Revisiting career frameworks: How Big Tech, management and IC roles have changed

foreign [Music] welcome to the skip podcast I'm your host Mikhail Singh Hall and this episode is part of a series that I'm putting together where I'm talking to you about not only your Tech Career but the different phases of company and how you should think about it if you were in in this case big Tech or if you're thinking about going to Big tack I would love to talk to you about what I'm seeing and what are the pros and cons and opportunities that might exist from a career point of view uh you know what I the last episode I did was focused on growth companies and really answering the same question around hey if we were in a growth company and things aren't growing as much is this still a good time to be there or is this still a good time to consider them you know my conclusion was that growth companies aren't as attractive and perhaps you should be looking to leave or you should avoid them I think big Tech is different I think big Tech in many ways a lot of people are moving towards Big Tack and big tax also you know tightening the belt there are fewer roles and so it's worth getting into both what is Big Tech how has big Tech changed over the last few years and then most importantly how you should consider them from a growth point of view and a career point of view um I think that the other piece that you're hearing a lot of across industry and maybe some of it's more more marketed by the big tech companies but you're also hearing a lot of discussion around you know managers are actually shifting away from management and a lot of the senior people in companies are actually considering IC roles or they're shifting from manager to IC and I think that that trend is also worth touching on though it's part of big Tech and commonly discussed in big tech companies I think that it's also just a general Trend that we should get into a little bit in this episode so um let me start by defining what big Tech is I think big tech companies are a really important phase as we've talked about on the podcast there's really three big phases of company there's startups there's growth companies that can be at hyper growth as well and then after you found product Market fit and you've really hit your stride you end up in this sort of big Tech phase now I think that big Tech usually when I refer to Big Tech I'm looking for a company that is publicly traded that is a market leader and that has thousands of employees this obviously includes companies like the magma companies the Microsoft Apple Google meta Amazon but you know Netflix Adobe Square sales force you know these companies have thousands of employees they've had a pretty long track record of growth they are you know very uh much public and there's you know thousands of tech employees so there's a there's a culture there's a longevity there's a denseness in how they operate that really make them the market leaders of our industry Uber and stripe are you know good examples of you know great companies that aren't big Tech I think there are lots and lots of good big tech companies and there are also lots of companies that aren't quite in that category but the purposes of this discussion I don't include them in big Tech because I don't think they have quite the track record I'm looking for companies that have the these multiple product lines that that are at this scale because the opportunities and challenges they face start to resemble each other um now also mention that you know I happen currently to be an executive at meta I work on the Facebook app and um you know though I have a little bit of a vantage point of both being at meta and actually having some experience at Google where I was there for four years I am not speaking on behalf of my employer and in many ways I spent as much time thinking about what's going on at meta as I think about what's going on from a career point of view at other big tech companies because there are a lot of similarities and then there are some differences so this episode is really devoted just to a broad category of these big tech companies now before 2022 big Tech was also in growth mode you know in some ways hyper growth they were hiring more people in big tech companies like Amazon and apple and and and certainly companies like Google and meta we're hiring in really really rapid succession um and part of the culture and the the belief was that the core business is quite strong and The Innovation needs to come from the side so what they would do is they would say let's make sure we strengthen the core because obviously the ads business for these two companies meta and Google work or the e-commerce business for Amazon was essentially core but there's a lot of external Innovation from the core there's a lot of interest in building products that were you know in some ways tenuously connected to the center and I think part of the reason why that was happening is because M A which was hot in the past decade heavily used to expand these big tech companies was decreasingly a tool that was available to these companies it turns out that you know M A requires companies to not only be interested in being acquired but also to get through the Regulatory and the uh the sort of Anti-Trust issues that were required to be able to successfully bring a company in but over the last half dozen years it's been just very hard for big tech companies to acquire which is why we've seen a pretty big slowdown of big Acquisitions that are two large companies that are successful merging together and this was in contrast to a lot of the success we saw with and you know the early part of the past decade and so when you can't buy companies and you need to innovate and certainly you have the