Purpose
When looking for a new position, I like my goals to be clear to me and available to others. This post documents the goals in my transitions. Like most goals/values lists, what’s excluded is often as notable as what’s included. At each transition, I have many “wants”, but I don’t expect to get them all - they’re notable factors for my decision-making.
2022
I’m not actively looking, just projecting that I will want some sort of change by this point in time (either within my current company or to a new one).
Two distant-future niches I want to pursue are:
- Automating expert tasks with AI
- Bridging Chinese<>Western AI tools and practices
For my long-term career goals, I am missing:
- experience with management responsibilities for an org (as opposed to “just being a people manager” - long-horizon choices, budget, exposure to investors/board, etc)
- world-class expertise in a domain
- business experience/network in China
I want to continue:
- living in London (and/or maybe the Sinosphere)
- working mostly remotely
To be more effective in companies that “automate expert tasks with AI”, I need:
- expert-level MLOps experience.
- intermediate-level data science experience.
- more business development / solution architecture experience.
- more product management experience.
2019
I want to leverage my experience and concentrate on the activities I like so that I consistently am a high performer and enjoy the work I do.
What I value
- Continuous personal improvement
- Highly collaborative environments (and highly collaborative, bottom-up decision-making)
- Radical transparency
My 10-year goals:
- I want to coach companies/departments/teams and mentor founders/executives/architects/principal devs (senior management and individual contributors)
- I want to understand everything about how successful tech companies work by diving deep into them
- I want to live concurrently in China and Europe
- I want to be expressing what I’ve learned in a highly scalable way (writing posts/books/software)
My 5-year goals:
The experience I gain in the next few years should enable me to achieve my 10+ year goals. These goals are unlikely to be achieved by staying in the same role/level - they require sustained growth.
- I want to influence a larger organization as a senior individual contributor
- I want more experience in senior/executive management
- I want to learn from people who are “top 10 in Europe at what they do” via recurring professional interaction
2017
What I’m looking for in my next position
In 5-10 years, my goal is to be a CTO of a small/medium company or tech VP in a medium/large company - because I would enjoy it and be good at it. I’m interested in learning the soft and technical skills necessary for that role.
In my next position, my title could be:
- Senior developer
- Machine learning / data engineer
- Engineering manager
- VP Eng
- CTO
Skills I want to use/develop
Things I’m very interested in and actively studying:
- Back-end / server-side development and architecture
- Machine learning and data engineering
- Line management / team structure
- Project management
Things I like to be competent at and sometimes study/explore:
- Dev-ops
- Frontend
Things I’m not as good at and not interested in investing significant effort learning (I can do these things in an early stage “everyone does everything” startup):
- Product owner & product strategy
- UX Design
The kind of company I want to work at
- I want to work at a growing company, doing at least 60% software development - preferably 75%-90%, especially at the beginning.
- I expect my peers and superiors to be exceptional and happy in their positions.
- I want opportunities to grow my professional network of great relationships with great people.
- I want to work with modern technologies.
- A bonus would be companies involved in sleep or air pollution tech, or companies that do business in China or have a significant Chinese user base.