Hey, Boston and OC, there are plenty of $200K+ jobs in SoCal; that’s officer pay at a VC-backed startup, of which there are tons here (remember, we get more VC money here in SoCal, now, than you Northeastern folks get).
Get a work ethic, some intelligence, and humility, and you, too, could join the club.
MBAs are nice — you don’t need to have gone to the best business school in the nation, as I did — http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/06/full_time.htm — but work ethic, intelligence, and humility are absolutely requisite.
Best book I read when I was a young know-it-all like you was “The New Rules” by John Kotter. He tracked the Harvard Business School class of ’74 over 20 years. He found that folks who went to work for small companies had better titles, made more money, and were happier than folks who remained at big companies. That put the seed in my mind to leave the Fortune 500, which I did four years later.
The Fortune 500 was a great training ground for me, but I’m happy to have the flexibility, leadership position, and meaningful equity stake that comes from working for a small company. I will recommend the same path — train at Big Blue so that you learn how to do things right, then go run/help run a company — to my children.
