This is Lyft FM, where I share stories, interviews, and lessons from the trenches building multiple billion dollar software products, 40Xing my career and compensation along the way. Thanks for joining me. So over the past few weeks, we've talked about a number of things. We've talked about finding new limits in behaviors, working backwards from outcomes, specifically customer outcomes, but also other outcomes, and cultivating an environment to help you be successful. And today, I'd like to just provide a full overview of all the factors that I think have the most impact on your tech career. And I'm calling this my 25 factor framework. First, I want to share a short story about how I found these. So I started my career in tech as a freelancer. In my first seven years, I really didn't have a plan. I didn't. didn't have an approach, just sort of went with the flow. And it wasn't until I think the winter of 2012 that I had a moment of clarity that sort of pushed me to start looking at things more intentionally. And around this time, this is when I was living in the Philippines, actually. Um, I had just moved there and had intended to stay there for a couple of years. And I had a personal event that caused me to really sort of look at all the different dimensions of my life and pick a few to start focusing on. And I did a full inventory from at the time. And, you know, there were, the goal was to basically find blind spots that I had been ignoring before then. And so I started, you know, after sitting down and writing them all down, tackling them one by one, and I started in both sort of personal health and professional health. So on the personal health front, in the following couple of years after this event, I had lost a bunch of weight. I had quit smoking. I had started running and started lifting. On the professional side is when I started really writing things down a lot. I carried a notebook around with me from where I went and I used it every day to, you know, wanted to keep track of work, but also note things throughout the day. different ideas I had, thoughts I came across, observations that I made about other people. And over time I started to pick specific areas to improve and then emulate those people. I had a lot of these notes that I would write down about this process. And over the next 18 months or so after I started doing that, I had pretty good initial progress. It was around that time that I sort of moved from making about 135, 140,000 a year. to just over $200,000 a year. But it really took me a while to figure out all the other different levers I could be pulling. And it wasn't until I think maybe 2016 or so that I really felt like I had cracked the code. And when I did this is when I went from again, just over $200,000 a year to $300,$450, $300, oh sorry, $450, $600. over the following two to three years. And that pace has continued ever since. And so if you're listening to this and you've started down the first steps of actively developing your career, my hope is that you can follow some of the steps that I took and maybe skip some steps that took me a while to get to. And so this framework, this 25 factor framework again is. is really just to be, it's meant to be sort of a landscape of all the different things that you maybe don't consider day to day. But once you know about them, once you think about them intentionally, you can decide how important they are or are not and put some energy into fixing them. And so for each factor, I'm gonna break down what I think it is, how it impacts your career, how important I think it is sort of on a one to five scale, how much direct control you have over improving it, again, on a one to five scale. And then, also give a gut measure of where I think sort of the, you know, top 50% and top 10% of people are in terms of, um, development on, for that factor. And again, that'll be a one to five skill. And so this starts to give you a picture of, of the competitive landscape. And so you can decide where to invest your energy based on that combination of, of difficulty control and competition. Let's get started. There's 25 of these, I'll try to go pretty quick. So I don't wanna go on forever. But the first factor is what I'm calling tech anti-affinity. And it's sort of the opposite of specialization. I think you talked about this in a previous discussion where you can do very well being a specialist, but a lot of the time success comes from being highly effective as a generalist. especially in large companies. And so I think less specialization actually widens your selection set as long as you're able to supplement it with a bunch of those other skills. So in the context of this approach, I give that an importance of four out of five. And I think a five out of five on control, you can actually, something you can work on actively through research, through books, through reading, through practice. I think the top 50% of people the median, right? I think they have a skill rating of two out of five and I think the top 10% have a skill rating of five out of five. And so this is where, um, this is one of those things where I think most people in tech, the majority of people in tech are not especially strong at approaching generalism as a strategy. And so you may have like tech who cut across like the full stack of development, et cetera, but not necessarily at the career level of what does it take to be successful as a career generalist, right? So you can improve this pretty quickly. And I think as soon as you do, you end up actually improving faster than your peers because most technologists tend to specialize over time. And sort of they find the thing they enjoy and they go deeper on it and they get comfortable in it. And so it's very easy to... become better than your peers if you approach it generally at being a generalist. If you push it intentionally, excuse me, I'd be addressed. So, um, the