10 weird tech career lessons I learnt over the last 20 years

(#6 will shock you)

Yeap, it's official- I'm 40 years old. I've worked for 20 years, half of my life. I've learnt a lot and done a lot. Instead of putting out the same linkedin BS about how to be a great leader or innovator, I thought I'd compile a list of practical career tips that I would tell my 20 year old self that is either not intuitive or I could not find anywhere else on the internet.

1. You probably won't make a big impact in your first 20 years of work

Unless you are incredibly lucky, you aren't going to make a whole lot of impact in your first 20 years of work. Just let that sink in to your 20 year old self. Most of my 20 years of work has been useful, but it would likely had been done by someone else. As a result, the best thing you can do is constantly learn new skills, and get yourself ready for the next 20 years. In fact, the average age of a successful startup founder is 45 years old.

2. What you chose to study in your undergraduate DOES MATTER

There are lots of people that would tell you that the goal of university to teach you how to think - so it really doesn't matter what you study, but that you learn problem solving skills. This is total bullshit if you want a long and meaningful career in technology. For me personally, I chose to study applied physics with the simple hypothesis that if I'm going to change the world, I need to fundamentally understand the world. Today, I'm working on quantum computing, and that would never had happened if I had not chosen physics in my undergrad. The most important thing that choosing your undergrad correctly is NOT learning to problem solve, but rather the love of learning. Especially has people hit their 40s, the biggest issue isn't that they are bad problem solvers, it is that they don't like learning new things that will help them advance their careers. Choosing something you like in undergraduate helps you instill that passion to love learning. That's even more important than problem solving in the long run.

3. Take time out of your career to get married early if you can

Getting married when I was 25 was the best career decision I made. There are several upshots of getting married early that is often overlooked:

• You are more flexible when you are young - this is particularly important if both spouses are "career oriented" because it enables both to mold their careers based on each other's limitations they impose on their spouse (and believe me - there will be friction !).
• Dating wastes lots of energy and resources - From a long-term perspective, putting money into dating is much better put into a Roth IRA or putting into building experience's with your spouse. As you get older, you really don't want to remember too much about what you did with your ex-boy friend or ex-girl friend. You can't even talk about it a whole lot either, so any time and energy put into dating others just doesn't pay off long term.
• After you get married, you start making long term decisions earlier - especially when it comes to finances. This has a compounding effect the longer you can sustain this. Your job on the other hand doesn't have the long-term compounding effects that your marriage can. So its important to put time into finding your right soul mate.

Obviously take this advice with a grain of salt. Getting married to the wrong person is very disastrous.

4. Take an active role in your spouse's career to better your own career

For me personally, having the opportunity to work with my wife Miryung Kim on her career as a Computer Science professor has been greatly satisfying. I've moved cities multiple times for her job, looked at a tonne of grant applications, and participated in her graduate student's startup ambitions. Here are some of the benefits I've personally gained:

• I have a deeper understanding for how academia works - especially related to funding and dealing with students. In fact, this has become a primary reason why I've been effective in my current job working on Quantum Computing.
• I gain a lot of personal satisfaction knowing what I did helped her out. It makes it feel that we are on the same team because we are ! Success at work for your spouse carries over to both financial happiness and family happiness at the home. Therefore it is worth investing in your spouse's career.

5. Build a part-time consulting business for equity

I've been doing consulting in some way or form for the last 10 years. Most of it came in the form of startup advising, but even when I was in undergrad, I did code for money.

The best benefit of consulting is that exposes you to new businesses and problems that keep you sharp. For example, by consulting for Nutpods and Carista, I got the opportunity to work on consumer businesses - something I do not have the opportunity to do in my regular. I had previously started a business called Kindly Care, but ultimately decided not to take the CEO position because I felt that I didn't have enough consumer experience to be effective (Igor was much better and experienced than me at the time). Today if the situation where to arise that I had the opportunity to start a consumer business, I feel much more confident I would be successful.

It also provides an opportunity to be your own boss, and start building equity. It turns out that for startup companies, you can trade your time/skills for equity, and this drastically helps you diversity your financial portfolio.

