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The article does mention this but worth noting that riding two rocket ships back to back is not going to be a typical career experience for majority of people.
by mertd 3y ago
The article does mention this but worth noting that riding two rocket ships back to back is not going to be a typical career experience for majority of people. So this doesn't strike me as a typical career growth story.
- Racing0461 3y agoAgreed. Make sure you get on apollo 11 and not the challenger.
- CommieBobDole 3y agoStatistically you're more likely to end up in a 1986 Chevy van with "Spase Rokit" painted on the side.
- strikelaserclaw 3y agoI don't think its about absolute career growth, everyone has limits to what they can achieve (determined by innate ability and luck) and understanding some good philosophical principles can be a good guide in how to approach your personal limit. Theres a lot of good advice in the article.
- darth_avocado 3y agoAnd that not every work environment is the same. The advice that works in a specific work setting cannot be generalized for every work environment that exists.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoThese are engineering driven companies with strong leadership and growth (and some of the best compensation). Most people only dream of having even one of those things once in their career.
- choppaface 3y agoOne rocketship bias of this article appears to be lack of "focus on the customer" versus "strive to be the most valuable, but least critical." The latter can be good core advice anywhere ("pager duty" stuff at any company causes burnout for ICs and EMs) but customer traction is only really given to you on a plate at a rocketship (e.g. after Series A/B). Most of the piece is about scaling rather than understanding the user / customer and evolving the product ... a more balanced advice essay is going to talk more about gaining, keeping, losing, and re-gaining traction versus just scaling a sprawling org.
- giantg2 3y agoI also wonder how good the advice is coming from atypical experience when the majority of people will never be in those situations.
- angarg12 3y agoThe equivalent financial advice would be "win the lottery". Not very actionable.
- mellavora 3y agoYou mean "win the lottery" "twice"
- ZephyrBlu 3y agoI think it's more useful if you read it from the perspective of "how do I hang onto this rocket ship and survive?". Of course, then the advice applies to very few people but it does become more useful. Not really convinced either way though. Much of this feels like backwards-facing advice, things that only make sense when you already know what you're doing, and very surface level. The "tying it all together" section really demonstrates this. The truth is, all the most valuable skills she's picked up are likely to have been implicit from being in an incredible environment in a company growing really fast around other great people. Very hard to distill that into useful information for other people unless you're very introspective and dedicate a lot of time to reflecting on what actually moved the needle. Though in fairness, I think that >99% of people cannot articulate their growth path or process and strategy and they would not be believable even if they could, so in that regard, she is par for the course.
- busterarm 3y agoI kind of agree. Also some rockets explode on the launchpad. Not every explosive growth company is a success story and they don't all mint millionaires. I've been on two failed rocket ships and I'm pretty mellow about it. Surviving that is also its own skill. You'll go crazy trying to pick winners and getting rich isn't why I got into this field anyway. While I would quit and work on passion software, you always owe it to yourself to find time for passion work in your free time.