I spent about 15 years doing SaaS and tech startups, then switched to working for a scientific non-profit. The first difference I noticed on my first week here was that, while they do produce software (thus me being employed) they do not have anything like a delivery process in place. There aren't product managers, nor really project managers as I recognize them either. Consequently, things which would have taken a month at the YC startup I came here from take six months to a year instead—no exaggeration. This has both pluses and minuses, as it can be frustrating just not making progress due to completely preventable holdups, but on the other hand I now have one of those jobs people talk about where they can work for an hour a day and still make all the deadlines with time to spare. I'm certainly not complaining, I've done years of crunch and I prefer this to the marginal salary I gave up.
The second difference I noticed is that people actually understand what my company does, because I can say "we research [disease X]" rather than "we're building a best-in-class, b2b SaaS product/platform ecosystem that augments existing teams, but to be honest, we're just trying to demonstrate product-market fit for investors so we can get our second round, and ultimately get acquired by one of the big players".
Thanks for sharing your story. Switching from a tech to a "non-tech" (if you allow) company doesn't sound like an easy decision. I assume the NPO must have a vision and/or a purpose that attracts you. Do you mind sharing some of the reasons that motivated your switch of career?
1. To work on a stable product. At startups, I never got to work on the same product through multiple versions across several years. I wanted the experience of launching something, then iterating on it. To become an expert in a market and develop long-term relationships with users or customers. All the startups I'd been in either failed or pivoted within a couple years, and all the consulting work I'd done with startups was always parachuting in to help on something and then leaving soon after.
2. As mentioned, to work on something more fulfilling than SaaS products. No shade on anyone who works on these, they are often really fun and exciting. But, my last job was trying to sell a yearly $60k subscription service to companies so that they could lay off members of their team and replace them with our product. My current job is helping scientists who are researching a very nasty disease that has directly affected my family. Not only can I explain what my current company does a lot more easily, I can honestly say I am there for more than the money or how good it looks on my resume.
3. Less work. My previous job had been described—by leadership, with a wink and a nod—as 'a pie eating contest where the prize is more pie'. That is, work really hard until we get PMF, then if we get that, work even harder so that we can get acquired. At the end of that, maybe my stock options would be worth something, but the owners and investors certainly would get a nice payday. I'm in my 40s now, I'm not going to work myself like a dog anymore, I kinda just want to have a nice, easy job, as long as I can feel good about doing it.
This is why doom and gloom among the biggest "tech" companies (layoffs etc) doesn't necessarily translate to our industry as a whole. (though the particular mix of tech may be different)
Speaking from the other side though, many of my non tech colleagues are having a really hard time competing with laid off FAANGers who are flooding the labor market all at once. It doesn't just affect tech companies proper, but also everyone else working in the same roles elsewhere.
> I chose to not use the category of “Computer and Electronic Product Manufacturing”, because it would include manufacturers of navigation systems (Garmin, etc.), which aren’t really what would come into my mind when I think of “tech companies”.
Thanks for saving me a click. Yeah, a product whose algorithm has to account for the general theory of relativity is no technical match for hooking up the Shopify API to my web store. Yes, I’m being dismissive, but come…on.
Which Garmin products require an engineer at Garmin to account for general relativity? Lots of products have GPS, but they use an off the shelf mixed signal IC that contains all the hardware and software required to implement GPS. As an engineer, you just feed augmentation data from a web API and receive a text stream of NMEA messages from the IC. It's literally glue code. The required skill set is the same one required to hook up the Shopify API to a web store (ie. "Software Engineer")
What difference would that make to the question at hand? Do you think the average engineer at Microsoft gives a whole lot of thought to Windows kernel development?
But to answer your question directly: I would have no idea. Do you?
I think the point is about if they are a tech company… and they are very literally a software and hardware company. It’s not a question of what the average engineers day to day is.
I understand that we quickly take this stuff for granted, but I can't imagine categorizing a company building digital navigation systems and devices, which depend on a constellation of satellites encircling the earth, as "not a tech company".
People don't think of the embedded systems category as "tech", but they should. When your car has 100 CPUs in it, it's in the tech category at least as much as in the auto category.
If you make and sell paper, you're a paper company. If you make and sell cars, you're a car company. If you make and sell software, you're a software company.
If you happen to use paper in your company and send printed advertising to customers, but you actually rent vacations homes, you're not a paper company. Even if paper is a hot new industry and companies that sell paper are receiving high valuations, you are still not a paper company. Even if you buy a ton more printers than you need and really produce a lot of paper internally and go to paper conferences and talk about how much paper you use, you are still not a paper company.
Hmmm. I tell people I work in "tech" and founded a "tech" company. We make software for testing complex systems (robots, cars, satellites, etc.) and constructing a model of their behavior to hunt for edge cases, help diagnose field issues, etc. (see: www.auxon.io)
It's not a SaaS, it's not a web service thing. Do we count as "tech" in the modern parlance?
There's a 4-example definition of the article, which aligns with the context it's used in on HN often: VC-funded SAAS or web-service-hosting. I thought about this one and did a dive a few weeks ago when someone I met at a coffee shop asked me if I work in tech.
Maybe the logic is, they're a GIS company that happens to use a lot of tech. (This is sort of how I thought of it when I worked at a LA media company- we have hundreds of transcoders, gobs of storage, distribution via satellite and other means, but the software wasn't much more than hacked-together glue with fancy buzzword names that sales spouted to prospective clients. We were a media company that happened to need a lot of tech).
