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

I have one key piece of advice: ask many questions. Be genuinely curious and friendly, and opportunities will continuously emerge.

I’ve landed high-value clients at coffee shops, hotel bars, music venues, or even through random emails. I was not prospecting. I was curious.

Questions are so useful at every layer of abstraction; whether you’re speaking with a server at a restaurant who’s having trouble with their POS, the general manager who’s wasted $10k on Yelp, or the real estate developer who happens to own a restaurant chain.

As a consultant your value is measured by your observations and imagination. Rich, open-ended questions allow you to absorb a vast repository of context and experience from operators. Use your skillset to imagine how things could be better if you were to apply effort.

I’ve had people quite frequently make declarations such as “you’re brilliant” or “you clearly have a lot of experience in this field” without knowing me or without me ever making a statement - only questions. It feels like a cheat code.

The only downside to this technique is you’ll be flooded with opportunities and your time won’t scale. I’ve dropped the ball on a number of awesome and profitable things because I was trying to pursue too many things at once. I’m trying to improve my consistency so I can hire more effectively, but it’s challenging.

Aside, I’ve been working on a crowdsourcing app to help solve this dilemma, as I’ve noted many others share my struggles.

Best of luck :)

If you're interested in in person time with the general public along with office people, consider healthcare.

Some of the mid-sized and smaller-sized healthcare companies offer technical people lots of opportunities to interface with the actual people who benefit from their work.

For example, my company does healthcare largely for the poor and underserved. Every person in the company from C-level down to button pushers like myself is required to attend public-facing events a certain amount of time each year.

In my case, while I'm helping these people in other ways, I also get to actually ask them face-to-face "What kind of computer do you have?" and to look at the actual phones they carry with them and to experience the kind of internet service they have in their neighborhoods. This hand-on intelligence is invaluable. Server logs are great in theory, but they are no substitute for actual field work.

Even with the 'rona scattering a lot of us behind-the-scenes people to the four winds, remote workers are still required to put in a certain amount of face time with the clients, whether that means flying back to the mother ship or driving to work regional events.

If general public isn't your thing, get into internal IT support. Walking around a call center watching people doing their jobs helps you think about the systems you build in ways that plowing through trouble tickets doesn't.