balance sheet and you have the growth to to motivate that you hire and you hire along the adjacent areas while you sort of hope that you can invent the next thing and take advantage of the distribution and the brand that your company may have and what happens in the culture of these companies is as a manager as a leader head count becomes a currency you know you care a lot about the team that you can build but you also think about well to get things done I need a headcount and head count might be product development it might be for you know cross-functional teams and oftentimes people's careers were largely calculated based on the size of and span of the responsibility they have you know so if you were to interview someone coming from Big Tech they would often say well this is the size of my team misses the number of people that I was able to bring on board because size of those companies meant that they were able to deliver on more bets and the smaller the team the less they could have bats you have the bigger the team the more and more uh you know impact one had and oftentimes career conversations were synonymous and are synonymous with promotion conversations and I can't tell you how many people come to me and say I want to have a career conversation and the first thing that they ask for is well you know I'm at level X and I'm looking for X plus one walk me through it and you know in the back of my mind I've always thought well that might make sense because you could assume that you know the growth of your level shows that you're building new skills but you know there's a lot of people that end up saying well in order to get from director to VP you know I need to get XYZ skills but then the thing I want to do is say start up and I think in one of my previous episodes you know trace and I had this conversation and it turns out that the skills needed to get to the next level and be a VP have nothing to do with starting a company if that's what a person wants to do so anyway the career conversations become there's almost like a game that everyone plays when you're in a large tech company that have these ladders is what's the fastest way to move up the ladder how do I get the biggest scope by getting the largest number of heads and of course compensation which we speak a lot about on this podcast you know is is excellent because it's Equity driven you know in many ways there's a healthy amount of equity that certainly the more senior one is that connects you to the success of the company and of course those are grants are liquid you can sell them because the companies are public and they tend to stack and they tend to grow over time so if you join and then the company's stock keeps going up the grants that you get are going to be worth a lot more money over the years and so you know this was the Heyday for big Tech as much as it was for the growth because you end up building teams you end up looking at promotion there was lots and lots of new people coming in compensation was excellent and you know you you would you would you you were really in a powerful position because you were in a brand name and everyone knew what you worked on and it was going to lead to a great next job and so this was sort of the pre-2022 environment for big Tech so when 2022 hit you know obviously the market changed covet started to elapse the impact of covid and when it when the pullback came it became clear that a lot of the growth that uh that the tech industry had had during covid wasn't sustainable and so cost cut a measures started to come in place you know multiple rounds of layoffs projects started to get shut down and we're hearing a lot more of that as companies said well maybe we don't need to do as much Innovation on the side maybe we need to strengthen the core and maybe the number of bets we take on or not a dozen then maybe two or three so that's a natural way to sort of bind fewer projects to work on leads to fewer employees and you know in many ways what these big tech companies are doing is they're not really in trouble what they are actually doing is just returning to where the pre-covet kind of hiring levels might have been or even be before that you know before zero percent interest what was the sustainable business you know they have an advantage they have a Core Business to lean on but they really want to make sure that Core Business is solid and sustainable and so when you end up in this mode of retraction where you don't have M A you are cost cutting you have fewer Innovation projects and you're strengthening the core you know Green Field Innovation is just tough it's tough to come up with New Concept and build out brand new product lines this sort of zero to one that a lot of people come to me and say hey my strength is I'm a zero to one I'm like well there's not a lot of zeros in big tack but I understand that new innovation is something that you're interested in but keep in mind most of those big tech companies don't have a great track record for creating brand new things during these last 10 years so though that might be your interest area and though you might have had a little bit of success a lot of those projects don't even exist anymore so zero to one wasn't necessarily a great skill to master during this period of time it was just an opportunity to give in to the industry and now the challenge is that when you look at Innovation when you look at the core business when you look at what it means to be a lot more efficient and then by the way a compensation is way down because the stocks are down and there is a lot more competition so companies can be a lot more conservative putting it all together I think that the environment and the opportunity to join or stay at Big Tech is vastly different and the calculation