How to make $100,000 in Silicon Valley without an engineering background

You can make $100,000 or more right away in Silicon
Valley without an engineering background. I know this
because I was making more than $100,000 per year in my
second job -- just out of college with only a couple of
years’ worth of work experience -- 15 years ago. So it’s
not only possible now, but should be expected,
especially by someone in Silicon Valley who has used
his or her time in high school and college to build a
marketable skillset and is intent on doing this.
Also, the pay for programmers and data scientists with
equivalent experience was typically not higher than
mine, and often was less or much less depending on the
kind of company and industry. Contrary to popular
belief, it’s typical for programmers fresh out of school to
get paid less than $100,000 for their starting jobs, and
sometimes for a few years into their mid-20s. Like non-
technical jobs, it’s really dependent on their skill level
and other factors.
The kind of computer science grads you hear about
getting great offers or making a lot of money right away
have typically distinguished themselves early in ways a
non-technical person might not recognize. Some
obvious ways to do this for programmers or data
scientists is to build really neat things, win technical
competitions or other academic achievements.
But I’d argue that the money possible for a new
computer science grad is not more than what’s available
to somebody with an MBA or who has achieved
comparable distinction with a focus in finance,
advertising or design. Traditionally, the money available
to people in finance is really high compared to what
anybody could get as a new computer science grad,
even if they’re coming from an ivy league school, have
won some competitions, etc. For MBAs, it’s not crazy to
see $150,000 to $200,000 offers right out of the gate. For
financial analysts and salespeople on Wall Street, you
can get up to the mid-hundreds of thousands after a
couple years of building a client base.
I was working in a sales capacity in high school and
through college, so by the time I got my first job as a
technology salesperson with a publicly traded company,
I had a great resume, references, and a short history of
exceeding expectations. I took that job and sold during
the day and rewrote the playbook on how to attack the
market over nights and weekends. I maintained over
250% of quota for two years, and then went to work for a
software company -- which gave me an impossible
client list -- but offered a $120,000 base salary. After
closing 75% of the company’s revenue, securing its next
investor, and getting promoted twice, my career was in
hand. I knew with the skills I already had, I’d never have
to worry about work again.
Three things a non-technical person can do to maximize
earning potential in Silicon Valley right out of school:
Find a sales job at a small, consumer startup. The Yelp
sale in the early days was about five times harder than it
is now when everybody has heard of it. But you’d have
made about 100 times more money from its IPO, so
probably a good trade. Sure, you can do what I did and
go business-to-business (there wasn’t really a
consumer Internet industry when I came up), but
business-to-business is much more difficult early on.
To be really good, you need to learn a lot about
technology, business strategy, and generally be able to
convince a CIO to trust you personally with a million
dollars of budget, and his or her job.
Start writing a ton and get into copywriting for a startup
that needs fuel for its content marketing strategy . Many
companies now would call this a social media strategist,
specialist, marketer, or something else, but really what it
means is creating mountains of compelling content to
help sell the pitch online. I’ve done this. It works, and
people who can do it well are worth their weight in gold.
Earn your keep as a research analyst. In small
companies, someone who can find some data, build
some charts out of it, and draw a narrative to quickly
and efficiently tell a story with it can move mountains.
These are not hard skills to come by. It takes a few
weeks to be passable at this, and a long summer to get
really good. Once you’re good at this you can try your
hand at more complicated surveys, data mining, and
creating infographics. But short of that, your ability to
do this would be helpful to project teams, sales and
marketing, or even founders looking to pull board and
pitch slides together.
Overall, the companies that dominate headlines in
today’s tech section are top heavy with tech talent,
completely dependent on peak technical work, and their
compensation reflects that. But take a flight a few hours
in any direction to a bank, hedge fund, video game
company, or any of the hundred or so other industries,
and the breadwinners are the sales people, marketers,
and operations whiz kids who figure out how to cut
costs while moving everything else up and to the right.
That’s been the case for about a few hundred years, and
there’s no reason to think it’s changing now.