Lattice Engines, a small San Mateo startup, where she makes “near the top” of the company’s $80,000 to $130,000 range for an entry level product manager, plus equity.
Notice that the young woman is not a techie, so her salary isn’t pay for (supposedly) hard to find programming skills.
Granted I’m no longer in the front lines of hiring, but I’m still going to stick my neck out and say that no new grad is worth that kind of money—not even programmers.
Why?
Because there is so much more to working than what was learned in class. Stuff like
you may not know as much as you think, let alone everything;
experience matters;
understanding that while screwing up your own work is bad it can wreck the project and damage not just your team, but even the company;
not only being present, but also productive five days a week, 12 months a year;
being engaged every day all day—no cramming just before evaluations;
no spring or winter break or summer vacation (it’s a different rhythm); and
many other mundane things
In other words, it’s a different world, with different rules and different measures.
Further, new research is showing that entitlement kills innovation and for a new grad to believe they are worth a six figure salary plus equity compensation package is definitely entitlement.
I’m not saying that they aren’t assets or that they won’t contribute significantly, just that it wouldn’t hurt if they proved themselves first.
Can you imagine the impact on their productivity and creativity if their annual raise is meager, let alone justifying that salary if they change jobs?
There is a world of difference in the skills of someone with one year of experience, let alone five or more.
The problem is that by the time that truth is learned they are no longer entry level.
What a joke. Bloomberg offers up information on which bankers are foregoing salaries and how bonuses are being set up.
For example, Steve Black and William Winters, who head up JPMorgan Chase’s investment banking unit, will forgo cash and stock bonuses in 2008, accepting only 700,000 stock options each.
“The stock will be awarded based on future company performance and must be held for five years, the bank said. The JPMorgan stock appreciation awards were priced at $19.49, the average of the high and low price of trading on Jan. 20, according to Bloomberg data. Shares of JPMorgan fell 21 percent that day and have since climbed to $24.28.”
I love the ‘only’. I just checked and the stock is up another 22 cents.
That means that even if the stock is no higher in 5 years they would still reap a little more than 3.5 million dollars.
Let’s not all cry at once.
There’s a reason that all those hotshot MBAs want to work on Wall Street. It’s because they believe, with reason, that they’ll make low seven figures within a year, two if they’re slow.
The attitude is blamed on Wall Street culture, but it goes further than that.
It goes back to their individual MAP and the deeply seated belief that they deserve it—they are entitled to that compensation; and that MAP certainly isn’t reserved for the new grads, it permeates all levels.
It’s not that they call themselves ‘Masters of the Universe’—it’s that they believe it.
Big problem since MAP is only changeable from the inside out. MAP is also sneaky and will pretend to change and then revert to its normal pattern when no one’s looking.
That means that we, the people, and we, the politicians, better have longer memories going forward than we’ve had in the past.
A newspaper article 30 years ago talked about the initiation rites of girls who joined gangs. Previously, girls hadn’t been active members of gangs and I remember thinking then that equality was happening in the wrong places.
There was a time when attitudes and actions moved from older to younger.
But it seems that more and more, instead of children learning from their grandparents, the grandparents are adopting the attitudes of the kids and, as with girls in gangs, it’s not the good ones that are moving—it’s the worst.
Entitlement. Instant gratification.
There are thousands who knowingly bought homes they couldn’t afford (as opposed to buying out of financial ignorance and/or mortgage chicanery) because they wanted it now, not in three to five years when they could actually afford it.
When I was young I thought the same way, but there were all kinds of adults who, by example, showed me that that wasn’t the way the world worked.
Now, with these attitudes spread throughout the generations, where are the everyday examples that show a different way? Worse, the examples that are out there are often ridiculed as being out of step with the current world.
I know that some of you reading my Thursday posts wonder what they have to do with leadership, managing and business.
The answer is simple; these are the people who work for and with you; they are the people you hire now and the people you’ll be hiring for decades.
Can you build a successful business or non-profit of any size on attitudes of entitlement and instant gratification?
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Narcissism has increased dramatically since I wrote this in 2009. In 1963, when adolescents were asked if they considered themselves important, only 12 percent answered affirmatively. 30 years later, that percentage had risen to 80. And those numbers predate the rise of social media, especially Instagram, by a decade or more. By now that 805 probably includes most of the adult population, too.
“Leaders tend to be narcissistic, but you don’t have to be a narcissist to be a leader.” –Amy Brunell, assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University’s Newark campus.
“…narcissistic behavior is a “trait predicting charismatic leadership. People who are charismatic and charming… They think they’re entitled to it. They think they’re smarter than other people and they can get away with it.” –W. Keith Campbell, head of the psychology department at the University of Georgia in Athens.
Narcissism isn’t necessarily bad, but it is growing. When psychiatrists deemed it a bonafide personality disorder in the 1980’s it affected 1% of the population; in 2008 the number stood at around 6.2%.
Most politicians are narcissists, as are many media personalities (neither is surprising), but it seems that more and more business leaders fall in that category also.
There are 7 component traits that are measured.
Authority
Self-sufficiency
Superiority
Exhibitionism
Exploitativeness
Vanity
Entitlement
Although I have no proof, I bet that most, if not all, tech titans (in fact, a good number of tech at all levels) would score fairly high on these traits, along with most of Wall Street.
“A study published in December in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that people who score high in these traits are more likely to be leaders, but these individuals don’t necessarily perform any better and potentially may become destructive leaders.”
So much for the much-ballyhooed ‘charismatic leader’.
Then come back and share your score and whether you believe it fits you.
My score was 11, but if I had taken it 30 years ago I think it would have been at least 5 points higher. (Age is either mellowing me or I’m more realistic:)
There are no right or wrong answers and even if you score off the narcissism charts that doesn’t mean you’re ‘bad’ — as with any trait it is how you handle it in everyday life that matters.