is vastly different than what might have led you to stay or join pre-2022 so what I'm going to now walk through is why would you want to stay what makes big Tech attractive and then what are the challenges that might exist in big Tech so then we can kind of match it to your personal career situation okay so let's start with the Positive what makes big Tech attractive to join or given the number of people that are listeners in existing big tech companies why is it attractive to stay well you know the simplest is that the compensation is liquid and then the stock is probably going to continue to rise as the market Rises you know growth companies as I documented in my last episode that aren't public or that at these were very very you know tough levels where they've lost 70 80 90 or Beyond those companies may not ever recover or they may never get to liquidity but if the company and this is why I Define big Tech the way I did if the companies have a track record for success and they had you know very very successful company and successful stock prior to the run-up of the market particularly in the last few years they will return and they will continue to thrive and we're starting to see that even in the public markets today now you know this podcast probably will live many years and people might hear it and think oh boy you know that he didn't know that the market was about ready to tank again and that's true I don't know but I would say that generally being at one of these leading companies given that Tech will continue to sustain you know does put you in a safer position from a compensation point of view and potentially a very lucrative position the second is that there is no doubt that when you've seen the movie at Big tack you have a set of skills that are very transferable people when they're looking to move from growth to the next phase they want to bring in folks that have experience of what's about ready to happen to the company and it's hard to do that in an interview just think about that I'm going to have a you know 20 20 Question Interview I'm going to determine whether or not you can handle us the scale and the challenge of the next few years of my company hard but if you've been successful in a company that's later on well that's a good sign that you probably can translate that so the brand value and the compensation are coming the two the most obvious and those sustain even prior to the the previous years I think that you know clearly there are these compensation challenges where oh I joined two years ago at the height of the market and now I'm at the company and it's going to take me two years for it to return to that level well if you don't have the patience and you know you are being underpaid in that situation so you'd have to find another reason to want to stick it out now if you're only going to be at a big tech company for three years and you join at the height of the market well you know you're going to be underpaid during that period of time if you just leave and move to another big tech company it's almost a guarantee you'll make more capital but if you're going to be there for five six seven years which is usually my advice for late stage then you know in some ways you'll make less than had you been reset but over time it won't be massively underpaid but I think that take that piece out in terms of like okay I joined a couple years ago in general your compensation is going to be quite solid in a big Tech situation and quite predictable you know which is you know saying something in this Marketplace um the other reason that brand value is really powerful is that you know many of the companies that are big Tech just have it millions of users and in some cases billions and that's a very unique place to be and not everyone's excited by that but it is a very powerful lesson so that that you can add to your career Playbook I worked at a company that was not just a market leader but we understood what it was like to service millions and millions and millions of users for our longer period of time the processes the way we think the type of products that you end up bringing in the market the size of innovation that needs to exist in order for us to move the needle is very very different learning than zero to one or trying to find something new and that is very valuable very marketable very helpful from a career point of view the other thing about big Tech is there's just a lot of employees and when there's a lot of employees and these are excellent employees many of them are at the top of their game in world class it's a great networking opportunity so when you're looking around for boy I need something to you know my next move it's incredibly helpful to know that well there's I you know every day I spend time with 50 100 different really hyper quality professionals you do that over the course of a few years you can get to know a lot of folks and if you're someone who's social and actually enjoys working or in a position like product management or you talk to folks it's an awesome opportunity to build that Network which you can then leverage and learn from for years and years and years to come and then the last thing I always say is that yeah hey you know moving around is hard for most people from a career point of view you know especially as you get into leadership it does take a while to learn the environment and the culture in order to have impact so the challenge around you know moving companies like let's say you take an opportunity and it's like well I can be here for two years then I'll leave and I'll join other company and I'll do that for two years well each time you make that transition it's a new restart right and it takes a while to get going but in a larger company it has this