
Ask HN: Career advice for people not on engineering tracks? - farjobffindhow
Hi HN,<p>Recently I’ve had friends in non-technical tracks(scrum master, business analysts, project management) ask for advice on their job search.<p>I’ve personally had success finding new roles as a SWE but I think the process has been a lot easier for me in general due to recruiters being more proactive in seeking me out&#x2F;soliciting new opportunities for software engineering roles.<p>Could anyone suggest good resources on jobs in tech for non-programmers, or share experience on what a job search looks like as a person with people skills? I found cracking the product manager interview as a sister book to cracking the coding interview, but I’m looking for a variety of resources beyond just PM roles.
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ratling
I write code occasionally but I'm not a developer. I work in Operations and
Security land. Essentially my entire career has been 'Work in tech but don't
be a software engineer.'

If I had to throw out a list of things it'd probably be this:

Move to a decent sized city where at least a couple of the big 5 have
outposts. Pittsburgh YES. Harrisburg NO. Massive bonus points if you go for a
CS undergrad in said city (apply often and be willing to eject from school if
they hire you, you can always finish later). If you're not willing to do this
for at least a couple years don't bother at all. Why? Because of item 2.

Be willing to switch positions often unless you have a good reason to stay.
Every 2 years (IMO now it should be 1 year) I ask myself 3 questions. Is the
pay good? Am I still learning useful things? Am I not going home pissed off
every day? If I answer NO to any of these questions it's time to go. Employer
loyalty is a joke and you'll be actively mocked for having it. Good reasons to
stay can be family related (kids school, not just 'my family lives here'),
you're waiting on something (like a profit share check you're pretty sure
you'll get), or Bush Jr. tanks the economy for a couple years (uuuuugh, that
was 3 years I want back). Incidentally you can't do any of this in rural
fuckoffistan. Believe me, I tried.

Train yourself on new tech. If you're not willing to do this don't bother,
you'll be irrelevant in 3 years. Companies will not do this for you, YOU have
to actively seek it out. If you're a PM and don't understand half of what your
'resources' are saying go smash your face against some of the buzzwords they
throw around. If you're in operations actually look at the frameworks the
stuff you're supporting uses. This is a hard one because there's a lot of
'new' tech that turns out to be 'garbage unused' tech (Openstack anyone? What
a joke that turned out to be). Developing a keen nose for vendor bullshit is
absolutely key. Whatever 'personal development' or 'continuing education'
perks the company has, use them. If you're going to do it anyway get someone
else to pay for it.

Don't be a contractor. Non-Developer contractor positions are shit. If you
have to be a contractor working for yourself ask for 3 times as much cash as a
full time employee, otherwise you're making 1/3 what you could be due to taxes
and health care. Working for a contracting company can be okay, don't be a
doormat or a subcontractor which is the same thing (full time employee at an
MSP is fine). If you're contract to hire and they jerk you around on the
contract end date LEAVE.

Certs are not useless, but there are a lot of useless certs. Treadmill cert
you have to retest for every 3 years? If it's not either required for your job
or you don't use it every single day NO. The thing everyone got 10 years ago?
Hell NO (looking at you CCNA). Anything CompTIA? NO. Certs are an HR checkbox.
Check enough boxes and HR is going to pick you because HR is lazy and these
are easy to understand. Some YES options are the CISSP/CISA in security land,
AWS Solutions Architect pretty much anywhere, and the OSCP in red team land
(CEH is NO unless you're doing government stuff since it's on this list
[https://iase.disa.mil/iawip/pages/iabaseline.aspx](https://iase.disa.mil/iawip/pages/iabaseline.aspx).
The DOD loves their arbitrary checkboxes and hates thinking).

Everything I just said about Certs? Applies to degrees as well. The sole
exception is if you think you're going to want to eject from Tech land at some
point or want to work for Colleges/School Systems (because they'll arbitrarily
require an undergrad degree for no reason). In that case definitely get 'some'
kind of degree.

Don't go to graduate school. Or rather, go to graduate school if you are 200%
sure it will help you for SPECIFIC THING you're going to specialize in, you're
a manager in a fortune 500 and want to get an MBA so you can be a manager at a
fortune 50, OR you want to educate yourself to unemployability. That's it (I
guess hiding out in the recession was a good reason as well but it's also left
us with a bunch of people with useless masters degrees). TBH I'd rather see
some certs or an interesting minor than a graduate degree.

Hardware sucks. Try really hard not to have to deal with hardware (or
specialize in it and make a fuckload of money doing what I won't do anymore).

