This is LiftFM, where I share stories, interviews, and lessons from the trenches building multiple billion dollar software products. These are insights that have helped me double my income every 2-3 years for the last 18 years. All in all, over 40xing my compensation at that time. Today's discussion is about cultivating an environment that supports your ambitions. And I'm trying a little bit of a different format today. It's still a new podcast. We're still finding our voice together. And all of the episodes at this point have been. Scripted top to bottom this time, we're going to freestyle a little bit and see how that goes. So I'm curious to see what you think. If you know me and you hear this, reach out to me in one of the usual ways and give me some feedback. So environment, so in the last couple episodes, I've, I've talked a lot about behavior and about, um, sort of personal values you have to take on to build a personal brand to help advance your career. And while I've mentioned environment a few times, I've basically said, let's talk about it in a future episode. So this is that future episode. Why is environment important when you're considering your career? Um, there's multiple elements of environment. First of all, there's sort of the physical space around you. There's your schedule as it pertains to when you work, when you have time with family, when you get your personal stuff done, there's the city you're in. There's this company you're in. There's the team you're in, the manager you have. These are all different elements of environment and they all have an impact on your. career advancement, on your amount of interest that you have in your job day to day, on your earning potential, on your productivity, and on your feelings of well-being, especially with respect to family. And so when you're thinking about sort of optimizing your career, taking it to the next step, it's very important to consider environment. And I think we sometimes forget that we have more control over our environment than we think. Environment is almost like any other behavior where you can change it by thinking about what you want the end state to be. And then taking actions to... to move it toward that state. Now it's a little bit more disruptive, especially if you have family or you have kids. It takes a longer time in some cases because there's more prep required to make change. And certainly it's a little bit less predictable because there are some factors that are outside of your control. In fact, environment is almost by definition, the things that are outside of your control, it's the things that are around you. But you can still move yourself from one sort of low opportunity environment to a higher opportunity environment and do so with relative confidence. If you keep the outcomes you want in mind. So this whole process, for instance, could take three to nine months. It could take, it could take months. You could decide, okay, I make $120,000 a year. I live in the Midwest and, you know, I make enough money to be comfortable, but I don't make enough to save. I don't make enough to, to invest meaningfully. You know, maybe I want to do a startup next and I'm trying to save up enough money to do that, or trying to build a network to do that. And you could consider, well, what if I moved to one of these maybe higher cost of living areas, but areas where also the compensation is much higher. And so if you, you know, if you go to, like I said, a site like levels at FYI, I think I mentioned them in the last discussion, that'll give you a pretty good picture of what's available in different cities. So as an example, you know, in Chicago, the sort of average salary for a software 130 a year. That's not bad money, especially for the Midwest. But that same person with the same aptitude, same skills could go over to Microsoft in Redmond and they could make 235, 240 a year, even in this sort of economic climate today. So that's like almost a 2X of their salary, right? That's gonna be broken down a little differently. It's probably gonna be like 170, 175 base, and then the rest would be some combination of bonus and stock, but it's pretty consistent year to year. Most of these large tech companies, they're pretty good about creating a compensation plan that gradually ramps your income. year over year or at least prevents it from going down. Now there are other benefits too, to moving to a company like Microsoft, right? Coming from a sort of no, no name SaaS in the Midwest and going to Seattle and living, you know, working at Microsoft, Microsoft would, um, pay for your relocation, they'd pay for temporary housing, where you found a place to rent or to buy if you were buying that help with closing costs for your house. I believe. Um, Microsoft is one of the many tech companies that has stipends for fitness. So once you're there, you know, they pay for your gym. Sometimes they'll pay for your trainer. They have discretionary time off policy, which means you can take as much time off as you need without having to sort of store it up. If you're a parent or going to become a parent, they have a very generous paternity leave program. I think it's 12 weeks for, for dads and 20 weeks for moms. And, um, And when you need childcare, if you need childcare, they have an emergency backup program for emergency backup childcare. So these companies tend to take care of their employees because you know how hard it is to attract them in the first place and how expensive it is to replace them. So you don't only get that increase in sort of compensation, but you get an increase in the overall benefit value in these larger companies, which can have a positive impact on your life. Then there's like the environmental factors moving from Chicago to Seattle. You know, if you've been, if you've been gaining five pounds a year for the past seven years, you're up 40 pounds because the winters are so brutal and you gain 15 pounds every winter and only