If you do want to work for a big Corp, ladders like Solutions Engineer will be a good fit.
Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
91–100 of 103 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
#92getting past interviews that focus on very specific things is going to be the hard part. Every one wants a jack of all trades but they really want a master of everything for the salary of 1 person.
Re: Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tons and tons of small web consulting companies would love to have OP. I was director of engineering for one such and would have loved to hire someone with OP's experience. (Of course, salaries at such a small consulting shop won't compare with some of the eye-popping numbers you hear about, so you want to factor that in.) I'm not sure how to find them other than to ask in your community. Ones that I know of (in Colo…
Sounds like a fun role! As Robert A Heinlein wrote: “Specialization is for insects.”
It's been fun for me, for sure! I've always leaned more towards the generalist side of things, though.
Re: Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
#94I find that most jobs for small companies are unspecialised Jack of all trades. The smaller the dev team, the more you will be pitching in with product design and dev ops etc. I'm not sure how you can filter for such jobs, given that job descriptions are always vague - but maybe for each job description see if you can find out the company and then research if they are a small startup for small business, or a large co…
I don't think it's just small companies, it's any team that doesn't have a focus on technology. The power of computers is so vast that a moderately competent technologist can deliver enormous business value if they really get to understand the business problems a non technology team is trying to solve. This could be anything from a legal team auto billing a six minute unit for every email received to using python to…
+1 to the focus on "team" instead of "company".
Inside a large company, the largest and most prestigious initiatives will be well-staffed with specialists, and a bunch of management types to coordinate them. But even if the company has a tech focus, you'll also find teams of network administrators, billing folks, supply chain people etc who are struggling to have their needs met. Typically their story is "we can't get out of our manual processes quickly enough", and they will be worried about a high manual error rate and/or scary headcount projections.
These teams don't have a product manager or UX designer because (1) they don't need 40 hours/wk (2) those folks will gravitate towards public-facing products. They don't have a deep bench of backend specialists and frontend specialists. They also struggle to get support from centralized teams, because they're a lower priority or they just don't know how to ask. This creates opportunities to unblock the team by jumping in and helping with data/analytics, deployment, testing... all the stuff you might expect to be "cut a ticket to the team which owns this" in a large company.
Re: Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
#95The keyword you're looking for is "cross-functional", which is used to describe teams where everyone is expected to be a jack of all trades. I'm on a team like that and my responsibilities range from system architecture, UX design, programming at all levels, infrastructure, etc. It's been great for me since I enjoy the variety and my team can generally cover anything for me when I want to take time off.
Just Google for "cross-functional senior software engineer" and you'll see a lot of listings that fit what you're looking for, including the high-paying FAANG companies.
Re: Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
#96Consider 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.
Everything I have heard about consulting is the hours and the travel are brutal if you have a family. Gone 6-9 months of every 12 would be a long time to be away from my children. Is that your experience?
Depends on what kind of consulting company you work for. The ones I work for historically only engage with long-term local clients. I normal embed with client teams, full-time, at the client office. With covid, everything is remote, probably forever, so that will change, but I'm still effectively embedding with client teams. It's like being a normal full-timer, but I get to change jobs ever 6-24 months.
Re: Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
#97Consider 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.
I hope this isn't too direct, but do you find that the pay is acceptable/comparable to non-consulting roles?
I typically work as a salaried W2 consultant with full benefits, paid vacation, etc. I give up a lot of my hourly rate for this, but my W2 salary as a consultant is comparable to the W2 salaries I get offered for normal employment, as are all the benefits. I don't get stock options or client bonuses, but often get some form of profit sharing on the consulting side. I've been burned by enough failed startups or already-established companies whose stock stalls that I don't miss playing the equity lottery; I just want a good paycheck and I'll invest it how I please. My two highest salaries were working for a consulting company, although I've turned down much larger offers for non-consulting roles because I didn't want to be tied to the same job for years.
Re: Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
#98You did not have to put senior in quotes, we all know it was sarcastic as "jack of all trade" means 0.1Xer with no expertise on any subject
Re: Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
#99This isn't going to answer your question directly, but as a generalist myself this just hit me, and I think it's valuable.
In my experience, many "experts" in specific programming areas have either gathered sufficient prior knowledge to know the right answer, or more likely have enough prior experience to know where and how to quickly find that answer. That's what makes them the experts.
In much the same way, generalists are quick learners, and your expertise is in knowing how to quickly learn anything so you could find the answers. You are quite literally the expert in becoming the expert.
You might start at 0% knowledge, but you can also get to 80% relatively quickly, at which point you too can function on a near-expert level, at least for a while in a narrow enough scope.
Understanding that, if true, will help you find the jobs that need this ability, even if they don't know it yet.
ps. Let us know how it goes. Would love to learn what you learn ;)
Re: Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you actually calculate your pay per amount of work and I mean just taking the official time - 37 hours /week and vacations, you'll actually get to similar numbers as your private sector colleagues. So the basic question is not whether you'd accept a lower pay, but whether you'd accept working less. Then you can add as bonuses the increased flexibility and less stress... Is there a difference in job stability betwe…
37 hours a week is a danish standard week, also used by private companies.
He’s not completely off though. I have friends in the private sector who work more than the 37 hours because the culture is like that, because they enjoy it, because it speeds their career or a combination. It’s gotten less and less as we age, but still, some of them have pushed some really long weeks in their younger years.