Advantage where there's lots and lots of different types of projects and lots of product lines so you can spend 10 years and have almost like four companies worth of experience but the way the company operates in the culture tends to be pervasive and so your start time is low and your ability to transfer oftentimes these companies encourage it so it's it's a very low anxiety move it's very career additive to see the different stages of companies different product lines some companies have consumer and Enterprise and you know companies that are early and late and some that are like future and some that are very core and some that are Technical and some that are more business oriented I mean there's lots and lots of opportunities to move around and learn in a larger company so I I think that big Tech is attractive for many folks on this call because the compensation is awesome has terrific brand value and you get this millions of users experience the networking opportunities are are terrific and then oftentimes you know you can move around as you see products mature and you look for New Opportunities so these are some of the positives that in some ways you know have existed for some time but are very very relevant these days okay well let's consider the opposite case why wouldn't you join a big tech company and I I think there's four reasons that come to mind the first one's the most obvious you know big Tech is tightening their belt and you know as most companies are these days there's just fewer positions and it's harder to find good ones and so the challenge with joining a big tech company is that it's really just harder to find a great uh role in the organization I think that the same kind of applies to people that are looking to leave I think you want to be cautious about leaving Big Tech because these roles are not the easiest to return to which is in contrast to the advice I used to give which is sure you can always leave a big tech company because there's always going to be a role for you and your return that's not really the case anymore the there are as many seats I think that'll improve over time and so you have to be cautious when you look at both leaving as well as how conservative hiring is coming in to these larger organizations now the second reason is just it's it's really just harder to build new things I think that for the Builders out there I think this is an important you know challenge in that it's just harder to build new things in big tech companies I think that there are fewer new things getting built so it's harder to navigate to those positions and I think that maybe the best way to describe it is a lot of the success in building things is mastering the inside the building problem and so I often look at the skills required for particularly for product management and I think that a lot of product managers get into the industry because they like building things for customers and that's an outside the building challenge let me take advantage of my resources take an idea and take it to Market and then spend my time understanding what are people resonating with what what are things that aren't working and then how do I do more of what's working and less of what isn't makes perfect sense it's a very fun job that's a builder job well in a late Stage Company in a big tech company the to get something out the door and to get people to use it is actually not that hard which is kind of a crazy thing like if if you just wanted to put a piece of software out there given that there are so many users millions billions of people it's very easy to get initial take because people will try anything and coming out of Google or coming out of meta coming out of Amazon I mean there's there's not a there's not a scarcity of usage distribution is available the hard thing is making something that connects to the business that's big enough of an opportunity that it's going to actually create momentum and that really expands the opportunity set for what products that the company has to offer to do that you spend a lot of time on inside the building problems influencing leadership influencing peers making sure that this is a product that won't backfire oftentimes companies that are in startup phases or even growth phases they just have less to lose you know a lot of people say hey there's just so much bureaucracy at Big Tech I'm not sure I want to build something and I'm like I respect that there is a lot of bureaucracy at Big Tech but if you think about it there's a lot more to protect you know if you didn't have anything to protect you might as well change what's out there because it's probably not working but if there is you know one of the most successful businesses out there a household brand there's a lot of people that spend time making sure that we don't mess that up so I think that this changes the kinds of skills you need and it changes the kind of build opportunities so yes you can still come up with ideas but you spend a lot of time making sure your ideas are really thought out that the business opportunity is substantive and by the way that it's going to actually be you know thoughtful around bringing the right things to Bear to the end user and then it's not going to backfire so that's the reason why I really like the describing the challenge is an outside versus an inside the building problem maybe the last thing that I'll just note around challenges around big Tech is that you know because big Tech tends to be a household brand there tends to be a fair amount of scrutiny you know not everyone loves what these big Tech products have come to stand for you know whether it comes to impact of society or privacy you know oftentimes people look at their own career and their own personal goals and they map it to