The first management position I applied to was at JP Morgan (Asset Management). JPMAM were opening a new office and forming a new team whose primary role was to underwrite commercial real estate acquisitions and support acquisition teams located in NYC. I thought this was perfect and I was well prepared to discuss underwriting and training newbies how to analyze deals, hitting deadlines, and generally busting my ass. I thought that my domain knowledge would be sufficient to create an air of authority (I was under 30) and the analysts would respect that.

It turns out I was so unprepared to describe how I managed people in my current role and how I would handle a team of know-it-all analysts who may not get along or have issues not related to underwriting deals, it took me 3 years to realize that mistake (I didn’t receive an offer). My ignorance in understanding the full scope of the role I meant I missed preparing for the key part of the role.

I Remember

Early in my career, I was near DC in applied math and computing, mostly for US national security. The jobs were not very stable, but the pay was good: Soon I was making in annual salary six times what a new, high end Camaro cost. When my wife was also working, we were having lots of good times, bought the main home furnishings I still have, and were saving money rapidly. Soon, so that she could get a better job, she went for her Ph.D. We had money enough for that.

Being there in DC with the jobs I was getting had an advantage: When new hot topics came alone, i.e., got popular, usually my job was close to one or more of those hot topics; I learned; and my resume looked still better for the next job.

E.g., people were trying to do curve fitting with polynomials. Well the usual normal equations get close to the notorious Hilbert matrix and give big numerical problems. But there is a cute, numerically stable, approach via some custom to the data orthogonal polynomials. That little point, plus two more, helped me get a nice slot at Georgetown University; that had me teaching computer science there (before my Ph.D.), and also helped me get a nice slot at FedEx.

Usually the hot topics were mostly hype as in, IMHO, AI/ML now and, again, IMHO, much better approaches are available. But that the topics were hot meant that people, the people hiring, were impressed by the hot topics. There’s an advantage in that: Or be where the big waves develop, see a wave, and ride it.

At one point, in a two week period, I sent some copies of a crudely written resume, went on seven interviews, and got five offers.

That’s what job hunting looks like when are in a good situation.

Big Surprising Lesson

So, I went for my Ph.D.; my wife went for her Ph.D. first, was supposed to get her degree first, and support us while I did my Ph.D.. Well, she got stuck, eventually completed her degree, but I took a part-time job to support us. My resume was good, and in grad school I met the person that gave me the contact for the job — “who you know” is important. Knowing people at a high end research university can help.

So, on that job, eventually the US Navy wanted, in two weeks, an evaluation of the survivability of the US SSBN fleet under a special, controversial scenario of global nuclear war limited to sea. Well, heavily from some of my grad school work, I saw a continuous time Markov process, needed minimal data (a bit amazing), wrote the corresponding software, and got nice looking results in the two weeks.

Being on time was good because my wife, suffering in grad school, had a vacation planned for us the next day. Both the Navy and my wife got what they wanted on time.

It was a nice vacation: For desserts, we got a cooler with a lot of French pastries from the Watergate Pastry shop — right, that Watergate. We packed some nice wine glasses we’d gotten from West Virginia Glass, likely the same as Jackie had picked, right, that Jackie, for the White House. They were nice but not expensive. Jackie had said: “I found just what I wanted in West Virginia” — it had to be the same. We likely found the same retail source, Garfinkel’s in DC. I called West Virginia, got passed to their retail store, and ordered, in total, five dozen, in four sizes including some nice Champaign flutes.

For a dessert wine, we had brought our favorite fake Champaign, Italian Asti Spumanti.

On the way, we stopped at an A&P in Front Royal, saw the head butcher, and had him cut us the two nicest, sinfully thick, Porterhouse steaks he could find. And, yup, we had some good French bread.

We’d brought baking potatoes wrapped in AL foil and lots of charcoal fire supplies and equipment. So, can bake such a potato just by putting it directly on the hot charcoal — we did that. Sour cream and chives? Sure.

So, at Shenandoah, in the woods we found a picnic table and a charcoal grill and chowed down! At the end, a doe deer, nice, gentle, walked up for handouts; we gave her some French bread.

