Ask HN: How can I get a tech job that's more social? I've found WFH tech to be really isolating and boring. Even with a few days in the office a week, it feels lacking. I miss pair programming and seeing people in person daily. Are there any ways to look for tech jobs which are more social and have more in person time? I've considered going into hardware so I have to be physically present in a lab with other people, but is there another way? |
A lot of consulting is technical planning and brainstorming with leadership. I used to have that kind of role, and you had a mix of heads-down work prototyping and heads-up work trying to understand requirements and think with different leaders on the best path forward.
Related: Staff or Principle Eng
Similar role to consulting above, but you're in house and often part of leadership...
Would like to know if there are there any people / resources that helped you out in this role? Or even any general guidance you could give someone just starting out? Also - out of interest - what is it you do now?
I have one key piece of advice: ask many questions. Be genuinely curious and friendly, and opportunities will continuously emerge.
I’ve landed high-value clients at coffee shops, hotel bars, music venues, or even through random emails. I was not prospecting. I was curious.
Questions are so useful at every layer of abstraction; whether you’re speaking with a server at a restaurant who’s having trouble with their POS, the general manager who’s wasted $10k on Yelp, or the real estate developer who happens to own a restaurant chain.
As a consultant your value is measured by your observations and imagination. Rich, open-ended questions allow you to absorb a vast repository of context and experience from operators. Use your skillset to imagine how things could be better if you were to apply effort.
I’ve had people quite frequently make declarations such as “you’re brilliant” or “you clearly have a lot of experience in this field” without knowing me or without me ever making a statement - only questions. It feels like a cheat code.
The only downside to this technique is you’ll be flooded with opportunities and your time won’t scale. I’ve dropped the ball on a number of awesome and profitable things because I was trying to pursue too many things at once. I’m trying to improve my consistency so I can hire more effectively, but it’s challenging.
Aside, I’ve been working on a crowdsourcing app to help solve this dilemma, as I’ve noted many others share my struggles.
Best of luck :)
* Listening is huge.
* And knowing how to 'hedge' when having opinions also huge. Like venturing an opinion as a question or using "forgive my ignorance, let me ask a stupid question"
You're probably not going to have the 'big idea' that saves them. But rather, your role is often to help the client have the big idea and own it. You're kind of a therapist for them/the org to think through something. You'll never has as much context as they do on their org/tech specific challenges. But you can help them by bringing outside perspective and ideas.
I sort of did a retrospective on my time as a consultant on my personal blog which might help
https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2020/12/22/hack-your-career-wi...
It's been a blast. We've worked for clients in many sectors (telecoms, energy, banking, transportation, employment, luxury, retail, and other more particular activities).
Personally, it has helped to have read books about reservoir characterization and have worked on multi-phase flows in university when we had a client in the energy sector. It has helped me having worked on heart anomaly detection in university when we worked for a health organization. It's helped that I worked on a personal project in telcos and read books when we had a telco client.
You get to do that a lot and build bridges with their domain experts. It allows them to be more precise when you help them frame the problem.
This leads to the following : one of the most important phases is problem framing and scoping. You absolutely have to nail down the actual problem, the "job to be done", what is a success, for whom, etc.
This is refined conversation. I also use what I call negative framing. Example : one client asked us if we could predict and alert about an event that caused losses in the 9 figures 48 hours in advance.
This triggered the spidey senses. What we dit was ask at what point it would be too late to alert them. The client said "It's never too late. Even if you tell me 2 minutes in advance, we can still do things. We have procedures".
A less refined way would be to accept that requirement at face value. Dig deeper. Question assumptions.
One thing we do is we insist and avocate for everyone to be involved in the project. The people we build for. Before the company reorg, execs at the client company used to be our interface. No more. If I'm building something for your marketing people, they ought to be involved.
We continually refined our way. One close way I found to ours was in a book titled "Cracked It! How to Solve Big Problems and Sell Solutions Like Top Strategy Consultants". It's a bit similar.
I tweeted a mini thread: https://twitter.com/jugurthahadjar/status/131066829330549965...
If you want to talk further, my contact information is in my profile. Please add a link to this comment so I could start from the same state.
It's not easy to find people who are personable but can also explain the underlying tech clearly to potential customers... and the best tech in the world isn't with a hill of beans if it isn't being used by sutomers. If your an inherently social, dependable and trustworthy person, I believe the sales part of it comes naturally.
Jobs like devrel can also have a good combination of being technical and talking to people and giving presentations.
Finally roles like "Technical Account Manager" can vary really widely across companies - in some cases these are basically glorified support jobs or sales jobs where you're dealing with existing customers instead of new customers. In other places it can be more like a solutions engineer where you're implementing a customer-specific solution using your company's platform. Again, a lot of 1:1 communication with customers.
You get to build demos, and learn new technologies and never have to be responsible for production.
The earning potential can be very high, especially if your team exceeds your sales quotas.
Look for jobs like solution architect, sales engineer, customer engineer, pre-sales engineer.
