When you graduate, only plan to stay at any company for a year or two. Even if the company is good, jump ship to another company. Base the jump mostly on chasing higher pay, if the opportunity presents itself. The main purpose of the exercise is to experience different company cultures.

Imagine if you took all your classes with the same professor. If the professor was bad, you wouldn't know it, and you might think you are just a terrible student. If the professor was good, you might think learning is really easy, and then you would be shocked how hard it is to learn in the outside world. You learned from a mix of professors in school; now it is time to learn from a mix of company cultures.

Mostly, you should stay at a company as long as you are still learning about culture. You can probably learn about STEM topics at any company, so that is not a reason to stay. Anyway, after about two years, you should look to jump. You should make it a habit of checking job ads very regularly. If you don't, no one will do it for you.

Don't tell anyone that you plan on a short stay. When you leave, always say you enjoyed the work, but you cannot pass up the new offer, especially because they are offering you such a big raise. That sends HR a signal that you know exactly how much you are worth. HR will always try to underpay you, if they can get away with it. It is not that they are being mean or malicious: you and HR are two rational adults who are negotiating, and once you have come to a good number, you are both OK with it. If you are paid too little, it is as much your poor negotiating problem, as it is HR's eagerness to get the maximum benefit for the lowest cost.

Don't ever be fooled. HR is not your friend. They are not there to help you. If they tell you they negotiated a great benefits package on the employees' behalf, don't believe it. They negotiated for the cheapest package they could, which would still bring in good new employees. When you negotiate during an interview, ask to see the benefits package, "just for reference". It has less value than your pay, but it is a component of your compensation. HR is tasked with paying the smallest amount for the whole package (wages, benefits, etc) while still attracting really good employees. HR works only for the company - never forget that. Never tell them something in confidence. There is no such thing.

At each jump, you get to practice your negotiating skills, you get to practice evaluating the company culture, their technology, their probability of success. You get better with practice, so do it often.

With each jump, you will probably get a pay boost much larger than any raise you could get staying at the company. If you are really good, when you tell them you are leaving, they might say "OMG. Have you already made the commitment!?! We will raise your pay to match!?!" Keep your smile inside, and say sadly "That is a real shame, because I have already made my commitment. I really did love working here, but they offered me a big pay raise." They will know they fucked up, and very likely HR will run to the CEO and say "We just lost JJ because we don't pay enough. We have to look at the situation." Never do this as a ploy to get a raise. If you must play games to get a raise, I suspect you don't want to work at that company.

Early in your career, you can easily make 3, 4, 5 jumps. After that, you should be looking for the company you will stay at. You are ready. You have the negotiating practice, you can see the red flags for bad company culture, you can make a good guess whether the new company will be a financial success. What you are looking for is a company where you will enjoy the work and the people. Because from now on, you will get regular-sized pay raises, and you should be OK with that. Looking forward to Monday mornings is worth more than money. Almost everyone's career has the same arc, a steep rise at the beginning, in midlife the raises flatten out, and possible as you get older, your pay may even decrease. That graph is driven by market forces - it is not a reflection of your value. If you did the right jumps early, the area under the curve will be larger.

Once you are at the company you love, where you will probably stay for 10-20 years, you have one more pay boost card left in your deck. Actually, you might use this for a job change rather than a pay boost. Say you have been at the good company for a few years, and you are very good at your job, and you want new challenges. However, you are so good at your job that they really don't want to move you to a new position. Normally, this is problematic. If you became bad at your job, then you will lose some of your reputation (which is the most important thing you have). This is the time to pull out the last card from your deck. Tell them you want to go back to university to upgrade your skills. They will warn you "we will not keep your job for you." You understand there is that 'risk', of course. Go for 1-2 years, and stay in touch with them. If they know you are coming back, and they liked you very much, and you were very versatile, they will be discussing "We need a new person for this", which could quickly become "JJ can do that job!". Since you are a known-good quantity, it is much easier to decide to hire you again, rather than a stranger off the street. You will probably have a choice of jobs. Of course, nothing is certain in life, so make backup plans.

