High-reward Full-time Jobs for Ambitious Engineers
Let’s say you’re an ambitious engineer. You want a job with a high upside: You want ten years’ worth of skill development and career growth in five. You want to be in a situation where you can comfortably do something that scares you today. You want doors to open to you that aren’t open today, such as getting a meeting with any founder you want, and being treated as an equal in that meeting. You want to get hired at a higher level than your peers. You want more job options to be open to you than are open today, like starting a startup, working as a CTO, consulting or advising a startup. Not only do you want more optionality, you want to start the race halfway through while others start from the beginning. You want to earn more.
These upsides come with risk1, but let’s say you’re not worried about risk. You consider it part of the process of growth. You’re ready for it at this point in your life. Instead of worrying about risk, you want to maximise the rewards you’re going to get. With that in mind, what kind of jobs should you take up? Here are the highest reward jobs I can think of. I’m limiting this to full-time jobs:
Cofounder (highest reward)
The highest reward job is to start a startup full-time along with another founder who has complementary skills. It gives you the following benefits:
You’ll have the highest growth rate of any job, more than consultants, and more than employees (even a CTO). In other words, when you look back after a year, you’ll learn more than if you’d taken any other job.
You learn to manage other people to get work done via them, rather than necessarily doing it yourself.
You’ll have the most influence on the company and the product.
Quite a few of us have strong opinions. Being a cofounder is a rare opportunity to try out your beliefs and see which ones work. Either way, you’ll learn a lot.
If it works out, you’ll have the most influence on users at scale.
You’ll be the hardest to fire.
You’ll have access to people you won’t otherwise have.
You may make enough to not work again.
You’ll have high status. We’ve always had a caste system, and founders are Brahmins.
If you move on, your status as an entrepreneur benefits you in whatever you do next.
If you move on, the skills you’ve learnt give you a head start in whatever you do next.
If you work as a cofounder, do it right2.
Consultant (second-highest reward)
The second highest reward job is consulting3. It gives you the following benefits:
Consulting pays higher per hour than other kinds of jobs, except a successful cofounder4.
Consulting gives you time to upskill, like building my website in Wix. I evaluated many website builders like Squarespace, Webflow, Google Sites, Google Docs, and Notion and concluded that Wix works best. I realized that website builders nowadays offer e-commerce built in, as an alternative to Shopify. There’s a widget available for consultants to share their schedule on their website, book a meeting, and collect payment. All these higher level abstractions are now common. This is something I did not know before I built my website. As a second example, I created an S3 bucket to back up my personal data. As part of this process, I realized that S3 offers different tiers, but these can cost more depending on your usage, and the standard tier has the most predictable cost. I could learn all this only because consulting gave me the time to.
You’ll learn marketing, which is creating demand for your service. You can’t just sit back and wait for people to contact you. You’ll learn personal branding, too. These will help you throughout your career, no matter what you do.
You’ll learn sales. You’ll learn to understand others, meeting them where they are, rather than demanding that they meet you where you are. You’ll improve your people skills, and ability to understand and overcome objections. All of us are in sales — we’re selling ourselves to clients, employers, cofounders, employees, investors, etc. If you think you’re not in sales, that just means you’re doing a bad job of it.
You’ll learn to be a leader. If you’re one already, you’ll improve as a leader. You’ll learn what needs to be validated before starting a project. And what can be figured out after the project started. In other words, it’s not relevant to the decision of whether to go ahead with the project. You’ll learn what you can commit to, what you can partially commit to, and what you can’t commit to (“I’ll do A. I’ll advise you regarding B, which you’ll do. C is not part of the scope.”) You’ll learn what to hold the client accountable for (“I’ll deliver A and B if you do C and D”). You’ll learn to draw a clear boundary between outcomes and process: the client is entitled to ask for whatever they want, but not to interfere in your process. One side of the boundary is their territory, and one side is yours. You’ll learn to say these explicitly, because consulting clients don’t have a clue about what’s the most obvious thing in the world for you. You’ll learn to sell outcomes rather than your skills and time. All this will help you be a better leader, whether you continue to consult or take up a different kind of job.
