The 6th piece of wisdom this particular thought leader has for us is
"NEVER GET INVOLVED IN POLITICS & NEVER BE NEGATIVE."
Which is followed immediately by this:
"The people who are killed, the deer, tend to huddle around the kitchen or go on cigarette breaks and bitch and complain about everyone and everything at the company. The tigers are too busy killing it to be bothered with such things...
Deer: “Bitch bitch, moan moan, blame blame, cry cry.
Tiger: “Hmmm…that’s an interesting take on things. I gotta get shit done, good luck with that.”
Apparently turning himself into a killer tiger who just fucking kills all the time has left him without a sense of irony.
actually, I followed this advice and it worked out very, very, very well for me. I've gotten much further than anyone ever thought I would -- even myself.
How? The whole point of deer analogy is to stop being negative. Whining and moaning instead of taking action is being negative. Being proactive and doing things is being positive.
My point: If you find a group of us to be deers because we allow ourselves to be distracted from the work we are required to do by the criticisms we have of others then you are made a deer as well by being critical of us.
The piece states that you shouldn't worry about short term $, you should worry about gaining skills and experience so that you can -- some day -- be the boss.
Early in your career, if you're aspire to be great, you should really just take on as many projects and get as close to the leadership as possible. The good news, if that if you take on a lot the leadership will naturally get close to you -- because that's how they (probably) got their slot in leadership.
I've seen many folks go for the quick money (say at a big company) and miss out on the massive experience you can gain being part of a startup (even, perhaps especially, if that startup fails).
>Never leave work before she does, respond to her emails quickly and without excuses. Here are things to say to her when she gives you amazing responsibilities that will make her love and trust you more.
>Don’t bust your ass and sharpen your skills for your boss alone, do it for yourself and your boss. Taking on all the problems at a startup is not being taken advantage of — it’s taking advantage of.
>Don’t worry about your salary, just get enough money to live in a closet close to work.
Is this guy serious? Is this satire?
From the sidebar:
>If you're a winner please email winners@calacanis.com
It looks pretty and all. How is it different from LinkedIn? I'm always weary getting myself on another "social network" thing instead in the end getting my data sold - or worse - stolen. (actually I'm not sure which is worse...)
I could talk a lot about how we're different from LinkedIn, and how looking pretty as a website is a hindrance at times, but we're less about what you've done and more about how you do it.
For a lot of people things like job titles and descriptions are out of sync with what we do, and we don't really have any good tools to show or share our work. Developers have Github, designers have dribbble, but for everyone else there's not a good tool out there.
But, I hear you on the YASN problem, and we're not solely a social product as a result of that.
Very, very. It worries me sometimes - and I know we're on HN and that's the audience here, but still - that people see "a startup" as the one and only way. This will inevitably lead to pain and heartache for many.
I've worked contract jobs through my 20 year career and have done very, very nicely out of it. (I started in the UK and am now in AU - our rates are healthy and consistent.)
Now, with my 20 years' experience, am I thinking of branching out and doing my own thing? Sure. Would I have recommended that to my 18 year old self? Hell no.
How do you get into something like that, if you don't mind me asking? What's your specialty, and where were you in your career path 20 years ago that set you up for it?
Sorry for the late reply, not sure this will ever be seen but just in case.
I was lucky, in a way. I did a year at work as part of my degree (my 3rd year), got kicked out of my CS degree (BSc, York - I just didn't do any work, failed exams, had too much of a social life), and the place I was working took me back.
Best part was I wasn't a "graduate" so my old boss told me to set up as a sole trader. 6 months later I'd finished what I had to do, and the guys I'd been working with mentioned they were off to Germany to continue the job. (Desktop refresh. Pretty good start for any contractor, teaches you all sorts of variety.)
I asked, jokingly, "can I come?". Week later I was in Germany. That job lasted a year and a half and took me all over Europe, and that led to a similar role all around the world.
I've been lucky.
Lessons: be a nice, personable, helpful human. Say yes more than no. Realise who the customer is and make them happy. Don't forget about the person at the end of the chain: they matter. Be a jack of all trades rather than a master of one. Don't be afraid to move. Don't be afraid to be different. Enjoy yourself.
