Read These Entertaining Tech Company Reports with a Heavy Dose of Skepticism
Screenshot from Fast Company's article, "Where Google, Apples, and Amazon Employees Want to Work Next."
I love articles like Fast Company's "Where Google, Apple, and Amazon Employees Want to Work Next."
They're hard not to click on. I seriously can't resist Fast Company and INC.com's headlines. Someone poach those headline writers, they're the best!
But while the article referenced above is quite interesting, there are a few reasons to read it with a healthy dose of skepticism.
The reports and surveys cited are blended ... perhaps advantageously
Paragraph one references a Fast Company report, paragraph two references a PayScale survey, and paragraph three references a Dice survey of 1,600 technology professionals in the U.S.
I love the collective insight, but when you think about the sources, they're kind of apples to oranges, so you can't look at the findings as a single harmonious conclusion.
The numbers might be deceiving
Statista.com says that "Apple reached more than 80,000 employees as of 2013."
So do those "1,600 technology professionals in the U.S." offer an authoritative enough sampling to represent all or even many technology professionals? Even within just one of the companies cited, the numbers polled represent a fraction of actual employees.
Each with his and her own very real employee experience and story.
The respondents' pain points might be magnified
Since those surveyed are apparently on job seeking / posting platforms (Dice, Anthology/formerly Poachable, which was a great name, but I can see why it was abandoned), the odds are probably high that those cited are somehow dissatisfied with their careers. You know, because they're poking around to see what's next in their career, not because they're entirely satisfied.
This isn't a bad thing. Seriously. Poke around! It's just a lens through which we need to examine the article's broader assumptions.
There are insights to glean
My naysayer ideas aside—and remember, I'm a fan of these publications—there are kernels along the way that I recognize. In my work with stealth job seekers (inbound and outbound) at Google, Apple, and Amazon, I offer the following anecdotal and collective observations from my own practice.
Program management roles can indeed be akin to mini-CEO roles. Pushing a product (much less multiple products) from inception to ship is big work. But to move into a CEO role from a program manager role ... you probably need to (a) have a well-known name or (b) launch your own start-up and proclaim yourself the CEO. In other words, you need to either have an advocate in your corner (i.e., people saying you can do the job) or you will likely have to take the risk of assuming a new skill. What is that skill? P&L management. It has to be somewhere in the mix of a career to move into a CEO role. None of the program managers with whom I have worked at Google, Apple, and Amazon have P&L experience. Massive budgets? Yes. P&L? No. Much to their chagrin. (Even very senior clients from Oracle and IBM haven't had P&L ownership, much less exposure.) If you're looking to move into the C-suite, you need to reverse engineer how you're going to fill in the P&L blank within your current job, so start looking now for exposure. Otherwise, you need to found and build a start-up of your own, which inherently involves P&L. A move like that is all about the risk involved. Where you find the rare person who went from product manager to CEO, you'll probably find a person who took the risk and succeeded.
People at Google, Apple, and Amazon—and most other large companies—have preferences about the kinds of companies and cultures for which they will leave. Some want to spring from one public company to another, while others want to quietly leave one of the "not traditional, but no longer terrifically disruptive" tech giants like Google, Apple, and Amazon to blaze into a well-funded startup. Trouble is, they don't always get what they want because the right corporate culture doesn't suddenly open just because they are ready to move on. It's for this and many other reasons that stealth job seekers—or passive job finders like those Anthology serves—need to plan and wait. Get your ducks in a row and be ready to compete when the right opportunity and culture comes along.
Oh, and following up on another of the article's tenets: Amazon's recent headlines seem to be uncomfortable for most, if not all of the corporate employees still on the inside.