Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–68 of 68 posts

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

#61

Post by lostcolony »

spookthesunset wrote: post #22
lostcolony wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is a pretty cynical take. I work 40 hours a week. Doing it at home is lonely.

Water cooler talk is not friendship. It's too easy to feel "connected" at work, and then not invest outside of it...and then once you leave, you find people don't have time for you.

By all means, if you find shared interests at work, seek to build on them, but a relationship of convenience through work will likely end once the convenience ends. That is both an obstacle to leaving (and is often what "culture" really translates to), and a major downside if you value real friendships since it's not any sort of emotional connection, nor even a shared activity you both can continue to enjoy.

As others have mentioned, if you just desire peoplecolocated with you that you can talk to throughout the day, that's also achievable from any major city, regardless of where your job is. And, a real benefit is since they aren't working on the same thing, or reporting in the same hierarchy, you can be completely honest and transparent with them (albeit with a mind toward not breaching corporate secrets), which is more conducive to building real friendships as well.

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

#62

Post by Jugurtha »

ABNW wrote: post #17
softwaredoug wrote: post #5

Consulting A lot of consulting is technical planning and brainstorming with leadership. I used to have that kind of role, and you had a mix of heads-down work prototyping and heads-up work trying to understand requirements and think with different leaders on the best path forward. Related: Staff or Principle Eng Similar role to consulting above, but you're in house and often part of leadership...

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?

Not OP, but in a tiny boutique consultancy where we build data products for large enterprise clients. End-to-end.

It's been a blast. We've worked for clients in many sectors (telecoms, energy, banking, transportation, employment, luxury, retail, and other more particular activities).

Personally, it has helped to have read books about reservoir characterization and have worked on multi-phase flows in university when we had a client in the energy sector. It has helped me having worked on heart anomaly detection in university when we worked for a health organization. It's helped that I worked on a personal project in telcos and read books when we had a telco client.

You get to do that a lot and build bridges with their domain experts. It allows them to be more precise when you help them frame the problem.

This leads to the following : one of the most important phases is problem framing and scoping. You absolutely have to nail down the actual problem, the "job to be done", what is a success, for whom, etc.

This is refined conversation. I also use what I call negative framing. Example : one client asked us if we could predict and alert about an event that caused losses in the 9 figures 48 hours in advance.

This triggered the spidey senses. What we dit was ask at what point it would be too late to alert them. The client said "It's never too late. Even if you tell me 2 minutes in advance, we can still do things. We have procedures".

A less refined way would be to accept that requirement at face value. Dig deeper. Question assumptions.

One thing we do is we insist and avocate for everyone to be involved in the project. The people we build for. Before the company reorg, execs at the client company used to be our interface. No more. If I'm building something for your marketing people, they ought to be involved.

We continually refined our way. One close way I found to ours was in a book titled "Cracked It! How to Solve Big Problems and Sell Solutions Like Top Strategy Consultants". It's a bit similar.

I tweeted a mini thread: https://twitter.com/jugurthahadjar/status/131066829330549965...

If you want to talk further, my contact information is in my profile. Please add a link to this comment so I could start from the same state.

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

#63

Post by nathanaldensr »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #57
sophacles wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's tone deaf and patronizing about your responses is that you assume that your personal working style is the best and only one for every person. Imagine not understanding that different people are different, and as a result may have working styles that are different too.

Where are you getting that I'm assuming that "personal working style is the best and only one for every person"? I am recommending what worked for me. It's a bit different than the question the OP ask's but, given a similar situation, it's what has worked. I suspected you my be projecting a bit of your own insecurities here. Unfortunately HN has become an increasing hostile place, and I think rather extreme reactiona…

I have no idea why these two users are taking such an uncharitable view of what you wrote. It's sad and offensive.

HN, by the mere fact that it is a discussion community, is about sharing perspectives and opinions. No one here is forced to read or believe anything anyone else says.

I appreciated your comments and would hate to see you go.

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

#64

Post by softwaredoug »

ABNW wrote: post #17
softwaredoug wrote: post #5

Consulting A lot of consulting is technical planning and brainstorming with leadership. I used to have that kind of role, and you had a mix of heads-down work prototyping and heads-up work trying to understand requirements and think with different leaders on the best path forward. Related: Staff or Principle Eng Similar role to consulting above, but you're in house and often part of leadership...

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?

OP here, I left consulting a bit more than a year ago after doing it for 8 years.

* Listening is huge.

* And knowing how to 'hedge' when having opinions also huge. Like venturing an opinion as a question or using "forgive my ignorance, let me ask a stupid question"

You're probably not going to have the 'big idea' that saves them. But rather, your role is often to help the client have the big idea and own it. You're kind of a therapist for them/the org to think through something. You'll never has as much context as they do on their org/tech specific challenges. But you can help them by bringing outside perspective and ideas.

I sort of did a retrospective on my time as a consultant on my personal blog which might help

https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2020/12/22/hack-your-career-wi...

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

#65

Post by DeanWormer »

mojomark wrote: post #2

Technical sales. It's not easy to find people who are personable but can also explain the underlying tech clearly to potential customers... and the best tech in the world isn't with a hill of beans if it isn't being used by sutomers. If your an inherently social, dependable and trustworthy person, I believe the sales part of it comes naturally.

Highly recommend this as well. And I encourage people to not get scared off by the "sales" aspect of the job. As the technical resource, you're almost never closing deals, cold calling, or any of the other salesy responsibilities. Your job is really just to help the potential customer solve a problem with your technology. You gather requirements about their problem, and have technical conversations to show how your product(s) can be a good fit.

You get to build demos, and learn new technologies and never have to be responsible for production.

The earning potential can be very high, especially if your team exceeds your sales quotas.

Look for jobs like solution architect, sales engineer, customer engineer, pre-sales engineer.

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

#66

Post by evanfarrar »

rrherr wrote: post #19
evanfarrar wrote: post #7

Find a job that is (remote) pairing? I have seen hardware shops that are eerily quiet and sparsely populated, so being in an office is not a precursor for social interaction.

Can anyone recommend some remote employers that do pair programming?

My employer, VMware, has many teams working on Cloud Foundry that do pair programming. It can be more exhausting to pair program remotely, so I would reckon few do so 40 hours a week.

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

#67

Post by evanfarrar »

abeppu wrote: post #42
rrherr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anyone recommend some remote employers that do pair programming?

And not to get too far off it, but does anyone have a set of tools for remote pairing that they really like? Even if pairing isn't something you're doing constantly, I do think that for many teams and jobs, it's useful _sometimes_. But when the norm was for everyone to be in office, it was easy to start and have a solid high-bandwidth session -- just both pull up to the same desk. I find voice + screenshare still mis…

Tuple is great, zoom is OK, tmux plus a neutral VM in AWS is great for lower bandwidth pairing.

> so one person tends to drive for a long time

This is not wrong though.

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

#68

Post by rpastuszak »

Hej, I started "office hours" when anyone can call me to pair program, get a coffee and chat or rant: https://sonnet.io/posts/hi/ (Feel free to come and say hi!)

I'm not the most social person in the room, but I've met so many fascinating people through this channel. Even though it's not the same as sitting with those people in the same room, I was surprised to see how much energy, satisfaction, inspiration I get from those calls.

It also makes it easier for me to meet people IRL and helps my consulting gig.

Post reply on HN