Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

Hey! A lot of people have mentioned you should keep going, and that's really good advice. You're probably better than you think you are.

But if you don't like it, you have other options! There's a lot of jobs out there that you might like more, and will benefit a ton from you having a background in engineering. You now have a superpower... you know enough about engineering to be dangerous!

For example – sales, CSMs or support teams for technical products will love you, because you can debug and figure things out – and your job will still involve more talking to customers than code. Look at solutions architect jobs, too.

Same goes for marketing. Most companies would kill for someone who does marketing but with a background in engineering who can do the work of setting up tracking/funnels/etc, rather than bugging engineering teams.

DevOps is a place where the hacker mentality will go a long way. There's not many "languages" you need to know deeply; but rather be really good at figuring things out and understanding how everything works together.

The list goes on! (EDIT: check the replies for more ideas!)

I've been in marketing for a while and my technical chops extend to being able to "run the demo" and even that gave me opportunities that others didn't.

One of the most valuable people on my marketing team when I was at a large company was our "Tech marketing" person. Someone who could build the demos and POCs and answer technical questions from customers and prospects. Maybe something like this or a "Solutions Engineer" could be a good fit

Also look into SEO. Its technical and marketing.

This is so true. I now get paid over twice what I got as a coder because what I do involves a combination of code knowledge, writing, and interviewing people. My skills in the last two make me a star there, and I am way more appreciated than I was in pure coding roles. Finding your "superpower" is the best thing you can do for your career.

That’s great!

What is it that you do for a Living now? Did you stumble onto it or made a gradual transition away from coding?

I totally stumbled on to it - I was very lucky, and do my best to never forget that. I work as a consultant for a company that does deep technical due diligence on mid-stage tech firms getting acquired, mostly by private equity firms. I worked with someone who was doing it part time for the same firm, and then following that I was the CTO of a small startup for a year, which got acquired, so I went through the process on the startup end. When I decided to move on, I was able to get hired based on deep architecture knowledge but also the ability to interview people delicately in high stakes environments, and then write that up in an executive report and present to the private equity clients. It's an unusual job, and I think the average programmer wouldn't like it, but for me it's worked out really well and I now have the mental energy to do more open source and hobby hacking again. It's great to be in a role that actually capitalizes on my arts education and people skills as well as tech. :-)

Thanks for this. It sounds very cool but very niche. Seems like you'd need to know the right person to get into this sort of work. Congratulations on all your success.

Thanks! I wouldn't say you need to know the right person really, but you do need to be the right fit - which is a pretty odd fit. I think it would be a bad job for example for someone who was not ok with the work uncertainty as it's pure consulting. But if you are someone with high level (VP, manager, or C-suite) tech experience, strong people skills, and can write, and you think it would fit you, feel free to find me on linked-in and get in touch. We need more folks right now! :-)

What is your job title, or what is it commonly called elsewhere? I'm desperately trying to get out of coding roles but hate just leaving my senior dev titles to rot and not help me in my next step.

see above thread

This is a good list. I’d add that I’ve had two friends that didn’t like programming and became product managers and have been very successful at it.

I'd also add Quality Assurance to the list. The QA person on our team started out as an engineer and is much happier now (and damn good).

Is the salary drop pretty steep?

Definitely something to look at. I'm not a developer but have an undergrad in CS (very mediocre student). I really liked working through the degree but didn't feel cut out to do well in a career.

So I got a job in a different field and have been at it for quite a while now. Knowing the basics of programming and, more importantly, databases and data structures has really paid dividends. Once you get your domain (finance/marketing/sales/etc) knowledge down at wherever you work, you'll very quickly become a major asset and probably with a good dose of job security.

Instead of asking the engineers to query a database or build out solutions that interface with various BI tools, this would become part of your job.

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