
Ask HN: Where are all the non-web jobs? - callinyouin
I&#x27;m a fairly &quot;fresh&quot; developer (less than a year out of college) who will be moving to the Chicago area in May. Since graduation I&#x27;ve been working at the company I interned at and was able to secure that position through the internship program at my university, so hunting for a tech job is totally new to me.<p>Using some of the more standard online outlets for job searching (Dice, Stack Overflow, Indeed, Glassdoor, etc.), I&#x27;ve found very few jobs that aren&#x27;t web-related. I have seen a handful of embedded programming jobs, but those tend to require a background that I lack (EE or CE, whereas I have a Comp. Sci. degree). My only other prospects seem to be in the financial and gaming industries, but those positions are few and far between and tend to require previous professional experience that I lack.<p>I&#x27;m afraid I&#x27;ll have to pursue a masters or doctoral degree in order to pursue jobs in any area outside of the web. Is this accurate, or am I simply looking for employment in the wrong places?
======
w1ntermute
Rather than thinking of it as "where are all the non-web jobs," think of it as
"where are all the $INDUSTRY jobs?" What are you interested in? The web is
just a very popular and successful medium for reaching users, including in
finance and gaming.

And if you really want to work in finance or in gaming, then go to meetups or
reach out to people in the field with cold emails, asking to just learn more
about what they do (rather than immediately flinging your resume at them). You
should always be networking long before you start actively looking for your
next job.

~~~
hwstar
Out of work Hardware/Embedded systems engineer with a CS degree here.

There's a lack of embedded programming jobs being offered by manufacturers in
California right now. I live in San Diego and it is terrible.

One might think this is because California isn't business friendly
(noncompetes are illegal), or that salaries are too high. I call B.S. on this.
The best talent prefers to live in CA due to the weather and the lack of
backwards policies. There are some of us who will not work in certain areas of
the country due to the lack of employee rights. We'd rather live off our
investments, and recurring income than work in such hell holes, where the
rights of employees are dead last.

~~~
w1ntermute
> There's a lack of embedded programming jobs being offered by manufacturers
> in California right now. I live in San Diego and it is terrible.

What about in LA or in the Bay Area? Have you explored moving within
California?

~~~
hwstar
Unfortunately we have to care for an aging parent, or we would have moved when
it got bad.

------
untog
The web is basically a UI layer these days. Google are technically a 'web'
company but there are a hell of a lot of positions available there that don't
involve doing any web programming at all. Same at any decently sized company.

 _I 'm afraid I'll have to pursue a masters or doctoral degree in order to
pursue jobs in any area outside of the web._

I'm curious - why would you go to the extent of studying for a masters solely
to avoid programming for the web? What is it about the web you dislike so
much?

~~~
puredemo
>solely to avoid programming for the web? What is it about the web you dislike
so much?

People can simply be uninterested in certain types of work..

~~~
trentmb
Yeah, I'm basically a 'full-stack' dev right now.

I enjoy thinking about and designing the database schema.

I enjoy writing the back-end code.

I enjoy thinking about the REST API.

I. Can. Not. Fucking. Stand. the front-end work. I don't know why; I just
dread doing it for every project I’m assigned.

I can’t wait to hit that 1-year mark and start looking for more back-end
oriented gigs.

~~~
slfnflctd
> I. Can. Not. Fucking. Stand. the front-end work. I don't know why

In my experience, it's a simple matter of it never being done, and people
always being unhappy with it. You can anticipate every possible need,
streamline the steps needed for the most common and/or important tasks, and
spend a gazillion hours making it look pretty-- not only will no one be
impressed, but someone will always complain about something. There is never
any 'right' way to do it. It's a black hole.

With back end stuff, it's like, does it work without making a mess and not
overuse resources? Ok, good job! What are we building next?

~~~
untog
_In my experience, it 's a simple matter of it never being done, and people
always being unhappy with it. You can anticipate every possible need_

IMO that's the exact problem - you can't anticipate every need. You need to do
user testing, iterate over UI layouts, etc. etc... by comparison, backend work
is straightforward.

------
greenyoda
_" I've found very few jobs that aren't web-related. I have seen a handful of
embedded programming jobs, but those tend to require a background that I lack
(EE or CE, whereas I have a Comp. Sci. degree). My only other prospects seem
to be in the financial and gaming industries..."_

I haven't looked for a job in a while, so I can't give you great advice on
where to look for jobs. But as someone who works on enterprise software, I can
tell you that if you're only seeing listings for web programming jobs, you're
not seeing the majority of job postings for software developers.

There's a very wide range of software between web application programming and
embedded software. Most of the software used by businesses is on the back-end
- the web stuff is just the top layer that users use to interact with the
systems. For example, think of all the software that runs behind the scenes at
Amazon.com: shipping optimization, inventory management, recommending products
to users based on purchase history, etc. - none of that is interactive, it's
all crunching through data.

A few sources of job leads that you haven't mentioned: (1) lots of companies
have job postings on their own web sites; (2) local head hunters may have a
broader range of jobs in your area than the major job sites; (3) networking:
talk to your friends to see if they have any job openings where they work.

