The unpopular strategy that helped my career grow

The first years of our professional lives are the hardest ones.

We enter a completely new World. We are working with a blank canvas, which gives us plenty of opportunities and many doubts. Making decisions with so little information is overwhelming.

Any mistakes we make will stay with us for the rest of our careers (or at least, that’s how we see it).

The most difficult decision

Not long after communicating my resignation to my first employer, he called us to an emergency meeting. He was euphoric: He had made the biggest sale in the company’s history, and we had to do our best to deliver that order. But we both knew I wouldn’t participate in that project.

I wasn’t leaving because I wasn’t comfortable. That was a great first job. I was developing software for slot machines, which was exciting:

• The product was entertaining
• The environment was exceptional
• And it had every benefit of a small company.

But there was no room to grow, so I went after a job at a big consultancy.

The scenario changed in front of this new objective for the company. I was the only developer working on the slot machines, so they offered me 5x my salary to stay with them (no exaggerations here).

The most significant decision of my extremely short-so-far career was on the table:

1. Should I become a trainee at one of the world’s biggest consultancies with a 6-month contract?
2. Or keep working at a company where I am comfortable and earn 5 times the money?

I chose the opposite of what everyone told me: I rejected the money.

Countless temptations

That was not the only situation where I had to deal with uncertainty in my early years.

In my second job, I escalated from trainee to senior analyst in 2 years. I’m not bragging about it. Although I was doing a good job, there were other reasons for my fast promotions:

• The programming language I worked with (SAP ABAP) was in high demand.
• Every other colleague was leaving the company, cleaning my path.

During the 3 years I worked there, I was tempted to leave the company and join smaller consultancies multiple times:

• Colleagues telling me about how much they were making
• Recruiters contacting me and sharing the benefits of working at a company with higher margins
• Even a team member asked to include me as a reference for a position which, according to her own words, consisted of doing the same job I was doing but earning twice as much.

However, I again did what no one else was doing at the time: I rejected the money.

My reasons for being “different”

Being in the opposite direction than my colleagues and friends wasn’t easy.

I was in my twenties, wanting to leave my parents’ home and become independent. But that wasn’t an option with my salary. Although I had the key to unlock that door, I refused to use it. The most challenging part wasn’t to resist the temptation or to see my friends move faster than me.

The hardest part was to feel that I may be making that effort for nothing.

Have you ever started a diet to lose some pounds without the conviction that it would work?

You stick to it for a while and see some results, but less than expected. Your negative talk grows in your head until that party where you can’t hold your willingness to jump into that piece of cake. You didn’t succumb because you were weak but because you convinced yourself it would not work.

I don’t know how close to that party I was, but the results started to appear, making my effort worthwhile.

This is what I was looking for:

• Secure and predictable job until I get my degree
• Contact with big companies’ governance and processes
• Learning to be formal and professional
• Understanding the business
• Leadership experience

I knew that small companies would be chaotic environments, where I may learn a lot about technical stuff but little about management at big companies.

My strategy in a nutshell

You may think I wanted to have a classic career at a big company, but that’s not true.

I intended to collect a solid knowledge of how the IT World worked and understand the basics of our business. With that basic knowledge, I could later dive into the topics I found most interesting and interact with the rest of the community by speaking their language. I wanted to be a senior consultant not only because of my tenure but also because of my skills.

So, I planned to acquire those skills during the first 5 years of my career, regardless of how much I made.

Conclusion

I must admit that ignoring the salary was extremely hard for me.

When I see it retrospectively, the balance is positive. I don’t know how much of it was just good luck, but things turned out to be more or less as I expected.

Those 5 first years contributed tremendously to my confidence in every subsequent experience.

My business orientation and confidence to communicate and admit mistakes were forged mainly during those years.