Ask HN: How do some people build their careers so fast? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do some people build their careers so fast?

34 pointsmrdependable19 comments

I was browsing LinkedIn out of curiosity and saw a pattern of people that had timelines that go something like this.

1) Graduated Harvard with degree in [random non-business related major]

2) Worked at [random company] as business analyst for 1 year

3) VP / Director at [multi-billion dollar brand name corporation] for 2 years

4) Seed investor at [unicorn tech company]

I'm just generally curious how people are able to climb like that so quickly. Does anyone know people like this and have some insight into how it happened? Are they just wunderkind that get groomed by billionaires or something?

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1) Mom wants you to take the time to become an adult and find yourself

2) Dad wants you to develop the discipline of waking up at 8 every morning and cheerfully greeting your company president

3) [multi billion dollar corp] has 5,000 directors, one just retired, and Dad plays golf with their boss

4) An acquaintance from high school/college bacchanalia with richer, cooler parents that just gave him his trust fund without requiring 1) and 2) is starting his seed fund because he doesn't want to wake up at 8 and play golf with old people, and you were fun enough at parties to make the cut. Plus you know directors at [multi billion dollar corp]!

With the money one must spend to study in Harvard, they can possibly live forever in a third world country without ever needing to work.

Not to mention that people frequently have parents and build very powerful networks in a institution that all the rich people send their kids to study. I would be actually impressed if they would take any time at all to build their careers.

Instead of focusing on those unicorn people, go get good examples of people for YOU. The ones that perhaps work as hard as you do and have similar outcomes and upbringings, they are the ones that together, you can possibly send your kids to study at Harvard.

The most important lesson I've learned in life is that what matters is how you are viewed and compared to your PEERS, not to how you are compared to someone from a different background than you. It takes a lot of time to build ones career, you will need to fluctuate in many social circles until you finally make it, don't make the mistake that there is a corner to cut.

With well connected parents and an Ivy League education these people start out on the basis of "who they know" and no "what they know". They can build their careers quickly because they are good at playing politics and excel at self-promotion.

As the question states, they start with some businessy qualification. You never read about people with engineering degrees achieve that type of rapid career progression.

> With the money one must spend to study in Harvard, they can possibly live forever in a third world country without ever needing to work.

Harvard claims to cover 100% of financial need for attendees. If the situation is similar to MIT, then this really isn't true.

[1] https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/types-aid/scholars...

Well you should go to a class in Harvard and make a questionnaire about everyones upbringing and see how diverse the class really is. I bet that it will be horrible and they will ask which yatch do you ride before they are even willing to answer your questions.

I went to MIT, down the street from Harvard. We had folks from all over. Among my social circle, I counted folks that grew up poor in poor suburbs of NYC, guys who grew up on farms, a pretty wide range.

> they will ask which yatch do you ride before they are even willing to answer your questions.

Yachts are really expensive. Like, stupid expensive in terms of total-cost-of-ownership. From the Harvard people I knew, I really think this is false. They might not want to answer your random questionaire because people get annoyed at being asked about their background all the time, but I'd be very surprised to see someone gatekeeping based on owning something so rare.

> among my social circle

You could have ended your reasoning as soon as you wrote this. It is obvious what I said is an exaggeration, but it carries out some truth. Go ask around the people in America itself, outside a city like SF/NY, what do they think about it. I'm not even American. That's not what I see/read about. A country with some big time inequality, with little to none social mobility, possibly the worst social mobility since the country was founded. But no, everybody can get into Ivy League.

> But no, everybody can get into Ivy League.

I didn't say that. I said that the universities offer scholarships which cover their assessment of financial need. They still have limited slots and are very selective.

> It is obvious what I said is an exaggeration, but it carries out some truth

I genuinely didn't know that you were exaggerating. I thought that was your perception.

We live in a world where lots of things are true in degrees. There is some amount of snobbery at elite US universities and there s some quantity of social mobility. But exaggeration makes it really hard to talk about how much or how little and that quantity matters to understanding the problem.

Bill Gates' career trajectory:

- Access to a computer lab in high school, something not common at all in the '70s, was making small computer apps before his freshman year

- Attends Harvard, meets Paul Allen (working at Honeywell nearby) and Steve Ballmer (Math + Econ).

- Gets a chance to pitch Basic (or whatever it was) to a higher-up at IBM, since Gates' mom was on the board of United Way and could arrange an introduction.

There's a lot of stuff that goes unsaid in a LinkedIn profile.

He was just very lucky that MS-DOS was chosen in one particular moment. More in the first comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624887

It's the elitist career path of the people from oligarch/aristocracy/magnate circles. Might be quite surprising for someone believing in the US' "rags to riches" myth (dead by now) but it doesn't surprise anyone in countries with strong family clans of various kinds (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden - just replace the Ivy league with Oxbridge, grandes écoles, etc).

One surefire way I've seen is to work at a company in which your bosses keep quitting. I've seen people jump from IC to VP over the course of a handful of years.

Another is to start a startup and then get acquihired into a large company.

The tallest tree grows from resilient acorns. It also grows from abundant light and water, lack of competition, and good soil.

There's a whole mix of nurture and nature. They don't necessarily have the best upbringing, but some have the ideal amount of bad conditions killing off potential competitors.

Gladwell's book, Outliers, covers all this in detail.

I have seen many similar profiles over at linkedin, but i would like to ask you not to get carried away.

They are outliers who, if you carefully observed, had got some stroke of beginners luck or an influence that guided them correctly or it could be any of the many advantages of being privileged.

Friends and family.

In many cases they are super-smart too. That’s optional. More often they’re good at relationships and have a great network.

This usually happens when you join a startup that either gets acquired by big co or it becomes billion dollar company itself. They key is to be lucky enough to join rocket ship early, which is mostly luck so most ppl fail.

I think we need to plough our own field and not be too concerned with other people’s fields...especially in an age when all the best fields are on display.

Resourceful parents and/or luck.

Example of the latter:

Plenty of noobs joined the dev scene in London at its most under supplied. They suck at what they do for 70k/y and drop off like flies, the survivors, but a few years later, become managers / heads of / etc.

> They suck at what they do for 70k/y and drop off like flies, the survivors, but a few years later, become managers / heads of / etc.

They suck at staying overtime regularly, commuting daily 1h one way with an overcrowded train costing an arm and leg, and at bearing the pressure from cocaine ingested manager.

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