This is LiftFM, where I share stories, interviews, and lessons from the trenches, building multiple billion dollar software products, and 40Xing my career and compensation along the way. Thanks for joining me. Today's discussion is about finding new limits and adopting new behaviors. So much of what we do in our lives, day to day, week to week, year to year, is limited, bounded. by what we think is reasonable or possible. Think about when you applied for your last job. You probably applied to a job that you thought you were qualified for. You probably prepared for the interview you thought they would put you through. You probably asked for the salary you thought was appropriate for the role. The problem is you're probably aiming far, far too low. There are two problems with the usual process for standard hiring. One is anchoring bias and the other is information asymmetry. And I'll, I'll touch on both of these and anchoring bias. The people on the other side of the table think that they have a pretty good picture of what they need and they have a pretty good sense of what they think that person is worth, who they're interviewing. And this is because when you're interviewing for sort of a standard role, you're just another in a bunch that look kind of like you. And on the subject of information asymmetry, because you're just another in a bunch, things like compensation are strongly tied to staying within some distance of the average. And only they know what the average is. And while sites like... Levels.FYI, which is a relatively new player in the space that gives an idea of sort of compensation and different bands for different companies. While they give great insights into the numbers, there are two problems with sites like this. One is that they're not always accurate. They can vary, you know, the numbers vary with the seasons, right? There are certain times when certain engineers are more in demand, certain times when others aren't. And you don't really get a sense of what's in demand right now. You just have this historical view. The others of the data is often incomplete. You're not often seeing the total compensation for people who are making the most, the people who are at the very top. That's partially because there are so few of them that they're afraid of being outed by posting. And so you may see, you know, a Fang engineer where there are L6 or L7 and they're making $500,000, $600,000,$900,000, but you're not seeing the ones who are making $1.5 million, $2 million or more. And so I think it's important that before you go through the job search process, or really before you even think about steps you can take to improve your prospects, you rethink what's possible. I personally know dozens of people in my professional network who make between $700,000 a year and $3 million a year. Some of them more, fewer of those, but That's a pretty wide range, but it's at the top. And when you think about who earns those incomes, it's usually people in one of three categories. One is it's specialists, people who are very good at what they do and what they do is sort of esoteric, or there's not very many people who do that. The other is publicly well-known leaders or people who are known in the community. And the third is just generalists who get shit done. even if they aren't specialists. And that first category, specialists, it's pretty rare, it's pretty small. Most specialists don't earn seven figures unless they're at the absolute top of their field. And there can only be so many people at the top of a given field, given area, given functional expertise. So I suggest not going after this unless you're already that good. That second category, the well-known people, People who have their name attached to something that's publicly well known. These could be core contributors to massively successful open source projects or people who have had a successful startup exit and maybe they're not coming in as a VP or something. There's, there's only two problems with this category though, as it pertains to you and your job search search. One is that You know, those people coming in from well-known open source projects, for instance, they don't actually usually make that much. They're not usually at this level that we're talking about. You know, for example, you, you could be a well-known core contributor, core contributor to a popular JavaScript library used by hundreds of thousands of people. But inside the company, you may only be sort of a mid-level IC5, someone who's career level, but not staff or not principal. And you may make$350 or $400,000 a year, but you're not making$2 million a year. And $400,000 is not bad money, but it's not the levels we're talking about here. And so they're not always the best example of people who are earning the most. They may be very talented. They may be at the top of their field in terms of skill. but they're not necessarily earning the most. They're not necessarily amongst that top 1% of earners. It's that third category of people that I think is worth focusing on. These people are often generalists and they're often not well known in industry, but they're known within the company for getting things done. And so what do they do? What do they do to command this crazy compensation? A better question might be, what are they known for? And you might ask, why is that a better question? That's because people who make the most money in a large company are often called in whenever there's either some huge opportunity that the company needs to capitalize on, or when everything is just totally broken, things are just off the rails and they need someone to come in and fix it. And these people have built a brand within their peer group. And sometimes that peer group is solely within the company, but often that peer group can span companies. And so you may have someone who's brought in a senior role and they're now filling out their ranks and they're thinking, who do I need on my team? And they're pulling this person in because they know them from a previous job. They've built this brand around these things. And so these are people, again, that you bring in when you have a gnarly situation. So you might ask yourself, well, what do I want to be known for? And again, that might be a very reasonable starting point, a starting question. But without more digging, if you just ask that question, what do I want to be known for? You might land on things that you think are important, but that others might not. So we should dig a little deeper. Should say, well, why should I want to be known for something at all? And the answer might be because it'll help me attract new opportunities. And then you might ask, well, why will it help me attract new opportunities? And the answer might be, well, because I will be top of mind when there's a situation that calls for this particular quality or set of qualities. And then you ask what kinds of situations are likely to be the most valuable command the most. it's going to be the ones with the greatest risks or opportunities. And then you might ask which qualities are the most valuable in situations with huge risks