alt Hacker NewsMy career in a nutshell:
- I picked a company that was less than 100 people and in business for at least 2 decades, and profitable these were my core parameters
- I worked like a dog first few years, specifically focusing on picking up everything no one else wanted. And in every shop there will be plenty of this
- I f'ed with the code that says DO NOT TOUCH THIS, NO ONE KNOWS, EVERYTHING WILL BREAK
- I intertwined myself with every part of the product (multi-million lines of code product)
Then:
- At 5th year anniversary I asked for 60% bump and yearly 15% raise moving forward, the owner did not think for more than a minute and agreed
- At 10th year I quit, started my own LLC and offered my services to the company at the same rate they were charging their customers for senior engineer rates (which was roughly 2x what my salary was - no problems)
I made more money that I can spend in 4 lifetimes just following these simple principles. I became virtually irreplaceable and henceforth could demand just about anything I wanted (within reason of course but that 'reason' is very high...)
I always find myself thinking why are so many people trying to get jobs at FAANG/Big Tech where there is a much simpler (and attainable) path that being one of the thousands and practically just a number.
Replies
SiliconValley Founders drank a lot of alcohol and talked about this exact thing, except that they wanted to kill every Oak Tree seedling in sight, whereas you grew your Oak Tree over a decade. Zero chance of this approach working near SiliconValley for the last 27 years IMHO
But GP wrote about being replaceable being good for your career - which doesn't make sense - and the opposite what you did, which does make sense.
About your career path - kudos to you, but my experience has been that willing to do the work nobody wanted/could resulted in receiving more of said work, but when it came to taking credit, people always came out of the woordwork, on the other hand I have had many negative interactions, like the guy who knew I was an expert at some sort of thing asked me to take on a bit of extra for his sake, and when I told him I already was doing the workload of 2 people. He then told me if that meant that I couldn't do it today, it would be fine as long as I did it tomorrow.