This way you set your own limits on the environment, rather than joining a new place that might be too much of an over correction six months from now.
I recently moved to a new city and discovered that unlike my old city, this one has lots of small coworking spaces. Some are run by neighborhood boards to foster community. Some are run as startup business incubators.
One down the street I find particularly inspiring — It's co-working for mothers. So WFH moms can have a place to do their work, and the facility provides daycare right there. I think this brilliantly solves at least two of the modern working world's biggest problems.
Even in the time before wide spread WFH this was an issue, during good times it feels great to go into work and get all your social needs met but when layoffs come or companies collapse suddenly that great work friend everyone loves gets let go and in a few more weeks they effectively don't exist anymore.
It's great if you can meet people at work and create a real friendship (I've certainly done that). Now that you're remote you can put more time into keeping up with those people. Schedule lunches, video calls etc.
Get to know your neighbors better, join local interest groups, schedule video chats with friends you haven't chatted with in a while that live far away, and make sure to get lunch with local friends whenever you can.
It will be a bit of transition but ultimately you'll have a much richer social life and honestly enjoy work more as well since you have more outlets in the day that have nothing to do with your 9-5.
Based on the specific words (e.g. "pair programming") the op used in his question, I think he's looking for the work itself to be more social during work hours.
Therefore, suggesting an art class or joining a club outside of work is answering a different question.
OP wants more socialization - I think it's good to think outside the box a bit, especially for us programmers who tend to let programming and work absorb their lives.
I work in a technical role and I miss my colleagues immensely. I feel best when I am around people I know, and when my job entails keeping a small group of people happy.
Working in sales, consulting, or relationship management is about working with strangers.... of balancing the joint demands of both your employer and the client. I get very self-critical and anxious in these roles.
I work in a platform engineering organization on internal tools, which means basically the entire engineering org are my "customers". At the moment I'm in a weekly meeting on OS-level configuration. I started a weekly meeting on our build system which has turned into a reading group of Google's SWE book. Our larger group (everyone under my boss's boss) has a weekly presentation series. I have a variety of less-frequent meetings, including a 1:1 with another engineer in a very different part of the org, some cross-team meetings, etc. And I regularly have all sorts of ad-hoc meetings. I do interviews pretty frequently. So it feels like I'm spending most of the day talking to people; I actually have very few blocks of time for writing code (let alone reviewing code or reading/writing docs) by myself.
I mean, maybe I'm just an introvert who's in an extraverted culture, and to you, this would also count as isolated and boring :)
If you're interested in in person time with the general public along with office people, consider healthcare.
Some of the mid-sized and smaller-sized healthcare companies offer technical people lots of opportunities to interface with the actual people who benefit from their work.
For example, my company does healthcare largely for the poor and underserved. Every person in the company from C-level down to button pushers like myself is required to attend public-facing events a certain amount of time each year.
In my case, while I'm helping these people in other ways, I also get to actually ask them face-to-face "What kind of computer do you have?" and to look at the actual phones they carry with them and to experience the kind of internet service they have in their neighborhoods. This hand-on intelligence is invaluable. Server logs are great in theory, but they are no substitute for actual field work.
Even with the 'rona scattering a lot of us behind-the-scenes people to the four winds, remote workers are still required to put in a certain amount of face time with the clients, whether that means flying back to the mother ship or driving to work regional events.
If general public isn't your thing, get into internal IT support. Walking around a call center watching people doing their jobs helps you think about the systems you build in ways that plowing through trouble tickets doesn't.
I have seen hardware shops that are eerily quiet and sparsely populated, so being in an office is not a precursor for social interaction.
Even if pairing isn't something you're doing constantly, I do think that for many teams and jobs, it's useful _sometimes_. But when the norm was for everyone to be in office, it was easy to start and have a solid high-bandwidth session -- just both pull up to the same desk. I find voice + screenshare still misses a bunch of cues, lag is of course disruptive, and the switch between who has control of the screen etc is clunky, so one person tends to drive for a long time.
I'm not the most social person in the room, but I've met so many fascinating people through this channel. Even though it's not the same as sitting with those people in the same room, I was surprised to see how much energy, satisfaction, inspiration I get from those calls.
It also makes it easier for me to meet people IRL and helps my consulting gig.
Half of us are "in person people" and the other half have never been happier working remote, so we're doing it team by team. My team has decided to be in-person. We show up 3+ days a week, have in-person happy hours, grab lunch together, and optimize our meetings for in-person. I love it.
But now hiring for this team has become impossible. We have other teams that will take on remote engineers, but ours looking for someone who also prefers in-person is just filtering so many people so early in the pipeline.
On the surface, that would seem to indicate it is a polarizing topic.
People have completely lost their mind (plus there are some very loud voices that are using this thing to push their WFH agenda)
Zoom sucks for anything social.
It's too risky for everyone involved. Conduct which is okay at a bar or a party has no place in an office.
That said I have made great friends at work. This should be a bonus. If you want to make friends and date do that at a bar , alumni events , concerts, etc.
