The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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looking for career device.
i am a midlevel professional in my mid 30s, my work is essentially in business operations type roles in midsized organization. In addition to inflation kicking my butt this year, I have small children and will likely have more, whom I intend to send to private school. So I simply need to make more money. Right now, with school budgeted we're deep in the red. We spend more than we earn.
My goal has been to move up (or parallel with a reset inflation adjusted salary) in mid-level manager type roles within business /sales operations functions. (I have some management experience on my resume. I am technically a 'manager' now, but have no direct reports at the moment).
So i've recently been applying around (internally and externally) and gotten no luck. I realize that in business / sales roles, I am outcompeted by folks with field sales and sales management experience or MBAs. (I have a master's degree in something that gets me through initial hiring process gates, but isn't particularly an impressive competitive advantage).
In product or development management roles, I am not competitive because i don't have any technical experience on my resume.
So I basically have four options:
Keep grinding through interviews until I get lucky
Go get an MBA, take on a lot of debt, and hope to come out in a place to rapidly make it up.
Jump down to field sales and climb back up through there back into business side/ management. My fear with this one is that I won't be competitive for any except pretty much entry level account executive roles. I'd essentially be starting over, but might see a big momentum gain /jump when I got back to the middle.
Move into software dev. In school I was originally a CS major, I held a few programming internships, etc. before switching to a pipedream (long dead). Recently I've developed some React apps on my own, but I am not at a college grad level in terms of skill. I know both that I am capable of programming job, but also not a prodigy, and to invest back into this without a degree and with small kids to raise might be a barrier. Once again, I would have to start at the bottom, salary and level and work back up. But the upside here is better salary bands. (at a manager level, I currently make what devs from state U are coming in at).
Right now, I am just trying to maximize earning potential in the near, mid, and long term to take care of my family. Every single one of these seems like bad options. All of these come with a lot of sunk cost and uncertainty for a guy in the middle of the game.
But I am kind of at a loss and have about 0 months to make a plan so that I can afford to send my kids to school.
How much are you making now?
What range MBA are you looking at? Top 10 schools close to guarantee a good salary but admissions are tough, tuition cost will be six figures, and you would need to relocate for 2 years.
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One option you might not have considered is technical sales. You could leverage your CS degree and your ability to deal with/manage people here. I'm a sales engineer about your age and make enough to send my three kids to private school if I wanted to. I'm a mediocre programmer and have an irrelevant bachelor's degree. I understand enough of the tech and can program enough to build demos and tools for customers, but that's about it.
If you've got people skills, you could try to work as an junior sales engineer (or regular engineer) somewhere and then quickly climb the ladder or jump ship to a better paying sales engineering role. Good sales engineers are really hard to find since it's kind of a weird skillset.
This is something my wife has suggested. About four years ago I almost made the switch to get into this at my previous employer. I had gone as far as getting technical certifications for their product. But before I got an opening I was recruited away to my current role, doubling down on business operations stuff.
This is good to hear. Do you think sales engineering is hard to come into of you aren't already in the company / have experience with their solutions? What would get me looked at from the outside?
Conversation skills and general people skills are the most important. You can turn a intelligent and curious sales person into a sales engineer, but it seems nearly impossible to teach a highly intelligent and skilled engineer people skills.
Straight up sales experience is great, if you have it. Also, I'd play up times where you advocated for something within your company or with a client. Bonus points if you can quantify the impact of your efforts. More bonus points if you can describe successfully navigating a complex problem with a customer or another team -- what was the problem and how did you scope it? Who were the stakeholders and how did you identify them? Did you define clear success/fail criteria to asses the results of your work on the problem? How do you handle customer objections? Are you good at asking questions to discover what the customer really needs (because often customers have misidentified their own problems)? Any stories you can share that answer these questions will help you.
