4 ms·

What does technical expert at large mean to you? I have some idea from my experience, but it seems like it's usually a nebulous role that nobody asked for.

by wocram 7y ago

eropple 7y ago
This kinda fits what I do at my current job. I've learned over time that this is a role that a small company really can benefit from and one most companies will not hire for. My current employer did, and it's a genuinely engaging role for me while also providing broad benefits to the engineering group overall. You're right in that it often de facto devolves to somebody who can sorta do it; my M.O. in my career has been instead to chase those roles, to be wide and deep and to plug as tightly as I can into the actual business hierarchy to understand how to solve high-value problems while exposing the results to the business to validate the time/effort/money expended. My current job is the most fun job I've ever had and I'm excited to be making stuff that people actually want to use, both in terms of our B2C product and the tools I work on for developers internally. I run our infrastructure team, with my focus there being around developer empowerment and developer-managed cloud resources for apps and services, and the necessary downstack education that that implies. But I've also done a lot of the formative work on our new APIs because I'd open-sourced a bunch of stuff in our stack and I've been building a lab so we can figure out what makes some web filters think our device (we sell in-home exercise equipment) is an "IoT device" that needs to be blackholed away from our API. I think you kinda have to run towards the fire, though. If it's high-value and requires pretty broad understanding of a grab bag of topics, I tend to move towards it--and it is always tremendously interesting and a lot of fun.
ptero 7y ago
This, in my experience, often means advising on several ( >3 ) projects with no (or very minimal) explicit technical commitments. And "no explicit commitments" means you get more freedom to attend conferences, close the door for a generic "I am working, please do not disturb" stretches, take vacation when convenient to you and generally be a master of your time. Getting there may not be easy. IME the best path, especially in larger companies, is to: 1. Be effective and gain wide domain knowledge, so your time is valued and multiple diverse projects want as much of your time as you can spare. This is (relatively) easy. 2. As requests for your time rise, negotiate advisory instead of worker bee roles. Avoid writing code, even when you can do it quickly. Instead architect, mentor, advise, assess, etc. This is tricky. As you transition to advisory roles you need to stay valuable and not turn into one of the folks just hanging around with nothing meaningful to do -- those heads are first on the chopping block. If you stop getting invites to new projects, lean hard on #1 for a while.

What does technical expert at large mean to you? I have some idea from my experience, but it seems like it's usually a nebulous role that nobody asked for.

by wocram 7y ago

What does technical expert at large mean to you? I have some idea from my experience, but it seems like it's usually a nebulous role that nobody asked for.

eropple 7y ago

This kinda fits what I do at my current job. I've learned over time that this is a role that a small company really can benefit from and one most companies will not hire for. My current employer did, and it's a genuinely engaging role for me while also providing broad benefits to the engineering group overall. You're right in that it often de facto devolves to somebody who can sorta do it; my M.O. in my career has been instead to chase those roles, to be wide and deep and to plug as tightly as I can into the actual business hierarchy to understand how to solve high-value problems while exposing the results to the business to validate the time/effort/money expended. My current job is the most fun job I've ever had and I'm excited to be making stuff that people actually want to use, both in terms of our B2C product and the tools I work on for developers internally. I run our infrastructure team, with my focus there being around developer empowerment and developer-managed cloud resources for apps and services, and the necessary downstack education that that implies. But I've also done a lot of the formative work on our new APIs because I'd open-sourced a bunch of stuff in our stack and I've been building a lab so we can figure out what makes some web filters think our device (we sell in-home exercise equipment) is an "IoT device" that needs to be blackholed away from our API. I think you kinda have to run towards the fire, though. If it's high-value and requires pretty broad understanding of a grab bag of topics, I tend to move towards it--and it is always tremendously interesting and a lot of fun.

ptero 7y ago

This, in my experience, often means advising on several ( >3 ) projects with no (or very minimal) explicit technical commitments. And "no explicit commitments" means you get more freedom to attend conferences, close the door for a generic "I am working, please do not disturb" stretches, take vacation when convenient to you and generally be a master of your time. Getting there may not be easy. IME the best path, especially in larger companies, is to: 1. Be effective and gain wide domain knowledge, so your time is valued and multiple diverse projects want as much of your time as you can spare. This is (relatively) easy. 2. As requests for your time rise, negotiate advisory instead of worker bee roles. Avoid writing code, even when you can do it quickly. Instead architect, mentor, advise, assess, etc. This is tricky. As you transition to advisory roles you need to stay valuable and not turn into one of the folks just hanging around with nothing meaningful to do -- those heads are first on the chopping block. If you stop getting invites to new projects, lean hard on #1 for a while.