Make your own software product. Requires to be a jack of all trades. Coding, marketing, writing, customer support, design. Because it's only you, you don't have to feel like "being the smartest person in the room". Downside: Takes quite some time to take off.
Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?
31–40 of 217 posts
Re: Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?
#32I think you will do very well in IT security, those who dabbled in many things can join the dots and appreciate the bigger picture, which is necessary for security due to its "cover all bases" nature
Depends on what you do every day. Revenue is made by doing stupid pen tests. Since you are a revenue-driver, you gotta do them. And most are boring. The cool stuff like hacking hardware, reverse engineering and whatnot doesn't pay money. It's mostly a marketing gag to find new customers. Maybe you're lucky and can fill such a position.
Re: Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?
#33DevOps
I had the same issues for many years, but the past 2 positions have been official "DevOps" positions and they more often than not have me doing so many random things that require all sorts of skills. I love it. It keeps things interesting, and it makes me very valuable to the company because I can do whatever they need.
Sure, some places have a very narrow definition of DevOps, but that's usually the large companies/teams. If you can find something a bit smaller, then you'll have more of a jack-of-all-trades role. At least in my opinion.
Re: Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?
#34If you are a “people person” IT consulting, technical sales engineering, and other “field” based technical roles at larger companies require a lot of generalist skills. Consulting and sales engineering are a lot more technical than I expected when I moved over from product engineering. The big downside is they tend to be high travel roles.
I agree, as a consultant I have grown into a generalist over time, and consulting rewards those that do.
As a concrete example, I'm at Red Hat Consulting. We have products that range from RHEL, to Kubernetes/OpenShift, to language runtimes/tools/middleware, and finally to more process focussed transformation. You can specialize, but the more of these you are competent in the more useful you become. I am in more of a leadership role now, and in any one project I am likely involved in all of the above.
The key skills you haven't mentioned are the "Soft" skills: mentoring, client facing leadership, presentation skills, etc. If these are a strength for you, then consulting would be perfect.
Shameless plug at the end, Red Hat is hiring: https://careers-redhat.icims.com/jobs/search?ss=1&searchCate...
Re: Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?
#35Early to mid career, the “full stack” developer has something going for them: odds are pretty high you have 7 years’ experience rather than “1 year [7] times”. Something i learned about myself a little bit farther in was that I wasn’t a generalist so much as I was a serial specialist (once you haven’t touched something you used the be good at for seven years, can you still claim to be good at it? Turns out I can’t).…
>what devops was supposed to be but nobody does it that way.
Can you elaborate on this?
Re: Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?
#36I was just like this in the laser field. As an engineer, my skills were middling but my physics was good. I hung around the product managers, who were chemistry PhD fraternity boys. In return for understandable answers for the tougher customer questions, they taught me product management.
Re: Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?
#37Smaller company. Master their domain. Streamline all their business processes. CTO role or something like that.
Re: Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?
#38Move into managerial/sales role.
Re: Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?
#39Product manager is great for generalist. I was a programmer who enjoyed technical challenge, but I eventually realized if I wanted to guide the direction of projects I would have to join the business side. The challenge is endless, diverse, and there is no perfect solution to the problem if people. It is a strange domain, but being technical is nice when working with development. Worth a try if you are in to that
Let's say a programmer was looking to make that change. Where would he start? Are there training programs? What kind of company would provide a gentle introduction? Is it easier to navigate the politics of a small company creating their own product compared to a large consulting company that provides staff augmentation services?
You pretty much have to job hop. Look for opportunities to help sales with customer conversations. if you can be a bridge from engineering to the business then you will have a lot of value in the position. Communication is critical. You have to be able to make people feel your solution is not best. Peoole do not care what is technically best. They want to feel something is the best. And that is a hard but to crack because every customer is different.
There are some technical product management positions. If you are looking for training and feel like that route and MBA will almost certainly set you down that path. Though I did not and got to a PM position. Luck is also involved. Haha
Re: Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?
#40You could consult if you enjoy the human relationship and light project management aspects of being a jack of all trades.