#44 | In Praise Of The Enemy

In the beginning of a career, the gravity of big names is strong. We all felt it.

The dream is to land a job at a Google, an Airbnb, a Facebook. It is the perceived summit. But after speaking with many people who have walked those halls, a different picture emerges. A picture that is less about glory and more about a comfortable, gilded cage.

The truth is, a really big chunk of people in these giants are working with a set of already established products. The machine is running, and the primary directive is to keep it running smoothly. There is little incentive to create anything truly new, to cause trouble. And without trouble, without a real adversary, do you really grow?

After three, four, five years in such a company, it can be difficult to show for it. Your portfolio becomes one of maintenance. Unless you navigated a truly catastrophic event - something systemic and threatening that required your ingenuity on a weekly basis - you have not learned much. You have become a very good gardener of a well-manicured lawn. But you have never faced the jungle.

I meet many Product Managers and Software Engineers. Some have strange experience from no-name companies. But in these roles, they have seen war. They were fighting fires daily. They might have been rewriting an entire application from scratch or facing down serious adversaries in their professional lives.

They fought, and maybe they won, maybe they did not. But they had a serious enemy - the market, the competition, the broken code - that forced them to grow out of the junior shell.

This is why startups are more interesting. You are trying on different hats. You have clear adversaries:

• The Market: It does not care for your idea. It wants you to fail.

• The Competition: Bigger and smaller, all fighting for the same ground.

• The Product: The constant battle for product-market fit.

In an established corporation, if the product is working, you have no incentive to cause trouble. In fact, it is not welcomed. Your colleagues rely on stability. I know this from engineers at Big Tech firms. When they were hired, some waited a month just for system access. How can you challenge yourself, how can you learn the ropes, if a decision takes a month to be approved?

The speed of decisions is important. But the challenges are what shape you.

No one loves challenges instinctively. But you must teach yourself to. The same rule applies in professional and private life: you must have an adversary. Otherwise, you are not growing.

The adversary is the only thing that makes you meet yourself. Your weaknesses, your mishaps, your blind spots. It is a harsh mirror.

So when I see someone who worked for a big, famous company, there is a big chance this person has not seen a real, serious problem. They might say, "we had a big load of users, we had an outage." But let's be honest with ourselves. Outages happen to everyone now. This is not a ground-breaking issue anymore.

In more chaotic, broken systems, you learn what actually works. You learn to distinguish the people who can handle stress from those who cannot. You cannot learn this in a quiet environment where everything is fine. I guess the same goes for governments, countries, and pretty much everything in life.

Only with really serious fuckups and issues, there is a way for you to learn about yourself, to gain new skills, and to make mistakes you can learn from.

So I hope for you that you have these issues. And that you fight them, and you win. This is my wish for you. If you do not have an adversary at work - that thing you must overpower - then you are not learning.

And if you do not have one, what to do?

• It is probably time to change the project.

  Or the company.

• You have to come up with your own enemy.

  This might be the people inside the company who love the status quo. The people who do not want to change anything.

At some point, you will be the pain in the ass. But be a pain in the ass for a reason. Be constructive. Be critical. And if you can propose a change and overpower the inertia, you will learn a lot.

A final note: you have to remember, the company is not yours. If you are not rewarded for this positive change, at least you have to be learning from it. If you are not learning, and not earning, you are just wasting your lifetime.

Remember, we only have about 80 summers in this life. There is no time to waste it for bad companies, bad people, and bad places. Go find a fight worth fighting.