The most important thing you should be looking to do – is to find your true professional calling. As the famous rags-to-riches entrepreneur Jim Rohn said: “Time is our most valuable asset, yet we tend to waste it, kill it, and spend it rather than invest it.” Investing your time in your 20s wisely enables you to spend the rest of your life doing what you love, not searching for what you might love. So the real question you should be asking yourself is: How do I learn the most (about myself and the things I’m interested in), in the shortest time period possible, so I know what I want to be when I grow up? Lets start with what not to do – go work at a big tech company. Unfortunately, that’s not the easiest choice to make. Google and all the big tech companies recruit on campus. The perks seem attractive (free food and occasional visits by Hillary Clinton or Bono). The brand feels impressive. The pay is good. A lot of your friends likely work there so there is a certain social comfort level. It feels like a stepping-stone to other things. The trouble is that your learning curve is unbelievably slow. If you are an engineer, you likely work on a large project whose contribution is likely irrelevant to the outcome of the business. You’re going to have high variance in the quality of people you work with (because in a company of 50,000 people that is almost certainly going to be true). You’re going to ship production code relatively infrequently. If you are a product manager – you are not facing the most important challenge of a real product manager (building such a product so great that even a lack of distribution capability doesn’t inhibit its success). If you are a salesperson – it’s hard to know if you are being successful because of you or because of the brand you represent. Fundamentally, you’re in the slow-lane as far as learning curves go. The skills you do cultivate, navigating large organizations or dealing with politics, are ones that don’t push you to the intellectual or emotional edge. Ask yourself the question: will the prospects of the big tech company I join change if I join? The answer will be no. And therefore neither your impact nor your learning can be significant. As a result, you might leave a little richer but you really don’t know a whole lot more about yourself and you’re likely much further behind your friends at start-ups or growth companies.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 12:41:27 +0000
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