If you were in the military KEEP YOUR CLEARANCE UP TO DATE. Then go to the DC
area and make a fuckload of money as a contractor. Massive bonus points if you
worked in intelligence or procurement. If you don't have a clearance don't
bother with the DC area at all.

Don't specialize in Java stack. Why would you hate yourself this much? Java is
last decade tech, a constant security problem (and target, struts vulns
anyone?), and the application quality is garbage. Moreover it's the single
easiest thing to outsource to India because of Tata International and Infosys.
Just don't.

You can do a lot more at small companies (like 120 people). Flip side, you'll
be expected to do a lot more at small companies.

Lose some weight fatty. If a company has a choice between a relatively fit
person and big chungus it's going to be Thank you for your interest but we
decided to go with another candidate. Figure out your BMI and try to stay
within the healthy range (you're not a powerlifter, the 'bmi doesn't
accurately portray muscle mass' line doesn't apply to you). If you're fixing
this do Calories In, Calories Out with MyFitnessPal or LoseIt, anything else
is just wasting your time. You can do literally just that and sit on the couch
for 6 months and lose weight.

Don't put your information on Indeed.com, they are trash. Don't put positions
on your Linkedin profile that aren't relevant to what you want to do (unless
you like random headhunters calling you about positions you don't have the
slightest interest in because you came up in a keyword search).

~~~
potbelly83
This is bad advice. When it comes to school finish what you start otherwise
you look like a quitter. Jumping ship every 1 year? I wouldn't hire that
person. At most places it takes min 6 months to get up to speed.

~~~
ratling
You're not playing the 2019 version of the US job market then. Admittedly
you're probably looking at a year and leaving at 1-2 but turn around time for
people who make real money is nuts now.

I would hire a former Google or Facebook tech/PM/etc over someone who has a
bachelor degree from who-cares-it's-not-MIT. Higher education is a means to an
end. Not an end itself (education itself can of course be an end, but not in
the context of OP).

Also if your stack takes 6 months to get stood up on you're moving too slowly
(if you're not in a monopolistic position which, thankfully, I am). Most
problems are not that complicated, 90% of your workforce is going to start as
framework or CRUD peons anyway. It doesn't take 6 months to get stood up on a
boring ass flask or django app.

------
paycomper
As someone who has flopped between technical and non-technical roles (program
operations, data analyst, compensation manager, business operations) some
obvious advice is to highlight the skills that are able to be used in multiple
roles. SQL translated across many of my roles; knowing how to build a program
timeline with clear deliverables was also essential.

What's harder for a "non-technical" role is there's not a specific, easily
graded test. When someone is shite at code, you can literally count the errors
and see if it doesn't run. If someone is bad at operations, that's more
something you discover in the heat of the moment.

This matters because for non-technical roles, the roles lean more on
experience or time spent doing a very specific task. I hired people on my team
as a compensation manager and did just that - I was trying to guarantee
someone would be able to do the work by requiring that they had done it
before. We had room for "potential" but I wanted someone to say "I've done
this before" because otherwise, it was my neck on the line.

So, knowing this, target where you want to go - say a business analyst wants
to become a program manager - look at what experience you need and build tasks
into your role that you can speak to in the interviews.

Experience in job searchers: my most difficult transition was program
operations to data analyst. I had experience with HTML, CSS & Javascript - not
really useful for analytics. Wanted to be more technical and less putting out
fires, thought data analyst sounded interesting. So in my operations role,
began using SQL and BigQuery to store and pull program outcome data. Used
Tableau for visualizations, and taught myself AppScripts to automate certain
GoogleSheet tasks. Excel was how I presented timelines (yay Gantt charts) and
after 6-months I was able to pivot to a data analyst on an internal tools
team.

Similar across tech & non-tech roles is you have to study to pass the tests.
When I pivoted from data analyst (which focused on compensation
tools/programs) to compensation manager, I had to learn how to handle not just
the numbers but also: philosophy and offer negotiations; how to create plans
and program timelines across many roles; how to build budgets, based on
forecasted headcount; how to create performance plans that tie to compensation
but foster growth cultures. Sounds super logical and mathematical, but it was
99% people skills. So I had to study that and be able to back up my answers
concretely.

Where I find roles now is on AngelList - usually searching "operations" \- or
Google searching for my skillset helps. You can also go to LinkedIn and turn
on "Actively Looking" which will increase the outreach from recruiters.

Also non-tech people in the Bay Area are very much hotly pursued and poached -
unsure of you're location, but would suggest looking out here!