or opportunities. This is the key question. And the answer I think is it's those qualities or behaviors which help people cut through uncertainty, cut through disagreement and move people to action even in the face of huge amounts of ambiguity to achieve some specific outcome as determined by the business. And that's it. And then you can ask, well, what causes uncertainty, disagreement in action? And in large companies especially, I would say most of the time it's fear. It's fear of failure. It's fear of being embarrassed. It's fear of having your territory stripped away if you're political, right? So what do you notice about the last two answers here? They have nothing to do with what programming language you use. They have nothing to do with your ability to design a complex distributed system. You may need those things to be successful ultimately doing the job, but those are not the things that will, that will cause someone to say, ah, I need to bring in so-and-so most of the time. Instead it's something far softer. It's this people stuff. And no, this is why the example of a, again, of a well-known core contributor to some open source library is usually not in the top tier of earners. Cause while the industry may value contributions and they may value them in the way of like giving them recognition, typically these types of projects don't accrue any sort of disproportionate value or opportunity for the company. It can happen, but it usually has to be some investment that is strategically interesting or strategically supports some other primary company objective. For instance, you can think about Oracle investing in MySQL, an open source database, and maybe their multi cloud strategy. These are a way for them to tap into Amazon Web Services customer base and gradually start tugging them over to Oracle Cloud. And so in that situation, you could imagine a well-known open source contributor being highly paid. But these types of situations are incredibly rare. They require a level of focus and coordination that is just not common among large companies. And generally also, you know, software is intellectual property. And most intellectual property is highly guarded. And so most software that is released to the public is open source. Almost by definition, it's not valuable. And so again, while it's possible, you could in some cases be the technical experts who gets called in any situations. Most of the time it's these generalists who get shit done, who are highly valued. It's these folks who cut through uncertainty, cut through disagreement and move people to action to achieve some outcome and in large companies, the more senior you get, the more you're dealing with bigger. and bigger egos in the room. And they often have different incentives. These are VPs who are overseeing different departments, different incentives. And so they often have different agendas. And so you also need to cultivate behaviors that help people move toward an end, but in a way that's also very non-threatening. And why is this you might ask? Well, I think again, most people make decisions from a place of fear, fear of pain. This is a reg rarely physical pain. This is like, again, fear of embarrassment, fear of making the wrong decision, fear of being fired. And what most people are looking for in these large companies at all levels, but especially senior levels is someone who can make their fear of pain go away. And it's someone who has those qualities who often can do that. They can bring all these people together in a room and they can leave the room with a plan and they can make the plan real. But at the same time, even though you have to sort of appease these different priorities, you want to make sure you're not diluting the outcome in the process. And this is something that happens a lot in large companies. This consensus driven product development or consensus driven execution. And so that's your challenge is to come up with a set of personal behaviors or tools that helps you alleviate everyone's fears while also leading them to the successful outcome. And you know, in an ideal world, everyone in your organization has cultivated these same behaviors. It would certainly make your job easier if they did, although you may not make as much money if that were the case. And more frequently, they just won't do it. You can't always change that unless you're the one in charge. You can't always change culture. Essentially about culture, but what you can do is take personal responsibility and cultivate those behaviors within yourself. And as long as you don't work in an overtly toxic environment, cultivating those behaviors shouldn't work against you. Now, As a side note, I actually do have a lot to say about environment in a future discussion. I think the right environment can make or break your career, but I'll save that for again, a future discussion. So let's talk more about these principles or these behaviors. What might they look like? I think you need principles that orient you toward the right outcomes. You need principles that keep those outcomes at the front of your mind at all times in decision, large and small. You need principles that direct how you make decisions about which outcomes to pursue. You need principles that direct how you interact with people in everyday interactions. You need principles about how you structure, organize and execute work. You need principles that direct how you take an act on constructive feedback. And you need principles that direct how you adapt to change and unforeseen situations and together these principles form a system that guide your daily, weekly, monthly actions. And it's through that consistently, ultimately, that you build a professional brand that is too hard for people around you to ignore. They come to depend on it and they come to they come to associate those things with you. And so when they come across a situation that requires those things, they say, ah, I need to bring in so and so. And so that's your homework for this week. Think through some situations like this. Maybe you've been in them in the past. And think through what these behaviors might be, these principles might be. You know, if you've been thrown into a fire drill recently, who steps up and helps the group move forward? How did they arrive at the right outcomes to pursue? How did they get people moving in the same direction when there was disagreement? How did they make sure that people had a clear picture? of what they needed to do at all levels. How did they organize the people in the work? How did they make sure that things were tracking as planned over the many weeks or months that it took to actually get the thing done? How did they deal with unexpected new information or setbacks? Just spend 20 or 30 minutes thinking through these things and write some of them down. And over the coming weeks, we'll touch on some of these principles or behaviors, ones which I found tremendously valuable throughout my career. Ones that have helped me attract multi-million dollar compensation offers and build billion dollar products. Thanks for listening. This has been Lift FM.