Welcome to Edition #14 of Ask Gorick Anything. This AMA is part of Gorick's Newsletter, where Harvard career advisor and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Gorick Ng shares what they don't teach you in school about how to succeed in your career.
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ASK GORICK ANYTHING
“What jobs out there are high-paying but do not require you to be ‘noticed’ or work very much with people?”
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Subscriber’s question:
“What jobs out there are high-paying but do not require you to be ‘noticed’ or work very much with people?”
— “Pete” from Charlotte, NC, USA
Gorick's response:
Hi again, Pete—
Thanks so much for your question. As you saw last week, I broke your question down into 4 primary sections:
1. What counts as “high paying”?”
2. How do you “not work very much with people”?
3. Under what circumstances do you not need to be “noticed”?
4. What’s realistically attainable?
(You didn’t ask #4, but my response felt incomplete without it, so here I am)
This is my response to questions #3 and #4.
→ If you missed my answer to questions #1 and #2, tap here.
3. Under what circumstances do you not need to be “noticed”?
Very few—and basically only if…
A) you’re not interested in getting promoted,
B) you’re okay with working under someone else, and
C) you don’t get fired.
Let’s tackle this one at a time.
A) You need to not be interested in getting promoted
Consider a lab researcher, whether at an academic institution or, say, a pharmaceutical company. Similar to a software engineer, your early years will be spent doing. But once you become a “lead” or a “lab manager,” you’re doing less doing and more scoping.
→ Tap to revisit last week’s doing, scoping, and deciding framework
And once you become a principal investigator (or PI for short—fancy speak for someone who leads research projects or maybe even the entire lab), you’re doing very little doing and scoping and a ton of deciding.
But deciding is still only part of your job. The other? Selling.
The higher up you go, the less technical work you will do and the more you will be expected to sell your ideas, sell your team, and sell yourself.
Sure, PI’s do guide the direction of the research, but they spend even more time presenting at conferences, attracting the best researchers, and courting the biggest funders.
Likewise, the Heads of Biologics, Heads of R&D, or Chief Science Officers at pharmaceutical companies are spending far more time in meetings to convince the executive team and shareholders that their initiatives are worth pursuing and continuing.
Who wins? The person who’s the best at being noticed.
B) You’re okay with working under someone else
What if you quit your job and worked for yourself? Now you don’t have to work with anyone—and you don’t have to get noticed… right?
Wrong.
Unless you’re trading stocks with your own money, I’d argue that getting noticed is even more important if you’re working for yourself.
Trying to sell t-shirts on Etsy? You’ll need to market yourself (AKA get noticed).
Want to become someone’s virtual assistant or bookkeeper? You’ll need to find clients (AKA get noticed).
Get so good at investing your own money that you’d now like to manage other people’s money? You’ll need to court investors (AKA get noticed).
If we apply our deciding / scoping / doing framework to entrepreneurship, the downside becomes clear: When you’re founding your own business, you don’t have anyone telling you what to do and don’t have anyone to delegate work to.
You need to do all of the deciding / scoping / doing work yourself and the hard work of getting noticed, too.
You can only hide if you have someone to hide under—which means working under someone else.
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C) Youyou don’t get fired.
Say you decide that entrepreneurship isn’t for you and you’d rather be in a “traditional” doing job. What if you’re a data scientist—and your number-crunching job is replaced by AI? Now you’re back on the job market.
Who gets the best job fastest? The people who get noticed, whether by networking or marketing themselves online.
(A friend once told me the story of how an executive at his company got his job. Here’s how it went: The executive was the CFO of a well-known company but got into a big fight with leadership over the strategic direction of the firm. He was fired—and it became such a big deal that even the biggest media outlets covered it. The next day, he opened his inbox and saw job offers as far as his mouse could scroll. Not everyone can boast about getting their firing covered by the New York Times, but if you want a story on the importance of being noticed, here it is.)
4. What’s realistically attainable?
This is a tricky one. Every career path has its unspoken rules—and the sooner you uncover the path, the sooner you’ll break in and hopefully take the Fast Lane to Leadership.
Take the case of accounting* (another job where you start off staring at spreadsheets as an associate… only to lead teams as a manager… before courting clients as a partner).
Most accountants studied accounting in college before getting their license (called the CPA—Certified Public Accountant—at least in the U.S.). So, if you’re years into your career in a different field, becoming an accountant probably won’t be as feasible as someone who’s still in school. But…
If you’re already well into your career, then my suggestion is this:
- Look for an individual contributor doing role.
- Find a colleague who has taken an IC path*, reach out for a conversation, and turn that coffee chat into a referral.
*An IC track, or individual contributor track, often has the word “Principal,” “Staff,” “Enterprise,” or “Distinguished” before the name, especially in tech. Meanwhile, some professional services firms will call them “Executive Directors” instead of “Managing Directors.”
If you haven’t yet started your career, then my suggestion is this:
- Reflect on where you’d like to be in the future—and be honest about what kind of life you’d like to have.
- Find people doing what seems interesting to you—and contact them asking for advice. (Not sure how? My How to Say It flashcards will give you all the scripts you need.)
*Fun fact: Cliff Justice, National Leader of Enterprise Innovation at KPMG—one of the world’s biggest accounting firms—said: “[AI] won’t replace the human at the human-to-human interaction level”—meaning, it’s only going to get harder to hide and not talk to anyone, no matter what job you’re in.
As always, I hope that this was useful to you (and perhaps someone else reading this). You can always share your feedback with me using the poll below after the break.
See you on Tuesday for our story of the week!
—Gorick
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