~~~
lmitchell
> (1) lots of companies have job postings on their own web sites;

This is mostly where I've had luck when I'm searching - find companies in the
area that you're interested in and check out their careers page!

------
lkrubner
Up until a year ago, the correct answer to "Where are all the non-web jobs?"
was "China".

Stats for the USA from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

[http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-
technology/c...](http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-
technology/computer-programmers.htm)

1990 Number of Jobs 565,000

2010 Number of Jobs 363,100

2012 Number of Jobs 343,700

All kidding aside, the correct answer is still "China". Computer programming
jobs follow employment in manufacturing. If employment in manufacturing is
rising in one country, but falling in another, the computer programming jobs
will be rising in the first country but falling in the second country.

This year, even the Chinese economy is slowing down. But it is important to
keep the long-term in mind. Over the last 30 years there has been a dramatic
decline in the number of all types of computer programming jobs in the USA.

There is a tiny subset of the industry that is growing, and we associate these
with the startups in San Francisco and New York. But so far these startups
have not created enough jobs to offset the jobs lost due to other factors.

This suggests that there must be a vast reservoir or programmers who would
like programming jobs, but they can't work as programmers because the jobs
have disappeared.

If the numbers were smaller, you could argue that the loss of jobs was due to
inaccuracies in the way Bureau of Labor gathers statistics. But the drop from
565,000 jobs to 343,700 is too large to be a spurious blip.

~~~
callinyouin
I didn't downvote you, but from what I've read (mostly here on HN), there are
people in the industry advocating for easier work visas to bring skilled
developers into the US to fill a talent vacuum. I'm not sure how accurate that
is (I'm going on memory here), but perhaps that's why you were downvoted.

~~~
lkrubner
If someone has a source more reliable than the Bureau of Labor Statistics then
I am happy to defer to it. But in that case those people should post a link to
the source that they regard as more reliable. They should not downvote me
simply because they don't like what the Bureau of Labor Statistics has
reported.

The issue of work visas have been discussed many times on Hacker News. The
argument has been made, many times, that "to fill a talent vacuum" is an
excuse that industry uses to get workers at a lower wage.

------
djent
I've been wondering whether HN would be interested in having "Hire Me" posts
in conjunction with "Who's Hiring" posts. Every time there's a Who's Hiring, I
spend a couple hours looking through all the posts. Why not do the opposite?
Have companies/recruiters look through our resumes. I'm weary about joining
websites like LinkedIn/Monster/etc. Even now, every once in a while HN will
get a post along the lines of "I've been out of work/the industry for a while
and I don't know how to find a job... here's what I know how to do" and they
get a bunch of support.

~~~
kevinschumacher
They're titled "Who wants to be hired?"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10822021](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10822021)

~~~
djent
Wow I feel like a noob. I've been on HN for 3 years and I've never seen these
posts.

------
sgrossman
Don't be too discouraged by job postings requiring an EE or CE degree. At my
last two companies (a network gear vendor and a hosted VoIP provider), our
postings stated EE/CE was preferred for new grads, but what we really needed
were folks with systems programming experience and an understanding of the
SW/HW interface.

If you've internalized most of your systems classes (OS, computer
architecture, compilers, networks, etc) and are comfortable mucking around in
C/C++, you're no worse off applying for these jobs than most new EE/CE grads.

~~~
callinyouin
Thanks, this is particularly useful information as I have a growing interest
in all things embedded. My experience at this point is pretty minimal and is
limited to messing around with an Arduino which, as I understand from reading
about bare-metal AVR programming, is fairly high level by comparison. How does
that translate with what people in the industry are using?

~~~
silvio
At Tesla we have lots of embedded software opportunities, ranging from code
that runs in very tiny microcontrollers to beefy ARM host processors. If you,
or anyone else in this thread, are interested, contact me on email. My inbox
at Tesla is sbrugada.