For the technical side, you'll just have to target companies whose product seems "crammable," for lack of a better word. This depends on your technical chops. You have a CS degree, so I'm assuming you can probably figure things out on your own and teach yourself, if so there are a lot of companies available to yoy. Sign up for a free trial of their software, play around with it, read the docs, see if it's something you can learn or whether you're in way over your head (but tbh you'll feel like you're in a little over your head no matter what -- that's normal). Make sure you do the obvious stuff like reading the site's main homepage, the "About Us" page, etc. You'd be surprised how many people show up to interviews poorly informed about the company and/or the product.
I'd also at least skim "Mastering Technical Sales: The Sales Engineer's Handbook". It's no-nonsense and not as dry as it sounds. It will give you a good idea of the sorts of problems and questions that SEs have and give you an idea of whether it's something you want to do or not.
as a coda here, unfornately I don't actually hold a CS degree. I switched majors halfway through. Nor do I ahve prior sales experience.
I am pretty confident, I could do (and enjoy) technical sales, as I peruse job listings, I am doubtful about getting to an initial interview with my background. I've put this to the test by applying to several, but I am not hopeful.
A path to Sales engineering looks like I'll have to come up through strategy 3 or 4 above anyway (entry level sales or entry level software dev). We'll see, I guess
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I'm not sure I can say much about your career beyond "#1 is the 'success story' I hear most often."
Given the discussion of children I assume you have a spouse. Are they employed? If not, why private school? Why not homeschool? If you and your spouse are both employed, the price tag of private school for multiple children could rapidly outstrip the kind of salary it sounds like you're drawing. That means it would be cheaper for you to quit and homeschool your children--to say nothing of the savings in other areas, like transportation, wardrobe, food preparation, etc. Homemakers (who take their task seriously) represent household economic value measuring well into six figures easily, particularly if you've got more than 2 or 3 children you want to keep out of the public school system.
It would also be useful to know (roughly) where you live and to what extent you're willing to relocate. What's the price of moving to a really good neighborhood with exemplary public schools? Have you looked into charter schools, or Arizona's recent voucher expansion?
If you're living in, like, London and you've hand-picked some insanely amazing private school, but you're having trouble finding a way to pay for it, my advice would probably be more along the lines of "you need to lower your expectations and learn to live within your means." Finding a way to earn more money is not your only option; finding a way to live with less is also something you should consider. But if you're living in urban Denver and just can't imagine sending your children to your awful neighborhood school, you actually have a ton of options (especially if you're willing and able to relocate) that don't require you to dramatically increase your salary in a short period of time.
my wife doesn't work, but wants to go back when kids are a bit older and that will alleviate the money problem to some degree. Homeschooling might be the default choice if we can't make the budget work otherwise. perhaps, i gave too much circumstantial detail. What i am trying to get at is I'm looking for a way to kickstart my earning potential, but can't crater it in the short term to do so, and i'm not hung up on a lot of other "job satisfaction" criteria beyond balancing family life.
I'm willing to do extra work, but want to find a strategy that will pay off well.
My big fear with #1 above is that even if I find a modest improvement that I may have hit a plateau or ceiling and digging in will only lose more time as I'm already mid 30s. As far as I can tell, it will be a long time with no guarantees to hit director level title/salaries internally, and externally I'm not competitive enough to up-jump levels.
On the other end of the spectrum, my fear with #4 is that I'm too old and established to make a major restart even if its at the bottom of a more lucrative ladder.
Im most curious about folks here in software dev roles' thoughts. especially if you got into it later
#2 and #3 are somewhere in between, strategies that might set me back temporarily, but with the goal of kickstarting momentum in hopes of reaching escape velocity in my current track. The big risk here is that I waste a lot of slack adn resources in the near term only to not succeed or blow up on the launchpad.
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Any sources for this? I haven't seen that claim before and I'm curious to see how you would get to that number.
Just math and life experience, really. Private school tuition is ~$12,000 annually in the U.S., though it can be a lot more--up to $60,000 annually. Two kids in a top tier private school and your homemaker is already clocking in over six figures. Four kids at an average-priced private school puts us at a homeschool value of $48,000 annually.