I mean I would say it is. Are engineers not the bulk of AWS employees? But I do see your point..."tech industry" maybe doesn't make sense as a description anymore.
I feel seen! I've spent my entire career as a web dev (15+ years) almost exclusively working for non tech companies: solar companies, nonprofits, museums, sustainability funds, etc.
I loved it! The pay was much lower (50 to 100k), but generally livable, and the people were awesome -- folks from all walks of life, not all tech bros, a lot of women, etc. Good work life balance (I've worked a total of maybe 6-7 hours of overtime in my whole career), no weekends or holidays, no crunch. No bonuses or equity either, but that didn't bother me.
But more than anything, I got to work in interesting verticals, whether it's alongside energy engineers, battery experts, world-renowned conservation scientists, archeologists, etc. People who love what they work on, making small but meaningful contributions to the real world (as opposed to like enshittified ad tech or crypto pyramids).
Would strongly recommend, if you can get over the lower pay (like you don't have a family or mortgage yet) and the lack of prestige (you're just another minion in the machine, not a privileged SWE). It's a lot of fun, though you also lose the opportunity to work with experts in your field (who are usually at proper tech companies), exchanging depth for breadth. It's not for everyone, but I wouldn't have had it any other way.
My pre-startup career was in advertising (before the dominance of social networks) where salaries were quite competitive and the creative atmosphere made you forget the ad biz was still corporate America. Another huge benefit was complete technical autonomy: so long as you met deadlines, they didn’t micromanage (because they lacked the domain expertise). I imagine corporate lawyers outside of law firms have a similar experience. All in all, trading the prestige for autonomy, greater work/life balance, and slightly less pay was well worth it.
Update: two more advantages…
1. Technical interviews are far less grueling. Fewer applications mean a more personal and realistic interview process.
2. More stability through the business cycle. A small engineering department in a medium to large company is more likely to weather layoffs than a Big Tech firm looking to cut costs.
I think the big difference is not "tech vs non tech" but "software vs non-software".
Software companies have beautiful margins. Their incremental cost is practically zero, their biggest expense is headcount for R&D, etc.
Non-software companies have to deal with gross things like inventory, lead times, logistics, shipping, RMA, etc etc... You know, the dirty details of not having the luxury of literally just selling information/bits.
Software companies great margins mean that employees can capture a larger share of that (because they create so much value). Lower-margin businesses can't, so the pay isn't as good.
Yes. The more I browse though the NAICS hierarchy, the more I feel uncomfortable excluding hardware-heavy companies like Garmin.
On the other hand, it also context-dependent. Let's say you're looking for a job opportunity as a software engineer/developer/programmer/..., how much priority would you put on whether the company has tangible inventory?
I think the ambiguity in the term "tech industry" is one reason related discussions flourish.
1400 of 73k posted. Which boggles my mind. Would they actually hire all of those or are a significant fraction ~duplicated postings where there is one headcount but they are willing to accommodate a range of experience/levels?
Yeah I’m currently doing data work at a retail company. It’s not bad at all. They’ve thrown money at seemingly every product that can be purchased with a support contract: Databricks, snowflake, Kafka, presto, rstudio, tableau, tibco, informatica, and so on lol.
It’s not “prestigious” but my resume has certainly accreted some fairly lucrative buzzwords.
I think it is more fair to say that traditional companies are evolving into tech companies. Every "non-tech" company I've worked for in the past 10 years have had a big push to get more digital, which has meant hiring software developers, IT people, setting up dedicated divisions to various IT tasks.
> Every company is a technology company, no matter what product or service it provides. The companies that embrace this fact are the ones that shape our world.
> Today, no company can make, deliver or market its product efficiently without technology. While smart phones and the internet used to be cutting edge, these days, new application code release dates and time to market for new technologies are shrinking. This is forcing companies accustomed to a four-year release cycle to adopt to change faster. Businesses must learn how to integrate technology release cycles into their production and service cycles.
Nearly every business uses software on phones or computers.
In that way every business is a software business and if they’re serious about their business they will find ways to be a software and tech business to get things how they want or need for their competitive advantage.
Always thought of a “tech” company as one whose bread and butter directly depend on shipping software and/or hardware. By this definition, all of the “magnificent seven” mega-cap tech-centric companies qualify, though admittedly old media morphing into streaming companies muddies things a bit.
Maybe a useful qualifier would be whether the business could exist without computers. So while the everything store of Amazon, for example, was in fact preceded by Sears’ mail-order catalog, its AWS division could have no reasonable analog analogue, putting AMZN solidly in the tech category.
Definitely, but then, call it what it is. "Tech" companies are those who provide "tech" products, such as cloud hosting, software for managing tech stacks, etc. It's not merely "anything that requires software to run".
You have a point: Apple is developing its own hardware and even recently switched over to designing and manufacturing their own components. There's something of a spectrum here (are air quality sensor station producers "tech" if they're just soldering other people's components onto PCBs whose designs were farmed out to consultants?) so it's not so cut and dry but you can probably safely say that if you're designing your own CPUs you need a significant amount of tech expertise.
The second difference I noticed is that people actually understand what my company does, because I can say "we research [disease X]" rather than "we're building a best-in-class, b2b SaaS product/platform ecosystem that augments existing teams, but to be honest, we're just trying to demonstrate product-market fit for investors so we can get our second round, and ultimately get acquired by one of the big players".