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Ask HN: Career paths to consider if I am better at supporting than creating?

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Re: Ask HN: Career paths to consider if I am better at supporting than creating?

#11

Post by cowanon77 »

aristofun wrote: post #10

Modern big tech software engineering is 98% supporting and maintaining.

AI does this really well, even better than new development. I regularly use Github copilot to automatically read production logs from the app and backend services, find errors logs, deeply scan the codebases, create theories about the issue, verify the theory matches production evidence, verify the theory in a sandbox env, create a failing test, and then suggest a minimal code change in a feature branch, verify test is passing now in sandbox, and submit a pr, along with a detailed analysis doc and any future design optimizations to fix the class of error.

AI is also very good at scanning legacy codebases, and reverse engineering design docs, system interfaces, and trying to reverse engineer what requirements and design tradeoffs lead to that system. It's not perfect, but already at medium software engineer level.

Re: Ask HN: Career paths to consider if I am better at supporting than creating?

#14

Post by sagebird »

If you have a secondary interest or hobby or real-world-knowledge about what consumers in a certain category want - you might be a good product manager in that field.

Many products require technical product managers.

Being people oriented and a "mediocre" technical engineer is not really a hinderance and can make your focus better aligned customer needs in a high level, not getting nerd-sniped on things that don't matter.

I suspect that engineers would prefer working under someone like you who doesn't have a god-like ego, and is likely to resolve conflicts between people.

Re: Ask HN: Career paths to consider if I am better at supporting than creating?

#15

Post by bryanlarsen »

I have a coworker who is incredible at the job it sounds like you want. The "keep customers happy" role. It's a massively important role in a company. It's part product support, part sales support and part product owner.

2026 has made him way more useful to us engineers. Before he used to send us tickets. Sometimes we delivered what the customer really wanted because of those tickets, and sometimes we needed a few iterations.

Now he uses AI to deliver pull requests that include full repro environments. These are slop, of course. Sometimes we can approve them almost unchanged. But more often they need to be completely rewritten. But even the latter is super valuable as a much more concrete representation of the bug or customer request than a ticket was.

Re: Ask HN: Career paths to consider if I am better at supporting than creating?

#16

Post by mcmcmc »

Depending on where you start it could be a bigger salary drop than you expected, but it sounds like technical support might be your real passion. I’m the same way - I love in-the-weeds troubleshooting and helping people solve their business problems. I started out in SaaS sales, hated it, switched to IT during the pandemic. Another commenter mentioned systems integrators, you could also look at managed services. See if you can get into an escalations role so you’re not having to climb out of the help desk which you’re probably overqualified for. Look up companies that make products you love and see what openings they have. There’s no shame in supporting others.

Re: Ask HN: Career paths to consider if I am better at supporting than creating?

#17

Post by pc86 »

gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #3

Perhaps a sales engineer? > I am just much more comfortable supporting existing software than building new software. Having technical skills is required, but you'd be doing little to no coding or design work. > Being an interface between business and tech. A sales engineer matches this almost by definition. > Just working with people in general! The job is essentially entirely about working with people, both with the…

This also has the added benefit of making a lot of money even by engineering standards in the right organization. Looks for large enterprise companies where custom demos and new customer hypercare are standard. I've been on the other side of the table a few times and often pre-sales cycles are months long and contracts start in the $2-4M range. Those are the places where sales engineers will be treated as first-class citizens and not just "hey grab one of the engineers for this sales call."

Re: Ask HN: Career paths to consider if I am better at supporting than creating?

#19

Post by monirmamoun »

your skillset sounds like perfect match for technical presales engineer ... you need to work at an enterprise software company, where they sell big tickets software of tens of thousands of dollar service, so you're part of the ensemble, but the sale is big enough and technical enough that they have a pre-sales engineering team. You are 50% customer, 50% medium intensity technical but you just use/config/troubleshoot without being the engineer responsible for building

Re: Ask HN: Career paths to consider if I am better at supporting than creating?

#20

Post by unified101 »

I'll be blunt rather than couch it: all the things you've listed will make you a ralph loop target in the org. You are adding human in the loop where the industry is moving in the opposite direction.

This is generally true across all roles, but first impact will be working that is more trivial for an agent or n8n flow.

So consider this and pick roles wisely, where you can see this existing for a bit. All the best.

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