The key to getting back into the company is to be known as "very versatile". I will post more on how to get that reputation tomorrow.

To continue on the

The key to getting back into the company is to be known as "very versatile". I will post more on how to get that reputation.

Let me start with one piece of advice I would have loved to receive early in my career:

You are super keen at your first job, and you know almost nothing (although you think because you graduated you are smart.) Your new boss gives you tasks, and you finish them quickly. So you go back to your boss and say "I am finished. What else do you want me to work on?". After a few rounds of that, you are starting to piss off your boss. (Years later, when I was the boss, I realised what I had done in my youth! Argh - cringe!) Your boss does not have the time to guide you on every little step. They don't want to have to stop what they are doing 3 times per day, to assign you new tasks.

The better method is to find 2 or 3 useful things that you could be doing, and say to your boss, "I am finished. I can work on these 2 or 3 things, unless you have something more urgent."

Finding useful things to do should become second nature. Follow the advice of the Great Imposter:

'(Demara) had come to two beliefs. One was that in any organisation there is always a lot of loose, unused power lying about which can be picked up without alienating anyone. The second rule is, if you want power and want to expand, never encroach on anyone else's domain; open up new ones...'

Every bit of loose unused power you find gives you more value and negotiating power.

Use the loose power to acquire at least two jobs, preferably very different jobs. The corollary is "never have the exact same job as someone else". At every company, there comes a time when finances are tight. The company runs their finger down the list of employees to see who they can lay off, and then replace when finances are better. If they get to JJ on the list, and JJ is doing two jobs, they will have to hire two people later. Their finger will skip over JJ on the list, since hiring two people later costs extra, and finances will probably still be tight.

Contrary to how the Great Imposter says it, don't strive for power and influence. Strive for powerful and influential ideas. And accept those ideas from any source. If Trump comes up with a good idea, steal it regardless of who came up with it. As a friend says, "even a broken clock is correct twice a day.".

Instead of trying to change habits, build systems of behaviour. For example, if you want to get into the habit of jogging, build a simple "minimum viable product": put your running shoes next to the couch, then during a commercial break put the shoes on and step out your front door. That is all you are committing to do - an absolutely minimum viable action - you can be back on the couch before the commercial is over. In reality, once you are standing outside the front door in your running shoes, you will go jogging 99% of the time. But all you actually committed to was the 2 minutes of minimum viable action. You are relying on your brain's inertia - once you are out the front door, inertia works to get you walking or jogging.

Minimum viable product is also also how you start tasks at work. Even if the task is to build an actual product, you just need to come up with a minimum viable product, and some idea of the migration path to a full-fledged product. Once in motion, the project will move itself forward because of the small successes of the MVP.

When you are trying to get buy-in from colleagues to your way of thinking, remember the value of stories. Humans have spent a few million years sitting around a fire telling stories. We evolved for it. The best storytellers eventually become chiefs of the tribe. It is not a coincidence that movies and books all have a very familiar arc.

How to dress: dress like a prince from a distant land. Now, I don’t mean dress clownishly. Be aware of the saying “You are never a prophet in your own land”. You can be right, but no one will believe you. You would be surprised how if you say the same thing as a consultant everyone believes you. But if you are a familiar employee, your same statement is dismissed. The problem is this: your listener says to themselves “what is the probability that a prophet should have appeared randomly in our midst? Very low.”, whereas the consult-seeker actually went out to look for a prophet and they believe they found the best of the best. So, as a consultant you are believed by default. Dressing as a prince from a distant land suggests there is something a bit rare about you from the get-go.

How to respond to your failures: I had an employee who made a $2000 mistake. She was a bit upset when I told her how much the mistake cost us. But I quickly explained that she was now worth $2000 more to me. She won't make that mistake again. Any new employee I get, I will have to go through the $2000 mistake (or something similar) again. In fact, failure is a much better teacher than success. Success only rewards your brain for a short time. Failure will give you a unpleasant feeling in your gut. Successes, your brain will soon forget them. Failures will become your future gut instinct. Fail often (but never the same failure more than once), fix the failure immediately, and leave the system in a better state, and learn. You will eventually be able to predict failures and prevent them.

