Stick it to The Man by Sticking It Out
Are you Gen X and see your friends and co-workers advance professionally, while you keep being stuck? Then this article is for you
I wanted to write this to give fellow geezers out there hope that yes, sometimes you do have to get in line and wait your turn for a loooong time, but eventually something happens that will feel like it was all worth it in the end. All the failures, rejections, feeling left behind in the dust by peers who have risen to Director level at the sexy Silicon Valley companies, the 5–10 year tours of duty that were at an entry-level job title for the entire duration.
Just this week, we here at Pie and Donut Analytics have nabbed our first ever contract since hanging up our shingle three months ago, for a C-suite role with equity and everything. Not gonna lie, I feel like George Jefferson from The Jeffersons (Gen Z and millennial readers, stay with me) after he had opened his own dry cleaning business, with a one dollar bill from his very first transaction in a frame hanging on the wall. Never mind that it was actually someone who had come in to get change for the parking meter. Point is that he felt like he had finally made it, and so do we.
Advice you always read THAT DOESN’T WORK
Make sure your CV doesn’t have any misspellings or fancy fonts. Focus on results and impact, don’t just spout a list of job duties, yada yada. Show you did a lot of projects. Organically grow your LinkedIn network and make your profile All-Star level. Research the companies you want to work at, and try to connect with someone there; hope that they will find it in their heart to refer you for one of these unadvertised secret job openings, thereby circumventing the company’s ATS software. Follow up with a nice thank you email within 24 hours. And so on and so forth.
Well I am here to tell you that not only are all of these things standard base knowledge by now and have been for years (for some reason you still see blogs and articles even to this day spewing all these banalities), but 99 times out of 100 are an utter waste of time and energy. Because yeah, maybe you do have a killer resume, get a callback, and even make it all the way to the final round. But you don’t get the job every single time, for any number of illegitimate unknown reasons. For example nepotism, they already had someone else in mind the whole time and were just going through the motions to create the semblance of giving an outsider a chance at employment, you weren’t a “culture fit” (oftentimes code for illegal discrimination in hiring), the entire hiring process was merely a front to get you to do uncompensated work for them in the form of a take-home assignment, etc.
So how does one overcome a sense of defeat?
What I’m about to say will not be very popular at all, but it really does work to get you through those feelings of sadness and despair. As human beings, we can’t help but compare ourselves to others and want to keep up with the Joneses. So, I know you’re really not supposed to do this, but the comparison thing can also be done in the reverse direction. Those cliches you always hear about be grateful, derive happiness from the daily small pleasures in life, count your blessings? I’m not saying you have to go as far as keeping a “gratitude journal,” but it takes very little effort to just acknowledge that if you have a roof over your head, food on the table, clean running water, and people who love you, then you are much better off than a huge swath of the world’s population. Doing this really does make your problems seem smaller and endurable.
Another related cliche that really turns out to help immensely: you have absolutely no idea what others are going through. We all have read the stories about the Instagram influencer with thousands of followers and doting comments, but in reality has no true friends and is suffering from depression. Or the seemingly perfect couple with the great marriage and house and 2.5 kids, who out of nowhere end up divorcing. Being popular, rich, and outwardly successful can and often does bring about its own set of problems. Problems that if you can work yourself into a sweet spot (YMMV but the happiness studies out there indicate that ~$70k is a good Goldilocks-like, not too big, not too small, just right level of annual household income to have), you will never have to experience whatsoever.
Serendipity
I would like to end by mentioning a third cliche that one hears all the time, that until we landed our first paying client this week I had always dismissed as complete BS. And that trite platitude is the one that goes something like this: “You don’t get jobs through applying to job postings and sending out resumes. You do it by planting seeds which will one day sprout into the perfect job opportunity just for you.”
Well I have friends who are high up in FAANG companies, and they have always put in a good word for me, but the most I ever got was a second round interview at Amazon and got told the standard “we think you would be great for another team, just not ours.” I even got rejected when it was a longtime friend who was the actual hiring manager.
But now I am a believer in the seemingly “chance” crossing of paths. Last week out of the blue, we got a call from a friend whom we have heard not a peep from in over 10 years since we were in the same grad school class. He was the one who introduced us to the CEO of the company he was working for. Only two days after our initial chat with him and the CFO, we had an offer letter in hand.
Did we turn on the charm and have a slick elevator pitch all ready to go? Not really. We were just being our natural selves that we have been all along; they simply liked our skills and industry experience we have built up over the years that we could bring to the table. Getting a great job based solely on your own merits, without having to go through all that rigmarole that takes forever? Who woulda thunk it!
So dear readers — it may not happen for you 5 years down the road, or 10 years. It may even take a whole quarter century like it did for us. But as another tried and true aphorism goes, good things come to those who wait.
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