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Ask HN: What are well-paying alternative jobs to being a software developer?

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Re: Ask HN: What are well-paying alternative jobs to being a software developer?

#61

Post by cwitty88 »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #45

This sounds a lot like where I was around year ten in my career... I made a move into a niche area of technology consulting. That led to a whole lot of variety - I did pre-sales engineering, sold services, did a whole lot of high-profile consulting work, etc. Point being - if you are still enjoying technology but not the specific work you are doing or the company in which you are doing it, find a horizontal move into…

What kind of role did you have when you switched to real estate? I have actually been thinking about becoming an agent since you can make decent money and the licensing process seems rather simple for what it is.

I have been interested in software sales as well but that seems like it could be hard to break into as an engineer.

Re: Ask HN: What are well-paying alternative jobs to being a software developer?

#62

Post by emteycz »

irrational wrote: post #40
emteycz wrote: post #6

DevOps, cloud architecture/engineering. Another option could be teaching IT (private) - organize lectures about your expertise, etc

Are there really people who only do devops? I work for a Fortune 500 company with thousands of developers and we are all expected to do our own devops work.

I was a contractor for a few F500 and all of them had separate DevOps teams that we were supposed to interface with; we didn't even have access to the cloud console. But I was also a contractor for few large companies (but nowhere near F500) and we did all DevOps ourselves and had full access to the cloud panel.

Both models had DevOps consultants though - someone who advises the management on the best ways to do DevOps so each developer doesn't do it in their own way & so never-ending discussions about what's the best way are avoided (those didn't write a single line of code).

Re: Ask HN: What are well-paying alternative jobs to being a software developer?

#63

Post by quacker »

trifit wrote: post #3

QA

Seems downvoted, but test roles are a legitimate alternative. It is not more/less work, but is a change of pace from dev/eng roles.

Test positions vary. QA might mean tedious manual testing, or it might not. What you'd probably want is a software developer in test (SDT) position.

This is maybe a rare good experience, but I was a software developer in test (SDT) early in my career, and enjoyed it. The salary bands were the same as dev positions at that particular company. I wrote test strategies and automated everything: end-to-end tests, CI pipelines, performance tests, etc. I gave a few internal talks, switched teams/projects frequently (once per year), and met whole bunch of people.

A big difference for me between QA/SDT and Dev/Eng is I could be more passive. I didn't run meetings and had less responsibility for the project. I never talked to a customer once, although you need a sense of what they want. If my tests weren't 100% finished/passing, the thing is still put in front of users anyway. When you find bugs, the fixes are prioritized against everything else (i.e. non urgent). Usually I wasn't finding major issues anyway, but working on regression tests to ensure most things are basically working from release to release.

YMMV. It's still a lot of work, but different. If you're a competent dev, you'll stand out easily as an SDT.

Re: Ask HN: What are well-paying alternative jobs to being a software developer?

#64

Post by cwitty88 »

Otternonsenz wrote: post #58

If you have a college degree and are willing to go through what essentially is an apprenticeship for 2 years, Residential Real Estate appraisal is not a bad gig. I’m just now getting my license after apprenticing since 2019, and there is a lot of work to be had in large metro areas (I’m in the Phoenix area). Having a degree gets you the highest level of licensure, but even with just specific appraisal classes alone a…

That sounds incredible, honestly I am quite jealous as it sounds like a grind to get to where you are. I will have to look into this more. I have always enjoyed real estate related stuff so maybe this could be a good calling.

Re: Ask HN: What are well-paying alternative jobs to being a software developer?

#65

Post by CodeGlitch »

Could pivot into cyber-security? This could be bug bounties or pen-testing. Basically knowing how software is built gives you a massive advantage here.

I imagine your pay would go down as you start, but you're going to have to accept that for any change in career.

Re: Ask HN: What are well-paying alternative jobs to being a software developer?

#66

Post by Ancapistani »

irrational wrote: post #40
emteycz wrote: post #6

DevOps, cloud architecture/engineering. Another option could be teaching IT (private) - organize lectures about your expertise, etc

Are there really people who only do devops? I work for a Fortune 500 company with thousands of developers and we are all expected to do our own devops work.

