Donald Kendall started as a worker in a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant, but he swiftly climbed the corporate ladder, becoming head of the company’s international division by 1957 when he was only in his mid-30s.
I wonder if that career path is still possible today?
Be a standout employee in a rapidly growing and transforming company, stepping into increasingly significant roles as opportunies expand?
Of course. Countless people on this very forum have taken that road and countless so are still doing so today.
But not everyone is able to make their mark as a standout employee, not everyone commits to one organization long enough to see it through (passing up on other opportities), and and not every organization grows or even survives well enough to open those doors to them.
It's common, but neither universal nor guaranteed -- and always has been. While the culture of loyalty (in both directions) has certainly changed over time and likely represents changes in how common, it's a misperception to not notice it still happening every day.
Watch out for survivorship bias here. How many people worked in the bottling plants who did NOT become CEO?
A bit of Fermi maths here: the Pepsi Bottling Group had about 70K employees before it was bought by PepsiCo. Assuming a management/admin/support layer of about 50%, you've got maybe 35K employees directly engaged in bottling. This was only one of a multitude of bottling companies, but let's assume for now that while other bottling companies produce for other companies too there's probably no easy path from supplier to parent company unless the supplier is effectively a subsidiary.
From 1957 to today is 67 years. F&B turnover is around 75%, so we're talking about ~25 000 new employees/year for 67 years, which is around 1.8 million.
When you look at this astronomic career progression as a one-in-two-million event, it seems a bit less implausible.
Now for a bit of a silly tangent: there are around 33 million businesses in the USA now, and around 330 million people, which means around one business for every 10 people. Assuming each one of those companies has a distinct CEO (big assumption here), we'd find around 180 000 CEOs who once worked in a Pepsi bottling plant. It would almost be a surprise if one of those 180 000 was NOT the CEO of Pepsi.
A similar but more recent career trajectory: Elliot Hill, the incoming Nike CEO started at Nike as a store sales intern and was already head of Nike EMEA retail by around age 34 (in the year 2000)
The military historian Richard Holmes pointed out in one of his books that at the height of UK imperial power someone managed to rise from private soldier to Field Marshall and Chief of the Imperial General Staff and that apparently today an equivalent rise would be impossible:
Absolutely untrue, at least in a US context. Michael Boorda rose from the bottom of the enlisted ranks to become Chief of Naval Operations in the 1990s.
I think this sort of thing is still very possible in the Games Industry.
The most accessible job is QA Tester, paid an hourly wage and accessible to anyone really[1]. Anyone that shows themselves to be smart and useful very strongly has an ability to move into Production/Product Management, especially if they're at a smaller studio.
From there, Production is one of those really weirdo jobs where at its lowest rungs you're doing things that no one really wants to do, like taking notes in meetings and filling out Jira tasks, but the top of the Production job chart is Executive Producer or Studio General Manager with substantial sway around the strategic direction of a game or studio and pay to match.
In contrast the Art/Programming paths achieve much higher pay and interesting work at the low end, but also have a lower ceiling in terms of sway and pay.
[1] Anyone that understands what a video game is and plays them of course. Though at this point I'm sure people with some sort of indie game dev experience have an edge in hiring.
I wouldn't put so much stock in these kinds of historic anecdotes about "self-made" or rags-to-riches people. Most of them are rose tinted recollections given by the person themselves in an interview with a journalist writing a puff piece without actual background checking.
It's really easy to hide privilege and connections by leveraging people's bias. For example, this guys' wiki says his parents were "dairy farmers" which immediately evokes some kind of small family subsistence farm. But maybe what it actually was is they owned half a State's worth of mechanized dairy farms and were multi-millionaires who had never milked a cow in their life.
People love to say the same thing about Bill Gates, how he was this rags to riches story even though his family was both well off enough to put him into one of the few high schools in the country to have computers at the time and his mother worked on the Seattle health board and handled IBMs contracts for computing.
I have a larger question. I know there is no answer now but i'll leave it here for posterity.
Everyone seems to have a love/hate relationship with app/play stores and these stores have a stranglehold on developers. "This is our new policy. Accept it or we'll kick you out."
The TOS we enter into with app/play store is fully in their favor with no rights to the developers.
For android, worstcase, i can have people download the apk from my website. For iphone there's no way around.
Finally, im glad I’m not alone. When we were building SuperCMMS, we already had a few companies ready to pay us. So we needed a billing system from the get go. While we use Stripe, we still had to wrangle a lot of stuff (like taxes), since we wanted to integrating other payment gateways in future. To save time we decided to have “only a single plan - all features included”.
Now comes the unexpected part. People kept asking us why we have only a single plan. Maybe all of us are so used to multiple pricing plans on saas products. So we had to explain ourselves in the pricing FAQ’s.