next factor we've talked about this a little bit in the context of the environment conversation is geography. So, um, the geography where you live, uh, has a huge impact because like we talked about, um, a lot of the tech companies break their own compensation bands into tiers based on high cost of living, low cost of living areas, and there are only a few areas that have a high concentration of tech companies that. I also have a lot of competition for software engineers. And so those are like the Seattle area, it's the Bay area, it's New York recently, it's Austin. You have other areas that are like sort of tier two or where you may have, you may still have, you know, Uber is in San Francisco, but they also had an Atlanta office for a long time. I think it's still open. You may have situations like that, or like Oracle is in the Bay area, but they also have offices all over the States. And so... that may help bring up the average in those sort of tier two, tier three cities where, um, uh, relative to if you only have local competition in those cities, but for the most part, it's these, these tier one cities that have the highest pay. And again, that I think as a, one of the highest, um, one of them, it's one of the most important factors in determining compensation is because of this banding that most companies do in the competition. You also have a lot of control over this. So I call it a five, both of these five and a five. Um, but even though you have control, Like I said in the previous episode this may not always be easy for you if you have attachments to your current city or town or whatever On the on the top 50, you know 50% of people do they take this into account? I'm gonna say no only because You know if you look at by the numbers, you know if you look at the or the focuses in the media, obviously everyone thinks all the tech people are in the Bay Area and the Seattle and Austin, but by the numbers, I think you'd find that's not the case. I think you'd find like the median developer does not move to take a tech job in a specific city. And so I say they're a one. However, I think the top 10% of engineers definitely, definitely do move to take a job somewhere else. So that's a five. Next factor, company. So again, this is just, you know, there are certain companies that prefer to play in the in the top tier, like by choice. In other words, they don't. And this is not necessarily correlate with the same tiering as the geography tier. So for instance, in the Seattle area, you know, you have Facebook, you have Microsoft, you have Amazon, you have Google. However, even though all of those are considered like top tech companies, Microsoft for instance, does not play the top of the band competition game when it comes to hiring people. So they will very intentionally not compete against Facebook and Microsoft, or sorry, Facebook and Google for top talent. And they do this for many reasons. I think that the largest is that they focus much more on long-term development of. employees and so they hire people straight out of college and they tend to keep them around a lot longer and then they also just don't want to get into that bidding war game with these other companies and so different companies have different strategies for how they hire. This can also even vary within a company so like oracle for instance you know 10 years ago did not play this game however from the period of like 2014 to 2019 they played this game a lot and they actually brought up a lot of the average comp for people in the Seattle area, because they were hiring heavily in Seattle. So that's a huge one. Once again, I think these are both five out of five for importance and control. I think just like geography, moving companies is pretty disruptive and I think you'd find them by the numbers at the 50th percentile, most people do not move companies to chase higher compensation or to develop their career. They kind of just enter a place and they hang out there. However, once again, top 10%. Absolutely. In fact, that's like one of the things they're known for is people kind of float around The most well-known companies and they you know, they hop every when they're junior they'll hop every two to three years when they're more senior They'll hop every five to seven years or so It's much more common to move at that top tier X-Factor, EngCulture. So engineering culture. This is really the how much a company values engineers and do they think of engineers as a cost center or as a profit center and This is this is really I think unique to technology companies not like not like companies that have technology positions but actually technology companies that they actually view Engineers as an asset because engineers develop products alongside other product people and those products are assets and so just at the macro level. That may not be true at sort of the per product level, like individual products, maybe loss leaders or maybe profit centers, but in terms of posture of how they treat engineers, it's technology companies that primarily will more highly value engineers. And this is pretty obvious when you look at salaries of a programmer at a bank versus salaries of a programmer at a tech company. Like they may have the same skills, but their compensations are vastly different because they value different things at these two companies. And so, once again, I think it's important from maybe a three out of five, because I think you can have, how will I say this? You can be successful in a company that, for instance, values product people over engineering, but it's ideal if it valued both, for instance. On the control side, I think it's a one out of five. I think... You know, you can control it by moving companies. Yes. But like once you're in a company, it's actually very hard to change a company's perception of how they view a whole class of people, um, whole family of