6. Be a founder of a startup at least once, but spend all remaining time at a Big Tech company

Every technology person worth their salt has thought about or had been part of a startup. However, joining a startup NOT as a founder is probably the worst financial decision one can make (Read my article on how to join a Series A company and not get screwed). The issue is that the cards are too much in the founders and VC's favor, with the employees getting too much the short end of the stick. Y combinator in particular has perfected this art of creating a collective hallucination for its employees. Personally, I benefited from Apigee's acquisition of my startup company InstaOps - and although it wasn't a "knock it out of the ball park" acquisition, it was financially more beneficial than my friend's who joined a Series A company as a CTO.

The reason why I suggest working for Big Tech is purely economic. Large enterprises can simply not get away with this kind of swindling, especially public companies. Big Tech (Amazon / Google / Facebook / Apple / Microsoft) has built their competitive advantages (some would say monopolies) that make it a great place to make a stable income. The inflation of living costs (think Seattle / SF / Los Angeles) is tied to the inflation of the stock prices of BigTech companies, so you know that you are never on the losing end. While it is true that the opportunity to learn may not be as great as a startup, I suggest every BigTech working also perform tip #5 (Build a part-time consulting business for equity) to maximize learning and career advancement.

7. Chose a business partner that looks drastically different from you.

Two of my long-time friends in the tech world are Prabhat Jha and Anthony Joseph. And yes, they look drastically different from myself. Having a business partner that looks drastically different has helped me with diversity of thinking, and having different perspectives on things.

Prabhat, coming from Nepal, has taught me a different level of scrappiness and resourcefulness. As co-founders, we launched Instaops, and made some good money too from the venture. Although we are different, what unites us is our sincerity and humility.

Anthony Joseph was my mentor at Amazon, and continues to be a friend today. He helped with InstaOps too, but it really helped to see his own challenges with his consulting practice after leaving Amazon. Although we are different, what unites us is our belief in Jesus, and how we can integrate our faith into our work.

8. Adopt the Principle of Maximum (Human-Interaction) Utilization

I've learnt this principle from Prabhat Jha, and it has served me well both from a career and personal satisfaction perspective. The principle basically says, regardless of the situation, maximize every new human interaction as an opportunity to reach your goals itself regardless of the failure rate.

In his particular example, his first job in US was a gas station attendant, even though he wanted to get a job as an engineer. As a gas station attendant, he would ask each person who wore nice clothes if he can get a job as an engineer. Eventually it paid off, and he landed his first engineering job in the US.

As corny as it may sound, I've employed that same principle with my own career too. You just don't know who you will meet, or where the relationships will take you. Much of success is random, but according to Wayne Gretzky - you miss 100% of the shots you never take.

However, principle of maximum utilization isn't the same as the old adage of "If you got lemons, make lemonade". You need to have a very small number of goals, and use EVERY chance human encounter to explore getting those goals.

9. Practice long form writing - even if you suck

Over time, you will have to learn how to write in long form in order to have greater impact. Regardless if this is an academic paper or a vision statement, being able to write in long form helps drive better clarity of thought that is often lost in powerpoint presentations. I'm especially a big fan of the 6-pager that has been institutionalized at Amazon.

10. Find your Career Narrative

Having a clear career narrative can drastically help your advance your career and improve your own happiness. Over time, I've settled on the career narrative "Engineer and Entrepreneur", which has helped me time and time again determine what I should focus on. Ever since I was young, I wanted to "be an inventor" - however the reality of being an inventor in this day and age is much more complex than just coming up and building a product.

By defining your "career narrative", it also helps you figure out what you need to learn next. For me, early on, "selling" wasn't something I was good at nor particularly enjoyed. But having the "entrepreneur" in my own narrative gradually made me enjoy the process, and is critical to my own success. It also helps with avoiding FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). Yes, I know that I didn't make a tonne of money on bitcoin, or flipped real estate houses, but having the narrative has basically helped me ignore what I don't want to do. It makes me happy.

If you have other tips you would like to add - shoot me a comment below !