Ask HN: How can I get a tech job that's more social?

Same. It goes without saying perhaps, but one consideration is what type of social contact you want.

I work in a technical role and I miss my colleagues immensely. I feel best when I am around people I know, and when my job entails keeping a small group of people happy.

Working in sales, consulting, or relationship management is about working with strangers.... of balancing the joint demands of both your employer and the client. I get very self-critical and anxious in these roles.

Do you want to see people in person specifically or just be more social? As a senior IC, over the last year I've actually become kind of overwhelmed with meetings and Slack rooms because the nature/scope of my work is across so many teams, and I'm curious if you think this would be enough for you, or you'd still find it isolating.

I work in a platform engineering organization on internal tools, which means basically the entire engineering org are my "customers". At the moment I'm in a weekly meeting on OS-level configuration. I started a weekly meeting on our build system which has turned into a reading group of Google's SWE book. Our larger group (everyone under my boss's boss) has a weekly presentation series. I have a variety of less-frequent meetings, including a 1:1 with another engineer in a very different part of the org, some cross-team meetings, etc. And I regularly have all sorts of ad-hoc meetings. I do interviews pretty frequently. So it feels like I'm spending most of the day talking to people; I actually have very few blocks of time for writing code (let alone reviewing code or reading/writing docs) by myself.

I mean, maybe I'm just an introvert who's in an extraverted culture, and to you, this would also count as isolated and boring :)

Agreed. Look elsewhere, for people with shared interests. Don't tie your social circle to work. It makes it harder to leave the job and allows the company to take greater advantage of you.

Very interesting! I've just moved into a consulting role and am discovering that it is very much like this. If you don't mind me asking, may I ask for some general advice?

Would like to know if there are there any people / resources that helped you out in this role? Or even any general guidance you could give someone just starting out? Also - out of interest - what is it you do now?

Can anyone recommend some remote employers that do pair programming?