jobs. And so really your only lever to move this is unless you are, um, somehow a very senior leader in that company is by moving companies. Um, I'd say again, TP 50 is probably, um, one, I think most, most engineers um don't really think about culture or they don't think about something you can improve. Uh TP90 the top 10 percentile I'd say like that's a four um and so again I think it's you know most top engineers find themselves in companies that value engineering that's just that's maybe some sort of tautological but that's just how it is. Next factor reporting structure so this is sort of where you report in the organization both from a maybe profit and cost center perspective, but also from a we're in the hierarchy perspective. So, you know, further up the chain, further down the chain. Sometimes the org chart tells the whole story, often it doesn't. So, you know, you may be high up, but if you're in the cost center part of the company, again, maybe not compensated as more as valuably or seen as valuable as in the profit center of the company. You can see this even in tech companies, again, we're like... If you were in the part of the company that generates all the cash, they may be more open to fast acceleration of your career, extraordinary compensation, et cetera. From a control perspective, I give us a three from an importance. I'd give this a two. I rated these a little bit lower, especially the importance factor. Cause even though it is important. It's mostly actually dominated by the other factors. So like your bench culture and the company culture more than its reporting structure That's different than then who your manager is which actually covers a separate thing So this is more like again. Are you in? Are you in the product line that develops foo or the product line that develops bar? Well, if they're both in a company that values engineering and that values product It's probably Not as important of a factor relative to the factors Control, again, you have some control, but limited control. And this is mostly like, are you able to switch teams? Are you able to work on different products? Again, most of your control here comes from moving companies. So there's not much you can do directly. TP50, let's give it again, give it a three out of five. The TP90, four out of five. And as much as it is important, I find that the tech, the top people do tend to gravitate toward the top areas. And so that's why I said there's a, you know, that's a, it's a four for the TP 90. So by way of example, you know, if you're in, if you are in AWS, Amazon, right, and you are trying to be a top, top of your field for any particular specialty, or even just be top of the company, you go look for the orgs that have the highest growth or have the leaders with the most influence and that kind of stuff. And you tend to hang out there for a long time. And so that's why you'll find people who like, this is more for specialists, but it's true of generalists too, especially management. This is why you'll find people who like, you know, during the last 10 years, they were really into, um, you know, like the database orgs had a lot of attention because there was a lot of competition happening in the market for, um, uh, database products, because those tend to be very sticky within the infrastructure space. And so you'd find a lot of top technologists working in, in databases and data stores and caches and that kind of stuff. More recently, it's the machine learning stuff So and those tend to be consolidated under strong leaders Like an Amazon, I think that the leader that used to lead the database products now leads the AI products for instance Next factor, hidden power structures. So this is again, this is where sometimes the Orchard doesn't tell the whole story and different than reporting structure, the hidden power structures are way more important. So I give this a 5 out of 5 on importance and a 4 out of 5 on control. You have a little bit more control than you do in the explicit reporting structure just because it's hidden. It's not like something that's codified by HR and it's very hard to move around. It's more like you have to go search for it. And so, um, what's a good example of a hidden power structure. So you, you may find, you know, you get into a company and there's what's on the org chart, as in like, um, who your manager is, who their manager is, what they're ostensibly responsible for, and then there's, there's which orgs actually. tend to get stuff done and as a result tend to have more leeway or tend to be able to hire more people and this is not always obvious in the reporting chain but it is obvious in how the teams deliver and so it's the hidden power structures tend to be a result of other factors in this in this list but I call them hidden just because I think it's something you have to go kind of sniffing out for and so this goes back to that example again of like the of the you know very effective org leader who happens to keep getting more and more scope under them, right? Like there's a hidden power structure there where the power structure leads the reporting structure by some number of months or years And if you can find those things you can you can find ways to align your work or go look for opportunities in that person's sphere This tends to happen a lot more in more political organizations, which is also where it's more important For the TP 50 I rated this a 2 out of 5. I don't think a lot of people think about this stuff very intentionally and for the TP10 I rated a five out of five. I think that the people who are most, at least financially successful and career successful in companies do tend to think about this stuff a lot more. So next factor, your manager, this is, you know, your manager is your biggest advocate for promotions and raises and that kind of stuff. Your manager sets the tone for the rest of the career. You're