Consulting exposes you to a variety of technologies: low-code, Firebase, Spring Boot, Python and more, running on both AWS and Google Cloud. Consulting exposes you to a variety of companies: B2B and B2C. Startups and established companies. You’ll see for yourself how a traditional company like a mining company looks at tech. You’ll meet people of different kinds. You’ll work with people in your country, and foreigners. If you work full-time in one job, you won’t have such varied exposure, and so learn slower. Consulting also develops your network faster.
We think of CTOs and technical cofounders as working on strategic things, delegating mundane tasks to the team under them. But the reality is that a lot of their time is wasted in routine stuff. As a consultant, you can work disproportionately on the high-value stuff.
If you’re gone through a distressing period in your life, you can structure your consulting to reduce distress. For example, you won’t be in trouble if one company you work with fails.
Employee (third-highest reward)
The third highest reward job is working as an employee. Not all jobs as an employee are high-reward, only the following:
Work on a scaled product, such as with a billion users5, or at least a hundred million. This will teach you technical guidelines, engineering processes and how teams are run at scale. Later in your career, when you’re working with a startup, this experience will give the skills and the confidence that you can tackle their small scale easily.
Work at a prestigious company, not Times Internet, even though it has 400m users. Nobody will say, “Wow, he worked at Times Internet, let’s hire him” the way they’ll say for Netflix.
Make sure you’re being paid your market rate. For example, if you’re a junior engineer in India, a fair pay may be 1-2 lakh per month. Anything in that range is fine. But if you’re not even paid a lakh a month, that indicates that the company doesn’t value you, or that the company itself isn’t valuable. You can choose a split between cash and equity that works for you, but your total remuneration should be as per market rates6.
If you’re the Nth engineering at the company, lower the value of N, the more you’ll learn.
It’s good to take on a higher role than you ever had in the past, such as a tech lead, if you never have been one before.
If you're Indian, work at a company where most of your teammates, your manager and the founders are not based in India or from an Indian background 7. In other words, your manager should be Peter, not Pramod. The company shouldn't have an India office because if they do, you'll be working primarily with your Indian colleagues, and that defeats the goal of exposing yourself to a different working style from what you're used to in India. This means a remote-first company.
Work at a company that makes most of its revenue and has most of its users in developed countries. Why? Apps made for Indians are mediocre, because the audience is not demanding of quality. People will refresh again and again till it works, for example, while Americans will uninstall it. Which means that high-quality tech won’t be rewarded. The company will be dominated by businesspeople. You want to put yourself in a situation that demands excellence.
There are different risks: One is financial, like needing to invest your money in the startup, or not getting paid, or not getting paid for months. There’s the emotional risk of failure. There’s health, like not having time to exercise or cook, ordering unhealthy food, till you’re diagnosed with an irreversible condition. There’s mental health like burnout which is hard to recover from. There’s work-life balance, not spending time with your family, until it’s too late. These are all the risks a job can entail.
You should have as much equity as any other cofounder. Otherwise, you’re not really a cofounder; you’re just being told you are in order to get you to join, as with the Founding Engineer job title.
Startups with sole founders don’t succeed as much. Don’t start a startup yourself and then go looking for a cofounder, because most founders who do that end up not finding one. Instead, join a founder looking for a cofounder.
Being a founder on the side while having a full-time job doesn’t work.
And no, a services company doesn’t count as a startup.
Or freelancing if you’re early in your career. What’s the difference? The company tells the freelancer what to do, but asks the CONSULTant what to do.
Most cofounders earn less than consultants, because the former’s startup fails.
Working at Google is not the same as working on a product with a billion users. Google has a lot of products with few users, like the Google Workspace admin console. Don’t work on these. Be careful, because managers will try to claim their product operates at scale when it doesn’t. One inspirational colleague at Google flatly refused to work on such a product. He said, “That’s not why I’m here. I joined Google to work on products with a billion users. I can resign if you want.”
In fact, if you’re going to work on a Google product with only 100m users, instead work at a company with 100m users, like Netflix, Pinterest or Telegram. These companies will have much less bureaucracy, so you’ll be be able to achieve more and learn more. The only reason you should work at Google is to work on a product with a billion users, which Netflix can’t offer.
If you ask for 20 lpa, some unethical or confused founders will offer you 12 lpa cash + 8 equity saying it totals to 20. Since the equity vests over 4 years, it’s actually 12 + 2 which is 14, not the 20 you asked for.
Or from an Indian background, like Indians who moved abroad.