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Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
21–30 of 103 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
#22My $0.02: A). join (or start) a startup. I suspect most would love to have someone like you or B). at a larger organization, join a team that is carved out from the overall org working on a new initiative. Depending on the company, job posts may specifically call out this sort of team.
Re: Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
#23If you're ever open to it, games and film have Technical Artist and Technical Director roles which are effectively asking someone to be a jack of all trades within that domain space
Re: Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
#24You should figure out what you like to do the most and pursue jobs/specialization for that. Wearing multiple hats will eventually burn you out, regardless of how much you enjoy it now.
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Re: Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
#25My $0.02: A). join (or start) a startup. I suspect most would love to have someone like you or B). at a larger organization, join a team that is carved out from the overall org working on a new initiative. Depending on the company, job posts may specifically call out this sort of team.
Angel list and Crunch base are good sites for this
Re: Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
#26Most jack of all trades jobs are at small companies in my experience, I've found most small places advertise themselves, not through agencies, so you can get a jack of all trades job there. They don't pay as well though, it's the trade off imho, interesting work that keeps you busy, or specialise and become a corporate consultant - lots of money but boring af. Other alternatives: - move into management - found your o…
>Most jack of all trades jobs are at small companies in my experience
Yup. I'd add public sector work to that list (mostly because it's chronically understaffed and heavily siloed so you have to fill in a lot of roles).
BigCos tend to like specialization because of consistency/efficiency. They might have a skunkworks where you can be a jack of all trades but it's hard to get hired into those roles.
Re: Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
#27I am in a similar boat and it is exhausting. It is very hard to manage people effectively and do individual contributor level work at the same time. Many people I know after a short stint in management returned to IC work and that is fine and respectable choice.
If you do stay in management, get your priorities straight. You do need to be the jack of many trades but these are probably not the trades you are thinking of.
Your first and foremost priority is building the right team. Hiring right people, giving autonomy and sense of purpose to the team members. You want people that are smart but even more importantly you want people that get things done with little or no supervision.
Having said that your second most important priority is to get people unstuck. Be it your gravitas in organization, making the right introduction, or sharing a critical piece of knowledge - check in with your team regularly and actively ask if there are stumbling blocks or blockers. Many people are good in asking for help but there are many for whom it is hard.
I could go on but the point is that the trades you want to master in management are more like: communication, courage to delegate, empathy, accountability, being able to make decisions on imperfect information and deal with whatever consequences come up, etc.
EDIT: if you are leaning more towards individual contributor role, you will probably either find startups more interesting OR - if you looking for seniority - find an organization that has parallel ladders for management and individual contributors. Those companies will have positions that are worded “staff engineer” or “principal engineer” and tend to be on a larger side.
Re: Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
#28Consider consulting. I like the variety of roles, and changing clients periodically keeps things fresh and exposes me to a lot of technology. I prefer working for a company so I don't have to find my own clients, and get benefits and a steady paycheck. If you can manage your own network, you can potentially earn more, but it's a lot of work finding a steady stream of clients on your own.
Re: Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
#29I am in a similar boat and it is exhausting. It is very hard to manage people effectively and do individual contributor level work at the same time. Many people I know after a short stint in management returned to IC work and that is fine and respectable choice. If you do stay in management, get your priorities straight. You do need to be the jack of many trades but these are probably not the trades you are thinking…
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Re: Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
#30I'm in the same boat, inside any given org I can tangibly feel that "jack of all trades" is in huge demand... and I find myself working long hours due to internal demand for this role inside companies. Like you, in my 20 years doing this type of role (wearing a large variety of different title hats) I've never been HIRED to the role. This feels odd, given playing the role always keeps me in high demand internally to…
> But even if they spent serious time using a technology, they still need 4 hrs of work in it to look surface competent again (I think because they're constantly swapping knowledge in and out, vs a deep knowledge person who have practiced the same patterns over and over and over). I've been doing professional software work for 25 years. The last several years I've been working with various JS toolkits (vue/angular, s…
A thing I try to do in interviews is ask people to help me see their strengths... rather than trying to catch them out, I want to know which style of interview (there's so many....) will convince me of their strengths. Some styles of interview will face more of a an upward battle to be convincing to me, but I'm genuinely game to bend toward any format somebody wants.
e.g. Interviewing for a backend dev position but don't want to write any code/algos in the interview, and just talk past projects? OK, that's gonna be tougher sell, but I'm game if you think you can convince me of your strength down that road.
This makes me think about, in my case, if somebody were to offer the same interview freedom to me... As a strong senior generalist, how would I demonstrate that most definitively in 45 minutes? I haven't come up with an easy answer, so I still try to masquerade as the type of specialist-to-role expected in interviews (which I can do to some extent, the full line is "jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than the master of one") but I do think it under demonstrates the real value I bring to organizations.
I don't have an answer yet: under even friendly circumstances, how would a strong pragmatic generalist unquestionably demonstrate it?
In the smaller category of "generalist programmer" (which, like the OP is too restrictive to cover my usefulness) I have thought of games like "pick any domain from a past job of yours, and we'll work on code problems like that, even if I've never worked in that area before", i.e. suggest the true generalist nature by random sampling. But, its hokey, and it still only covers programming.
I'd love ideas, I must confess the frustration of the "useful-in-practice generalist in a world interviewing for specialists" mismatch has me staying at companies that are no longer ideal places to work longer than I think specialists do. Every time I switch jobs, I think the interviews undervalue me, and once I'm hired as a generalist-disguised-as-specialist, it takes time to migrate organizationally into the generalist role where I contribute the most value (even at small companies).