Getting to VP level at a "top startup" has little to do with data science, and everything to do with your ability to play the networking game. Depending on the size of the company, VP level jobs are more about management skills than technical proficiency.
Why does this community (HN) have such a proclivity for these types of bitter responses?
This comment makes wild assumptions, doesn't assume best intentions, and really just makes `brenden2` sound like a nasty person. Yet here it is, top comment on the front page.
Nice work OP! You are flexing a very unique set of muscles (technical + leadership + communication + ambition) that very few people have. You will go far in life.
Why do you perceive it as bitter rather than simply factual observations about employment? It is a whole discipline of social science research, eg “Moral Mazes.”
My personal goal is for my beliefs and my participation in a community to above all be accurate. If the fact-based conclusions aren’t very pleasant, that is a function of the state of the world, not the state of participation.
You seem to be reading a bitterness into the comment that is not there. Apart from that your comment is also very true. The op will go very far! Big picture, networking, and management are far more valued than someone with raw technical ability who misses the above.
Indeed. If your goal is to become a VP at a successful startup, you're better off working on your networking/blogging/social/managerial skills than studying anything technical.
Tech startup as a phenomenon of the last 25-ish years is maturing and has become sufficiently mainstream that it has attracted a very wide spectrum of people, so much so that the majority of them are - as you would expect - quite average. It turns out that being average is not enough to beat the odds, and those are quite stacked against early-stage startups. So you end up with fairly low chances of success and the resulting bitterness. As this industry continues to mature, the next step will be calls for regulation, unions, etc.
None of this is new - it's happened to all industries after they became sufficiently mainstream. Take a look at aviation - at first it was the wild west at the beginning of the century, then WW1 and WW2 brought some rapid advances, and in the last 70 years things have been relatively stale. Anyone dreaming of designing the next airliner today is a very different person from those who designed them at the beginning of that cycle.
I am not even saying there's anything wrong with all of this. As an industry matures and becomes more mainstream (aka, affects more people), we have to put some safety mechanisms in place. That means discussions become more about safety and less about achievement, and this attracts a fundamentally different group of people - more average, more bitter.
Kudos to the OP: just like syndacks, I am rooting for him and hope he'll use his enthusiasm to continue to shoot for the stars!
> Tech proficiency is largely irrelevant once you go into management.
The lack of tech proficiency is even an advantage: in the companies where I worked, it is people who sucked badly at the technical job they had, who were moved to management, hoping that they might be less useless there. They are happy, they are paid twice as much as others who could fulfil their tasks, so it must mean they're good at something (something difficult to assess otherwise so money must be the right measurement). And then, since it is almost impossible to differentiate between a good and a bad manager, they could thrive a few decades going up in those roles, jumping from a company to another, boasting about the number of projects they 'made' (which are naturally more numerous than for the people who actually worked deeply on them).
Strange comment. How could you be a good data science leader if you are not a good data scientist? Could you equally be a good CFO if you didn't have technical skills in finance?
My best manager was my least technical manager. He was really good at getting the right work to the right people, controlling expectations, stopping the clients from burying us under requirements, stopping us from hiding behind poorly phrased requirements, communicating setbacks early to turn them into course-corrections rather than trainwrecks, and juggling lots of constraints and dependencies while planning and rescheduling. He wasn't even an interpersonal wizard, but he was really good at keeping his part of the organization running smoothly. Nothing fell through the cracks while he was in charge, and we were all better for it.
This lies in stark contrast to the three other managers I've had for any length of time, who have all been considerably more technical and considerably less good at those other things. They've been able to step in and help fight fires in a way that the above manager couldn't have, but they haven't been as good at keeping their part of the organization running smoothly. Thing is, the latter is a manager's job, and the former isn't.
I mostly see management and implementation as orthogonal skills, with the caveat that experience is industry-specific in both cases.
Im afraid that while this seems logical, it's not how the real world actually is. I've known of many heads of departments with rather grand titles and only a very small percentage of them even know the slightest of what goes on below them or why.
Heads of IT, software departments and even CIOs that cant even login.
In fact, they often move to similar roles in other companies because the new companies believe they must be good to be in that seniority of the current company. When in fact the current company just can't wait for them to go.
After a couple of these moves, they have a whole career of senior positions in immpressive companies.
I can think of about 10 examples within ftse10 and fortune25 companies right now that I've had the "pleasure" to work with.
>How could you be a good data science leader if you are not a good data scientist?
The job of a Data Science leader at a growing company is 50% recruiting and 50% sitting in planning meetings. Even if you started with good IC knowledge after a few years your skills will be rusty as hell. So assuming you know nothing and trusting your team and delegating is going to work infinitely better than trusting your own out of date skills.
edit: And yes, this is from personal knowledge, I've held such titles before and I've had a lot of offers for other such titles.
edit2: As a corollary, promoting someone to management just because they're a good IC is a really bad idea. You want your top ICs to stay ICs if possible. You want your managers to be people who actually can manage and want to manage.
This exactly. I can't begin to list off all the rich dumbasses who had all sorts of titles in startups because they went to the same school, knew the founders, etc. I've had such people have no idea what model they even use for large chunks of their pipeline. Obviously they hire the actual talent and these guys get the credit.
How is this different from any other company though? It happens a lot where I live. You either know the higher ups through some sort of connection(school, event, family, etc) became friends and that's it you landed on a nice position.
I'd love to say it's only prone in startups but it's been plaguing companies forever, especially small-medium sized ones where it's easier because the owner is probably hoping to find able hands, perhaps the huge ones have slightly better processes to counter this type of scenario.
It's not different, all companies are like this. That doesn't make it any better though...
Success is mostly based upon who you know and being at the right place at the right time. That's why it's disingenuous to suggest you can "teach" how to be successful with blog posts like this -- you can't teach someone how to be born into the right family so they can attend the right school and meet the right people.
