Musings (rant?) of an old timer

First a bit about myself. I am old compared to most of you on Blind. 20+ years industry veteran. I have worked at 5 major companies including hedge funds in NYC and healthcare services in the mid west and the last 12 years at Google (L5 to L8). CS major from a top school ( not Ivy League), switched from IC to Manager track late in my career (along with my L7 promo). Thought I would take some time to share my thoughts on certain recurring themes on Blind posts. I am not defending anyone, I just want to add share my perspective to these recurring themes based on my own experience. A data point of 1. Also, I am generally talking about the 80% case and not the edge cases/outliers. 1. First and foremost, corporations only care about the bottom line and profits. That is the way it should be. Don't believe anything else they say. Example: WeWork was just a commercial real estate provider and they had no business "elevating the world's consciousness". I want my employer to be maniacally focused on the bottom line. I can do charity and activism on my own time and money. Another example, Google caved into their employees demand in 2018 and walked away from a Pentagon contract. Big mistake, all it did was to strengthen the competitors. Thank god for Apple to remove certain apps form the app store as demanded by China for their market. Also glad that Google found the courage to fire the employees protesting in private offices. 2. Unless you have started and ran your own business you have no idea what you are talking about when you are criticizing senior management. I tried to be entrepreneur thrice - moderately succeeded once and failed the other two times. It is incredibly hard to run a company and employ even a few dozen. Let alone 150K people in 50 different countries. Contrary to what most of you believe (based on the majority comments on Blind) execs are a competent bunch. For every one incompetent executive I have come across, I found the other 9 to be very competent and in many cases very inspiring. If you think they made a bad decision, it is only because they are seeing other things that you don't see and they are doing the best they can. 3. I have been an IC for 15 years and a Manger/Director for 7 years. Without a doubt being manager is much much much harder. I look back at my IC days very fondly. It is somewhat easier as an L8. But L6/L7 have it the worst dealing with an immature and entitled bunch. 4. If you work fo top tech or financial firms - No, your employer is not paying you peanuts. A 25 year industry veteran, say a VP of Operations, running a $500M factory in Ohio employing 300 people dealing with an array of issues and regulations on a daily basis makes $350K and is super proud about it. What makes you think $300K you are making just 4 years after graduation is peanuts. Why do you think you deserve so much more than your dads and moms and uncles? Cos' you can Leetcode hard? Know that what happened with the tech industry wages the last 10 years is an exception and not the norm. I bet any of you can take an International vacation anytime you want. Be thankful for it. Even now, most of you are making more than 98% of this world. Are we that special? If you strongly believe you deserve promos every 3 years and double digit raises every year, then you must think you are very very good at what you do. If so, quit and start something on your own. Also, US wages have always been the best in the world even compared to other developed nations. In my entrepreneurial days (2008 - 2010), I learnt that for every 1 engineer I can hire in SFO, I can hire 3 in Spain/Italy and at least 2 in London/Berlin/Switzerland. 5. WLB. Yes some companies and some teams have it hard. No doubt about that. But in general, WLB in the US is awesome especially compared with Japan/China/SouthKorea/India. And if you point to France I say - great how much innovation has come from there lately? Feel free to move there. My sister is a high school teach and I know their job is extremely stressful, thankless and fraction of what we get paid. Again, be thankful for what we have. Also, don't even start about WLB to any entrepreneur or an executive. And your peers in financail firms in NYC are making big bucks too and 12+ hours / day is routine for many of them. Don't confuse greed and ambition. Stop saying me, me, me. Take a walk, smell the roses. Peace out. L8, TC $1.2M #tech