Three career paths in IT: founder, manager or employee

Original author: Michael Seibel
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When people ask me for career advice in IT, I find it helpful to outline three ways that I have encountered in my career: the founder, leader, and employee. I leave the investor behind the brackets, because it is better to do this after a successful (or unsuccessful) attempt to go along one of the three paths listed above.

Below I will outline the advantages / disadvantages and useful strategies for each role.

I wrote this article because, surprisingly, you often come across people who, when discussing careers, think of only one way, ignoring other options. When others give them advice, they often recommend following this chosen path (as a partner of Y Combinator and a former founder, I am also very guilty of this).

I do not give any value judgments to each of these paths. For ten years in Silicon Valley, I have seen friends who lead a successful and fulfilling life, being in any of the three roles.

Founder


Benefits


  • Doing what you really love
  • Creating something new in this world
  • A high level of responsibility often inspires extreme productivity.
  • The choice of people with whom you want to work
  • Mastering new skills with exceptional speed

disadvantages


  • An incredibly high level of stress. Even success will be painful
  • It probably won’t provide you with the maximum income.
  • Significant barriers to entry (finance / skills / location)
  • Large-scale success often requires decades or more dedication
  • The level of dedication significantly interferes with personal life

Strategies for those who want to be the founder


Your initial goal is to assemble all the necessary components to become a founder.

  1. Identify potential colleagues with whom you can work and who have the necessary technical skills to help you create a minimum viable product (MVP).
  2. Outline a financial plan. For example, do you have enough personal savings, do you have friends / relatives who can provide seed investments, is there enough money to start up, can you cut costs and save money to provide 6-12 months of working on your idea?
  3. Identify the problem that you and your potential colleagues are passionate about solving.
  4. The least important (but still necessary) part is the plan on how to solve the problem.

Many people who want to become founders lose sight of one or more of these components. A common mistake is to try to quickly find the missing component instead of solving the underlying problem. If your team does not have the technical skills to create an MVP, you do not need to place an order with third-party studios and developers. Make friends among those who have the necessary skills. Convince them to join you.

Often there are serious obstacles that prevent a person from starting a business. In these cases, my best advice is to move closer to the IT hub (preferably near Silicon Valley) and work for the IT company until you make enough money. Make friends with suitable potential colleagues and find a problem that you really really want to solve. It usually takes ten years to create a large and influential company. So it’s quite normal to delay the launch moment a bit to increase the chances of success.

Please note that among the required components there is no experience. The fact is that experience is overestimated. It has some significance, but it is very much overestimated by those who think about creating a company. In almost all cases, it doesn't matter what knowledge you have. After starting the company, you will learn almost everything you need about the problem, your users and the best solution to the problem.

Head (top manager in a large company)


Benefits


  • Stable income / benefits / etc.
  • High prestige (only the most successful founders are respected)
  • Higher probability of impact on the industry (as most startups fail)
  • No team building and no money needed to get started

disadvantages


  • Good work and results do not guarantee promotion of the corporate ladder. Domestic policy can be just as important or even more important.
  • Other employees may hinder success.
  • You need to have a talent for choosing companies that will grow successfully over time
  • It takes a long time to achieve a significant level of responsibility.

Strategies for those who want to be a leader


In reality, I see two strategies along the way.

The first strategy is to choose a fast-growing company. If you manage to choose such a company at an early stage of its development, you will receive more responsibility as it grows - I assume for granted that you are a friendly and productive team player. For example, if you were one of the first hundred Facebook employees and stayed there for ten years, now you would have many opportunities to become a leader. The problem here is that it is extremely difficult to identify a company that will grow rapidly over time (in many ways this task is similar to the task of a venture investor).

Another option is to go to work at a recognized company. I saw people who successfully follow this path - and they don’t get hung up on work in a single company, but often think about diagonal movement in positions between widely recognized brands, until they eventually occupy a leadership position. For example, after college, you start at Google, accept the Dropbox invitation to the team lead position, go to Yahoo as a manager, go back to Google, and so on.

People on the way to leadership positions should either think as venture investors and choose a company that will be successful over the next ten years, or constantly look around to find the best and best opportunities inside and outside their current company.

Hired employee (individual member / mid-level manager)


Benefits


  • Stable income / benefits / etc.
  • More work and less meetings.
  • Greater impact directly on users through their work
  • Thanks to the required skills, flexibility appears, where and how much you will work
  • Often more time to chat with friends and family

disadvantages


  • Productivity May Hinder Poor Management
  • Often there is no way to choose what to work on
  • Often there is no way to influence important decisions - even if you “know how best”
  • Hard to get rich
  • May be boring
  • If you don't have rare skills or productivity drops, it's easier to fire you.

Strategies for those who want to be an employee


The strategy for choosing a place of work is similar to the strategy of someone who follows the path of a leader. You need to either calculate and join a fast-growing company, or find a way to get into a well-known successful company. It is much easier to change jobs among well-known companies if you initially started with one. Also, in my experience, it is especially convenient for programmers to optimize such a career option.

I would like to say one last thing: it takes time to achieve mastery in each of the three roles. The idea that from 20 to 30 years old you need to look for yourself and a job that gives you the most pleasure is common among the guys in college. The problem is that if you need 5-10 years to achieve mastery, and you spent 10 years searching for yourself ... it will take a very long time before you achieve success in anything (and get the appropriate reward for this). This does not mean that you do not need to explore different options, but you need to understand the price of these studies and plan them accordingly.

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