercury. I made only a shade more than minimum wage, and learned a ton every day. I would never be where I am today if it weren’t for that great academy.
3. Go for the biggest illustrious brand name employers you can get
This is something a lot of people miss in their career planning. When the job market looks at you, the first thing they look at is the logos on your resume or LinkedIn profile. They matter much much more than the job titles. A vanilla SWE at Intuit or Amazon is worth so much more than a CTO in some company you never heard of. Don’t send me hate mail on this, since this is not some values-based moral judgement I am passing here. I don’t know if this is how it should be, I just know it’s how it is. Put the big logos on your profile as soon as you can and keep them there. The bigger the better. Ivy league logos count too. But Fortune 500 logos more so.
4. Don’t get discouraged by the odds when you only need one break
So the biggest turn in my career happened around 2008, towards the end of my tenure at a startup company where I spent 3.5 years as a lead developer. I had this experience of working there building a networking security product that did not end up selling as well as we expected. This got me thinking — whose job was it to make sure we build stuff that will sell? Through conversations with a great mentor, I hit on this great epiphany (duh) that there was this thing called Product Management. I became convinced that it was my destiny to be a PM, and pretty soon I started to look for a junior PM role.
The blogs I was reading at a time were pretty discouraging on the odds of landing a PM job without prior experience. Maybe they were right about the odds, but I knew everyone had to catch their first break some time. And I had time, and I only needed to succeed once. So that’s what happened. There may be some survivorship bias here, but the lesson I learned is that the odds don’t matter so much when you’re trying to get from A to B and it’s a reasonable path. (By reasonable I mean - I wasn’t’ trying to be an astronaut).
The other lesson here is that you need to believe that you will find someone like Tamir Segal, who gave me that first PM job even though I wasn’t really qualified for it, based on actually interviewing and getting to know me and what I could do. And further along in your career you need to be that person. More on this later.
5. Don’t get Promoted (Yet)
This might be another controversial one. The biggest mistake I see people make, especially in recent years now that I’m more senior and get involved in a lot of folks’ careers etc.— is that they optimize to promote early as if it were a race. It’s really not!
Promotion here can mean two things - promotion up the hierarchy, managing people and groups and all the way up, or promotion by level, which comes with increased compensation and so on. I’ve learned in both cases you should just not worry about it, and certainly you shouldn’t optimize or chose between employers based on how soon it will come.
As counter-intuitive as it sounds, promoting early doesn’t actually help in the long term. The right logos on your CV matter much more, and your actual personal growth even more than that. Promotion will come as a result of the progress you make that’s within you. Wherever you go they will always need people who are ready to take on bigger challenges. If you ask me, just don’t worry about it.
By the way, I’m in the habit of sending ambitious young people who I think are in too big of a hurry a link to listen to Billy Joel’s Vienna.
6. Artists should live in Paris at least once
This is a funny one because it’s the good advice that I just couldn’t take. One day I was walking around Stanford University with my friend Amir Shevat and we were talking about his re-location from Israel to the Silicon Valley. “If you’re an artist, Tzvika, you should live in Paris at least once”, he said. We technologists have silicon valley and the USA in general as our Paris. He was right, and I always try to encourage any one on my team or anyone who asks my advice, to relocate there. It is career rocket fuel. If that’s your priority and your life situations allows for it, you should go. I know if I had take that path one of the times it was offered to me, I would in all likelihood be in a completely different place now career wise, further on by as much as a decade maybe.
7. Don’t use Excel when making career decisions
There’s this famous Sheryl Sandberg story about the time right before she joined Google. You should totally hear her tell it. I am not MBA-trained, but I also, for as long as I can remember, always had a spreadsheet with the different jobs I could take and the different criteria - pay, advancement opportunities, learning, commute etc. I religiously keep these kind of sheets even today, even when I am not at all contemplating doing something new. But the kicker is: you should keep that spreadsheet, but like Sheryl, you will be ill advised to make your decisions based on the formulas you encode. It’s just not how things happened to me and the people I know and admire.