The average commercially-prepared meal costs about $13. A nutritious meal for a family of four is easily prepared at home for $20 plus prep time, and with skill, knowledge, and appropriate tools can be prepared for half that without much difficulty. Easy-prep meals are cheaper than commercially-prepared food, but more expensive than cooking from scratch. Very few people eat out every meal, so it's difficult to quantify the benefits precisely (and one of the benefits is often improved health, which reduces health care costs in the long term), but very conservatively, a homemaker should easily bring your food budget down $5,200 per year (assuming a $100/week savings) and potentially brings your food budget down much more:
Assume $25 food per person per day for a family of four: $36,500
Assume $5 food per person per day for a family of four: $7,300
Savings of $29,200 per year
Add two more children, and the savings from homemaking could get much higher, but if we assume even a low figure of $10,000, between private school tuition and food preparation, the hypothetical homemaker with four children is already saving the family $58,000 annually--in post-tax dollars, so in terms of salary comparison we're already over $60,000.
Ah, whoops. I forgot about after-school care! I'm assuming all four children are old enough to be enrolled in school, so I'm not including daycare costs (which are not low), but with two working parents, four children in after-school care will run you $600/week easy, or more like $2000/week for Nanny-level care. Assuming 36 weeks of school (I think that number is actually higher in many places), that's a minimum of $21,600 annually for after-school care for four children. A conscientious homemaker does better-than-Nanny level care, clocking in at an eye-popping $72,000 annually, but let's just use the lowball number.
For four children in an average American household, a homemaker would already need to be earning more than $79,600 post-tax--just to cover the stuff they can no longer do when they are employed. This might not sound like much to someone who is accustomed to working in San Francisco or Manhattan for $300,000+ per year, but don't lose sight of the fact that the median American worker earns less than $40,000 per year. And in terms of quality, compared against expensive private schooling, commercial meals, and professional nannying, the "fair market value" of conscientious homemaking is already well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
Past this point, individual circumstances matter a lot. A two-parent family with a homemaker can more easily get by with a single vehicle, for example, though where one lives will influence this possibility substantially. A homemaker doesn't need a work wardrobe, though more expensive work wardrobes typically come with higher-paying jobs, so perhaps this is a wash. And there are a number of non-economic benefits as well, whether those be improved academic achievement, greater emotional connection to your children, or just not having to answer to an employer.
For someone who hates kids or can't grasp their own self worth without a corporate stamp of approval, all of this is obviously moot. But in terms of dollars-and-cents, one would need to be at minimum a rather above-average earner before a salary could outpace the monetary value of conscientious homemaking.
Yeah, and OP made it a bit clearer in another comment that the point of the post is strictly to solicit career-trajectory advice, rather than to examine plans pertaining to spouse and children, so this is all rendered somewhat tangential anyway. Ah, well.
Some states do have private school vouchers of various kinds, there are also tax rebates and of course many private schools offer scholarships. It's difficult to commensurate costs and benefits in the realm of child-raising for many reasons (not that this stops anyone, including me, from trying), but one that I think COVID-driven remote work expansions really highlighted was the possibility of spending more on a house in a good school district, to spend less on private schooling. If you've only got an average number of children, this likely represents only a small savings, but if you have 4+ children (OP seems to have some children and specifies wanting "more") the savings can stack up quickly--even at only $10k/year.
This also kind of overlooks the fact that the "private school advantage" is much more legible in the UK than in the US. There are some good private K-12 schools in the US for sure, but usually when I see stark opportunity or income gaps being discussed in the literature, it's UK schools under examination. In the US, private and public charter academies vary in quality as much as, and arguably even more than, neighborhood and public magnet schools. I admit that--while there are no doubt many good counterexamples!--I personally view suburban $10k private schools as kind of weird; they don't generally appear to outperform suburban neighborhood schools (the way urban private schools are almost always superior to nearby public alternatives), so it's hard for me to see suburban private schools in the US as anything but opportunities for the middle and upper-middle classes to participate in a cargo cult of pretend-wealth.
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This article suggests a sum of 180 k$/a. I think this topic was in the news a few years ago because it was "just another example of how women are being shortchanged".
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