In my professional career, one thing that troubled me is the statement from folks that “titles and money” don’t matter. That if you do good work, both will come, and that fixating on them was a bad thing.
My professional career has taught me the exact opposite – titles matter a lot and money matters. The only thing I learned over the years is the – how much – depends.
Let me offer a personal perspective.
[edit – forgot one more piece of the narrative]
In 2005, I was ready to quit NetApp. As a Senior Engineer at NetApp, I was never in the room where it happened. And so all of my ideas went nowhere. I had good intuition on what the storage management team needed to do, but my role made it impossible to move the ball forward.
After my wedding, and realizing that I could spend the next few years frustrated, I called an old friend and former boss and said – “I’m out because I can’t impact the company the way I want to.”
He took it upon himself to get me the role and title I wanted. And I spent the next four years at NetApp doing some amazing stuff.
Until the accumulated frustration and powerlessness to affect product strategy pushed me out again. I didn’t have the role and title to get myself heard about what the company wanted to do.
In 2009, I was looking for a job. I thought that NetApp’s strategy was wrong. I will observe that ten years later, the company seems to be pursuing a better strategy than what they were doing then.
When I went looking for a job, I made the decision that money be damned, I wasn’t taking a step back in the role. Companies that could not offer me a similar position were just not interesting. Zynga’s org structure at the time, had precisely the work I wanted, that of a CTO of a team with a large amount of operational freedom.
The cash money was lousy, and the equity was good.
In 2013, after Zynga changed its CEO to Don Mattrick, the company had to choose who to make the CTO. There were three excellent choices, and Don made a fantastic choice in picking Nick Tornow. I was disappointed it wasn’t me, and at the same time, I know Nick was a better choice. In fact, he is such a better choice, I spent several years trying to recruit him.
After that, I quit.
Why? Because the title mattered. Why did it matter? It mattered because it was a recognition and validation of the blood sweat toil and tears I had put into the company. And the successes I had been part of. It was a public statement of my accomplishments that my new boss had to acknowledge. When he didn’t, it was a personal statement about me. He disagreed with my contributions, and more importantly, didn’t see me the way I saw myself.
The money wasn’t that important. In fact, if I look back at the money I walked away from at Zynga, it was more than the money I made after Zynga until I lucked into a job at VMware.
After Zynga – I had to find a new job.
At the time, I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Thanks to Zynga, I had made some money, and for a large but not insurmountable amount more, I could have had enough of a nest egg, that when I turned 55-ish, I could think of retiring as long as I didn’t dip into my savings.
The painful experience of that time was that I mismanaged my career. I came up with this cutesy title, “Chief Engineer,” instead of a title like GM or VP of Engineering. As a result, when I went looking for a job, and recruiters applied their ML algorithms to look for people, no one looked at me. I spent more time explaining why I had that title than what I did. And when I explained to them that I was a GM, but had no GM title, you could imagine the credibility gap.
I went looking.
And I had a CTO dream job with an old friend, but the guaranteed money of Juniper mattered more. Because of what was a non-trivial amount of money, my ability to fund my retirement, and my kid’s college education – it meant I had to take the job that paid more.
The role at Juniper was weird, I basically was working for a GM whose job it was turn around a company. I had no experience in security or networking, but I knew a lot about how to motivate teams and build software. The thesis was I would help with the team and software, and we would surround me with networking and security experts.
The money was excellent. And it solved a particular personal problem. If I could stick it out for three years.
Long story short, thanks to a hedge fund, a new CEO was hired, and then the new CEO made a series of unbelievably boneheaded decisions that lead to my layoff in about 1 year.
Because of the way the deal was structured, the three years of money was obtained in one year.
Having gotten that money, I was interested in what kind of job and impact and title.
In 2015 – VMware and nimble made competing offers. Nimble’s VP of Engineering created a great offer. But the then GM at VMware, who was looking to hire me, made an excellent point – that being a VP of engineering matters. And that having that title on my resume from a company like VMware mattered.
He pointed out that as a VP, you have access to information, and you are at tables that you are not invited to as a non-VP. And lastly, he pointed out how it will help my next job.
And so when I weighed the opportunity, I chose VMware. I believed at VMware I could do great things. But also I think I could have done great things at Nimble. The title VMware offered made it clear how much more the scope of impact was at VMware.
What I have learned from my experience and continue to learn from that experience is that titles matter. Maybe not for your current job, but for the next one. And money matters, because it’s how you choose what to do next.
And most importantly of all, titles are given to people who make certain decisions. And those decisions drive strategy.
Every career decision is very personal and context-dependent. There are times when I felt that someone made a horrible decision to pursue a title. But I had no idea what is going on with their lives, and so I respected their decision even though I didn’t understand it. My lack of comprehension was more about me not being them.
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