Ask HN: How do you get domain expertise in less technical industries?

4 points by linseed_213 5 years ago | 3 comments

We have bootcamps for hard and soft skills, but there appears to be a gap in getting domain experience in various industries that could benefit from more technical expertise in their space.

The fields that are top of mind are medicine, non-profits and governmental services, construction and agriculture.

If I were interested in starting a venture in one of these fields, I'd cold call and reach out to any and all contacts to try to get an understanding of the environment. However, there's likely only a few people who have a full grasp of what tech exists in the space. Reputation-wise, the largest companies in these fields often aren't as "sexy" and aren't known to have the career trajectory or compensation of more mainstream firms (regardless of whether that's true), so I don't think we're getting as many strong applicants into these vital fields.

I'd love to hear from folks in these industries on how you got into it, and how you recommend others do so?

Thank you!

moksly 5 years ago |

I work in the public sector of Denmark, have for long and well enough to impact our national strategies for procurement and common-architecture, and it’s really hard to answer.

Most of our minor vendors either won an OS2 contract (open source community for public sector software), or sold something useful to one of our institutions around centralised IT. Like selling an activity app for daycares. Almost all of them were known to us beforehand through consultations or having worked in the public sector themselves before they started on their own.

I don’t think we’re necessarily as bad a target for cold calls as many other businesses. If you’ve got something that is interesting to us, we’re likely to give you a chance to show it.

This year we haven’t really had any, but last year we were cold-mailed by a company who does some ML on a tedious manual accounting task, and we invited them in for a meeting. We ended up buying their software because it was actually really good and solved a problem we had. I think they now sell to every one of our kommunes.

You have to have a good product though. I’ve sat through sooooooo many potential sales meetings where the company obviously didn’t have anything useful, just a lot of good ideas and assumptions. This includes major companies like IBM, who’ve tried to sell us Watson, God knows how many times. We even let them rummage some data to come back with analytics and BI report suggestions from Watson that were basically useless compared to what our analytics and BI team build, and their pay is like a quarter of the Watson contract.

So the domain knowledge is going to be your main problem. This is why the companies who typically sell us software, go out of their ways to steal the project managers or whatever domain they are building software for. Like medicine software, the companies who build this will have hired a range of, now former, nurses and project managers. Because we’re not going to waste out time teaching you about our business. Not even because we don’t want to but because we’re trying to keep the 500 different IT systems in our portfolio running for our 10.000 employees with maybe 10 developers and operation staff and maybe 5 supporters.

giantg2 5 years ago |

I'm having trouble defining the problem you want to fix.

Are you saying that non-technology companies have weaker technology candidates? Such as for hiring IT resources at a hospital or agricultural company? That the strongest candidates go to hard tech companies like Google?

Or are you saying that there are no bootcamps for medical or agricultural candidates? And would those be focused on IT candidates or any worker in that industry?

Spooky23 5 years ago |

You find a procurement lobbyist and start engaging in vertical conferences for the sector you’re looking at.

For .gov, you look for legislation that you can latch on to and find funding opportunities.