Every once in a while I hear people claiming how sexy cool it is to work in a tech startup, as opposed to how bad it’s like in a corporation. The mere word “corporation” now has a negative connotation. You simply close your eyes and picture thousands of profoundly unhappy people working on mundane, repetitive tasks, overworked against their will, forced to only live after work and on weekends. At the other end of the spectrum there are the people in tech: mission-driven, passionate, always smiling, working relentlessly to change the world, all while relaxing in their special-designated areas and playing in their game rooms. Ok, let’s stop the charade now.

Time to wake up and get back to reality! This is a blatant misconstruct of the work environments in different types of companies and I couldn’t disagree more. When I speak at different events, attendees frequently ask me if I recommend a career in tech. My answer is always the same. “No, God NO! I don’t recommend a career in tech. As I don’t recommend a career in FMCG, audit, consulting, agriculture, or any other industry out there. The only thing I recommend is to choose a career that’s right for you”.

The best career path

I strongly believe there’s no such thing as right and wrong career paths. Close friends of mine are happily working in established companies or traditional banks. Others love the work they do in tech startups. And, unfortunately, I also know people who are miserable after making the switch, both from startups to corporations, and vice versa.

Choosing where to build your career is a highly personal decision. What’s right for me might not be right for you. There’s no such thing as the right industry or the right company. There’s only the right industry / company for you! After more than 12 years of working in tech, I am confident this was the right decision for me. I’m here to stay. However, this isn’t true for other people’s career choices and it shouldn’t be. I’ve told this before and I’ll tell it once again: we are different, and that’s the beauty of it!

The tech mirage

“Abandon hope all ye who enter here” should be written at the entrance of established companies. And then it’s what I call the tech mirage. In popular belief, tech companies are at the opposite side of the spectrum. They’re the land of promise and opportunity, where fun, glory & money await. And not only is this dichotomy wrong, but it’s also dangerous, since it can potentially encourage people to choose a career that’s not fit for them.

One other bothering thing with the tech mirage is that all tech companies are blended together. More often than not, they’re incorrectly labelled as startups, irrespective of their current size and scale. Uber is no longer a startup. Neither is Google, Apple, or Facebook. The problem with the incorrect labelling is that the work environment in a company such as the latter is so much different than the work environment in a 5 people company.

Tech Companies by Size

I love how Reid Hoffman classifies tech companies and people working in them in his “Blitszcaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies”. (If you’re working in tech, this book is a masterpiece and you just have to read it). Based on their size, he divides companies in five categories:

• The Family: 1 – 9 employees;
• The Tribe: 10 – 99 employees;
• The Village: 100 – 999 employees;
• The City: 1000 – 9999 employees;
• The Nation: 10000+ employees.

Tech employees by company stage

He also underlines that different types of people fit in different stages of a company’s development. I loved his analogy to the pirates, the navy and the police patrol.

• The pirates are the ones that hack the sea (and sometimes break the rules) to discover new land. They are a fit in the very early and early stages of a company;
• The navy admirals come in after the pirates discovered the land. They build the city, bring in the people and create the rules. They are best fit as the company moves away from its early stages into (hyper)growth;
• The police officers come in once the city is setup. They patrol the streets and make sure law & order is maintained.

It’s nothing bad with being a pirate, a navy admiral or a police officer. But it’s really really bad if you end up in a company that needs someone you’re not. For both yourself and the company. So let’s deep dive into how the work environment actually looks like in different companies.

Early Stage Companies

Work environment

While we mistakenly label lots of tech companies as “startups”, the early stage companies are the real startups. Their products can be in different stages of development, from a simple idea and a founding team to execute on it, to having a minimum viable product and experimenting some early traction. In terms of size, these companies are in the “family” and “tribe” stages, generally having less than 100 people in the team.

There’s a special kind of “can do it” vibe in these companies that excites some people and terrifies the most. Being small in terms of size, they lack formal processes and workflows. They are scrappy and lean, quite informal, and decision-making is generally collaborative and fast. In such a startup, people get exposure to all areas within the company. It’s a great learning environment for individual contributors and generalists who like to get things done and who cope well with uncertainty and frequent change.

Are you a pirate?

If the description above sounds appealing to you, chances are you are a pirate and you’d thrive in an early stage company. If there’s any doubt, below is a checklist to help you decide:

• You are a generalist that prefers to work across multiple areas. Eg. a marketer, not a product marketer, brand marketer, performance specialist, etc;
• You’re a “jack-of-all trades”, comfortable changing hats frequently to do what needs to get done;
• You thrive with little structure;
• You have a general disregard for processes and rules;
• You’re comfortable taking risks;
• You love working in a small team and be part of a flat organisation;
• You’re an individual contributor;
• You like to be involved in decision-making;
• You like working in an informal environment;
• You’re resilient and like experimentation and the unpredictability that comes along with it.