what big Tech and they say hey that's just not for me which I respect but if I think about the things that have led people not to lean into big Tech they usually come down to I'm a builder and though I love the idea of having distribution my interest and skill doesn't really lend itself to the inside the building influence type problem and the slowness of seeing things out the door I'm much more interested in Rapid Fire building things being more in charge having less of an EQ and influence to get something done okay I respect that but I think that that's a different style of learning and it comes with the territory of success and that's you know the fact that when there's so few opportunities it does make it harder for a big tack professionals to always be the purest of builders so when I net it out and you look at the different phases I think that growth companies are struggling right now and there are just a few great ones if you're in one of those or if you have an opportunity to join one of those those are terrific opportunities you should grab that with both hands but if you're in an xgrowth company you either should be moving to a startup very early stage clean early environment or you're very very suited to go late stage because the brand the compensation the learning is going to be excellent the opportunity to meet with other folks and frankly when you come out and you decide to maybe do something a bit more risky when the growth curves start to become more plentiful for companies you're going to have a lot to show for the next few years so that's why I'm very very encouraging people to look at later stage companies that will return and continue to thrive in the market that we have in front of us the exception is when people come and say look I don't really feel like this inside the building type challenge is a good fit for my skill set and my interest and I don't want to learn it I'd much rather be left a little bit on my own with not distribution as the thing that I'm granted but I'm okay with coming up with a 90 and just trying to find people to use it but that's where I meant my best this early crafter opportunity is much more of interest to me than it is for me to manage sort of the more complex building type challenges the influence type requirements of a of a successful big Tech leader or a successful big Tech professional and in that case then they should head to much earlier stages than maybe they had in the past but I don't think that one should stay in these X growth companies as I noted in my last episode when there's such promise in these later stage big tech companies now of course the challenge is that these big tech companies right now are right sizing so they're laying off a lot of folks that are being asked to leave are also in market so it's competitive because there are fewer positions even in big Tech and that's just generally the case in the market but I do think that that's a temporary State I think that what will happen is many many of those companies will continue to hire more conservatively and you know when there are so many of these employers out there that I would encourage you to be knocking on those doors building those relationships and trying to find a way to lean in so reason number three is that bigger organizations are more complex to learn and as a result you do have to plan on staying for a longer period of time to have impact it's not as easy as just coming in doing a couple years and leaving and then having something substantive to show for it oftentimes you need to really understand the context and how the company operates and it's probably different from what you've done in before even if you've been at one big tech company it does take a few years to build the connections the relationship the understanding of how things are done and so these are not short gigs these are longer gigs and perhaps that's not what you're looking for at this next phase of career you want something that's a bit shorter I think the last and fourth related point is the connection to the value system that a lot of big tech companies uh have come to stand for you know this is a personal question and you know when you look at later stage companies oftentimes they've become so large that there are points of view around what the products have stand for what they mean for society what they mean for government and it may or may not be connected to your value system I think that ultimately that becomes a personal question as to do the values that you have as you consider your next role line up with the values of how the company operates as well as what the products stand for again these four questions or perhaps concerns altogether are the primary reasons why people perhaps don't want to stay or join big Tech the biggest probably in my opinion is that it's just hard to build things and often it's hard to find the right role uh certainly a starter role and then you have to stay for a bit of time and then ultimately you are working for a company or you're a small Port part of a much much bigger organizations you put it all together the so-called advantages of the compensation the stability and some of the brand value might not be enough to outweigh these concerns and again my job isn't to necessarily tell you one versus the other my job is to sort of give you this framework that you can contrast which one makes most sense for you at this stage of career so before we conclude this episode I want to speak to a trend that we're seeing in the market Marketplace which is many employers certainly big Tech is the prime example are actually hiring fewer managers and asking managers to be more closer to ICS and for a moment let me just Define what we mean by managers and ICS you know the obvious example is