A lot of people would be better off doing "intra-preneurship", meaning trying to innovate and strategize within their current company to make the job more fun, gain more autonomy, and advance their career prospects.
Or, if you work at Google, push for a new chat app. It’ll probably be approved.
ftfy
The manager was sharing how challenging it was for his team to debug a certain type of code that they were responsible for. Without missing a beat, this very senior leader replied: "What do we need in order to make it fun? What kind of tooling or other improvements would make it enjoyable and easy?".
I'm paraphrasing because I can't recall the exact words, but I was flabbergasted to hear how he framed the problem as a lack of "fun".
Interactions like that are why I left NVidia with enormous respect for their managers and not just the very bright individual contributors I had the privilege to meet.
I bet people who have been on the inside can guess who the very senior guy was. Absolute legend.
Um, you're being sarcastic yeah? (just checking) ;)
You do realize there are all sorts of reasons why people leave a job, right? I left Qualcomm perfectly satisfied with my managers and coworkers, too.
If somebody always leaves because of being unhappy with their coworkers, they may want to do some introspection to find out what those disagreements have in common.
No worries at all. Asked because the comment about the manager asking how to make it "fun" could also have been read along the lines of "see how out of touch the managers are", and I wasn't sure which meaning you were going for. :)
Frankly, starting every other year on a completely new application/system does not sound so much fun to me, now that I am programming for more than four decades.
But there are also many workplaces that are more human, and run by people who you can build a psychological trust and rapport with. In those cases, there are opportunities to propose improvements, or push for pauses in feature work for support work. It’s not every day, and you can’t always change everywhere, but often management is receptive if you can sell it. This is how you start to build greater autonomy and a bit of fun into the workplace.
It takes a certain level of trust, but starting with tasks that vaguely fit the below tend to work well - start with something focused clearly on the business, not your own person feature ideas.
“Debugging/deploying/verbing situation X takes 0.5 man-sprints every sprint (across the team). If we can spend 2 sprints with 2 engineers to do X, we can cut this down to 0… during [time of year, eh holidays], our feature work slows down because people often take vacation. Can person and I work on this?”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antonyleather/2017/09/05/amd-ry...
My current employer, Google, seems particularly amenable to internal entrepreneurship. After all, they're essentially paying you not to create new external businesses.
Whereas working for a big company, you have a fairly reliable shot at bringing in a decent income with some stability.
Nothing is guaranteed of course.
Also feels like chasing a lottery win. Some folks might be chasing a financial safety net first that is smaller, because the variables and formula of everyone's life in what they have to take care of is valid.
I'm very happy for people who are able to swing for the fences, and also happy for the people working on getting more hits to bigger hits to swing for the fench. I know the latter is a much more sure way to get an outcome to have time freedom to really swing fences.
Everyone does what they best can do, if there's not an option in front of them at work, some people have to try to create the option themselves if it's not geographically accessible.
Assuming that's in an environment where it's possible (no shitty office politics, etc), the monetary returns from that ain't gonna be competing to a succesful project. Nor is the freedom and satisfaction ever going to be the same. And of course all progress in that front, is a round of layoffs or a change in management away from being nulled.
So, it's a safer path (as much as being an employee is safe these days), but not achieving the same thing.
Companies can promote you every 1-2 years, but you need to start that clock.
3 orders of magnitude is 1,000 times larger, so $100,000 salary would become $100,000,000.
Never going to happen.
If that isn't exponential growth, idk what is.
RSU values compound.
Once they vest, you can sell them to match snp500 past the 4 years.
And it's not even "give 1x work -same as before- and take x1.5 money" but more like "give 1.5x work and take x1.5 money" at best (and usually less): more responsibilities, more stress, and more work time.
This is exactly my case.
Here are my w2 compensation (salary+bonus+rsu) changes YoY working at $Yelp and $Grab:
2025 35.96% (projected)
2024 20.77% (projected)
2023 30.39%
2022 -0.65% <- promotion
2021 34.25%
2020 65.06% <- job change (December 2020; 2020 had a big jump due to unemployment in 2019)
I don't think my work hours, responsibilities, or work stress has any connection to my compensation or career growth, primarily due to the "work smart, not hard" thinking.
Even if you have zero promotions or changes in responsibility, RSU grants compound, even if your salary increase by only 1-6% (like mine did)
Or you manage to move into those staff/post-staff positions but those are very few, hyper competitive and during rounds a layoffs you have a huge target on your back.
Realistically it's not a bad problem to have.
I'm no where near making a capped IC amount but if someone were in this position you really only need ~5-8 years of working to pretty much set yourself up for life financially if you keep your living expenses reasonable.
Im still earning way less than what I see reported on Blind and what my coworkers make.
That puts those "30% YOY" in another perspective though, doesn't it?
Also, within companies, you need everyone’s unanimous permission to do anything.. if a problem is big enough, the team would do it themselves. If the problem is too small, the team won’t integrate.
Or, more likely, 0%