Asha Sharma had an incredible career. She graduated from the University of Minnesota according to her LinkedIn and yet by age 28 she because Facebook’s VP. How did she pull this off? What can regular Blinders like me learn from her career? Many 30 year old top school grads with PhDs at Facebook were and are trying to get promoted to L6.
Work harder. Pick the right projects. Make a genuine effort to build friendships with your stakeholders. And most importantly, be luckier!
Seems like she joined a startup leading to early executive experience + Fidji having high confidence in her. Of course, Fidji herself had a meteoric rise as well.
DEI
Smart and luck (very important)
Did you join Facebook when it was on hyper growth mode and were you smart enough make the connections and work on right projects . She did it and that’s why she is where she is. Her boss also did well it plays a great role if there is a sponsor within the company who doing well as well.
First understand that a PhD does not indicate leadership potential at all. Zero.
Careful, you might break the bubble that nerds live in, like I once did.
If anything it’s a negative signal! Source: Have PhD
I was there in her org when she was hired into FB, honestly have no idea what she even did, but just saw her kept getting promoted, every re-org would not impact her but give her more promotion. There were a lot of other VPs at FB that people have more visibility into, like you know what direction they are trying to push, what vision they have and they are well connected with people. But not much people had any idea what Asha was doing there. There are other examples too, like Heidi Young, Fidji Simo, all get promoted to VP like a rocket ship. Despite no deliveries or even many failed products. Can only say that they know how to play the game and played it well. VPs in FB are just Zuck’s minions, as long as Zuck and his inner circle likes you, then you are one of them. You don’t need to deliver your own vision, just execute on whatever Zuck wants is enough. Manage up is the key. Our ordinary coding 🐒 starts our career learning Java or C++ and learns how to be a cog. They starts their career learning how company higher-level works and how to be part of it.
This 👏
This just in, lowly man doesn’t know what women are doing in his company instead of making an effort to find out and engage plateaus in his career and rants on Blind about it
WUT