The “Save Points” Theory of Career Growth

Maximizing Career Growth for the Bold and Ambitious

When I first joined Meta (then Facebook) back in 2018, I went through orientation along with ~200 other people. At the time, the company was hiring people so quickly that when you joined, you were assigned an onboarding cohort. Each cohort was sort of like a graduating class at a university. We attended the same training sessions, completed the same course work (yes there was coursework), and “graduated” together 6 weeks later. 

I was in the 8/20 n00b group and I made friends with the dozen or so other PMs that joined Meta that same week. Remarkably, many of us still remain in touch 6 years later.

My fellow 8/20 n00bs and I spent a bunch of time together, so we had a lot of time to swap stories about work, career, and life. One peer in particular – we’ll call her Rachel – had a particularly interesting theory of career development that I’ve often shared when mentoring other folks. I think it’s a practical framework for avoiding burnout and maximizing career advancement.

Wanting to Get Off the Treadmill

Working at enormous, competitive, industry-leading companies can be tiring. Working at Meta, for instance, felt like sprinting on a treadmill. If you slowed down or stopped, you would be physically thrown off. At the same time, running a bit faster didn’t do much for your career. There were just so many high performers that even if you pushed yourself hard, it was difficult to stand out.

While Salesforce and Google foster better work / life balance, both push their workforce hard too. At Salesforce, it was the constant marketing, demoing, conferences, and press panels. At Google, it’s the relentless technical self education and social networking required to be effective.

After you work at one of these companies for a while, it is mighty tempting to get off the treadmill and take a breather. And if done strategically, it can also be a really good thing for your career, too.

Save Points

Old video games wouldn’t let you save your progress at arbitrary points in a level or campaign. You had to reach a predetermined place in the story or level where you could save your progress before venturing further. Rachel, my peer in the Meta 8/20 n00b cohort, used this metaphor to describe her career strategy. 

The idea is to modulate how much energy and focus you expend on your career over long stretches of time to ensure you don’t get trapped on an unproductive treadmill. More concretely, it means intentionally moving between large, well-established companies and smaller startups every couple of years.

The “save point” is the big company. Your biggest growth opportunities are your stints working at smaller companies. Most of your forays into smaller companies won’t pan out, but that’s okay. Over the course of decades, you only need to get lucky 1 or 2 times.

How it Works

So how exactly does this strategy work? It’s actually pretty simple: you seek out roles at large, established tech companies and work there for a couple of years. Then, you take a risk and dive into a smaller company. When you make the transition, you negotiate a more senior title and responsibilities. Then, you work at the smaller company for a couple of years.

Most of the time, the smaller company dies, you get reorged, you get laid off, or the role you were originally hired for disappears and there isn’t much opportunity for growth. In those cases, you reload your save file, and interview with a big company again for the role you had when you left. True, you lost out on a year or two of big company compensation, but you can’t win ‘em all.

And, if you try this approach many times, you might get lucky. 

If you happen to join a high-growth company, you can rapidly move up the ranks in a way that the fierce competition at a place like Meta would never allow. If you do get lucky in this way, you can then return to a big company, but use your experience to get a better title and compensation package. And once you’ve been a director at a large, well-known company, you can leverage the company’s reputation to decline less senior offers. You will have “saved” your career at a more advantageous place.

Limitations and Advantages

In 2024, this nomadic approach to career growth might seem a bit useless. Due to layoffs and tightening budgets, it’s a lot harder to move between positions than it was a couple years ago.

But I think the approach is still workable. Instead of moving between a big company and a small company, you could instead move between a mature team and an experimental team inside the same company. Or you could pick up more risky projects within the same role. 

If you’ve gotten this far in the post, you might also wonder why I’m not practicing what I preach. If the save points theory is so great, why haven’t I followed it in my own career? The answer is pretty mundane: kids! Since 2016, we’ve been raising a family, which has forced me to be a bit more risk-averse in my career than I otherwise would be. 

If you’re ambitious, aggressive, and interested in maximizing the chances of getting to be a director or VP, however, I think the save points theory is a great approach.