High Growth Companies

Work environment

As a company grows in size and matures in terms of product offering, its work environment undergoes significant changes. While we still call these companies “startups”, they have clearly outgrown their early stages. These are the unicorns, the rocketships, the hypergrowth companies. As Reid Hoffman explained it:

Once you move away from the early stages of Blitzscaling […], you’ll lose the ability you enjoyed as a pirate to communicate and collaborate effectively on an ad hoc basis, and you’ll have to trade in your Jolly Roger for the flag of legitimate, disciplined navy. […]

The impulsive Captain Jack Sparrow has to grow up and start acting like the sober and responsible Captain Picard.

Reid Hoffman

You win some, you lose some! The products of these companies have now reached product-market fit and started seeing some early network effects. Sustaining and amplifying them requires proper community-building and marketing efforts. The teams have also grown in size and informal communication is no longer effective. What seemed to be a cohesive team before now looks fractured. It appears that everyone is working in silos and the right hand no longer knows what the left hand does. Here comes the wind of change, bringing in the navy admirals.

Due to its increased size, the high growth company now needs formal processes and workflows to keep operating effectively. The smart generalists sometimes scale, but more frequently are replaced by specialists. Functions are born and people no longer get exposure to all areas of the business. Instead, the scope of their roles narrows down and they have the opportunity to focus and do fewer things, but better. The organisational complexity increases. A new layer of management is created and professional execs join the company to build the framework needed to keep scaling smoothly.

Are you a navy admiral?

High growth companies still go through a lot of change, as the entire company transforms and reinvents itself. If you’re wondering whether you’re navy material, go through the checklist below to see to what extent it applies to you:

• You’re a specialist that likes to create meaningful impact in your area of expertise;
• You are a builder: you enjoy building teams, processes, frameworks, from scratch;
• You’re comfortable building a rocketship while flying it. In the navy stage, there’s no time for you to build the proper framework and then execute. You need to constantly balance the two, sometimes at breakneck speed. There’s only a special category of person that likes doing that;
• You’re the person that loves to put order in chaos – structured, organised, with great project management skills and attention to details;
• You understand how to build lean processes and workflows that bring in structure, without stifling innovation or reducing speed;
• You’re a leader that has previously built and managed teams before;
• You’re resilient and can cope well with frequent change. In this stage, the organisation will look completely different every 6 months;
• You love working in growing teams, in a complex organisation;
• You like to be involved in decision-making in your area of functional expertise;
• You’re a problem-solver that loves to find solutions to the organisational and growth challenges ahead.

Established tech companies

Work environment

As a company keeps growing and gets to the size of a larger city (1,000 – 9,999 employees) or nation (more than 10,000 employees), it reaches an unprecedented level of organisational complexity. It does no longer resemble a startup. A nation can no longer be run effectively the same way you ran a village, a tribe or a family. Companies the likes of Uber, Netflix, Google or Facebook fall in this category. Welcome to the world of the Big Tech.

The era of pirates and navy admirals is long gone by now. The product (at least the main one) has gained mass-market adoption, while processes and operating frameworks have already been established. Given their size and scope, these companies are less agile. They need clear structure and formal communication to be able to function effectively. They employ individual contributors, managers and executives, none of which have full visibility into the bigger picture. Decision-making is hierarchical and slower, with different levels of approvals required to get things done.

The established tech companies have plenty of resources available. Hence they no longer need to be scrappy, but efficient. There’s more stability and resilience is no longer a critical skill – change happens less frequently and takes much longer to enact. Born in the “navy” stage, office politics appears more and more frequently, as employees are negotiating to get internal support for their teams or just climb the “corporate ladder”.

Are you a police officer?

There are few differences between established tech companies and what we usually call corporations. In fact, many of the corporations are just that – take Microsoft, Oracle or SAP as examples. While there are lots of misconceptions about these companies and they’re commonly perceived as slow and bureaucratic mammoths, there are plenty of people that thrive in their working environment. And it’s absolutely nothing wrong with this, quite on the contrary.

Thinking you might be a “police officer”? Go through the checklist below to see if it resonates with you.

