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Comment by badpun | Hacker News Reader

What you described is mostly not tech jobs. Tech is building Starlink, or maybe even Chat application No 17 at Google, or doing some other technical product. Coding work at banks or other non-tech corporations you mentioned rarely have any technical challenges - they merely use technology, they don't develop it themselves.

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This just feels like arbitrary gate keeping. The vast majority of people would consider any kind of coding work a "tech" job.

Maybe there's not much innovation happening in these jobs, but that's a different topic.

> The vast majority of people would consider any kind of coding work a "tech" job.

I'm not so sure. Even on Wall Street (which is pretty mainstream), "Tech" means FAANGs and similar, not a yogurt factory releasing its iOS calorie counting app.

You’re confusing “novel” with “tech.” Very few people work on novel problems as programmers compared to the number of programmers. It doesn’t mean they don’t work on/with “tech.”

A baker may just follow recipes. It doesn’t mean he’s not a baker.

Technology is a sector classification, but for any other company in other sectors, they likely have a business unit called Technology, with a c-suite position called chief technology officer, with developers who hold computer science degrees (just like at Google! No wai?! Yes wai!)

MasterCard is also a tech SPDR holding, for… reasons?

And finally, Netflix is a tech company with a film studio, but Disney is a film studio with a technology application, and I can’t meaningfully disambiguate why someone who works on Netflix code is in technology and a Disney+ developer is not.

That is in the context of companies. Agreed, a yogurt company is not a "tech" company. But someone who programs their mobile app certainly has a "tech" job.

FWIW, I work at a company who’s core product is a SaaS suite and it’s about as interesting as when I worked at a non tech F500.

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