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I have been doing a greater part of the things elaborated in the post as a solo founder/freelance software person. Albeit the scale of things I need to handle a
by gmanis 6y ago
I have been doing a greater part of the things elaborated in the post as a solo founder/freelance software person. Albeit the scale of things I need to handle are relatively small.
What kind of a job profile should I be looking at if I am in a position where I absolutely need to have one?
I don’t slot particularly well in any one thing I feel, neither a great developer nor a great systems person. And I did do a bunch of recruiting and tech consulting too:
- tda 6y agoPerhaps a job at a medium size non-tech company. There are plenty of problems that can be solved with small scale (web) apps everywhere, that don't need webscale levels of scalability, but are well suited for a single full stack developer
- intpx 6y agothe mythical 'full stack' engineer? or just sell the AL/ML snake oil and get hired to brute force tech debt.
- gmanis 6y agoThere’s nothing mythical about it. Just have been doing this for a long time across different parts of the stack and few indie products under the belt. The newer javascript frameworks are a bit tricky to wrap your head around though.
- b4ke 6y agoyour head is meant to fall into them like a box.... not wrap around it like a present, and in that understanding there is a solace in knowing that javascript is not "the way"
- mattwad 6y agoThis is the way of beginners. The truth is, read the source code of these libraries. You'll realize a lot of stuff on SO is just copypasta work-arounds, while a more elegant, more efficient solution may exist that just wasn't documented well for your use case.
- fapjacks 6y agoHave you ever considered working technical support? As a lifelong generalist programmer, I never imagined I would work in a support role beyond what every programmer at a startup is expected to do, but I was persuaded to cross over by someone I greatly respect. That support team was the most talented team I ever worked with in almost twenty-five years in tech, and working in that role grew many different skills both in and out of tech in ways I never imagined. Hacking broken production environments back online and writing and pushing bugfixes is exhilarating, and it was the single most valuable experience of my career.
- gmanis 6y agoNever considered support role to be honest. Maybe it feels a little inferior after having those degrees I guess but that’s my own bias. I did think of like a product management role at startups but they all expect you to have pedigree or previous work ex in similar role. Catch-22!
- fapjacks 6y agoYeah, that's exactly what I thought, too. It is just one of those weird cultural artifacts that when someone says "tech support" we automatically conjure this mental image which is both not really technical and not really flattering. It was definitely one of those life moments when I had to sit down and talk myself out of a baseless prejudice. Also, the sibling commenter mentions one of the big reasons I found so much joy in it. This kind of hardcore technical support is in many respects closely related to working on greenfield projects. In my experience, the fun stuff usually ends up with some unfun caveats like company bureaucracy, office politics, or having the tech stack chosen beforehand, this kind of thing. But there's an interesting inversion when a company's production environment is broken and you're the one that can fix it. Obstacles magically disappear and you have a tremendous amount of freedom to do your job, with effectively two different companies doing what they can to enable your work, because the only thing everyone cares about is getting it working again. You do have to be able to walk the walk -- and I cannot stress enough that it takes a certain type, and just knowing your shit isn't going to cut it -- and you also have to get some personal enjoyment out of chaotic environments, and be able to talk people out of a tree sometimes. But you'll never run out of new and interesting problems to solve, you'll be testing your mettle far more frequently than your peers, and you'll be expanding your professional network every week about as much as everybody else does once or twice a year when they go to a convention. It's the closest thing the tech industry has to a firefighter or superhero or something.
- cvhashim 6y agoMaybe you’d enjoy software consulting work under a firm with good engineering management. You get to touch many different tools and tech depending on project.
- wolco 6y agoEasiest path for you: Frontend/full stack agency developer (node/react).