8. Keep in touch with the right people
If not by spreadsheet, how did good things happen to me in my career? Mostly, they happened because I kept in touch with the right people. “The right people” here is important. a lot of career minded people who read blogs start an effort around ‘strategic networking’ and try to get in front of the biggest hot shots they can wrangle a meeting with once. Maybe that works for some hustlers but it’s not what I recommend. Once you’ve been around for a bit and have a track record, keep in touch with the nice people who know that track record. Your old bosses and coworkers who you’ve actually been in the trenches with. This is not a long list of people, but they are your real strategic network and once you’re gone or they’re gone, they are the ones worth staying in touch with. That, for example is how I got to Intuit which changed my life completely.
9. Dumb luck will play a bigger part than you’ll care to admit
We’re coming near the end of this list, and I think it’s really important to underline that all your hard work and planning will in the end mix with a big dollop of pure chance when determining what happens in your career. So much of it is just dumb luck. Someone will up and quit, or get promoted, opening up an opportunity, or something will happen in the market or in the strategy of some company. A chance encounter. You get the gist.
Here’s an illustrative story. When I was about 6 months into my PM career at Google, I got an invite from the Talent Acquisition team to join a weekly resume review. This was a pan European meeting (Google had maybe a dozen PMs across the continent then, most of them in Zurich) where PMs reviewed dozens of CVs that came in for Product roles and decided together how to narrow them down to a lucky few that would get called up for an interview. We had maybe 3-4 minutes per CV.
At the end of this meeting I had this epiphany that my CV must have been reviewed at this same meeting at a previous instance. So I asked this guy I knew who had been around whether he remembered it. He laughed, and told me that yes, he remembered. It was kind of touch and go as he recalled. I had worked at EMC which they knew (logos matter!) but my B.Sci. was not from one of their favorite named universities (e.g. the Technion). They were kind of inclined to skip calling me up for an interview. It almost ended there. But then they spotted the 3 words “summa cum laude” and decided to call me up, and the rest is history.
The thing is, I remember debating with myself whether it mattered much to write those words on the CV, in addition to the GPA, especially after I’ve had some success in industry. I might have easily edited them away, and in that alternate universe I am in a very different place now, in all likelihood.
I get angry when Tech people argue that their success and outsize financial outcomes are all due to their hard work and brains. This comes up a lot as an argument for low taxes and less social solidarity. Personally I’ll have none of it. What happened to you is half chance. Same as everyone else.
10. In the end, you’ll remember those you helped along, and those who helped you
In addition to luck, what little success I’ve enjoyed has been driven by several people (you know who you are!) who gave me the right opportunities at the right time. So will yours be. In my opinion this gives you the obligation to try to do the same for others, which I hope I have already begun to do.
I leave you with this most important advice. The world already has a sufficient amount of takers. Be a giver. It will come back to you, and the order in which these two things happen will not matter in the end.
Luck is a big one. I agree wholeheartedly. I also think a lot of things are easier seen from a distance (like grabbing that opportunity). But luckily, history repeats itself and opportunities will keep on knocking.
I'll add 3 of my own, with your permission- focus on who your boss is and ensure they're good people (similar to what you said but with a different focal point). Solve for big problems- when given a chance to work for 2 companies always pick the one that solves for something major, ideally mission critical. (Can the DM for buying your product sleep at night without a solution?). Understand your organization and develop a holistic view- it's a system and you'll do better if you involve yourself in more nooks and crannies. Really good summary you offered above. Oh, and I did live in Paris :)
I didn't know Vienna. Such a great song - Oded of 10 years ago would definitely benefit from a listen.
I also didn't know Sheryl Sandberg's speech - personally I would change 7 title to "get on the rocket ship" but it will collide with 3 I guess. But I guess both of us are talking from our current position.