It’s totally possible. Aside from a stint “embedded” on an implementation team to launch a critical product, I’ve been doing exclusively exploration, architecture, devops, and documentation for the last two years or so.

Re: Ask HN: What are well-paying alternative jobs to being a software developer?

#67

Post by abdabab »

porksoda wrote: post #13

I took 8 months off fishing in the ocean, and never could really look that code in the eye again. After that, I found it helps to move between teams and projects often. I last about 1-3 years with overlapping contracting jobs. Pays well, about $30 an hour on average, for as many hours as I want. Honestly, I'm still edging the ~buildout~burnout vortex, so when I start to feel the first tendrils of that morning-sicknes…

Are you fishing with a boat? I’m interested to read your blog if you have one.

Re: Ask HN: What are well-paying alternative jobs to being a software developer?

#68

Post by levi-turner »

cwitty88 wrote: post #61
poulsbohemian wrote: post #45

This sounds a lot like where I was around year ten in my career... I made a move into a niche area of technology consulting. That led to a whole lot of variety - I did pre-sales engineering, sold services, did a whole lot of high-profile consulting work, etc. Point being - if you are still enjoying technology but not the specific work you are doing or the company in which you are doing it, find a horizontal move into…

What kind of role did you have when you switched to real estate? I have actually been thinking about becoming an agent since you can make decent money and the licensing process seems rather simple for what it is. I have been interested in software sales as well but that seems like it could be hard to break into as an engineer.

> I have been interested in software sales as well but that seems like it could be hard to break into as an engineer.

I am currently in technical sales (Presales is the name of my org).

This absolutely is not the case. There aren't a ton of folks crossing over but one of my team members did so and has been quite successful.

While it wasn't from a software engineering role, I moved to technical sales from the org's support group so I have the faintest sense of what pitfalls that you may go through.

At the end of the day, many folks in Support groups and R&D groups can fall into the trap of thinking narrowly about a problem. Let us take the problem of getting data into an application. In this scenario a customer asks you if your tool supports 'real time data'. The direct answer is no, it takes time for the tool to fetch / process / present the data from the source system. From a technical lens, this is absolutely, 100% correct. From a selling lens, it's helpful to redirect the conversation towards the customer's goal. Their goal is that they have the lowest latency data possible. This isn't a binary yes / no situation like the previous question.

Now it's relevant to ask questions like:

- What is the source system?

- Is the source truly the originator of the data or is it a downstream consumer of a pipeline?

- If it's not the originator, then how frequently is this pipeline run? Real-time? Micro-batch? What is the latency here?

- Is the source a fixed price system or a cloud-native platform (e.g. Snowflake, BigQuery, etc) where there are marginal costs per query?

- How many consumers will there be of this data? 1? 100? 1000? 10,000? Data approaches often can be cost / performance effective at one scale but flounder at another.

The net result is that the key question that you have to ask involves focusing on the _problem_ the potential customer wants to solve, not just the mechanics of how to solve it.

That plus

- the politics of the deal

- answering the question at the right level of grain for an audience (engineers get different frames of the same answer than VPs / Executives)

- positioning your differentiated techniques and technologies early in the deal to nudge out competitors (they will be doing the same)

- explaining broad or complicated techniques in a consumable fashion (aka a ton of PowerPoint slides) and a number of other aspects

Feel free to ping me (email is in my profile) if you want to chat more about this.

Re: Ask HN: What are well-paying alternative jobs to being a software developer?

#69

Post by hogrider »

trifit wrote: post #3

QA

If he's burnt-out from being a developer, QA will just add fuel to the fire. I feel they the most under paid and overexploited and time pressured of any role adjacent to software development and dedicated QA jobs are going extinct anyway.

Re: Ask HN: What are well-paying alternative jobs to being a software developer?

#70

Post by cwitty88 »

bladegash wrote: post #23

Technical/consultative sales. The kind where customers come to you and are looking for advice/solutions, not the kind where you’re cold calling or fighting for leads. Sales professions get a bad rap and rightfully so in some cases. However, if you find the right role, it’s incredibly rewarding to help customers solve problems, beat out competition, and have a measurable metric (money) to determine your level of succe…

Where do you find these jobs? Everything I see seems to require sales experience, which being a dev I do not have.
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