There is a moment where you need to become visible

Introduction

Today we're talking career evolution, and why you can feel stuck and what can be a solution.

Let's say you started as a Software or Data Engineer, you understood how the market worked as explained by Gergely Orosz in English (here) or by Hugo Lassiège here (in French)

A quick recap is:

There market for tech engineers is divided in 4 and the salaries are limited by the group in which your company belong.

• Local offers the lowest salaries because the impact you will have in this kind of company is low. Because the customer base is small and the turnover is limited
• Glocal are companies with a bigger reach but that will only hire on a local market and thus offer limited packages because they only compare with other glocal companies. Usually the base salary is limited but you have some cool bonuses related to the fact that you're in a very well known company in your local market.
• The tech group is composed of companies built on top of tech, they are selling software globally, we name them FinTech, HealthTech, MedTech... In this category packages can be highly competitive especially compared to other groups.
• Big tech, companies are Google, Meta, Uber and so on. The packages can be really high with a big part composed of stock. The trick is they will only hire top 1 to 5% of the candidates.

The limit

In France, once you reach a 80 to 100k€ package, you can get stuck (even earlier if you're an individual contributor) because in local and glocal companies your impact especially as an IC will not be able to offset this big package.

If you're in a company where the CEO isn't paying himself more than 80k you're probably not going 6 figure. And it goes for a lot of other situations, if you're not managing X people you're probably not getting 6 figures, if your manager is not making this salary you will not get it.

In France after reaching >100k salary it gets more fiscally efficient to get paid using dividends so it's probably why the base package doesn't change that much after 500 employees.

Another thing to take into account is the repartitions of the companies sizes.

The solution

The solution is simply to be visible, however you want. I think you will get stuck or very limited in your career the moment you reach the ceiling and you're not visible. Your visibility could be the hammer to break this glass ceiling.

Being visible can mean a lot of things and you can probably define the way you want to be visible. For example I learned when I created my first startup that you absolutely need to talk about it, this way you will receive feedback but most importantly people will talk about it without you, and this could lead to discovering new clients or future colleagues.

As a pro-remote work this is even worse for us remoters, because we only have interactions with people we directly work with. It's harder to become friend with other tech teams, that could offer you your next job, if you don't have any reason to work together.

Some very common ways to be visible are:

• Speak at conference
• Go to some meetups
• Have a newsletter or a blog
• Posts some stuffs on social media
• Take part in local communities
• Take part in online communities
• ...

Personally I take part in online communities, which brought me several clients, and I decided to blog and share the content on linkedin / twitter. I don't enjoy the social network part but I think it's a good way to reach some new clients for my company.

Why is it the solution?

Simply because this additional visibility will increase significantly your impact.

For example, you're still an IC but you can help your company hire some developers more easily by a single linkedin or blog post. Each new hire can be worth several thousands euros not spent in a recruiting agency.

Being visible is also accepting that your ideas will be challenged by people and that your ego can handle this.

Being visible is exposing to everyone the range of skills that you have and this could be a way to be extra impactful in your company or for your clients. ie, I can do software engineering stuff but I'm also crazy about data stuff, I should be able to solve this issue for the company in the next few months. Tackling challenges that are risky is also an impactful way to boost your impact.

This visibility can also make some people think about you whenever they see an opportunity, as we know it, luck is a very important variable in succeeding. And I think that's the most important point.

My conclusion would be this, being visible is simply maximizing your luck