Chapter 73. Manage Your Tech Career

It may sound strange for the CEO of an investment management firm to say this, but managing your career well is much more important than managing your investments well.

Good investment management—using low-cost ETFs and low-fee advice—can mean higher returns in your investment portfolio. Over time, that might add up to a lot of money—maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars on larger portfolios. But the economic rewards that follow from good career decisions in the technology industry are potentially much larger.

Today, Wealthfront is launching a Startup Compensation Tool to help our clients with that part of their financial lives: their careers. The Tool offers data on the tech startup job market, including cash compensation and equity packages for a range of jobs, so that you can maximize the return on your career.

We’ve licensed data typically used by Human Resources departments and made it available for free—one more example of how Wealthfront is democratizing access to sophisticated financial advice and information.

I’m not suggesting money should be your first concern when you think about your career. People do the best work, and have the best chance of great success, if they do what they love on a day-to-day basis. The data in our Tool supports that idea—take a look at the way individuals with expertise in their fields earn as much as or more than managers in their fields (filter by engineer—hardware or software—on ...

Get Managing Startups: Best Blog Posts now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.