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Comment by The_Colonel | Hacker News Reader

> Get a job at smaller to medium sized non-tech company. Every company, in any industry, has computers. They need you.

I personally had the worst experience at such jobs. Small/medium sized non-tech companies don't value technology and don't understand its importance. If it works, you're invisible and just a cost center, if it doesn't you're to blame.

For work/life balance I've found big tech corps the best (not FAANG). I haven't worked on Saturday/Sunday in the last 10 years. I've seen people negotiate reduced hours/days successfully.

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> Small/medium sized non-tech companies don't value technology and don't understand its importance.

I work closely with IT departments within such companies through ERP implementations/localizations and can coroborate this. In my experience 9/10 non-tech companies with their own IT departments(1+ person) don't value and especially don't understand what their IT department does.

On the other side, the people working within such departments are in my experience just terribly bad at sticking up for themselves, and explaining what needs to be explained. They don't draw lines where lines need to be drawn and they see themselves in the same way as the management/leadership does.

Counter-anecdote: I'm working at a non-tech company (we build the in-house technical software that everyone else in the company uses) and the experience has been great. We deliver real and immediate value, our clients are our colleagues and there's a great emphasis on UX, user testing and what not as a result.

Yes, there are loads of other problems, especially on the technical side, because tech isn't the company's strong point (our processes, especially revolving around the DB and deployment, are quite a mess) but the right things are in place that make me enjoy my job.

That might be the counter-anecdote that proves the rule.

In my own humble anecdotal experience, the less focused a company is on tech, the worse. Beyond that, if management is not from a software (or engineering) background, they will likely have no clue what to expect from programmers (because such hard things are simple and such simple things are hard) and the treatment will be . . . strange.

That gives you more freedom

I would love to get a job building internal tools that my company needs and uses but I haven't had any luck actually finding those kinds of jobs, so I always wind up building products.

Any advice on how to find those kinds of positions?

Connect with a recruiter (or five) and tell them that's what you want. They exist to act as a filter, and if you work with several from multiple companies/geographies in addition to doing your own searching, you'll eventually find what you're looking for.

In my experience, recruiters basically keep your name and skillset on record and don't take into account any of your other wants/needs.

You've worked with shitty recruiters, which is to be expected because most of them are.

Some of them are great and they're the ones worth keeping in touch with.

I'm honestly surprised how many don't even seem to take your skillset into consideration.

You don't have to know much about programming languages to know that if none of the words on my resume match the ones in the job listing, it's probably not a good match.

Maybe I need to be more clear that while I'm willing to learn new tech for a job, I probably don't want jobs where I have to learn an entire new stack just to get started.

Agreed -- and, even worse, in my experience they don't even know about more than 20% of the opportunities.

connecting with recruiters is a meme.

they're basically glorified salespeople. they would only reply to you if they thought there was quick money to be made.

I ended up in this current position because I was first interested in their field of work (geospatial work), and secondly skilled in programming. Even if I weren't a programmer I would probably work for them in some other capacity.

I don't feel qualified giving advice but personally I think I would look beyond what is commonly considered "tech". As another poster mentioned, everyone uses tech. When a company's work is sufficiently complex or special, chances are they may not rely on external vendors 100%.

Really out of my depth here but maybe some types of firms where I think there could be some interesting stuff internally:

- engineering - analytics - games - graphics/animations

Vfx industry

Also, if they have an existing solution that they're looking for someone to maintain/port/update- it's more likely to be some cobbled together spaghetti monster without any documentation.

Whether it's a mess or not depends entirely upon the skill of the people that built it and the constraints they were under while building.

There is no shortage of anecdata on HN and elsewhere of people being shocked at the poor quality of the code base at FAANG and other high level prestigious companies.

The world is different now. It's 2022 and the value of technology is far more clear to the average person.

but mostly not so much if the person has an MBA.

Sure, it's a gross generalization, but after 25+ years in this industry, I stand by this bigotry.

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