>USD 50/-
Per User Per Month
Enterprise Support (Optional)
Starts at USD 1000/- Month
Are you Indian, perchance? How you write prices in India doesn't work in other places; this looks strange to someone who works in nearly any other currency.
Any of the following would look a lot less out of place:
$50
50 USD
$50 USD
50.00 USD
$50.00
Of these, I recommend the first one; dollars default to USD worldwide unless specified otherwise.
I think currency notation is more of a regional thing. Had we just mentioned "$", our Singapore customers might think its SGD (Singapore Dollars). We'd be better off using "USD $50.00". Thanks for the perspective.
The reason this exists is because even highly qualified graduates (Harvard included) suck at writing CV's/Resumes. How do i know? I went to a similar kind of college.
All of us go through the same 16-20 year education grind (K-12 + University). At the end of it we are made to differentiate ourselves through our CV's/Resumes.
A simple rule of thumb: A CV/Resume should be strictly-one-page and honest. Not sure if anyone needs cover letters anymore.
You absolutely will have to leave details out - the HR person scanning through 30+ CVs doesn’t have the time or interest in reading through 3 pages of your work history to see if you tick the boxes they’re trying to match. You don’t have to list every job you’ve had, just list the relevant recent ones for the job you’re applying for. The ones you’ll talk about in your interview.
How can HR know if my experience is relevant for the position? Do they even understand what my CV says? I know people in HR that could do it. But most likely no.
In my previous company, resumes were forwarded to us, the tech team. After all we’re the one recruiting, and we’re the one who will maybe work with this person. We were also the ones giving technical interviews, and also did a team interview.
HR should not be in charge of recruiting for the teams.
Perhaps this can succeed at a low growth company, not making many hires. Did you conduct your own sourcing as well, proactively engaging 'cold leads' you found on linkedin, twitter, github, etc? Most hires don't come from job postings - they are recruited, and its a laborious task, esp if its a specialized niche or skillset. You need the recruiting team if you plan on growing quickly.
> the HR person scanning through 30+ CVs doesn’t have the time or interest in reading through 3 pages of your work history to see if you tick the boxes they’re trying to match.
I've 25 years experience. Listing only the last 10 or 15 would leave important details out. Cluttering all in one page would be awful. Even if I write a "one line" for the positions in the first years of employment, I cannot put it on one page.
Like coding rules: you cannot make hard rules that apply always. It depends.
Depending on the role, resume readers typically don't care about where or what you worked on more than 2 jobs ago or 5 years ago, unless it is uniquely germane to the job being applied for.
Tons and tons of employers will still require or expect a cover letter. At least in the US.
Résumé guidance is all over the place and I think largely comes down to the reader's preferences, which are wildly inconsistent, so there's no such thing as the One Best Résumé layout and/or length. See a sibling post claiming that a one-pager is a "red flag".
None of this is scientific and every single thing you do during an application and interview process can easily be one hiring manager's "best practice" and another's "red flag". It's a minefield, because it's all basically arbitrary but many people in the hiring process will have strong feelings about various unimportant details, regardless, because they're just casting about for some signal in all the noise, such that they end up taking a lot of the noise as signal.
Most effective cover letter I ever experimented with was a simple preamble expressing interest in the company and the particular position (2-3 sentences, just enough to demonstrate basic eloquence), followed by "In the sake of brevity, here's a T-chart matching my qualifications to your requirements:" where I put in a T-chart pairing most of the bullet points in the job posting with a description of the skills I had. Since most of the requirements were similar between multiple job postings, I had LaTeX shortcuts to reference a pre-made pile of qualification statements. Took me about 5 minutes to hammer out, and definitely improved my rate of receiving responses by about a factor of 2.
> A CV/Resume should be strictly-one-page and honest.
Yeah, no. I was an advocate for this until recently. I realized it's not fitting anymore. Maybe I should do a dumbed-down version in the first page and fill the position details on the second.
I always stick to 2 pages (25 years ~10 jobs) but include the URL of the HTML version of my CV/resume which has the full details of each role. You may need to be creative about how you include the URL... as some recruiters will edit it out if you put it in the header or footer.
If your resume is a single page, you send the message that most of what you did isn't relevant, isn't important or doesn't matter. I see this as a red flag.
Or they basically only need cover letters with a pro forma resume because they’re going through their network which has been my case for 25 years or so.
Network effects apply to almost every industry, not just social media apps. FMCG companies are a great example. The reason Nestle, Unilever, P&G have so many brands is because they have a phenomenal distribution network. Even a crappy product is guaranteed to make millions of dollars in revenue.
