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Comment by tibbon | Hacker News Reader

Your last sentence has been my experience so far. Essentially, when a company gets me, they seem to realize that month that they got more than they expected and its a good thing.

One thing I've noticed about some (not all clearly) people who are very good at one thing (let's say back end programming) is they might not really want to do something totally different. Dealing with customers? Writing documentation? Writing front end javascript? Its a bit like pulling teeth.

I don't mind in the least. Documentation writing is great. Making beautiful products is great. Listening to customers (and investors) is great. And yea, I like coding too!

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The problem with finding programmers that are good at the social stuff (phone support, dealing with customers) is that the great conceit of programmers is:

That knowing things is more important than knowing people

Hence (most good) programmers will find dealing with customers and doing phone support a tedious chore.

What you are looking for then is a programmer that doesn't passionately love programming. If you find them I am willing to bet that as far as their programming skills go they are not so good.

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Alternately, look for someone who used to be a hot-shot programmer, but then dialled it back, "got a life". Look for programmers in their 40s or 50s who are more into the social aspect of life. The problem is, they won't work 80 hours if you're only paying them for 32.

I'm building small products. Why don't you try that too? If you can build and maintain 2 or 3 products or SaaS, then you won't need to work for anybody else and you'll enjoy double what a developer gets.

In a product, you'll deal with:

- Coding the product back-end

- Doing its front-end and UX

- Writing the documentation. (I like that too)

- Design the landing page (and may be the Interface, if it's too important/creative)

- Marketing, branding and copywriting

- Customer support

- And finally getting some gigs (and you can charge well for them) from time to time

So you get to try everything. There are lot of opportunities on the web, you just need time to grow the ideas and validate them.

Same, except I don't really enjoy writing documentation. :) I posted my full thoughts in a separate post, but I'm looking for a job, and every job description I read makes me feel like I'm at a crossroads where I have to pick something to give up and something to get better at.

I would really like to have some people post that are looking for someone like you or I, and how someone can actually make themselves the best candidate, or even find such positions. I know how to find standard programming gigs. That isn't a problem.

I keep hearing about the demand, but I keep not seeing it. Unicorns looking for unicorns?

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