What are the “trophy jobs” in tech?
anuatluru.com
anuatluru.com
My mom just got rid of 2 unopened cases of the stuff sitting in her basement from the late 80s.
Imagine two cvs. One has 10 years of experience programming and 2 "managing" a team of software devs. The other 10 years of experience "managing" and knows nothing about programming. Guess who they would hire?
This is because the system is top down. More often than not top directors are old and understand nothing about technology. So they see engineers as threatening and scary and they prefer to hire people they "understand".
Most people managing a software developer team can't read code so everything eventually becomes super political because the manager is guided by impressions and things like the name of the PR ans such.
Its like hiring a blind man to supervise a group of painters. Then managers feel super insecure because they don't understand things very well even if they try with metaphors. Insecure managers tend to be very aggressive and toxic
This is such a sad industry.
This really gets at the heart of my reaction to this article - this feels like a description of how people who have no real idea of what life is like in an industry think people feel might feel about well-known titles within it. I'm not seeing much connection between this article and the reality of working in tech.
There’s a lot of substance in those jobs (denominator), but the status is insanely high (numerator).
Smart. Quants are generally “smart” with diverse software, hardware, and math knowledge.
Scarcity. In the United States, the entire industry might hire 1,000 to 2,000 new grad quants per year.
And most importantly, a realistic path to $1M+ TC by 5 YOE, and $10M+ TC is not uncommon for 15-20 YOE.
That’s wild, if true.
If you want to be a quant, getting a post-graduate education at a top-tier university is pretty much a requirement. If you want to be a software engineer/SRE/etc. in the front office, you might be able to find your way in by going to the tech industry proper and then pivoting.
A product manager's skill set can make or break a product.
If you're a bad programmer and produce nothing, it'll (usually) quickly be discovered (though not always) even if you're good at talking. It's also easy to spot check in the interview before you hire them.
If you're a bad PM, but good at talking - it's easier to pass the interview and it can be harder to know they're bad and fire them.
Great PMs support their teams and make things better for the engineers they work with (especially by avoiding people working on stuff that doesn't matter). Bad ones make their teams miserable and add negative value. The role can also vary depending on the company (sometimes it includes product design work and sometimes it doesn't).
The best PMs I know are also really good at debugging/troubleshooting and have a technical background (I think necessary to be really great).
If you're long enough in the tech industry you've seen such people and learned to identify them with good certainty after one or two meetings.
- Minimal actual work
- “Lavish” lifestyle: lots of travel and networking
- Fairly influential in the industry
- Can get paid $10-50K/year for attending a few meetings per year, per company board
Also, you underestimate how difficult it is to get technical people to talk about tech to multiple audiences, including non-tech people.
Also also, many of the good devrel folks in the industry _do_ have code in production; they just wanted something different than doing engineering day in day out. (Think of the person doing devrel at Tailscale, for example; they are very technical).
It's not a trophy job; it's just more extroverted and people-facing.
> Sometimes it’s easier to spot a trophy job in retrospect. For example, when someone has a trophy job and its status drops, their desire to do it decreases a lot. It’s common for people to lose motivation when they’re unhappy with their job's substance, but with trophy jobs, satisfaction is tied most to status (e.g. of their role, the company, industry).
So the current jobs that supposedly could soon be replaced by ML/AI will or are dropping in status, possibly also in valuation and satisfaction with perceived substance. What's funny is that the actual substance of work and expertise hasn't changed. Even if I had a quickly responding LLM, I'd still be tweaking inputs, outputs and reinterpreting to make it as I see fit. Not much if at all easier than just writing it.
I suppose these could become high substance, low status jobs (always were?). Artists are mixed in that their status level depends on which circle you talk with.
I mean if someone said they were a Quant or PM that seems a bit meh to me, but if they were a Linux Kernel "lieutenant", I'd be impressed.
One where I earn enough to retire early and own all my own time.
Seriously? Trophy Jobs now? Take a step back and think how absurd that is.
Full disclosure - I am a mediocre product manager. First PM role after 20 years in engineering.
Long story short, this company is in the middle of being cleaned up by private equity. It used to be a cost center, and has never made money in its history. In my opinion, engineers were allowed to do whatever they wanted with no oversight. There were some god-awful, appalling business and engineering practices here.
Honestly, I didn't really absorb all the red flags. I was more enamored with the idea of a career change and trying something different. I think I was particularly targeted for the role because I was previously an engineering manager. My product is universally hated and had been left for dead. I've had to milk everything I can from one real engineer and several data/business analysts to get it resurrected. Part of that is mentoring the DA/BAs how to do basic git branches and commits while butting heads with the engineer to get him to stop doing psychotic things. Just this morning we got into it because I stopped allowing direct pushes to master.
Honestly, this situation is such depressing, pain in the ass, but the moments where I get to be a real PM has been pretty fun. Just listening to customers and relaying what we're doing different has been rewarding.