------
callinyouin
Wow, I didn't think this would get much of a response and I really appreciate
all the advice given thus far.

I realize now that I really should have been more specific about a couple of
points. First, by "web job" I mostly mean jobs that would be characterized as
"full stack". This is what I currently do for a living (enterprise, for a
company with 1000+ employees), and from what I can tell this is mostly what's
being advertised in job postings. There are many things one could do deep in
the depths of some company's back-end that I wouldn't consider a "web job".

As far as what domain I'd rather be working in, that's really the 10 million
dollar question. I feel like it's time for me to make a decision and
specialize, but I really can't narrow it down to one, single domain. I've
taken a machine learning course and really enjoyed that. I did some work with
parallel computing in CUDA with a professor while in school and ended up with
my name on a paper that made its way into a peer-reviewed journal. I've done a
decent amount of hobby game and network programming, hacked a bit on an
Arduino and a Raspberry Pi, and I've recently been getting into audio DSP
stuff. I really like a lot of different things and I'm more than a little
afraid to limit myself to one area for the rest of my career.

------
aespinoza
How about Security ? Cylance has more than a couple:

\- Senior Automation Engineer:
[https://cylance.workable.com/jobs/102010](https://cylance.workable.com/jobs/102010)

\- Senior Software Engineer:
[https://cylance.workable.com/jobs/74863](https://cylance.workable.com/jobs/74863)

\- Senior Software Engineer, Windows:
[https://cylance.workable.com/jobs/182251](https://cylance.workable.com/jobs/182251)

All of these positions are for non-web related jobs. I recommend you look at
what are the areas you are interested in, and then target companies that have
that. Looking for anything non-web is not a good plan. There are a lot of Data
Science related jobs that are not Web as well:

\- Data Scientist, Analytics (Instagram):
[https://www.facebook.com/careers/jobs/a0IA000000G3OLOMA3/](https://www.facebook.com/careers/jobs/a0IA000000G3OLOMA3/)

~~~
callinyouin
Thanks, I appreciate the suggestions. My problem is that I have very little
work experience in the industry at this point (< 1 year), so I don't think any
"senior" positions would be open to me yet.

I am somewhat strongly considering the data science route, so I definitely
appreciate the nudge in that direction.

~~~
aespinoza
I would try what you feel attracted first. You can always change. When you are
starting, everything seems to be confusing, but as you progress in one field,
the others will become clearer. The idea is to get experience in something,
and start experimenting. You don't know if you like it until you have tried
it.

Regarding experience in Security, I wouldn't discourage myself on a lack of
knowledge of an specific topic. For an engineer is not expected to know
everything (it is practically impossible); learning speed is what you should
care about.

------
alkonaut
If we include any tier of layered applications (backend m, front end and
anything related) in the definition then the web has a big chunk of jobs these
days.

Lots of people still do work with regular applications such as desktop
software though. Find an industry (engineering/cad, graphics, music, finance,
medical, games, ...) and see where their software is made. You don't have to
do OS:es or embedded to do non web things. Millions of people pay billions of
dollars for special niche software in all industries.

I have successfully managed to stay away from web most of my career and think
it's a lot more interesting to do desktop (note: desktop apps that couldn't be
web apps are the interesting ones, not desktop apps with crud which would be
no more interesting than doing it as a web app) simply because the amount of
"algorithm work" is much greater than the proportion of work that is
repetitive data input/output/validation. Not to mention the tools on desktop
aren't html/css/js.

------
sudheshk
This is a very common problem faced by those who are looking to move to a new
career, taking job for the first time or looking to move back to work after a
long time. General tendency is to look for some silver bullet like a degree or
course or something like that to solve this problem. Sadly none of these
usually work. The reality of what industries are actually looking for is very
different. It's best to get a mentor or multiple mentors from industry who are
in these roles and know what exactly do these companies look for. They can
also do some mock interviews and give you personalized feedback so that you
can prepare in focused way. if you don't have good network yourself,
Http://mockinterview.proudfolio.com is a great platform for finding these mock
interviewers and mentors from the companies.

------
capitalsigma
There are OS/systems jobs at most of the big companies (Google, Apple, MS,
etc). Really, I'd bet that any company that deals with serious traffic (e.g.
Netflix) probably does some kernel hacking.

There are HFT jobs to be had for pure CS folks, too --- especially in Chicago.

