The Sorrows of Young Werther

In my WeChat public account, the question I get asked most often is: how do you choose a job that lets you grow? And how do you grow on the job? The key word in both questions is growth — and last weekend I met up with a friend from Amazon, and that’s mostly what we talked about.

Let’s take the first question: how do you choose a job that lets you grow?

I already wrote about this in a 2014 reader Q&A that I reposted in 2015 (see — some questions just stubbornly torment us over and over). Here’s a brief excerpt:

Paul already gave the answer in Hackers & Painters: choose work that is measurable and scalable.

Let’s unpack that. Note that the following is phrased much like the Agile Manifesto — when you have the right and the ability to choose, prefer the former over the latter. That doesn’t mean the latter is bad.

First, choosing an industry. A booming industry beats a stable one. In software, for instance, the internet moves far faster than traditional software.

In a booming industry there are far more opportunities; the market keeps expanding and the pie keeps growing. That maps neatly onto scalability. In a stable or slow-growing industry, the map has already been drawn; by and large, the good positions and career opportunities (though not always) have been claimed by those who entered before you, so scalability is poorer.

Having picked the industry, look at the company. Likewise, a company on the rise beats a mature, stable one. When a company grows at rocket speed, an individual who performs fully has a strong chance of jumping onto the career fast lane. Again, this is a question of scalability. The painful part is: how do you tell who’s on the rise? Half of it is studying and grasping the trend, half is luck (if you’ve invested in stocks long-term, you’ll understand). We’re all brilliant in hindsight. Rewind the clock to before the fact, and few would have believed that Apple could return to the top tier after Jobs came back; and almost no one in early 2012, when Weibo was at its hottest, foresaw its current decline. Choosing a company is sometimes like picking a stock: do your homework, form your own analysis from all the material available, and then leave the rest to luck.

Having chosen the company, look at the team. A small team that values individual ability beats a large team that over-emphasizes collective wisdom. If you can, avoid teams where you’ll be a cog from day one. Of course, if being a cog is unavoidable, then work hard to make yourself worth more than a cog. Companies and individuals define an ordinary position (non-executive) differently: the company wants every ordinary role to have a backup, to be replaceable; the individual wants to be unique and irreplaceable on the team. The advantage of a small team is that your work is far more measurable. When a piece of software takes five thousand people to build, you’re a fleck of spray in the ocean; but when a product takes only five people, then even averaged out, you are one-fifth of it.

While evaluating the team, size up the boss too. A boss who dares to fight, dares to hustle, and dares to own the outcome beats one who is merely warm and pliable. Don’t pick a boss who won’t take responsibility (you may become the scapegoat); don’t pick a boss with no ideas who just wants to hold on to his position. At work, don’t assume your boss is the one managing you — you have to learn to manage your boss, especially the allocation of his time and energy.

When choosing a team, look at your teammates too. Prioritize teams with more excellent teammates. Excellent people tend to become your benchmark and push you forward. It’s the same reason a footballer should go play in Europe rather than stay at home. Standing out like a crane among chickens feels great, but over time you may become a frog at the bottom of a well.

This is plain talk; no explanation needed.

The second question: how do you grow on the job?

If you made a wise choice on the first question, then the external conditions for growth are basically in place, and the second question is mostly about internal factors.

The vast majority of people are driven by their environment. In other words, a good environment and a not-so-good one will produce utterly different life trajectories for the same environment-driven person.

Quite a few others are self-motivated. Prosperity, adversity, even desperation won’t change their nature.

The words are plain, but dry. Let’s crack open an example and add some moisture.

In 2005 I joined Juniper. If I’d had the above understanding back then and analyzed the industry rationally, I might have recognized the rising tide of search and chosen to join Baidu or Yahoo China (whether they’d have taken me with my background is another matter — Google hadn’t entered China yet).