all there also. They're the channel through which your progress has communicated often with the rest of the org. And so if you have a crappy manager, even if you do good work, it may not matter. And so I gave this a five out of five for importance and a four out of five for control. The control here really can only come through if your company does have a transfer policy or if you have the ability to move teams, sorry, move companies, is another way to move teams, right? So ideally you can just move teams in the company. I guess it's kind of variable. I said four out of five, but it's more common in tech companies. You can move teams after a year or whatever. If you're in a non-tech company, your control may be lower, and you may actually have to move companies to find a different manager. TP50, three out of five on this. I think most people realize how important a good manager is. For the TP90, the top 10%, I give it a five out of five. I think the difference here is gonna be how did they view their manager and how do they use their manager? And so I think the TP50 realize the importance of a good manager, but maybe don't really know what a good manager is. And I think the TP50 or the TP90 actually do know what a good manager is for them. And by for them, I mean, a lot of it depends on your working style. And so if you're the kind of person who like, really loves to go wide and like go chase problems and not have a lot of structure, your manager has to be pretty supportive of that and you will have realized that and you'll have found out that type of manager. And so that's why I give it a five out of five for the top 10%. For next factor, I call this direct impact. This is actually the stuff you do. This is, or the stuff you have traditionally done. This is like what most people think of as the work, like the actual work of like writing the code or designing the thing or building the thing. And somewhat counter-intuitively, I would say that this is actually a three out of five on importance. I think that at the end of the day, as a company, yes, like if you, if nobody does things, the company will fail as an individual over the arc of your career, given that you're, you know, these circles are small. Yes, you have to do things. It's not like a one, but I think relative to the other factors in your overall, especially for the financial element of your career, it's not the most important thing. You can be sort of an average to just above average person doing average to just above average. quality work, but if it's really like, are you choosing the right things to do? Are you communicating them well? Do people know about it? And that will actually have a larger impact on your career and compensation than the work itself. And this, this goes back to that story about like contributing to open source, for example, like that could have a huge, um, a huge impact to the industry. Um, this is the actual work you're doing every day, but if the business doesn't value it, then it kind of doesn't matter. So on the important scale, or sorry, on the skill scale, again, I would say that like the TP50, probably here, I think I got the scale backwards for this one. I already did this a five for some reason. I think I meant to be a one, one and a five, and then on the opposite side, a three or four and a five. We'll see, I may have to go back and. Rethink how I scored that one. Execution, this is your ability to get complex projects done. And this is a little bit different than the one above, the stuff you do, or the direct impact one. Although I guess in hindsight, maybe it shouldn't be. We'll have to revisit these two. I actually, I think about this more as like, how quickly can you wrangle chaos? And then the one above is how quickly can you do the thing that... you know, gets the project done. And so this one actually I think is importance five, control five. And this goes back to that previous discussion we had in a different podcast where you said most people at the top of the compensation bands like they're hired to basically step in and get shit done, right? Whether it's like tackling a brand new ambiguous opportunity or if it's fixing an off the rails project. And so I think the TP 50 for this is two, I think two out of five, most engineers do not do well with chaos and uncertainty, but the TP 90 is a five out of five. The top 10% absolutely do thrive doing this type of stuff. And a lot of this comes from understanding how people work and how to structure projects and how to break down projects and how to like install the right accountability mechanisms and incentives. and then the ability to like track it on the right cadence so that you understand if things are going off track or on track, knowing when to escalate, knowing how to escalate. This is all that stuff. And the best engineers I know could be just perfectly average like developers, but if they have this ability, that scales their ability, that scales their overall impact because they're not, it's not just them, it's that scaled impact. It's like direct impact versus indirect impact. I think that was the distinction I made on the last one. Oh! And that's why I rated the last one a one, the direct impact does a one, because most people at the most senior levels actually, if they're generalists, they actually get most of their impact through others. So it's indirect impact or execution. It's all coming into place now. Yeah. Next factor, strategy. So this is, strategy means lots of things to lots of people, but to me strategy is your ability to sort of cut a path through a tricky situation. So it's not just like figuring out the goal, but it's actually figuring out all the steps between here and there and this can be related execution I think the best you actually don't have good strategy if you can't figure out execution But this could be you know coming up with their ideal path given