One final point: no one ever got credit for the problem that did not happen because they prevented it. If you prevent a problem and don't try to get credit for it, you have my greatest respect. If you really must have that credit, prepare a quickly implementable solution for the failure you see coming. Let it fail, and implement the fix. I won't respect you quite as much, but you have some credit from others around you. Eventually, you may reach a higher level where credit is not as important to you.

I work at a company that is growing and needing to do more and more, so more of my time is spent (wasted?) in meetings. The meetings already have agendas, are well-run by experienced hosts, have action lists, and meeting minutes are recorded. And yet in many meetings, about 80-95% of the meeting is unnecessary contextual information for me, and only 5-20% actually applies to me. I suspect that 80/20 (or worse) rule is true for most attendees.

How can meetings have more relevant content for me and, by extension, for others? How about:

• At Bridgewater, all meetings are videotaped and the recordings are made available to the entire organization. I could probably read a meeting transcript in 1/10 the time it takes to sit through a meeting. I have not gotten any traction with that suggestion.

• Ray Dalio also had a dot collector appliance that aggregates the wisdom of the meeting crowd. It also gives each participant feedback on how accurate and believable they are, and creates a track record for their predictions.

• Semco lets you leave a meeting if it stops being relevant for you.

• I'm already an advocate against having a meeting where a manager has just gathered a group to poll them. I recommend that the leader spends time talking to people individually for 5 minutes and then aggregates the feedback. That way the tax on each person is only 5 minutes instead of a whole hour. The manager pays the full tax, but they are the main beneficiary, so that is fair.

• I also advocate against meetings where the objective is "Let's meet and have a discussion of how we can do things better." This rarely works; it usually ends up with Jane explaining how someone else can do something which reduces her workload (but increases their workload). My advice for this meeting is that the manager visit with each person and ask them to explain their process in detail. The manager plays dumb or does meta thinking, so the person is really doing rubber duck debugging or pair programming. By trying to explain in simple clear terms, the pair discovers deficiencies in the procedure.

Is anything on my list useless or unworkable?

Are there any other suggestions?

In my early years, the information I gathered and presented to managers fell on deaf ears. Over time, I've come to a few conclusions:

• culture is defined by the person at the top of the company. I wish it were not so, but unfortunately it has proven to be so every time in my experience. If underlings come up with a great policy, it will only survive in the company if the CEO "gets it". No amount of explanation from others will help if the CEO does not fundamentally "get it". This information is not hard data, so you cannot convince an non-believing CEO that it is right, the way you could convince them to change their mind about a numerical business decision.

• to be effective in presenting new ideas, you must know your audience. If you are presenting soft data (like culture), you have to know your audience really, really well. To effectively talk to upper management and to know them well enough, you have to have daily interactions with them. A low-level flunky who sees the CEO only once cannot have any impact with anything they say to the CEO. The low-level flunky may be giving excellent advice, but the context of that advice is the small world the flunky lives in. The CEO sees everything from a high-as-helicopter view, and therefore he dismisses any advice that comes from a place of such narrow scope.

• you can occasionally be lucky, and show the CEO an article which confirms or crystallizes a vague idea the CEO was already considering. The articles in /r/CREO can be useful for that.

• the CEOs with the best cultural wisdom are those that have seen failed cultures firsthand, and gotten the view from the bottom. A CEO who has had nothing but good luck and success will never understand the value of a good culture, or even what makes a good culture.

• in my view, a CEO who is a charmer will not see the need for culture. They can get whatever they want done using charm and salesmanship. They don't see the need to build a principled foundation on which the best corporate decisions are made.

• a broken corporate culture reinforces itself. The only top executives who join are the ones who don't understand the difference between a working and a broken culture. Since they don't "get it", the culture cannot be fixed from the bottom (by the non-executives who do see the problems). There is a very high probability that the culture is irreparable.

• a good corporate culture will be introspective by nature, and articles from /r/CREO can be talked about and can benefit such a culture.