I haven't had a job interview in 10 years, now. It's all on people I know, who know I'm good, who refer me to other people.
In my experience (in the UK) you start by submitting your CV to loads of recruiters saying you are looking for contract roles. If they think they can make money from you they'll give you a call and ask for your rate etc.
I'm not the OP, but I just do plain front-end development. Contract length can vary, sometimes it's one week in a digital agency, sometimes it's a few months in a large company. You can also find contracts that are 12months, and they can be extended after that.
I was freelancing when I started out, so I had some income but was also available for full-time contract work during the day.
> Now, with my 20 years' experience, am I thinking of branching out and doing my own thing? Sure. Would I have recommended that to my 18 year old self? Hell no.
Working at a startup you can also do very well for yourself.
Yes, but those who do are statistical outliers in a field of people who are underpaid and see very little money even if there's an exit at the end - you might get a $100k check but if you've been earning $50k below the market rate for 5 years that's not a very good deal. There are plenty of great reasons to work for a startup (challenging problems, freedom to work how you like, meeting smart people, learning huge amounts of tech very quickly, etc) but if you think it's a good way to get rich you are plain wrong. If you're a developer who wants lots of money go and work for a bank.
Well the argument of the post is that a well thought out technical career should necessarily land a person at a Startup early in their career. Given this position that the post is taking, adding "startup specific advice" to the title would conflict with the premise of the article.
Now, said premise may very well be entirely wrong (I think the optimal career for most people is to be a lifer at Google), but isn't that what the comments here are for?
As much as startups can "disrupt" by creating new businesses, big tech companies can also create entirely new products or businesses and when they attempt to do so they often succeed. Google has a good shot at eventually being successful with products like glass, self-driving cars, etc. Amazon is already succeeding with AWS and at some point will launch drone delivery. Even if you just own a small feature, it's fulfilling to work on large important products with high impact (legacy products too e.g. gmail). Plus, there is little risk and great payout guaranteed. Contrary to Thiel's comments, I think you're surrounded by brilliant people at a place like Google and will learn constantly and won't stagnate. The key is to not stay on the same team/product forever.
Not just startup-centric, but Valley startup-centric. I love how it assumes the reader has their pick of companies to work for. Kind of insulting to those of us outside the Valley who don't. :/
I'm interpreting your comment to mean that because an engineer won't be able to pick a successful company anyway, it is useless that they follow any career advice.
If that's a correct interpretation, then no, absolutely not. Most engineers (you see this if you sift through linkedin) make far less optimal (I believe) choices than they would by simply picking a Series A/B company backed by a tier one firm like Sequoia/A16Z/Greylock/Benchmark.
And surprisingly, people take very little time to think about what they want, what they care about, what they believe the world needs, what they enjoy, and so on. Doesn't seem like a good idea given they'll/you'll spend 50%+ of your waking hours at work.
In life, it's often about picking from what's available to you at the time of making the choice, instead of what's optimal. Especially true of young people.
Many engineers that come to me for interview training (http://InterviewKickstart.com), have been at their workplaces for several years, mostly since college. When in college, you just want a job and a job in a brand name company like Cisco is amazing. It's usually too late until you realize that you were in a team that nobody cared about.
Then you try and interview to get into a good startup, only to realize that interviewing landscaping has shifted. Your only option then, is to go join an also-ran startup because they paid no attention to the interview process. It's a vicious cycle.
"it's often about picking from what's available ... instead of what's optimal."
That is true and is good life advice. However poorly it correlates with reality, a semi-comical mythology has sprung up that startups are only for young urban white male brogrammer ivy league grads in a handful of cities but only if they have rockstar abilities. Oddly enough an aspect of the mythology is there's a shortage of programmers and no one knows why, which is also pretty funny. Note that every other employee at a startup is fairly average and thats OK, only the programmers are held to this weird standard.
If normal people want to play baseball, then the a marketplace opens based on whats available, and most of us play on parks and recs fun leagues, or the Y, or pickup games at the park. However, the mythology is that The Best Pitcher In The World gets to select what major league team he plays for, and similar individuals are the only important people worth discussing.