• You thrive in a structured, established environment;
• You’re not a big fan of taking risks;
• You deliver great results when working in a predefined framework, within your key area of expertise;
• You’re comfortable not having visibility into the bigger picture;
• You don’t mind following processes and rules that have already been established;
• You enjoy predictability and stability;
• You’d rather follow the proven path than build your own;
• You’re happy when things are not moving too fast;
• You enjoy the stability that comes with working in a less agile organisation;
• You’d rather be a decision-taker rather than a decision-maker.

Common traits for people in tech

Despite their very different profiles, people in tech also share some common traits. Irrespective of the type of company they work for, these are essential if you want to succeed in the tech industry.

Tech-savvyness

If you want to work in tech, you need to be proficient in using tech. Hello, Captain Obvious! And still, so many people get this all wrong. While not all people in tech are innovators, the successful ones sit on the left hand side of the innovation adoption lifecycle. They understand technology and they use it on a daily basis. It comes natural for them to adopt new technologies, use new gadgets and test different tools.

If you’re the last one to adopt technology and you need lots of support in the process, you’ll be able to create more value in other industries. I saw this in practice and it was a horror story for all parties involved – don’t do this to yourself!

Data-driven

Being data-driven is not optional when working in tech, no matter your role. All tech companies, irrespective of their size, have data at their core. If you want to succeed, you need to know your way around numbers, understand the key metrics you’re looking at, and be able to quantify the impact of your work. This means you need to be comfortable using basic maths and statistics for modelling, at least in Excel. Of course, a little SQL is great. And Python is a plus.

This will not only help you get the role you want, but also thrive once you start working. If you’ve struggled in statistics and data analysis is an unknown for you, I strongly recommend less data-intensive industries. I see this time and time again. People that don’t get the key metrics they’re trying to impact or work with business models they don’t understand. It inevitably leads to frustration on both sides, subpar performance and nasty outcomes.

This doesn’t mean you need to be a data scientist to work in tech, although some tech companies do exaggerate in this matter. But it does mean that you need to be data literate and able to quantify the impact of your work.

Grit

The other trait that people in the tech community share is grit – the unique combination of perseverance and passion that helps them deliver meaningful impact. It’s not easy to define grit, but you know it when you see it. People that have grit are driven, relentless in pursuing their goals, ambitious, bold, resilient in front of adversity.

It’s grit that makes the difference between mercenaries and missionaries. Successful people in tech are the latter. Their passion comes from their personal belief in the mission they’re trying to accomplish, the love for their work. If you see your work as a means to an end, the job that finances your passions, and you want clear boundaries between work and life, then the tech industry is not for you. For successful people in tech, work is their passion and grit is the result of this.

Complexities don’t end here

Throughout this post, I painted a binary picture, categorising tech companies and the type of people that fit in each of them. Truth is reality is so much more complex than this and it’s not black and white.

People evolve

On one end, if you’re a “pirate”, a “navy admiral” or a “police officer” today, it doesn’t mean you’ll be the same tomorrow. People grow and evolve throughout their lifetime, their expectations and needs change.

To take my personal example here, I’ve started my career in tech as a pirate and loved every single minute of it. “Why join the navy, if you can be a pirate?”. You might’ve heard this before. Oh well, because I evolved as a professional. I grew into a “navy admiral” that loves to build teams and processes, shaping organisations in periods of intense change, as they scale and optimise for hypergrowth. I wouldn’t go back to doing the “pirates” work again, unless I start my own company. And, while I’m happy wearing the “navy admiral” hat today, we never know what the future holds.

I’ve witnessed people transitioning over time from the pirates to the navy and, later on, to the police patrol. It’s important to always be connected to yourself and understand who you are today, without planning for too much time ahead, when circumstances might change.

Tech companies need a mix of roles

At the other side of the spectrum, companies are not stuck in a particular stage either. Things are quite clear in the early stages of a company’s lifetime. However, the pirates, the navy admirals and the police officers normally coexist in high growth and established tech companies.

An example is that of high growth companies that are building local teams. While the overall company has evolved into its navy stage, the market teams are full of pirates. Similarly, established tech companies foster innovation by building divisions. These function independently from the mother company, building their operating frameworks and functioning as navy admirals.

The right tech company… for you

So, should you choose a career in tech? Definitely NO, if you don’t have the common traits of successful people in tech and the work environment in different type of tech companies is not the one you’re looking for. Definitely YES, if you’re confident this is the right choice for you and you know who you where and what part of tech you want to be in. This decision is going to influence the quality of your life. Just be sure you make an informed decision and escape the tech mirage. In the end, there’s no such thing as the right career path or the right tech company. It’s only the right career path for YOU and the right company for YOU, in tech or anywhere else.