------
OopsCriticality
Are you taking advantage of your college alumni association? They may have a
job board or career counseling; related, you may want to find an alumni meetup
in Chicago for networking. The alumni angle can be surprisingly effective.

~~~
callinyouin
Wow, I feel kind of dumb for admitting it, but I completely forgot to consider
this as a possibility. I went to a somewhat smaller university in Michigan
(GVSU), but I bet there are a decent number of grads working there. Thanks!

------
pdq
If you want an embedded programming, OS, or firmware job, your best bet is
with a hardware/semiconductor company. No, you don't need a masters or
doctorate -- a CS degree is just fine. I highly recommend taking a low level
job; you learn an amazing amount that is abstracted away at the high-level
web/database areas.

Have a look at the big hardware vendors: Qualcomm, Broadcom, Freescale (NXP),
Nvidia, Cirrus Logic, Xilinx, Apple, Intel, AMD, etc. Note that you'd probably
need to be willing to move to a more hardware-oriented area, including
California, Silicon Valley, Austin, Boston, or Portland.

~~~
yitchelle
It would be wise to look at the big players for specific industries. As an
example for automotive, look at the tier 1 suppliers such as Bosch, Delphi,
Continential or Johnson Controls, or even the vehicle manufacturers themselves
who does software work, like Volvo Cars, Jaguar Land Rover, General Motors,
Renault Trucks

Go through industry you are interested in, do some googling and a list of
potential companies can be found.

------
ScottBurson
If you want a job in finance, I think you should apply for a bunch of such
jobs, despite your lack of experience. You might well find someone willing to
give you a try. Be prepared for long hours.

Otherwise, I think you should pick a specialty within CS to focus on.
Distributed systems, perhaps -- they're hot right now and that shows no signs
of changing; operating systems, maybe; compilers, maybe. I don't know for a
fact that BS-level jobs in these areas exist, but they might. Anyway, decide
what you're most interested in, and if you can't get a job in that with a BS,
go back to school.

------
probinso
Find videos from conferences with technologies you are interested in. Watch
any / all talks from that conference. Take note of company behind each
interesting talk.

If you follow some of these companies on sites like linkedin, keep an eye on
other companies you haven't heard of in their 'people also followed' section.
(companies that everyone has followed you likely already know about)

------
jaegerpicker
So, my company is not in the Chicago area but we are a startup with a decent
web presence (ecommerce/pharmacy/brick and mortor shipping/data science) and
we have a whole back end team. I'm the manager of the front end engineering
team (50% swift/Java, 50% JavaScript very little html/css since we use
react.js and are porting existing ext.js) and the backend team writes a ton of
rest api's, message queue processors, scheduled processes, and integrates with
a bunch of third party api's. We also have a healthy and growing data science
team. Point being don't write off a place just because it looks mostly web
based.

As a side note if you want to move to Portland Maine, contact me I might have
a cool place for you to work. :)

------
superuser2
OS kernels, databases, networking and distributed systems primitives, backend
business logic services, config management, orchestration, containerization,
etc. A sufficiently large organization doing web or mobile service delivery at
scale will be working on these things. Look for a "core infrastructure" or
"systems engineer" role.

They may ultimately exist in a business's infrastructure to prop up some HTTP
endpoints, but you can work on them for years without touching
JavaScript/HTML/CSS or even HTTP. (A lot of people are using REST across
internal services, but Thrift and friends are popular too.)

Then of course there's native mobile application development.

You might have some more trouble finding traditional non-networked desktop GUI
apps to work on.