You would surely have to qualify what you mean by "optimal". I would say from a "roll-the-dice" perspective that an average engineer or designer that goes to work at an established Fortune 500 corp is going to make far more than the same at a prestige startup.
Full disclosure, I'm biased, I worked at one of those startups and got screwed bigtime; now I work quite happily at a mundane but profitable adtech firm for over 2x the total comp.
actually, the beauty of my advice that if you worked at three failed startups for two years each and followed my advice you would have a roadmap of how and why things fail, as well as a massive skill set.
You would also probably become a bit fearless and resilient... which are critical to being a great entrepreneur.
It is in the VC's interest to push more and more people to take risky bets - this gives them more horses to bet on, while managing the risk through diversification. For the individual horse (or er, engineer), this still remains a risky proposition.
Which becomes far less risky if before you launch in the startup world, you take a couple of years after graduation to work for a well known and reputed company (say google). That will guarantee a soft landing if your startup experiment fails, which is very likely.
Yes. Though part of the crux of this advice is to choose a company that is already growing revenue at a solid rate, from a solid base. This is not as risky as you might think.
Also, generally, if you are a good engineer (as long as you learned things and improved, if you worked at a company that didn't become a big success), Google et al will welcome you back with open arms.
I agree with you. Joining a company that has a clear revenue model (or has found a decent way to monetize their user base) and is growing by leaps and bounds seems like an easy bet.
But how many of these companies are out there? Granted, we are a few waves after the deluge of social startups with gigantic user bases and no idea on how to monetize them, but what you describe is still a minority of startups.
And the suggestion doesn't seem to be "join a company that is already doing well", it's "join a startup or create one, instead of going to work for some corporation".
This is what I think: in engineering (and even more, in business), right after your graduation there is this window where you have large and famous companies with deep pockets who are eager to get the cream of the class. If you join them even for an year or two, you have significantly smoothed the rest of your working life.
Sure, you can always join them years later, and you don't need them to succeed - but statistically, the impact of taking advantage of this window cannot be denied.
This is a great summary and analysis of the best career advice from lots of different people. Also from the same person who made the breakout list (breakoutlist.com), which I've sent to my engineer friends who are looking for something other than Google/FB. Just sent this one to a few friends as well.
For something meant for designers, I felt that the site was poorly designed. The main menu makes it hard to see who each picture is of, and it's hard to tell at times if we're reading the editor's opinion or the subjects'.
I like the "after getting hired" quotes; they're all good advice that benefit you, the only caveat is to make sure you aren't getting taken advantage of. Don't overwork yourself to enrich someone else; enrich yourself first.
What I've learned about getting "taking advantage of," is that if you're learning and growing you can't be "taken advantage of."
Who cares if your boss is getting some great deal on a $ basis if you're getting the experience to be the boss?
My advice in this piece is for people who aspire to accomplish great things in their life--not folks who want a "great life" (defined as balance, vacations, etc). So, if you're 35 and have a family this isn't the advice for you (that should be obvious).
Yes. And often the best way to enrich someone else is to enrich yourself (i.e. people are happy when they are skilled, good at their work, liked by their coworkers, etc; turns out employers also like this).
Great post! I think those notes are not limited to engineers and designers tho. They are interesting for marketers, finance professionals... It could be called" "Career notes for everyone"
The rest of the site is a helpful database of tech companies considered to be "breaking out" which would look good on your resume/teach you a lot/maybe make you some money.
The 6th piece of wisdom this particular thought leader has for us is "NEVER GET INVOLVED IN POLITICS & NEVER BE NEGATIVE."
Which is followed immediately by this:
"The people who are killed, the deer, tend to huddle around the kitchen or go on cigarette breaks and bitch and complain about everyone and everything at the company. The tigers are too busy killing it to be bothered with such things... Deer: “Bitch bitch, moan moan, blame blame, cry cry. Tiger: “Hmmm…that’s an interesting take on things. I gotta get shit done, good luck with that.”
Apparently turning himself into a killer tiger who just fucking kills all the time has left him without a sense of irony.