lose 10 every summer. Well, maybe you should move somewhere where you don't have a winter. So a place like Seattle doesn't have snow in the winter. It has rain, but it's, it's very, it's very nice to live in Seattle. Most of the year. It gets a little gray. but you're not dealing with freezing temperatures in the winter, and you're not dealing with spaltering heat necessarily in the summer, except for maybe a week. So it's a pretty ideal place from a climate perspective as well. So these all have a huge impact on your career again, your compensation, and your sort of daily happiness. There's also the upside, future upside. which is, once you're in Seattle, or an area like it, in Bay Area or Austin, or any of these areas that have lots of tech companies vying for the same talent, you're in a higher opportunity environment. And by that I mean, these are areas that consistently have more investment in people. And again, they're all competing for the same small set of people. And so once you've worked for one of them, it's very easy to get into the other ones. This happened to me, you know, before I moved to Seattle myself from Montana, I was, I was moving around the country and I was working for smaller companies and startups for five years and these larger companies like Google at the time, um, would not pay me the time of day. Like I would apply and I would get no response. And my first job was one that I almost looked into working at, at Amazon. And after just two years at Amazon. Suddenly all the other companies started responding to job applications because you have the right resume now. And so if you can crack into one of these and spend a few years there, you only have more opportunity for the most part. Microsoft has a pretty good soft landing if you can get into there, I think, because they are a pretty well-established company. They have a large number of different levels that you can be hired into. So even if you don't sort of... You know, even if you have like seven years of experience working in industry and not for one of these tech companies, you could slot in at sort of a mid to low, mid level role at Microsoft, put in a few years there and then hop out to an Amazon or a Facebook or a Google. And once you have that Microsoft on your, on your resume, you know, they, they know that you've sort of cleared some bar, some industry bar that, that sort of seems to block these top tier tech companies. Other companies are a little bit less welcoming to industry hires. I think Google is one of those, like I said, where even if you have 10, 15 years of experience in industry, if you don't have 10, 15 years of experience at. A tech company, a well-known tech company, they won't consider it 10, 15 years of experience. And so they may think that you're sort of too late to bring you in, even at a more junior role. I knew several people who came in. We had 10, 15 years of experience. outside of Amazon and when they joined Amazon, they joined as SDE2s at the highest. These are folks who would have been, you know, mid to late career out, out in the world, but because they came in to Amazon without experience at Google or Microsoft, they put them at SDE2. And for context, SDE2, like you can get to SDE2 in five years as a fresh, fresh college grad, even sooner, if you're good. and you several of you got in there two or three years. So there is a little bit of a club you have to get into, but after that it becomes much easier. So finding the right one to get into first can mean all the difference. So, you know, this may seem sort of facile, like this may seem sort of too easy or too simple where it's like, oh, if you don't like your environments, just pick a new environment. I think it actually is that easy. It takes intention. It's not necessarily, um, I'll say this. It's simple, but it may not be easy. The steps are not complicated, but they're very easy to do. It's just emotionally difficult sometimes to do them. If you're living in the Midwest, maybe you're there because you have family there or you went to school out there or, you know, your friends are out there. Like it can be difficult to make the decision to uproot your life and move across the country. It seems these days people do that less and less, especially given the ability to work remotely. But these tech companies, these large ones, are not necessarily remote friendly. They're actually still going to be, I think, going forward. They're still gonna want to have people in office locally. And so, you know, I think if you do wanna have a step order change in your compensation, you should be willing to consider this lever as one to pull. And it'll take intention. Like I said, it can take, the whole process can take three to nine months to find the right plate, to find the right companies you might wanna work for, to prepare for the interviews, to go through the interview process with multiple companies because you wanna cultivate multiple offers, to pick one, to move. It can take three to nine months end to end. But the result again can be two extra compensation in that time. There are a few things you can do in such a short amount of time that will have such a drastic effect on your compensation if that's what you're optimizing for. You know, for context, we've sort of been talking through this mid-level example where it's a person making a $120 a year in Chicago and they go to Seattle for $235 a year. If you're a senior and you make $235 in Chicago and you can, and you are able to get into one of these tech companies at a more and more senior level, you could go from $235 in Chicago to $600 a year in Seattle. So it can be a sizable jump, but it requires you take action. It requires you look with intention. It requires you work backward, you know, from, from the outcome you want to achieve that you plan forward, what are the steps you need to take to prepare for that? That you execute those steps and that you make it happen. So this has been LiftFM.