Ask HN: Need career advice | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Need career advice

20 pointsbprasanna6 comments

I'm working in software industry for around 9 years (3 years development, 6 years in testing). Currently i could feel that my interests are changing related to technology. Though my primary job is test development, as side projects i have developed many tools and automation frameworks which were useful to the team as a whole. Through these side projects i realized that, sharing knowledge or making useful information available to everyone what interests me the most.

In that regard, what could be the right field/job profile which allows me to expand my interest. Some of the profiles or research fields i thought which would suit my interest were: 1. Tools development 2. Doing research on Semantic networks

Can you all please feed me with some inputs on possible next career move which would align with my interests?

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You may be interested in Developer Evangelism: http://thenextweb.com/dd/2012/06/03/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-d...

> A developer evangelist is first and foremost a translator. Someone who can explain technology to different audiences to get their support for a certain product or technology. It needs to be someone who is technical but also capable to find the story in a technical message… A good developer evangelist can get techies excited about a product by pointing out the benefits for developers who use the product on an eye-to-eye level.

It sounds like you may enjoy working in open source. I would suggest finding an employer than embraces open source and allows you to spend time working on those projects.

Any company can always use improvements to tools such as build tools like webpack, etc. The entire community benefits from those improvements and that may align with your interests.

A lot of large companies are starting to gap the breach between manual test and dev. While part of this is writing automated tests for each feature, a large part of this is writing tools and frameworks to help with testing, debugging, and operations.

I've worked in a few "tools team" job descriptions. I personally enjoyed it. By being internal tools, it allows you to iterate faster and do more interesting technical things than could be publicly released. If you are working for an open source company, these tools can be very useful for other companies and are of great value when released.

Look for job descriptions that have tools, devtools, etc in the title, or any senior test automation roles where this would likely be most of your job (making the shared parts that everyone else uses).

Good luck!

Continue to do what you are doing, but start a blog on the side. Do this for 1-2 years so you can see if you have what it takes to e.g. build an audience, and also if it really is what you want to do full time. This is career not lifestyle advice, so whatever you decide, make sure you can get paid to do it.

> sharing knowledge or making useful information available to everyone what interests me the most.

This sounds like support engineering might be a fit. It would allow you to teach people about code and help develop good documentation while still utilizing your programming skills.

You and I have similar interests. I write documentation and perform other community evangelism tasks.

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