Not software, but cyber. Currently working in a director of sales role in the federal space.
I mainly switched because I kept hitting the salary cap for cyber roles as a government contractor and got tired of being asked to move on to new contracts.
The transition has been difficult. Sales has a huge learning curve and even more so in government contracting. Selling to the government is it's own animal, since you can't talk to your customer directly (in most cases). So you have to do a lot of work to influence your bids indirectly.
I'm still undecided about whether I made the right move. I like having more influence in the day-to-day management of my org, but I jumped shipped right before remote work options and tech pay exploded, so a lot of my old tech friends are making as much money or more than I am for a lot less work.
I agree with your overall sentiment, though this definitely isn't limited to large businesses. Plenty of small businesses are plagued with hero culture as well.
What's really needed are leaders who recognize hero culture for what it is and are willing to move away from it. That's hard to do, in large part because managers benefit from it in the short-term and many will move on before the long-term costs become apparent. Given your previous example: Every manager wants to be the "winner" who gets the job done with 10 people, but what's unfortunate is that many of them will move up to the next level and claim that they would have success even with just 4 "good" people (re: heroes). So their replacement will get 4 people and the cycle will continue.
Not sure if it helps, but this is exactly how I read your earlier comment. I still don't quite understand the defensiveness coming from some of the responses.
This mirrors my experience as well. In the small and medium-sized business area, the "sociopaths" are the large businesses and private equity firms looking to acquire the smaller businesses. Or often it's the business owner who's the only sociopath in the business, but they are far enough removed from day-to-day operations that the people working underneath them don't recognize them as sociopaths.
Another thing I've learned is that the more time you spend with executives, the easier it becomes to recognize this behavior. Go to any large chamber meeting in any large-ish city in the U.S., and I'm sure you will find plenty of sociopaths (in both the literal and the Gervais Principle sense).
If you're seriously considering it already, I say just do it. I'm a "normal" by your definition and have a both an individual counselor and an executive coach, both paid for on my own dime. I've committed over $10k between the two so far and feel like it's money well spent.
80% of the value for me has come from identifying hidden sources of fear and working through plans to overcome them. I'm naturally risk-averse and really had no real understanding of how much I was letting my own self-limiting belief system hold me back. A good coach can help you identify ways in which you're inadvertently sabotaging your own progress and help you to overcome them.
The other primary benefit (the remaining 20%) has come from having a completely new and fresh perspective on problem-solving. I can easily say that I've had more directly actionable "Aha" moments in the last three years of coaching than I had over the previous 20+ years of my career. For every "unique" problem you think you have, a good coach or counselor has probably seen some variation of it dozens of times and can probably offer you a half dozen useful ways of tackling the problem. It's the same thing that something like YC does for startups, but applied to you on an individual level.
The major caveat of course is that good coaches are often hard to find and you might have to search a bit to find one that works well for your specific needs. YMMV and all that.
I searched for coaches in my area, did a handful of interviews, then went with the one I related best with. The only unique insight I can offer here is to take any recommendations with a heavy grain of salt. Counseling/coaching is highly individualized, and what works for one person could do absolutely nothing for you. For the reason, there's no harm in ending a relationship that isn't working for you.
Sounds like that 80% could also be covered by talk therapy. I’m not discounting your approach, but identifying fears and their sources is pretty common.
Isn’t coaching basically “non-professionalized” therapy? Like insofar as a decent chunk of therapy is this^ (interrogating belief systems), there’s hardly a reason you need someone to do it from the blessed perch of a paper that says “Doctor” on it, and hardly a reason your beliefs need to be pathologized to the degree that you become a “Patient.”
Coaching should focus on work issues and your personal development in the workplace. While that does overlap with regular therapy, regular therapy can involve family and more complex personal issues. You may also expect a coach to have more experience in corporate life than a therapist may. But the central tenant is their that the only change that can happen is the change that you make.
HBR has a good podcast that is run by Muriel Wilkins that is useful for those that can learn vicariously.
