

Ask HN: How would/do you find your niche... - grumps

I've been having issues for the past year or so determining where I'm headed (career wise).<p>I'm not really sure how to approach finding my Niche, and building on it. Let me give some background:
Degree: BS engineering management (basic courses in most engineering disciplines + a little bit of business)<p>Career: (latest first)
-6 Months as technical project manager at web design/dev agency (18 people).
--I think this one's fairly straight forward.
-1 yr "Big 4" management consulting (150K people)
--6 months w/Military Electronic Health Record, as a "Enterprise Architect" basically had to go back and figure out how 64+ systems worked together. blah
--6 months as requirements manager/unofficial project manager a Financial oversight agency working with a giant data application   think 10+ years of transactions.
-3 yrs Systems Engineer in a Aerospace and Defense company working in the communications space. (1500 people)
--It doesn't really translate to a non-defense role.  Think kind of like a Business Analyst but purely technical, Quality Assurance, quasi project manager<p>I'm very happy with my job, at the moment, but I do feel that there will come a time when I'm not happy.  I'd really like to end up working for myself.  I can't "build" anything really myself.  I'm working through a Django app right but it's slow going.  I also don't see myself coming up with an idea disruptive company. It's not that I'm not creative, I'm more of a "executor" than I am a idea person.  Maybe I will come up with something, but who knows.<p>To jump to the chase...as people in the startup community, where should I focus, or where would you focus, or how would you find your focus.  I don't see myself as a developer, but I still see myself as technical.
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skeltoac
Do you use any open source software that you could work on if only you knew
one or two new languages?

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grumps
Do I use open source, yes. I run debian, wheezy at home as my only OS. I only
operate Android phones/tablets.

If you're referring to writing code, I've worked through Python the hardway,
and I'm working on writing a small djanogo app that extends on mezzanine. I
also took Fortran in college, but shhhh

For work, I mostly work with Drupal developers, and a single .NET developer. I
could probably start picking up python. I can write basic scripts. I can also
read most code. Although Front End drives me nuts. Lan

