Recently I was talking to someone about someone else. “He got an offer to join XXXXXX as CTO”, the guy I was talking to told me, “but I told him not to take it. Problem with CTO role is that you just stop learning and growing. Better to join a bigger place as a VP”.
The discussion meandered for a couple of minutes when I added “I feel the same way about being head of analytics”. I didn’t mention it then (maybe it didn’t flash), but this was one of the reasons why I lobbied for (and got) taking on the head of data science role as well.
I sometimes feel lonely in my job. It is not something anyone in my company can do anything about. The loneliness is external – I sometimes find that I don’t have too many “peers” (across companies). Yes, I know a handful of heads of analytics / data science across companies, but it is just that – a handful. And I can’t claim to empathise with all of them (and I’m sure the feeling is mutual).
Irrespective of the career path you have chosen, there comes a point in your career where your role suddenly becomes “illiquid”. Within your company, you are the only person doing the sort of job that you are doing. Across companies, again, there are few people who do stuff similar to what you do.
The kind of problems they solve might be different. Different companies are structured differently. The same role name might mean very different things in very different places. The challenges you have to face daily to do your job may be different. And more importantly, you might simply be interested in doing different things.
And the danger that you can get into when you get into this kind of a role is that you “stop growing”. Unless you get sufficient “push from below” (team members who are smarter than you, and who are better than you on some dimensions), there is no natural way for you to learn more about the kind of problems you are solving (or the techniques). You find that your current level is more than sufficient to be comfortable in your job. And you “put peace”.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind youNo one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
(I want you to now imagine the gong sound at the beginning of “Time” playing in your ears at this point in the blogpost)
One thing I tell pretty much everyone I meet is that my networking within my own industry (analytics and data science) is shit. And this is something I need to improve upon. Apart from the “push from below” (which I get), the only way to continue to grow in my job is to network with peers and learn from them.
The other thing is to read. Over the weekend I snatched the new iPad (which my daughter had been using; now she has got my wife’s old Macbook Air) and put all my favourite apps on it. I feel like I’m back in 2007 again, subscribing to random blogs (just that most of them are on substack now, rather than on Blogspot or Livejournal or WordPress), in the hope that I will learn. Let me see where this takes me.
And maybe some people decide that all this pain is simply not worth it, and choose to grow by simply becoming more managerial, and “building an empire”.
I was this guy (small department though) and a decade went by before I moved on 3 years ago. Positives: you make steady income and expertise in that niche. Negatives: you have pointed out.
The last 3 years have been really enlightening and I’m learning a lot of what I missed out on.