My thoughts too. I think the hardest thing is finding a therapist who will actually be giving you good data/challenging the things you're stuck on versus a therapist who just agrees with you
80% of what personal trainers do could also be reduced to "talk therapy" and the other 20% is literally googleable.
Perhaps you can see how my example is an over-reduction that eschews the actual value of a personal trainer, and then likewise for founder coaching.
The main value is overcoming your own bias and limitation by accessing an informed neutral perspective. A coach isn't there to provide you with all the right answers. He's there to help you see the right problems.
You can easily search for one online or LinkedIn. But generally, once you start running in certain circles (think executive networking and chamber of commerce type events), you'll usually find a bunch of coaches and mentors waiting for you there. Or, at the very least, you'll have a group of people who you can ask for leads for finding a good coach.
This is where the entire libertarian ideology starts to fall apart for me.
Who does "contract enforcement" in a libertarian society? Who enforces "truth in labeling and advertising"? How do you scale those things without introducing regulation into the market?
It's not falling apart. It's expressing its final form, which is an all encompassing world government with the duty of tracking the ownership of every molecule of matter on the planet, and of enforcing every contract without judgement on its contents or the conditions under which it was signed.
Libertarians are people who believe that markets are natural, like trees. Markets are not natural, they are arbitrary sets of rules that people agree to abide by in order to have the agreements they make within those rules enforced by whatever institution is dictating those rules. Markets are an endorsement by the powerful, where at the least the loss of that endorsement will get you ejected from the market, but at the most it could get you broke and imprisoned.
So the fact that they don't recognize what markets are, and think that they can be free (either as in speech or beer) forces them to make governments the ultimate market, but their desire for unlimited freedom and autonomy (or rather limited only by your property) forces them to deny governments the right to make rules about their own markets.
Instead, they revert to natural rights, natural freedoms, natural markets, social Darwinism, etc. Mysticism. That's why when you scratch a Libertarian for long enough, you eventually either find a blood & soil racist or an ex-Libertarian.
I think it's become more common, but the subgenre of "surveillance" media has always had elements of this. Compare The Conversation (1974)[1], for example.
This Porsche hot-take is about 20 years past due. Porsche practically invented the sports SUV in the early 2000s with the Cayenne. At the time, many Porsche enthusiasts were against the idea of a Porsche SUV, but many in the market point to that decision as one that basically saved the brand. They also have a line of EVs that compete directly with the higher end Teslas.
The problem with night mode is that it compresses the dynamic range of the audio which undermines one of the main benefits of having a home theater system. It's a poor compromise for bad audio mixing.
Most home theater systems are in a home where the noise floor is significantly higher than a theater, which the audio mix was targeting. Dynamic range compression is often appropriate and when applied correctly improves the experience in homes.
The referenced article is five years old, so of course it's going to miss some of the biggest trends of the last decade. They Are Billions and Northgard were both released on Steam sometime after this article was written.
The author also made it a point to narrowly define an RTS game as "one that involves base building and/or management, resource gathering, unit production, and semi-autonomous combat, all conducted in real time (rather than being turn-based), for the purpose of gaining/maintaining control over strategic points on a map (such as the resources and command centers)," which leaves MOBAs out of the discussion.
I think the author succeeded in his goal of providing a light history of the RTS genre during its peak years (early 90s to mid 2010s). The criticisms you have may be valid, but they are largely outside of the article's scope.
I mainly switched because I kept hitting the salary cap for cyber roles as a government contractor and got tired of being asked to move on to new contracts.
The transition has been difficult. Sales has a huge learning curve and even more so in government contracting. Selling to the government is it's own animal, since you can't talk to your customer directly (in most cases). So you have to do a lot of work to influence your bids indirectly.
I'm still undecided about whether I made the right move. I like having more influence in the day-to-day management of my org, but I jumped shipped right before remote work options and tech pay exploded, so a lot of my old tech friends are making as much money or more than I am for a lot less work.