Try looking for a top digital agency. I know they get a bad rap from HN, but good ones do a ton of interesting work for a big variety of different clients and product types and there is usually wide open opportunities to dip your toes in pretty much every aspect of every kind of digital product. They're also active in a ton of different markets so don't need to be in SF or NYC.
Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?
41–50 of 217 posts
Re: Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?
#42Two things that come to mind are sales engineer (tech skills, sales, training) and consultant (tech skills, project management, team management, sales).
If you've worked with a particular software vendor's products, it could help you get your foot in the door as a sales engineer for that vendor.
You could also do technology consulting at one of the Big Four or a similar consulting firm. And you can leverage your reputation and network to go back into industry if consulting isn't a long-term fit. (A few years ago, I was in a similar place career-wise and went to one of the Big Four for a while. It was a good experience for me because it basically forced me to improve my weaker skills, and it exposed me to new domains outside of my areas of expertise.)
The downside is that you'll travel a lot in either job.
Re: Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?
#43I have a similar situation, I enjoy building electronics, increasingly analogue, projects, Finding efficient ways of deploying hardware (Wireframe spot welded). Using interesting software (Like M/Mumps, have a look you will be impressed). Really am a jack of all trades master of none, but I have a lot of fun. I dont have a lot of billable work which is a bit of a problem at times
Re: Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?
#44Product 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
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Re: Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?
#45After 9 years as a programmer at a small polyglot dev shop, I moved to a publicly-traded industrial hardware firm as a systems engineer a few years ago. There's a bit of overlap between programming and systems engineering (requirements analysis, testing and test design, failure cause analysis, et c.), but I knew nothing about hardware. (I was very open about this, and they hired me anyway. So far, so good.)
On the balance, I've found it to be remarkably similar to being a software generalist. You have to know something about everything and everything about something (I stretch a little, but my core competency is programming; the rest I learn as I go). You get to be engaged at all points by all people throughout the product development life-cycle. For my part, it's taught me a lot and definitely made me a more critical thinker.
Downsides include more red tape, similar mentoring problems due to personnel churn, and occasional tensions due to aligning more on shareholder than employee goals. Our project management is also a bit dicey.
I've toyed with getting back into programming full time, and the career switch has cost me a bit there. While I think my coding chops are still decent (I program daily and grab a few minutes sometimes for personal projects at home), my vocabulary has suffered, and that definitely cost me in recent interviews.
Re: Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?
#46Try to become a full-fledged mechatronics engineer and then we can talk about the woes of spreading oneself too thinly across too many disciplines, instead :)
Re: Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?
#47I would market yourself as a generalist. Small and medium sized companies under rapid growth need generalists more than anything; especially if your soft skills are good and you can mentor/lead other engineers.
I went through triplebyte as a generalist and it literally changed my life; I had lots of competing offers well beyond what I thought was in my reach.
My role is now 'engineering manager' but I was hired as a staff software engineer; but into an org on a stack I had zero experience with.
If I did it again I would probably do the same thing; but I would also be looking at sales engineering roles; something I wasn't really aware of at the time.
Re: Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?
#48Another "jack of many trades here". I can write super fast assembly, can do db, networking, web, sysadmin stuff. If anybody is looking to hire for part time remote work.
Re: Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?
#49If 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…
Has the IBM acquisition started to affect you guys yet?
Re: Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?
#50Fullstack Developer? Btw big companies like FAANG interview generalists all the time.
They do, but in my experience most really broad generalists don't sufficiently fit into any given box. (One interview loop at a FAANG I was asked to come back three times for three teams--one systems, one backend, and one mobile--andmy backchannel feedback was "they all worry you'd get bored." Which was probably true.
There are definitely generalists at FAANGs, and they've got license to kill, but it seems like they were hired specifically at a certain rarefied level or they grew into the role over time.