Recently I talked with a friend who is facing some tough career decisions. She has many options. As engineers, we have a tendency to think about all the edge cases even before we start coding. It’s a good practice but it can also easily stop us from moving forward. And it gets worse when the input variables get multiplied on the way. Yes, many things can go wrong, work, life, colleagues, friends, career future, stability, etc. But can we also focus all the things that could go right?
And the big question is, how could we learn what to focus so it can mitigate the risks?
I asked her a question, ‘If a friend ask you to borrow $10,000, what would you do?’ You could be thinking a lot: do you have that kind of money to spare? Would your family be ok? What’s the money for? Is the purpose justifiable? When does your friend need it? Is it going to set a precedent for the future? Does your friend have the ability to return the money… All are pretty legitimate questions that we all think about when facing the situation. If you start to drill on the details, you friend may think you are not the one to turn to when in trouble. And before you had time to response, you already lost a friend.
But what’s alternative? We can’t say NO to a friend’s request right away because it’s simply not friendly, and we can’t say YES immediately either. We think we always need time to think.
But, no, you don’t always need to think, in fact, only once is enough — think for once whether that person is worthy of the friendship. And if you’ve made up your mind about that, every sub-sequential decision will be easier, because you’ll be following a clear path, and every step down the road is just minor adjustments and corrections.
Just as I think public relations is about communicating the right message to the right people at the right time through the right channel. Selecting the path is about knowing what you will be doing with whom. More often, knowing the person is a lot more important than knowing what you will be doing. If you can’t imagine yourself being happy in one year working together with the same group of people, then maybe it’s time for you to consider the alternative path if you have any.
7 months ago, when I was standing at a cross road, deciding which direction I should go after getting several offers from companies that are in fields of cloud computing, travel, financial management, and digital marketing. It didn’t take me long to choose my path, in fact, almost less than a week which seems to be quite a rush considering that I only started my job searching three weeks before that.
I imagined myself working happily with a group of exceptionally smart and humble people to offer the best education to the world in the next few years. And that made my path crystal clear. The rest is just a matter of negotiation, and if I’m prepared to back out when the negotiation goes bad. That very imagination still holds true today and I’ve been walking down that path since my day one of joining Coursera.
My path of joining Coursera seemed easy. But it really wasn’t, if I zoom out and look at my path in the last two and half years. When I first moved to the bay area, I was still working on a startup that I started with my partner in Beijing to offer digital marketing and communication services to small companies who need global reach. We had a few clients in Beijing, and 3 interns who sits around the world to help us manage the social media accounts. We had advantage in China because the language barrier, time difference and limited access to Google, Facebook and some other services. But I struggled to make ends meet, especially the cost of providing services to Chinese clients while I’m physically in US is simply too high. The bigger problem, is that I no longer can apply my knowledge, experience or anything on the new land. I couldn’t even carry a comfortable conversation with my friendly neighbor. And all that I’ve previously learned, which my startup is solely based on, is no longer a premium knowledge here. I’d feel like a fraud if I offer similar consultation services to my clients in US.
My first decision is that I should go down the startup path, which felt like a stray, an experiment or a desperate attempt. I spent months learning all about digital marketing in US, taking all kinds of courses, and getting certificates from Google, Hootsuite, Hubspot… I also started to market myself and got a few small clients. Too small, perhaps.
After a few months of learning and frustration, I asked myself, how could I serve people if I don’t even know how people is served traditionally? Even though I’ve worked on startup, medium-sized and global companies in China, I don’t know a single thing about the office life in US. And I SHOULD find a job first.
I started to search for jobs around December 2014, which brings me a lot more frustrations, and I had a feeling lacking valid diploma may be a big blocking stone for my future, and maybe I should get a MBA. So I started to check different schools, Stanford, Berkeley, UC Irvine, UC Davis, etc. All programs requires GMAT and huge amount of money. Well, one thing at a time, so I borrowed two GMAT books from local library and would often go to the community college to study.
The next GMAT exam was a few months away and I kept searching for jobs while studying. It was an interestingly sad time. I went for some top PR firms in San Francisco first, among which one was trying to pull a global team together to serve the newly obtained SAP account. I thought my SAP account experience in Beijing would give me some leverage, but no. Not even any answer after my follow-up call. Then I went for digital agencies, advertising agencies, and marketing firms. I couldn’t even get to the 2nd round after submitting my resume.
I did get some face-to-face interviews, which I suspect was because they don’t have time to go for several rounds of interviews, or their reputations are so bad, they just need some new blood to fill in while the newbies are ignorant enough to not check the companies’ online reputations. And the interviews are for all sorts of strange positions, strange to me at least, that includes standing on the street waving signs, going house-to-house to sell solar panels, local travel/business assistant for gathering data (which felt like an online scam). Besides this, I also went for an onsite interview for a program analyst position at Facebook which seemed to be my highlight, but really it was a $15/hour contractor job and I didn’t even get it.
At one point, I was so ready to become a life insurance agent for New York Life.
In early February 2015, after looking back at my messy and unpurposeful life in US for the past 10 months, I ask myself, ‘I’m living in the center of the technology world. People here are either serving the technologies or they are the technologies. Marketing, communication, sales, they are all ultimately part of the serving group. And why can’t I be the technology part directly?’
This time, the path is excitingly clear: be part of the technology. The rest is just minor corrections. I started with iOS and Swift, created a few small apps and wrote some articles about my learnings. 4 months later, after watching almost all of the new WWDC videos, I realized there is no future for me as an iOS developer, so I started to look at the web space and learn Angular.
Why did I switch from mobile to web? Because I see the DOWN and UP. DOWN for individual developers’ lives in the Apple system. UP for the rise of the web apps in the coming few years. Because mobile is making people’s lives so much better, when they turn to web, they’ll expect the same level experience: intuitive, fluent, non-obstructive, remembered, fast…
The rest is pretty predictable. Once I’ve chosen the path, I self-studied for 4 months, borrowed money to pay for a 3-month bootcamp called MakerSquare in November 2015, then started my software engineering journey in April 2016.
My father chose a computer science path for my future before university. But I chose my path in real estate after graduation based on rental listings from an English magzine. And I’ve had quite a few career switching paths in the past, whether to start an event startup with my parter, a market research analyst at Penn Schoen Berland, or a PR consultant at Burson-Marsteller. Not all paths are happy or glorious. But one thing I know is that at the time when I walk down that particular path, I never had any regrets. I can shift my directions, but I’ll always keep going.