Market conditions given political situations giving given sort of product constraints given Staffing constraints. It's really that ability to cut a believable executable path And not get stuck on stuff, right? So you're There's a coherent set of actions that you're taking that all ladder toward an end, and there's flexibility through the execution because of this sort of coherent policy that drives you toward the end. I give that a four out of five on importance. So less than execution, but still important. Five out of five on control. I think you can learn this mostly through research that you're doing. I think TP50 for engineers is a one. I think most people do not know how to do this. Most people... are very good at figuring out what the end state needs to be, but not how to go from here to there, how to create policy that drives you there. But for the top 10%, the TP90, I think they absolutely know how to do it. So there are five out of five for strategy. X-factor communication. This is the ability to focus on the core message and to communicate it in a way that is heard and acted on. And so it's not about like simple versus complex, although simple tends to be better. It's not about slides versus PowerPoint or docs or the docs tend to be better depending on the culture. It's really about the adaptability of your communication. And so you may know what the right thing to do is, but if you can't frame it up in a way that people hear it and act on it, you're failing. I think this again is five out of five in importance right up there the execution. I think you can't execute if you can't communicate. It's a five out of five in control. You can learn this stuff. There are a lot of great books on how to communicate in different situations. Communicate up, communicate down, left and right, across the org. TP50 is a two out of five. I think most engineers can communicate very well on a very tightly scoped set of things, mostly technical things. But the best are five out of five. So the TP90 is five out of five. The best engineers can boil stuff down and it can be understood by most people. And this is what kind of makes them powerful is they can act as a bridge between worlds a lot of the time. So hugely important. And the best engineers exhibit the skill. On the flip side, listening, this is the next factor. This is the ability to listen to understand someone else's problems among other things, right? And so this kind of goes along with um, strategy and communication. The way you will learn how to cut through noise, the way you will learn how to structure things, the way you will learn what the biggest problem of the org is, is by listening. And so, um, I actually find that when I, when I go into a new role, I spend the first 30, sometimes up to 60 days, just doing a tour of, of the whole organization, putting together a sort of a mind map of what, you know, who they are, what they're, what they see as the biggest challenges. and where we're doing well, where we're not, and then further getting a list of people who they think I should talk to about what they just told me about, right? And so it's sort of a consultative method of mapping out inorgs perceived problems. And once you have that whole picture that, each of them has a little slice of it, once you have that whole picture, then you can start to come up with strategic solutions and also start to come up with strategies to communicate that in ways that each of those individual people hear it, understand it, will act on it. And so I think it's hugely important, especially in the most senior roles, especially if you want to solve big problems for organizations. So it's a five out of five on both control and importance. I think again, for most engineers, TP 50, the median, they are not good at this outside of their very narrow scope of technical problems. So I give the TP 50 of one out of five. And then again, the TP 90 is a five out of five. This is one of the biggest areas where if you can improve this as an engineer, along with communication, I think you'll bolster your career in ways you wouldn't believe. Related to this, next factor persuasion. This is the ability to use your understanding of someone's problem to convince them to support you, especially in engineering. So going back to the previous one, listening, like once you understand everyone's individual problems, it's way easier to convince them to do anything, right? Cause you can actually connect your stuff to their work. You can see, explain to something, explain something to them in a way that they understand and benefits them. And so I gave this again, a five out of five on a on importance on control, I gave this a four and a five only because there is only so much you can do to connect things like sometimes a person's problem is very is very distantly connected to the problem you're trying to push and so from a skills perspective there's a lot you can do but from a sort of environment situation perspective it's not always it's not always applicable once again I think on the engineering front TP-50 is a one out of five and TP-90 is a five out of five. The best can do this very well. The next factor, I call this local org pain. So this is the presence of some large pain that hasn't been solved successfully, even after a long period or after multiple attempts. And so this is kind of the chaos as a ladder theory where like, if you are in an org where everything feels like everything's hunky dory, it's actually very hard to advance because most people are looking for solutions to problems and they're most willing to expedite. things like careers if they believe that you can solve their problem. And so I gave this a 4 out of 5 on the importance scale and a 2 out of 5 on control. So I gave it a 4 out of 5 on importance because I think you can advance without local org pain if there's some larger org pain or if there's some