Not saying it is easy, but when I was a teenager I moved across the world because my father needed the job. It sucked in the moment, but looking back it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
US dollar attack vectors are gradually drying up. Ironically, the more they are used - e.g. in sanctions - the stronger the motivation for detachment from USD as a reserve currency and direct trade in the parties' own currencies. Plus - how much of the world can the US sanction at the same time before it's only the select few that it trades with? Russia + Iran + China + Venezuela + Mexico + Canada + + + ...
I agree. Mao once said that he was willing to accept US atomic bombs. But that was when China didn't have fancy cities... Both sides are simply too vulnerable in an all out war.
Xi wants to make China great again he doesn't want a nuclear wasteland.
You'll find that outside the startup, the director/vp/cto title doesn't translate. Larger companies will often write you off as being "not experienced" enough which is often code for "you don't look old enough for this position". Unlike engineering and the startup world, big companies want you to look the part not just know the part.
> Larger companies will often write you off as being "not experienced" enough which is often code for "you don't look old enough for this position".
It's not about age, it's about what you actually had to do. Company size, company age and political complexity are strongly correlated.
A successful large company engineering director spends their day mostly doing politics across the org, while a successful small company engineering director spends a lot of their day writing code, being an architect, filling in for product management.
> Unlike engineering and the startup world, big companies want you to look the part not just know the part.
Big companies want you to know how to play the long game.
That latter person sounds like a normal L6 at FAANG. Director is 8. They truly haven’t had the exposure to build the required skills for that lateral transfer.
A CTO of a startup might be coding day to day, making technology decisions, and have a team or two underneath them. In F500 or Corpro world, this is more like a engineering manager or tech lead. In most big companies a manager does zero coding and rarely makes a tech decision, you go up to a director level, they might have 100-200 people under them, direct reports are almost all managers, and they never touch tech. Go higher up to VP or CTO levels and they are just so divorced from code that it doesn't make sense why a CTO in a startup would translate.
The corporate world is simply a different environment with a different set of rules and a different set of engagements and thus requiring a different set of skills. A director or VP at a startup and a director or VP at a Fortune 500 company are two totally different things.
