How NOT to become a VP – 24 wrong steps on a journey

1. Be born in Ireland where university is free. Study Maths and Economics. Spend 12 hours a week in lectures and 30 hours a week ‘networking’. Join the maths team. Join the karate team — adding a few punches and kicks in case the maths doesn’t hurt your head enough. Play a lot of music.
2. When you graduate, have absolutely no plan. In fact, the less you know about what you are going to do here, the better.
3. Take the first job you can find. Yes, that job at Burgerking will do fine. Take 1 day off between your final exam and selling burgers. Learn what it’s like to work a full-time job. Resign abruptly after 4 weeks, once the reality of your 8-hour on your feet and 4 hours of travel hits.
4. Go work on a building site, as a general labourer. Enjoy a massive salary bump from Burgerking. Be too exhausted to spend any of your money (that must have been your father’s excuse too).
5. When that job finishes, go work as an electrician’s apprentice. Pull wires through basements, and climb into small spaces full of dirt and dust. Realise that not all the smartest people you will meet in life are in a university — regardless of what your professors seemed to think.
6. Meet all of your college friends 6 months after graduating, and feel like the king of all failures. Hide the panic when they tell you about their office, career plans, and business lunches in beautiful restaurants. Try to push the image of your plastic bag full of cheese sandwiches out of your mind. Bury your shame with the customary Irish cocktail of jokes and pints of Smithwicks. Remind yourself that buried shame is an Irish tradition, where all the novels, poetry, and music came from.
7. The very next week, go into your careers office in your university, and look for any job which doesn’t involve cement or burgers. Take down every number. Print up a CV that has 2 things on it, went to college and worked manual labour. Start calling.
8. Take a job as a telesales agent. Work 4 x 10-hour days. Enjoy a different type of tiredness, a dull, numbing sort that makes cartoons seem like differential equations.
9. Quit in the summer, and go on holidays with your girlfriend. Enjoy – this is the last summer you will have off till you retire. Realise this as you are writing the list. Stare at the wall for a while.
10. Fly home and write out a new plan. Masters in Maths. Move back in with your parents after a year of freedom. Stay for 4 weeks. Decide that you’d rather die of exposure than have your mother complain about the state of your room. Write a newer plan. Get any job and leave home.
11. Print 250 CVs, buy a cheap shirt and tie, and take the bus to Dublin. Walk into every office you see, even though you have no idea what they do. Ask for the name of the head of recruitment and ask if you could meet them in person. Witness every variety of astonishment from receptionists. Meet no-one. Handwrite the name on an introductory note and give in a CV. Give one CV to a friend who is working at a tech company. Eat lunch in your old Burgerking.
12. Go home and wait. Get a hundred rejection letters. One of those will be from Merrill Lynch. Tidy your room before your mother complains. Feel your desperation rising. Get 5 interviews, and no job offer. Get offered a job at the one company where a friend gave in a cv for you. Mentally write off the 250 CVs as a cost of doing business. Feel excited about the new job.
13. Turn up on your first day as a trainee software engineer in a large multinational, not knowing what Control Alt Delete is. Get looks of astonishment from fellow grads as you ask for help logging in. Feel like a fraud already. Spend every minute learning as much as you can.
14. 18 months later, watch the company fold. Get the CV out there. Get 2 offers. Take the better offer, a small software team of about 14 people. Have the other company make a higher counter offer. Stick with your original choice because of honour. Realise that you need to learn how to bargain.
15. Have your boss and the 4 most senior engineers quit at the end of your first week. Wonder if you can feed yourself on honour. See a desperate-looking head of the software group ask if anyone will manage a team. Feel your body raise your hand, without giving your brain a chance to think it through. Be the only one to put your hand up. Become a manager at 22 with 18 months as a developer under your belt. Make every mistake there is. Learn as much as you can as quickly as you can. Get involved in sales deals. Travel. Once again, after 18 months, watch this company fold. Wonder if you are cursed.
16. Try starting a company. Pick the wrong co-founder, watch it burn in the rearview mirror as you drive away. Join a telecoms software startup as employee no 4. Work every hour for three years. Sleep with the phone on your pillow, as the company (you) provides 24/7 support. Have some of the highest highs and lowest lows of your career — often on the same day. Move from Dublin to Liverpool so that your girlfriend can go to college, and you can keep playing music. Experience the company winning a big deal with a major US Telco, and then slowly running out of money. Live off credit cards for about 6 months. Ask other developers working for you to do the same. As the company is about to fold, make sure your president miraculously finds a way to sell to a rival. Get your back pay. Pay off credit cards.
17. Become a professional songwriter. Record a series of songs written over 10 years. Get some radio play. Get some great gigs and tour the UK, Ireland and Canada. Land a BBC session. Network as much as you can. Realise that the cycle is moving on to other new acts. See gigs dry up. Take more gigs further away. Watch promoters disappear when the comes time to pay. Play a gig one night in St. Helens for 150, only to be told that the promoter will only give you 50, and “you will take it if you ever want to play here again”. Become increasingly depressed about the lack of financial security.
18. Realise that you need a job that pays the bills. Try to figure out what you actually do. Look at job boards and read as many job descriptions as you can find. Decide to call yourself a software architect. Buy a bunch of architecture books and read them all. Somehow pass an interview process at British Telecom for an architect role. Go to work at every day, waiting for the inevitable tap on the shoulder as you are ‘found out’. Really enjoy the job. End up managing a team of developers.
19. Move back to Ireland. Get offered a few jobs, and take a contract at Merrill Lynch because you like both your interviewers so much. Forgive them for the rejection many years before (they assume this is a joke). Specify 2 conditions of employment. You will be the chief architect for the group, and you will manage no-one. They agree. Three weeks in, they give you a team of developers to manage. Design and manage the system that makes margin calls. Have the system make a call on Bear Stearns. Inadvertently start the Global financial crash. Not realise this until 6 months after.
20. Have Merrill be acquired by Bank of America. Watch your hand raise every time there is an option to take on for more responsibility. Start to resent your own hand. Get promoted. Run a European tech group. Get yet another new manager. Realise it’s a bad fit. Get offered CTO at a rival bank. Take a counteroffer to stay — going from running a group of 60 to a group of 2. See your colleagues disbelief as you make this choice, to give up your group to work on quant/data science, and AI.
21. Grow this group and take over the mortgage and credit card risk models for the US. Run the (joint) first-ever public cloud project in the Bank’s history. Do this for 4 years. Feel something gnawing in the back of your mind.
22. Sit down one day and write all of your values at the top of a page. Stare at the page for 15 minutes. Ask yourself the following question. “What the fuck am I doing with my life”. Call a couple of recruiters and tell them about your values realisation. Have them both tell you not to leave your job. Meet loads of people for coffee. Get introduced to a VP at an Irish company. Make sure the company is working on making the world a better place. Have him introduce you to the CTO. Meet both a few times for coffee, and deep conversations about technology. Interview with the CEO and SVP of HR. Spend too much time talking about music in both interviews. Kick self for blabbering on once you leave
23. Make sure the company is a billion-dollar company
24. Get offered VP job. Take job.
    

There we go. Just follow these simple 24 steps, and it’s guaranteed to work. How do I know? Well, these are the exact steps I took, and every step worked out perfectly.

Best of luck!