larger strategy that's well understood. And so it's not all important, but it is quite important because if a company has communicated a strategy well, then there will be gaps in the org. Maybe they may not be understood, but they should be there. And so most of the time, this is sort of a leading indicator for does the company actually have a coherent strategy that's causing a gap, like a strategy that's different relative to where they are. And so that's where the pain's coming from. Or if something's just off the rails. So there's probably very few situations where, where you're not in some kind of, the org's not in some kind of pain, whether it's skills or people or project or whatever. On the control knob, you actually have less control here unless it's indirectly through, again, persuasion and listening and that kind of stuff. This is very situational to the company. And so, you know, it's really gonna come down to like, does the CEO believe that there's a large push that needs to happen? Or does the market believe there's a large push that needs to happen? Or does some senior executive think there's a large push? And you have a lot, you have very little control over this unless you are very, very persuasive and very good at listening and very good at strategy. TP 50, two out of five. TP 90, five out of five. I think most people don't, the highest paid people go find local org pain. It's kind of what that comes down to because they know it's an opportunity for them. Next factor, ideation and analysis. This is your ability to approach problems from new angles to find innovative solutions. I give us a four out of five on importance, five out of five on control. I think that, again, if you're in the above situation, local or pain, if something has gone on through multiple attempts and they have not been successful, then the thing that will get you through that, if it's not an execution problem, is probably some sort of innovation problem, right? I had this happen at Facebook where There were multiple teams trying to accomplish a thing and no one could figure it out. I mean, they could figure out pieces of it, but they weren't really thinking of it holistically. And I was able to come in and present sort of a holistic solution. And I got a lot of people on board. And then that turned into a whole billion dollar thing of its own. So I think it's a pretty important factor. It's not the only factor. So it's four out of five, but it's pretty important. TP50, two out of five, TP90. Five out of five, I think the best are very good at this and the average is not. That's what it comes down to. This one is a little bit contentious, physical appearance. I think how people perceive you in the first five minutes very strongly informs their overall opinion of you and your abilities, at least until they get to know you better, which colors everything they hear from you. And so if you present in a way that seems very negative, if you present, you know, if they perceive you as being you know, whatever physical qualities they perceive as lazy or as, um, uh, you know, lacking intelligence like that is obviously going to work against you. And this is what happened to me for the first seven years of my career is that I was, you know, grossly overweight and were terrible clothing and, you know, didn't make an effort to, to present well. And I had a really hard time with my career as a result until I fixed it. And then everything got really easy. So I give us a four out of five on importance. I think. It's not everything, but it's hugely important. It makes everything way easier. And a five out of five on control. I think people have a lot more control over this than they realize. Like you don't have to be a, you know, super athlete or anything, but you can walk, you can lose pounds, you can put some attention to your clothing, you can like get a haircut and a shave and you can do these things and it's not impossible to do. I think this is a little bit different for men and women. I think that like the bar is just inherently higher for women. And so maybe that has a lot less, um, importance only because everyone has already like sort of dressed to the nines. If you're in one, I think for guys though, um, I think there's a lot, lot you can do to improve this. And so this may be my rating here is a little bit skewed because I am a man, but I gave it a five out of five in control. And then again, TP 52, maybe even a one. I think most engineers, especially don't put a lot of thought into their appearance. And that's changed the last five, 10 years as like the whole tech bro thing has gotten to be more of a thing outside of the Valley. But I still think across the country, so to speak, most people don't care about this and they could and they should if they want to be recognized. And so TP90 once again, five out of five, I've had very, very few encounters with people who are like making multiple millions a year whether or not. aware of their appearance. And that's because once you're at the top, you tend to be included in executive discussions, you know, talking to customers, these types of things. And so you just simply won't find yourself in those rooms if you don't look like you should be in those rooms, so to speak. So five out of five importance for, or sorry, rating for the TP-90. Presence, this one's a little bit hard to describe. Maybe call it executive presence. So this is how you present to your org to your leadership to your peers outside people This is kind of a combination of confidence cadence tone content Maybe this shouldn't be broken out as its own factor But it is sort of its own thing like there are books on just executive presence that you can read and I think actually think this just tends to Have a pretty huge impact kind of like physical appearance is sort of like the non-physical parts. Although they're interrelated So I gave this a five