Comment by sevennull

I have changed my "career" several times and luck played a big role.

Short answer - work for a small startup where you wear many hats. Scale, sell or fail - rinse and repeat.

Started as a mechanic, went back to get an engineering degree which got me into a auto manufacture. I found engineering cool but moved to slow and salary growth was very slow. During dot com days things were booming and I had an opportunity to jump to a marketing startup which helped me break out of my engineering shell(such a different world).

I found operations was a very good fit for me - complex machine you have to engineer to work efficiently as the world is on fire. I happen to make a career out of it working with several startups in numerous industries. My job was always started with - fixing stuff young startups get wrong to help them keep up with growth. Basically put business processes in place and be an interpreter between technical and business people so they stop making stupid technical decision that cause long term problems.

It was a great ride and learned a ton about business that you will rarely learn at a big company. I was responsible for various aspects of technical and non technical operations so always had a seat at the table.