Recent grad here and was lucky enough to land 2 offers. However, I'm having a hard time deciding as neither of them are exactly what I want to do and I'm not sure which would be a better start for my career (goal is to become a product manager in the tech industry). Also, I'ma say now that I know the pay for both is 🥜 compared to what many on here are getting, but I guess I can't be too picky with that considering I'm just out of school and these were the offers given to me. Salesforce Associate Success Guide (fancy term for a jr. Product Consultant from what I gathered in the interviews) TC: $63k - LCOL area Foot Locker Scrum Master TC: $76k - HCOL area On one hand, SF is the bigger name when it comes to tech, but my role would mainly be customer facing. Whereas at Foot Locker, I'd be working on their technical teams directly with product owners, but I'm not sure if the growth path for Scrum Masters is that great (especially if I want to pivot into PM later in my career). Any advice would be greatly appreciated. #pm #tech #salesforce #footlocker
Brand matters at the start of your career. Work there for 0.5-1.5 years then jump ship to faang in NYC/Bay area for 2x TC
Would a FAANG tier company really look that much more favorably having SF on a resume over FL, even if technically the FL role is more "senior" compared to the SF one?
Location doesn’t matter nor should you include it in your resume. If they ask in the interview say it but also highlight you plan on moving to SF anyway
If you want to work on the tech side of the house, start there. It can be hard to get from Customer Success and its associated roles back into the technical positions. I have 9 yoe in project management followed by 6 yoe in success/service delivery/account management, all in the tech industry, and I can't get a bite on a project management job anymore. I'd probably need to certify to get anywhere, and that gets harder when your experience isn't recent (at least through PMI). I'd take the Scrum Master position without thinking twice.
So one of the reasons why I even went through the process for the success guide was because they told me that Product Management was apparently one of the designated growth paths for the role (along with becoming an Account Exec or Solutions Engineer). I'm not sure how true or easy it is compared to how they made it out to be. I'm also PSM 1 certified already. I was honestly planning on just doing an internal transfer a year or so in Salesforce to something closer to my career goal. Would you feel that this would be more difficult than jumping into the Scrum Master role at foot locker and try to transfer into a product owner (and then subsequently PM) at another company down the line?
If SF has a designated path from Success to Product Management, that puts a whole different spin on things and it makes sense to follow it. It wasn't an obvious jump for me. Making an internal transfer at SF gets you more yoe in one company (and an established name at that) and will provide you good experience for further up the road. It might be worth asking what proportion of people move from that role into PM, vs. account management or sales engineering, to find out if it really is a viable path or just something they mention because it sounds good.
I’ve hired 100s of people into technology roles in Salesforce and other places. Don’t go to Foot Locker. You’d find it impossible to switch to a tech companies ! Also, scrum master in none-tech companies really means the person that helps with logistics. In the vast majority of tech companies, the Eng manager also acts as the scrum master ( or Eng IC in some cases). Very few companies use professional scrum master and from experience it usually doesn’t work because they are not deep enough technically
I've heard from my interviewers that apparently Salesforce hires a lot of people with non-traditional background into their company. In this case though, would you say industry experience would be more beneficial than role experience if the tech industry is where I want to end up at the end of the day? Also, I didn't know that the experience being a Scrum Master would be so different depending on the industry that the company is in.
Yes, relevant industry experience wins every single time
Don't join Foot Locker, Scrum master here don't create story nor they work with product owners, Scrum master at FL are only here to setup meetings in the calendar nothing more than that and keep updates on looking by the jira board. Engineers, Leads, Architect directly write epics, stories, Scrum master at FL just take status while checking on the jira tickets. FL is not tech so no scope of career growth. Please don't join it. Check reviews of FL. They don't promote even if you're most hard working in the team, promotion cycle is 5 years, pay hike is peanuts. Its retail company and a stone age era company so they don't care about technology or data or scrum masters.
Sales force has scrum Maarten you can switch