out of five for both importance and control. Once again, one out of five for the TP-50, most engineers have very little presence outside of engineering circles. And a four out of five for the TP-90. I think the best engineers tend to, but don't always have a good presence with leadership. If they don't, if they have any gaps here, they tend to be very good at something else, like analysis or strategy or something. And so... Um, you know, you can make up for this if you don't have it, but if you do have it, it only adds to, um, sort of your aura. Next factor, independence. This is your ability to make decisions without sort of undue outside influence. This is like from family, from such, or this really just self-belief. That's what you might go call this. So. So I believe I give that a five out of five for both importance and control. I think that, um, If you don't have self-belief, you don't have a lot of the confidence to do all the other things. And so it's hugely important. Uh, two out of five for the TP 50, most engineers outside of the engineering competence, they're not, they don't have a lot of self-belief, I think. Um, and then five out of five for the TP 90 top 10%, they definitely have very strongly aware of what needs to be done. And then even if it's not popular or even if it's, you know, not well understood, like they'll push it. And I think actually. You know, the best ideas are not the ones that everyone agrees are the best ideas. The best ideas are the ones where everyone disagrees initially, and you actually have to put in a lot of work to convince them of something. And I think to do that, you have to be an independent sort of self-driving individual. Next factor, your level or years of experience. This is like kind of a poor proxy for skills. I don't personally believe this should be a factor, but it is a factor. And so this matters a lot more in large companies and in various senior roles when you're sort of be considered as a hire externally. Excuse me. You know, they'll tend to look for years of experience and they'll say like, oh, is this person quality or looking for a VP or whatever. If they see you looking for a VP and they see you only have three years of experience. probably not going to hire you or even consider you. And so there's definitely is a factor. It matters a lot less in two situations. One, where you come up within an organization, like this is a situation where you can be a VP when you're very young, if you've sort of done the rise within the org. And then two, if there's, you know, if you have an Margalitarian company, or at least one that pretends to be where, you know, they do value impact and they promote based on competence. It tends to be less important So I said I gave us a three out of five on importance only because most companies are not that type of company And I give us a one out of five on control because there's not much you can do about the years of experience You have except for what to wait Yeah TP 50 five out of five. I don't know how to rate this I just said that most people tend to think about most people's years of experience tend to correlate with um, their job. And so that's what that means really is like, if you, if you're the average engineer, your seniority by compensation lines up perfectly with your seniority by, by year, whereas if you're a top 10%, the correlation is quite low, I think. And so this is where you get the, the wonder kind very young executive or that you get the wonder kind, very young senior engineer. Um, and that's why that, that's a two out of five for the top 10%. where you like, I know a person at Facebook who, you know, he's younger than I am by five years and he was more senior than I was when I was there, right? And that's because he, you know, got there when he was young, he rose in the ranks, very smart, company valued, impact. And so his compensation does not correlate in any year in any way with his years of experience. Let's see, next factor, simplification. So this is kind of related to communication, although I think you can do one without the other. This is really the ability to distill problems down to their core elements. This helps with a lot of other things in this table. You're not seeing it as a table, you're seeing it as spoken. But so, and I think that's simplification, ability to distill things down to core problems, core elements, first principles, helps you think about problems in new ways. And so if you're not, if you're just tackling sort of the surface of the problem, and then you're trying to map it on to other problems you've encountered, that kind of stuff, it's not always a good thing. Like you may get to an answer quickly, but you may not actually be finding the key things that you could be moving to solve a problem in a better way. And so this is a thinking game, I think. It's really, for me, it's about just deconstruction, and then what is the simplest version of that deconstruction? I gave this a five out of five for both importance and control. You can learn how to do this. If you're an engineer, you already do this within a very narrow set of problems. I think you can just do this in more areas of your career. TP 50 two out of five. Most engineers don't do this out of the technical, technical domain. And then TP 90 five out of five. Most of the top ones do, they can communicate simply. They can break down a problem to the core elements. They do know exactly what levers need to be pulled to have the impact that they want. Next factor, confidence. Again, maybe there's some overlap with other factors, but I call this the ability to promote yourself and your ideas without strong external validation. So this is sort of the peer to the independence one where the independence is about can I act without external validation? Confidence is can I promote myself without external validation in a way that still presents well? This