Otherwise we ate in the restaurant of the Shenandoah cabin setup.

We had a great view of the valley below, went on hikes to the tops of the hills with box lunches from the restaurant, and at night used a simple telescope to find the Andromeda galaxy.

Nice vacation.

Back at the office, a stranger was wandering around for an hour or so a day.

He was talkative. He wanted to talk with me, about whatever, but actually not the SSBN work. So, we talked. I explained that I thought that LBJ, etc. acted stupidly in Viet Nam.

I had just finished my Ph.D. Eventually four things became clear: (1) That I had finished my Ph.D. had been noticed by some high up people I didn’t know. (2) My SSBN work had also been noticed by some high up people I didn’t know. Actually that work was soon sold to a leading US intelligence agency; I could tell you which one, but then I’d have to …. (3) I was being interviewed for some better position I knew nothing about. (4) My Viet Nam remark caused me to lose the slot.

Lesson: As soon as get considered for anything above the bottom level worker bee slots, politics in all its forms matters a LOT. Take the old advice: Never, especially on a job, discuss politics, sex, or religion.

I Notice

Some families are buying luxury SUVs, summer time pleasure craft, 22′ speed boats, 35′ boats, taking vacations, sometimes outside the US, have US housing prices up, supposedly to a new high, pay for college for their children, have the GDP of the US economy growing for the last two quarters at an annual rate of 3+%, etc.

Point: Some people are buying houses, moving in, putting down roots, doing will. Some people.

Point: Not everyone is some migrant laborer going from one short term gig to another.

Big Companies

I’d be wary of big companies: E.g., at one point I was in GE, and they decided to do something different. That’s when I got seven interviews and five offers. At one point I was at the IBM Watson lab in AI, and IBM decided to go from 407,000 head count down to 209,000. That and some really nasty, quite illegal, clique politics shot my career in the gut. I really wanted to do applied math on Wall Street, but I never got to the right people; e.g., I didn’t yet know about James Simons and Renaissance Technologies (internal hedge fund 40% per year gains for decades).

GE has continued to sell off, close down, etc. divisions. IIRC, at times Intel, Microsoft, FedEx, Boeing have let go hundreds of people at a time.

Wife Work

Apparently now one of the main ways a young family can buy a house is that the wife goes to work. The two leading careers are quite traditional, nursing and K-12 school teaching. In addition, might do well in office work in an insurance agency, a hospital, or a local government office. These jobs tend to be stable.

Barrier to Entry

IMHO, currently a crucial point about a job, especially one that does permit buying a house, not having to move, and does permit putting down roots, crucial for having a good family and keeping a marriage together, is to have a barrier to entry.

IMHO by far the most common and important such barrier is the geographic one: Get a job where are not in competition with anyone more than 100 miles away. Then do relatively well in a radius of 100 miles and, then, likely can do well. For a lot of jobs, say, Chinese carryout, the radius can be much less than 100 miles.

Examples include independent insurance agency, auto repair shop, auto body shop, HVAC, plumbing, kitchen/bath renovation, grass mowing and/or landscaping, etc.

For more, veterinarian, dentist, medical lab, etc.

If can run several pizza shops, gas stations with convenience stores attached, several franchised restaurants and are good at it, then can do well. Being a little bit good at it, e.g., carefully matching staffing to customer traffic, almost hour by hour, can mean quite significant bucks to the owner each year.

One of the best career paths is to be a child of an owner of a successful family business, e.g., a leading beer distributor in a corner of a major state, then the child can take over the family business. This situation will improve if Trump can be successful repealing the estate tax.

Beyond a geographical barrier to entry, get a technological one. But so far, only a tiny fraction of the population can do that.

If Trump is successful throttling the importation of cheap products and cheap labor, putting back to work a significant fraction of the 94 million US citizens out of the labor force, and getting the inflation-corrected annual GDP growth rate up to 5%, then the US job situation should change enormously.

Here’s how.

http://themusingsofthebigredcar.com/managing-your-career/

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com