The tech vacancies you forget to promote - Product Support Engineer anyone?
It seems that here on HN we are pigeon-holed. You're either a dev, a designer or a 'business person' (read: idea guy looking for a Tech Co-founder) I want to point out it is possible to be somewhere between those and still be technical.
Each month on the 'who is hiring' post I see hundreds of posts looking for dev ninjas, rock-stars and wizards. I get that it's a struggle for the best talent.
I often click through to those companies and see at the bottom of the list - Support Engineer, Sys Admin, Product Specialist - all needing a technical skill-set & soft skills and wonder why these aren't listed on the 'who's hiring' too or at least well publicised elsewhere.
After all, we are the interface between developer and end user! The first point of contact, the aggregator of customer feedback. Firefighters, troubleshooters, bug hunters, process writers and more! Of course you need someone with a fantastic skill set!
It's also a great way to bring hidden talent into your organisation. They're going to learn your product inside out and support the 'existing' features while your devs concentrate on the 'new'.
The greatest gift you can give your development team is a handful of uninterrupted hours during the work day to concentrate. A great support team enables this.
On the flip side, it's also a great starting point for anyone who wants to joint a startup or become a developer/engineer later on in their career.
So companies & startups - please - post your 'other' tech jobs here. You'll probably be surprised at the response. I know I'd be interested in them!
(A bit about me, I support real-time finance applications in the UK, CS degree + 5 years of Field, Remote, Application, Product & User Support. I earned a place on in a UK startup incubator last year. Main strengths include relational databases, data analysis, SQL reporting, PHP, mySQL I build small things in Python, RoR & I'm learning OO programming through iOS app development. Able to relocate or work remotely.
If you have a role you'd like to contact me about, I'm my username on gmail.com
If you have several - post them up here!