one's a little bit. I don't know if you want to do this all the time because it can cut both ways where if you're highly confident and you're wrong You may convince people to do something that's the wrong thing and then and then you'll be wrong and then they'll pin you for it Right, but if you're doing it and you actually are right then it's huge. And so it's kind of related to communication I gave us a five out of five on both importance and control I gave us a Two out of five for the TP 50. I think most engineers do not present their solutions confidently And I give us a five out of five for the TP-90. I think most of the top engineers do present themselves confidently. This is probably another one of those tricky ones for women versus men where confidence comes off different if you're a woman or a man. I think that's kind of an unfortunate thing. I don't know exactly what to do about it. I just know that as a man, if you are not confident in your solutions, it will hurt you. So there's probably another... factor here that maybe is more important to balance if you're a woman like maybe conscientiousness or like The the one about Sort of listening and persuasion, I think I probably have to over index on that and under index on confidence as a woman But again, I don't I'm not a woman. So I don't know for sure. This is my list Next factor, straightforwardness. This is the ability to do the right thing in a kind of a social setting or like to confront difficult things, especially in a group setting. This one is tricky a lot because your ability to do this will be sort of wrapped up in the culture of the company. And also one of those, again, what's like one of those things that varies if you're a man or woman. And so... Yeah, I'll leave that there. I think it's a five out of five in importance and control. Once again, maybe control is a little bit different for women versus men. I think it's a two out of five for engineers, I think for engineering things. Engineers are not shy about doing the right thing and presenting the right thing. However, outside of engineering things, I think they're very poor at it. I don't know if it's because of lack of lack of confidence, lack of subject matter expertise or what or they just don't have the bandwidth or attention or desire to do it, but they tend not to raise flags outside of their domain even if they see a problem. But the best do, I think a four out of five for the TP90 top 10%, I think they tend to be more straightforward, even if it's kind of painful in the moment, they find a way to smooth things out and communicate the information. which is the next one, effectiveness. So this is, you know, if the previous one was the ability to do the right thing, this one is the ability to message the right thing in such a way that the person reacts to you in the way that you want. And so you can be very straightforward and the person could be very negative in response to that, or you could be very straightforward in a way that the person is responsive. And this is, maybe this has too much overlap with communication, but I wanted to pair these two together. And so this is once again a five out of five for importance and control. And once again, two out of five for the TP-50 and once again, a four out of five for the TP-90. The best people are both straightforward and effective. Another way to see effectiveness is as political. And this is where I actually think that a lot of people call things politics that is actually just how to be effective. And so, you know, take that as you want. It's very hard to deliver bad news without getting quote political. But sometimes the only way to make progress is to be quote political. So that's why I call it effectiveness. Last factor is assertiveness. Related to confidence, but it's more about in versus out. And so this is the ability to hold your ground. You know, have confidence to hold your ground on stuff when it's being contradicted externally. This is much harder for eng when they work outside of engineering again, kind of related to kindness. You know, if you put something out there and then you're attacked for it, how do you respond to sort of what this is? So four out of five on importance, four to four on control, two out of two out of five for the TP 50 and four to five for the TP 90. So those are my 25 factors. These are, again, they're sort of just the things that I tend to look at. And when I think of a situation, I think like, oh, what's causing this to go wrong? And how can I solve it? Like, which factors would I need to work on to solve this problem? As it pertains to my career, or as it even pertains to a problem. So hopefully this gives you, again, a picture of the competitive landscape, how important it is, how to invest your energy. Your homework this week is, to assess yourself on each of these factors. And I'll try to put out a PDF that has this table. And then pick three that are high importance, high control and where you are relatively weak relative to the sort of TP90. So find an area where you have a lot of room to improve based on your self-assessment and then brainstorm some ideas for things you can do to start making improvements in these areas. And then once you have that list, you know, in the next subsequent week, we'll talk about how to turn goals, ideas, right, into actual programs. Not the code kind, but the sort of activity kind. How to define goals, how to work back from goals into milestones, how to work back from milestones into habits, how to track progress and how to arrange your schedule to execute on those things. So this can be really the basis for starting to make substantial improvements to your career, is starting with this assessment, and then... starting next week, turning it into meaningful habits that start to move the needle on your behaviors. And we'll go from there. So thanks for listening. This has been Lift FM.