Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Regrets in Life
- One of my regrets in life is that I have'nt kept a list of all the books and all the movies that I have watched till date. Foolishly, I always thought that I will be able to recollect them in a jiffy...Stupid ! Duh ! (I know)...
- One more regret in life is that I haven't made as many friends as I would have liked. Of course one only makes very few friends over the course of one's life, I would still want to have friends who I can call at 3 AM.
- One regret (at least now) is that I want to work in a foreign location for another stint. I hope it happens.
Before 30 i used to regularly maintain a 'reading list'
Your Own Career
These are some of my career-related musings :
- If you are paid out-of-whack with what your contribution to the company is or what your market value for comparable jobs is - be very very careful. Your salary can be high because of two things :
- Your criticality to the firm might lead to a high salary. Firms do this golden-handcuff you for proprietary know-how you might have. But the risk here is that if the particular product or firm goes belly-up, then you are stuck with useless skills which are not valued in the market. Of course, if the job pays as much that you can retire relatively early and you can hope to last till then, then great - stick to it.
- You by some quirk-of-fate start getting salary which is out-of-whack with the market for the contribution that you do. This can happen if you are someone with more years of experience but the content of your work can be done by a lower-cost resource. Or can be done at a lower cost in a different country. Firms, if generous will let you 'stagnate' at that level for years till the time for a 'workforce cull' comes. In technical terms your productivity was out of whack for your salary
- Hence, the only enduring currency that you have is 'employability'. And that means sharpening your skills to stay relevant.
- The two common ways you can do this is by : going up the functional hierarchy. This is one of the sure-fire ways of not being unemployed. Of course, this entails learning a bit of everything but then learning it as you grow senior. Being a generalist and being stuck in middle-management is not a good bet.
- The second one is to be a deep subject-matter expertise in a given area. That your knowledge (broad-based and not specific as in the first bullet point) is so valued in the industry that you are valued.
- Thirdly, as much as possible, avoid being an 'aggregator'. I define an aggregator as the person who is only a 'people manager'. Of course, if you are externally focussed, then yes it is an option but no one respects a manager if that person does not at least have an 'appreciation' of what they do. People do not expect the manager to know 'everything' but at least understand the underlying dynamics of the challenges that they face everyday and guide them in a 'managerial' way.