a manager has someone that reports to them and ICS down that's actually not quite accurate managers usually are spending a lot of their time thinking through what I would call team ambiguity you know how do I make sure that I have a team to go after a problem ICS are looking at you know much more of the problem directly how do I go and solve that problem now the advantage of a manager is that they can take on more and bigger problems the advantage of an IC is they're closer to the problem set itself and so they are Hands-On and they have a lot more context and in the past what's happened with these growth companies and with big tack is that there was so much hiring going on that it was crazy to hire people and not have folks that were able to sort of Shepherd them into the right opportunities and organize them and so managers became critical to the success of the growth of these companies and so you would build work structures that weren't based on the needs of today but more needs of Tomorrow hey I need to go and innovate on three different product lines let me go set up three teams I'll go hire managers for each of those teams I'll go hire an executive that can manage those managers and then we'll go higher ICS to actually go deliver against these three new product lines and those were you know 50 heads that they would basically yeah it's recruiting to go and help staff and so a lot of these managers were being hired and then they were asked to go higher their next level and this became you know the currency of how companies ended up building and then promotion systems largely looked at the size of role as a way to determine whether or not you were owning a big enough problem you know I hate to get to this next level you need to have X number of people reporting to you or this number of managers or expertise in managing managers because it was a proxy for the impact and this the complexity of what you were essentially being asked to do and you know the incentives were to really get to management as quickly as possible because if you were in ic and you're solving the problem directly you realize boy in order for me to get more pay for me to be able to solve a bigger problem I need a team and so everything was around going and becoming a manager everything was around trying to make sure managers were actually being moved forward and the more that you had this expertise and the more the growth companies existed out there growth companies are like look we have a 12 person team that needs to become a 25 person team let me go to a big tech company pull someone out who's currently managing 25 and promised them an opportunity to build this from scratch so this entire system was developed to be able to effectively make management the north star for a lot of our industry and that's not just for product managers it's for our Engineers it's for designers Etc now the challenge is hiring slowed and as I noted there's less Innovation so as such it's there's a fewer management roles and it's a harder path to management and so now the question is does that mean that it's just like Ugh everyone's just going to take longer to get forward in their career I think that what we haven't talked a little about is like what were the downsides of what we just discussed you know the downsides of what I just discussed was that there wasn't a lot of training and a lot of the more promising managers they did not they not only didn't get trained to become experts at management but they weren't necessarily trained or excellent at the craft of Building Product and solving the right levels of ambiguity instead they were promising and they were like look we need someone to kind of lead us forward so what we should do is try to take this you know emerging IC and move them forward into management and so the the industry pulled them forward and the managers themselves are probably weaker because of it and this is an opportunity for you to think about your depth of craft and the story you will tell your next team so what I mean by depth of craft is look if you're in a position where there's fewer management opportunities unlike in the past when you were able to jump on it early the moment you became a manager you spent less time solving problems directly you didn't get the expertise at crafting a problem a product that solved a problem you know this gives you an opportunity to become an expert which then improves the story that you will tell to the next person think about the distinction that you have in front of you in the past someone would say hey I was doing some interesting project I had a little bit of impact then I got tapped on the shoulder to be a manager I quickly hired one or two people and in the past I've been sort of lurking at this area through my three-person team now the product itself may not have gotten that far I can't really tell you how I was solving the growth uh and the details around the growth of the product or changing the product because you know I was kind of managing folks that were responsible and I didn't really want to step on their toes and yeah I mean I've only managed a couple people so it's not like I'm an expert manager I've had a little bit of experience now if that was the interview that was happening in the past but there was so much hiring going on and because the managers were such a valuable skill that was like hey you know what the fact that you've had some experience in some brand value we're just going to pop you in here and hope that you can kind of continue the journey for us now people are like let me get this straight I'm not sure I can hire you to build stuff in my company because you're not that close to building and you're certainly not an expert in managing because you've really done it only a