What A Chief Technology Officer At Scholarly Wishes They Had Known Before Entering The Software Industry
Kelly, Scholarly's CTO, wishes they had understood the vast diversity of companies in the tech industry—"everything from two people in a garage to companies like Microsoft"—and the varying dynamics of working in startups versus large corporations. The experience of building something from the ground up versus having "a lot of impact" on a small feature at a massive company are starkly different, highlighting the need for early-career professionals to learn how to evaluate a company's potential for success.
Career Exploration, Technology, Leadership, Industry Realities, Workplace Challenges
Advizer Information
Name
Job Title
Company
Undergrad
Grad Programs
Majors
Industries
Job Functions
Traits
Kelly Sutton
CTO
Scholarly
Loyola Marymount University
N/A
Computer Science
Education, Technology
Product / Service / Software Development and Management
Honors Student
Video Highlights
1. The industry is vast and diverse, ranging from small startups to massive corporations like Microsoft and Google. Each company presents unique challenges and opportunities.
2. Understanding what constitutes a successful business is crucial, especially when evaluating startups. Learn to identify key indicators of success and ask insightful questions to assess a company's potential.
3. The nature of work changes as companies grow. In smaller companies, you wear many hats and have a large impact. Larger companies offer specialization and potentially significant impact on a massive scale, but the work may feel less significant on an individual level.
Transcript
What have you learned about this role that you wish someone would have told you before you entered the industry?
This industry is very large. In some ways, every company is a software company these days. When I was getting a computer science degree, I didn't really understand how many different types of businesses there are.
There's everything from two people in a garage to large companies that basically build entire cities, like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Facebook/Meta. Every company is going to be very different.
It's very hard to tell, especially on the smaller end, if a business is going to work out or not. Learning what a successful, well-functioning business looks like can take a while to figure out and understand as a software engineer.
I wish I would have learned more about what it looks like to be inside a successful startup. What are some things I can ask the leaders there to understand if it's going to work out?
When working at larger companies, you understand how the company changes as it grows, or if it's as big as it's going to be. You can have a lot of impact, but you're not going to be focused on too much.
There's a joke that it's an entire team's job at Google to decide the color of a button. That's facetious, but that button might be seen by two to three billion people a year. That's a lot of impact for doing something very small. You'll also be compensated very well for that.
This is very different work than earlier in your career or earlier in the company life cycle, where you're just trying to figure things out and build something that customers love.