your career is gonna be long

I was reading this brillant piece on career by Nikhyl Singhal. Apart from the main argument of ‘stage of the company’ that Nykhil makes. I want to expand on the thought of ’longetivity of tech career’ more.

As the article mentoins, with the improvement in health, most of us would work way past our 60 and may be till our 90s, taking a safer side, let’s reduce it by 20% and keep it at 72.

If I take my case, I am 28 right now and have 6 years of work experience. I still have 22 more years to reach 50 and then 22 more years to reach 72. That means, out of (22+22+6) 50 years of total work experience, I spent 6 right now. i.e. if my career is an ODI match innings then I have not even played the first power play.

Now, when I think about the decisions to make in my career, this is a good perspective to keep.

Also, just want to expand on the factors that we consider while making a job shift.

• compensation
• brand (name of the company)
• peers / potential
• potential impact / value
• work-life balance
• work-culture
• learning
• Stage of the company (after you read the mentoined article)

I think, ‘compensation’ is a strong factor that people consider (at least it has been a pivotal one in my ciricle). But focusing only on compensation is like focussing only on ’number of runs in this over’ in the ODI innings analogy, that isn’t the right approach for a long innings.