As I said yesterday, millennials aren’t what you think.
It’s pretty stupid to think that 80 million people would all think and act identically. Not all Boomers did drugs, not all Gen X were slackers and not all millennials were spoiled and entitled.
Just as an animal reflects how it’s raised, so does a human.
When I’m accosted by an unruly dog I hold the owners responsible.
The deprived generation of the Depression raised the entitled generation of Boomers who raised the much entitled, very special generation of Millennials, so when you look at millennials you should look to their parents — the Boomers.
Time magazine’s 2013 cover story was written with an eye to covering for its Boomer reader base. It did a good job by locking in the millennial myth.
“The Me Me Me Generation—Millennials are lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents.”
Not that they had much choice.
No generation grows up in a vacuum and economics plays a large role.
The first wave of millennials hit the job market in 2008.
(…) millennials were in the fourth year of the “jobless recovery,” facing high unemployment, mounting debt, and an eroded social safety net. And yet, with breathtaking cluelessness, TIME framed the millennials’ desperate search for stable work as a privileged character flaw—look at the kids too flaky to handle “choosing from a huge array of career options.”
Options maybe; actual jobs, very few.
Worse, the attitudes drummed into our heads growing up are very hard to shake at any age and some are still wreaking havoc.
Join me tomorrow for a look at what’s happening now.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
Regular readers know I have a thing for CB Insight’s co-founder Anand Sanwal and the newsletter he writes. The great data is a given, but the real draw for me are his common sense and wicked sense of humor, both of which infuse his prose creating an irresistible combination.
Monday’s newsletter shared a contrarian view of failure taken from his presentation at last year’s at SaaStr.
Acknowledging and being ok with failure is one of the best things about the startup community. We now celebrate the act of writing a startup failure post-mortem as courageous. (…) Most are vapid puff-piece post-mortems that talk about being too early to market or suggest investors weren’t committed or offer up trite discussion of why they’ve joined a “larger platform” whose vision aligns with theirs.
Once again Anand is my hero by saying stuff out loud that needs to be said.
I’ve always believed that failure is a learning opportunity, but I never thought it should be enshrined and lauded.
Any more than Mark Zukerberg’s “move fast and break it” should have become a startup mantra.
Jean M. Twenge, author of The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. “But the ‘everybody gets a trophy’ mentality basically says that you’re going to get rewarded just for showing up. That won’t build true self-esteem; instead, it builds this empty sense of ‘I’m just fantastic, not because I did anything but just because I’m here.’”
That attitude permeates everything else, so why should Startupland be any different?
It’s amazing to me, but looking back over more than a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies are a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.
Last week we started looking at our heroes — first as cowboys and then why/how they needed to change. It’s a timely subject, especially considering the attitudes/actions of so many of our current ones — from Donald Trump to Travis Kalanick and all those inbetween.
“The higher you go in an organization, the more those around you are going to tell you that you are right. The higher reaches of organizations–which includes government, too, in case you slept through the past eight years–are largely absent of critical thought. … There is also evidence, including some wonderful studies by business school professor Don Hambrick at Penn State, that shows the corroding effects of ego. Leaders filled with hubris are more likely to overpay for acquisitions and engage in other risky strategies. Leaders ought to cultivate humility.” He ends by advising not to hold your breath waiting for this to change.”
I think much of Dan’s advice is good, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for the advice to be taken.
I think that power corrupts those susceptible to it, not all those who have it; there are enough examples of powerful people who didn’t succumb to keep me convinced.
Changing MAP and stopping drinking are similar, since the individual has to choose to change. All the horses and all the men can’t convince the king to change—that only happens from the inside out.
Moreover, as I’ve frequently said, MAP is sneaky; it will pretend to change and then revert to its normal pattern when no one’s looking.
We, the people, can’t force them to change, but we can learn to sustain our attention span and keep looking.
Many of the actions of people such as Travis Kalanick, Donald Trump, Parker Conrad, etc., are deplored, yet they seem to have no effect on people’s opinions.
They go their merry way while thousands of far superior leaders are ignored.
When the subject does come up the usual response involves the infamous “yes, but…”
Why is that?
I finally found an answer that makes sense from Margarita Mayo, a Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IE Business School in Madrid.
Mayo terms the first type of leader ‘humble’ and the second ‘charismatic’.
Humble leaders improve the performance of a company in the long run because they create more collaborative environments. They have a balanced view of themselves – both their virtues and shortcomings – and a strong appreciation of others’ strengths and contributions, while being open to new ideas and feedback. (…)
[Charismatic leaders], despite their grandiose view of themselves, low empathy, dominant orientation toward others, and strong sense of entitlement, their charisma proves irresistible. Followers of superheroes are enthralled by their showmanship: through their sheer magnetism, narcissistic leaders transform their environments into a competitive game in which their followers also become more self-centered, giving rise to organizational narcissism, as one study shows.
Mayo’s research and the other’s she cites (with links) provide proof of the value produced by the humble leader vs. their charismatic counterpart.
However, I think there is another problem happening in the background that is word-related.
Ask most people if they want to be remembered as ‘humble’ or ‘charismatic’ and most will choose charismatic.
Warren Buffet aside, ‘humble’ is more often associated with dorky, weak, shy, and unassuming.
Not adjectives most people would choose to describe themselves.
Thanks to Wally Bock for leading me to this article.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Northern California startup land is once again the Golden State for new grads—especially those with a strong sense of entitlement.
What a joke. 
A newspaper article 30 years ago talked about the initiation rites of girls who joined gangs. Previously, girls hadn’t been active members of gangs and I remember thinking then that equality was happening in the wrong places.
I recently questioned whether, in fact, the 