little bit of time that puts those folks in a pretty tenuous position so when I hear that hey companies are asking folks to get a lot more Hands-On I think well this is a huge career Edition because being a mediocre manager if that was the past currency and now you're saying hey you can actually build something and solve something that is outstanding because the future management opportunities will always come to the best people in the team and now if you can basically prove out like hey I can actually really deliver on something that's meaningful not only will you get a management opportunity but that story that you will tell people is hey I really do have Mastery of how to solve something and as a result I'm starting my management career but you probably want an expert to join your company that knows how to build something first and manage second that's what your next employer is probably going to say to you so the fact that you're weaker in management but deeper in building and crafting is massive and as an aside you know and I use this framework for PM but I think it actually applies for other functions as well is that you know there are like four major types of of ambiguities that all of you should just think about in your career one is growing things one and solving the growth of something have got something working at smoking I want to turn it in fire one is crafting products based on Market ambiguity hey I've got an idea and I think that it creates a space that maybe the other incumbents or competitors don't have so this is a market driven innovator someone who knows how to solve Market ambiguity is different from someone who knows how to solve growth ambiguity now org ambiguity is how do I take a very complex problem which is sitting between lots of seams within a big company and solve it you know we call this a captain at meta someone who can really look at a very complex project knowing that there are lots and lots and lots of pieces and put it together into one cohesive Vision now that's a complex project but sometimes it's hard when the organizations all have different goals different ways of solving the problem even different cultures so an org ambiguity expert is different from that crafter who comes up with a concept and says hey there's an opportunity in the market and differ from a growth expert and then certainly there's domain experts that are out there who are experts at AI experts and ranking experts at Hardware right so my point here by making this quick aside that look there's growth there's crafting and Market there's organizational complexities domain is that this infatuation with being a manager is just being a Mastery of Team ambiguity but it turns out there's four other things that you want to be good at to get a very fulfilling career this is an opportunity for those of you that feel like it's slower to become a manager or stunted or perhaps being asked to become an IC to go build an expertise in these other four areas because the most successful professionals aren't just great team managers they're great at these other things first and then they use the team to help amplify their strengths so in conclusion I think that big Tech rules are more stable more predictable and generally pound for pound are just a almost a guaranteed career additive step except for the cases where someone is very very much not going to be at their best and they're going to be lost solving these slower more complex organizational issues and being an inside the building expert in which case you want to go early early and not to X growth and not get stuck in between I see roles are or more Hands-On roles maybe a better framing for this are going to become much more common than management roles and my counsel is Embrace this because I believe this is going to be a much more positive term for people's professional careers then it will be becoming shallow managers and not having that core skill that core set of skills to navigate these ambiguities in their careers to lean on because once you become a manager you start becoming distant from the work and I think that nailing an expertise or two before you start to scale away from the actual detailed work is incredibly career added and my general sense is that the the big elephant in the room is that past growth companies that were hiring kind of unfettered or the zero to one enlarged lead stage companies which were adjacent to the Core Business they just don't exist in the way that they did before and when they do there's all kinds of challenges associated with delivering against them because of the change in the climate so mourn if those were the most fun and maybe your existing role or the role that you just lost because that was a moment in time but don't seek that next recognize that that may be actually the worst type of move for you in your career at this stage go back to these more core roles look at big Tech look at startups look at the few Healthy Growth companies these are the best ones for you to look at at this stage I appreciate you listening hopefully this was helpful to you we'll continue these career conversations for 2023 and Beyond in the next couple of episodes thanks everyone and most importantly please leave a review please give me feedback and share it with your friends have a good one

Channel: The Skip

Views: 1,572

Keywords: Big tech, growth companies, innovation, networking, career growth, transferable skills, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, industry changes, management roles, individual contributors, hiring practices, corporate culture, tech leaders, job market, distribution, product development, organizational complexity, domain expertise

Id: LJzztzG2reM

Length: 42min 37sec (2557 seconds)

Published: Mon May 08 2023