------
PaulHoule
A lot of business software is developed for the web now.

~~~
lostcolony
To expand on this - even for internal applications and things, the expectation
generally is that the backend is going to expose some RESTful endpoints, and
the client will be a webpage. So there are loads of jobs that are still doing
backend work inside of a corporation, solely for business needs, nothing
customer facing, but the skillset is still similar to what you'd be doing were
it customer facing.

------
khedoros
I found my first job out of college when I met someone at SCALE (Southern
CAlifornia Linux Expo), building a backup system for a storage vendor. I
expect my next job to come from following someone when they leave the company,
or from an in-house recruiter contacting me on LinkedIn. I haven't had a lot
of luck on the regular job boards, either.

I've gotten a little attention by contacting locally companies directly, but
no success in actually landing an interview or a job. I still think it's
worthwhile to get your name out there, even if the only benefit is getting
practice in marketing yourself.

------
naner
Look beyond the "standard online outlets".

Reach out to contacts if you have them (friends/mentors from College and your
personal life).

If you know specifically what you want to do and you want to stay in your
current are, seek out the companies in your area that do this and monitor
their job boards and/or reach out to them directly.

You can also try volunteer work, professional comp sci and meetup groups that
meet your interests, etc. to expand your network.

Basically try anything you can think of besides just searching online job
listing sites, that's the least-effort approach and you'd be lucky to land a
desirable job that way.

------
dgcupps
If you're interested in finance, we're (OptionsCity) hiring a Core Java
developer in Chicago. This job wouldn't be web related; rather, it would
involve working on our Metro suite of trading and risk software.

More information:
[http://optionscity.atsondemand.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=5124...](http://optionscity.atsondemand.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=512465.viewjobdetail&CID=512465&JID=503796)

------
alanctgardner3
Reach out to some local companies that look interesting? Job search sites are
a pretty poor resource in most cases - you'll do better from referrals within
your network. Even cold-calling/emailing/LinkedIn messaging people at
interesting local companies and trying to meet with them would be worthwhile.
They might not have a role, but they'll have connections in the industry who
can help you.

If you don't have any EE experience, it might be worth doing a second degree -
graduate or undergrad. EE is pretty different from writing code.

------
hyperpape
Even at my company, which does enterprise SAAS with a web front-end, about 20%
of the developers do minimal to no front-end work (integrations, document
generation, optimization tools for trucking).

That's numerically not great, and we mostly advertise for people who can do
web programming, but the positions may exist.

Of course, it depends on what you want to do that's not web programming. Do
you just hate the web, or do you have something specific you want to do?

------
beachstartup
every sizeable company (web or not) has a contingent of developers who don't
touch anything frontend-related. these generally fall into the categories of
systems automation, data wrangling, or specialized things like machine
learning or information retrieval systems (search).

also don't forget about good ol' fashioned systems administration, which is
heavily developer-driven now. your job could be to try to code yourself out of
a job.

------
vidanay
Contact me. My distinctly non-web company should be hiring a developer right
at that same time frame. Western suburbs (Aurora) location.

david dot nay at gee mail dot com

------
mahyarm
There is web front end, then there is backend which can be a lot of different
things. Ranging from simple CRUD APIs, interesting map routing engines, web
search, messaging app servers and so on. There is also mobile, where you can
program ios and android apps in many different languages.

------
Pxtl
Even if they're web, web companies still have back end work. If it's
enterprise, 90% of the job will be interfacing with hoary 3rd party APIs or
antediluvian databases. I hope you like XML.

------
petke
I think it depends on the language. As a cpp programmer its easy to find a
job. You wont find many web or frontend jobs here. Its mostly backend or stand
alone applications.

------
vonmoltke
The defense industry has large numbers of such jobs. Of course, that means
having to deal with all the crap that comes with government contractors.

~~~
hwstar
And renouncing any dual citizenship you may have.

~~~
DrScump
Why would that be?

At a major defense contractor years ago, and in defense-specific departments
(unclassified roles), my group of 10 had:

\- a Cuban-born (immigrated as a child) who never renounced;

\- a Kuwait-born (same). (and her Iraq-born brother was in a parallel
department)

\- a Taiwan-born, not sure when she immigrated

\- and the project leader was China-born (pre-revolution)

Now, I can imagine that in higher-security roles, things could be stricter,
but I've never seen a public job listing that said dual-citizenship was a
deal-breaker.

~~~
aggieben
You cannot hold dual citizenship and get a security clearance, and a clearance
is required for many government contractors (certainly defense contractors,
anyway).

------
aprdm
I've switched from embedded systems to web development because of the number
of jobs and salaries.

web dev can be pretty fun as well.

------
randycupertino
I thought ziprecruiter was a scam until I got called in for three interviews
from having my resume on there. Might be worth checking out. They were from
good firms, too. I was actually shocked that they used zip recruiter!

------
paulpauper
I did a search for Walmart jobs in my area ( a large metropolitan area) - zero
hiring. With the exception of certain types of jobs, there has been little
hiring since 2006 or so. The supply of labor vastly exceeds the demand, for
many jobs. We're definitely moving to a 'post-labor' economy, with more 'gig'
jobs and fewer salaried ones. In 2011, Mc Donald's had a national hiring day,
receiving over a million applications but accepting only 50,000. Too many
people, not enough jobs.

