Crossing the career chasm on your way to a VP position

So, there you are, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, clutching your fresh and clean sheepskin for your Computer Science degree from Anywhere University. Unless you are brilliant enough, AND ESPECIALLY lucky enough, to start your own Facebook or Apple company, you have been job-searching for a while and finally found an opening.  You arrive for your first day at iThing Corporation as an entry-level programmer.   You are now on the bottom rung of the ladder to success.

You spend extra hours and weekends diligently coding and pretty quickly your brilliance is recognized.  You get promoted to team lead with a couple of junior programmers worshipping the ground on which you walk. Step two on the ladder.

And so, your career continues. Project follows project, and effort seems to have its own rewards as you move steadily up the ladder.

Of course, the titles may vary slightly in any one company or another, but the old motto of per ardua ad astra ('through struggle to the stars') certainly seems to work for almost all of us. In nearly every case, especially in larger corporations, this linear progression of promotions is seemingly guaranteed, but then things change, and the infamous glass ceiling rears its ugly head.

If you are driven by relentless ambition, you want to join the 'Vice President Club', but now you have come to what I call the 'Career Chasm', and to cross it, you are going to need more than just hard work and commitment.

There are so many things that can help you make this leap into space, and I admit to knowing only those that have worked for me. I would like to share a few of them with those of you who are headed for the top. I would especially like to call upon any other 'oldies' who have made the leap to perhaps add THEIR experience and suggestions as comments to this blog. Part of our responsibility as Geezers is to help the next generation make it as far as THEY can. So, here are my few tips :

• LUCK - this one you have little control over, but keep the expression 'be in the right place at the right time' in the back of your mind, and be prepared to change 'places' and change them 'at the right time' ...
• ...which leads me to CHANGE COMPANIES. If you have made your linear progression through the ranks in the same company, the odds of your getting promoted to VP are low. Someone in HR is going to remember the Christmas Party incident from 7 years ago and THAT will be held against you forever. Almost everyone I know has had to take their first VP position in a different company from the one in which they were previously working.
• TAKE A BUSINESS VIEW OF THINGS - A lot of us in this industry are geeks, and we often believe the Field of Dreams quote 'If you build it, they will come'. Well, they won't! Once you get to the VP level, your job is no longer to be the best programmer in the company, it is to help take the company to the next level, and for that, you NEED to start to look at the way BUSINESS WORKS, not the way that TECHNOLOGY WORKS.
• ...and for the last of MY four suggestions, along the same lines as the last one, TAKE A PEOPLE VIEW OF THINGS. I once was an adjunct professor at a business school and taught a class on 'Organizational Behavior'. I not only managed to pass on a lot of experiences, but it finally dawned on me that 99.99% of the problems in companies are caused by people, NOT by technology. Learn what people like and what they fear. Learn what motivates and demotivates them. Learn how to speak in public and learn how to LEAD people!

Successful VPs think differently from the level below them, and for those of you who can recognize this, the leap of faith will bring the ultimate rewards of both success, and a sense of achievement and contribution that will far outweigh your financial gains.

Good luck to all of you on the way up!

Glyn Meek, with 40 years of experience in the technology industry, has earned his curmudgeonly outlook.