If you step to a girl and ask if you can buy her a beer at a pub, the worst that happens is she'll say no. If you do it at work, you might come off as rude , seriously don't date co workers. It's easy for HR to get rid of you.
For my part I've had a gay co worker aggressively hit on me. At a bar I'd laugh this off ( or even let him buy me a drink ). At work I felt very uncomfortable. No I don't want to know I look like your husband, why is that an appropriate thing to say in the office!
Regardless you shouldn't expect anything from work aside from a paycheck. I actually love working remote because while I try to be a friendly person in the office, I'm not at the office to make friends.
Sometimes in life socialization comes easy and requires no work, but that's not always the case. This is a common problem people face once they leave high school/college. The truth is that real social relationships, the ones that keeps us more fulfilled take work.
I realized that to not feel lonely all the time when working at home I had to put some effort into making sure I reached out to friends, scheduled lunches and calls (which can happen during that 6 hour period, that's one of the benefits of WFH), make sure I went to local meetups etc. The end result was that from that effort I made some fantastic friendships that were much more fulfilling.
Even in the OP's current work environment a little more deliberate effort can go a long a way. I'm sure other coworkers feel the same way, if they pair programmed in the office why not reach out and schedule some pairing sessions? I've know many remote places that do this. Schedule virtual coffees during the day where two people can just chat, again something I've seen at many remote places.
Yes, for decades people could get a basic level of socialization for no effort, but like most no effort things that socialization goes as easy as it comes.
Having been in a similar situation to OP, that was the lesson I learned so that's the advice I'm giving, which I hardly think is tone deaf.
Listening to music when the programming task is simple helps me somewhat. Apparently, it scratches part of the "social itch".
YMMV
I can focus on what I'm doing when I'm alone. It's definitely preferable when writing things like code or copy, which is majorly stressful if other people are in the room.
If I feel like chatting, I can go to the cafe, talk to a neighbor. Even meeting the same UPS guy every day is kind of nice and makes me feel like my home is part of a regular community.
It feels much more natural than spending a good portion of my day on the freeway or in an office and just using my home for a place to sleep.
I can’t wait to return to our offices and go back to normal. WFH works for some people and some projects but not all.
Plus being around people that aren’t your family is nice too.
I absolutely hate that this is the standard answer that comes up everytime someone mentions not being happy with WFH. Not only it doesn't answer the question, but it's just a slightly more polite version of "just make friends, duh" which is not helpful at all.
To many people (myself included) 2-3 hours of social activities in a day is not enough. I need to be around people, and while it's great to meet some friends in the evening it doesn't change the fact that I just spent 10 miserable hours alone in my appartment. In addition to that, I find there are many disadvantages to remote work: I hate doing over the phone what could have been a nice in-person chat, I hate how tedious it is to show/explain things that would have been easily demonstrated in person, I hate how difficult it is to grasp non-verbal cues, etc. I don't know a single person IRL who likes full time WFH, but judging by how popular it is here, it seems I shouldn't assume that everybody is in the same situation. Conversely, don't assume everybody can turn his miserable WFH experience in something awesome just "by doing stuff in the evening". Btw no offense but I had to laugh at your suggestion that a vido chat is a social activity.
What if you answer the question instead of telling other people how to exist?
There's a difference between being dependent on work for social contact and wanting to work in an environment that's social.
I don't think this person is looking for a work BFF so much as a work environment that is collaborative and isn't built around solo work.
Everybody is different but I as a coincidence, I personally tried your suggestion to pursue outside hobbies and finally learned that it's really the work that makes me happy. I made a previous comment about that life lesson: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23925964
Some of the replies agree with me. I do understand your viewpoint and acknowledge I'm in the minority group that wants deep work to "absorb my life". I thought I could be a mercenary and just compartmentalize "work" as 9-to-5 and then do "fun stuff" outside of the job but that doesn't make me happy.
Maybe the op doesn't want to work more than 40 hours but if he's asking in 3 different ways to work more around people, it makes perfect sense to me that he wants the work itself to be more social. A few hours a week at an art class still doesn't fix the 40 hours of lonely working.
That works for some people, but I prefer to spend my 40 hours doing work I enjoy with people I enjoy being around.
By all means, if you find shared interests at work, seek to build on them, but a relationship of convenience through work will likely end once the convenience ends. That is both an obstacle to leaving (and is often what "culture" really translates to), and a major downside if you value real friendships since it's not any sort of emotional connection, nor even a shared activity you both can continue to enjoy.
As others have mentioned, if you just desire peoplecolocated with you that you can talk to throughout the day, that's also achievable from any major city, regardless of where your job is. And, a real benefit is since they aren't working on the same thing, or reporting in the same hierarchy, you can be completely honest and transparent with them (albeit with a mind toward not breaching corporate secrets), which is more conducive to building real friendships as well.
I actually think it's quite the opposite of cynical to engage with your community in a much more natural way than it is to be forced to socialize within the context of a for-pay job.
> so one person tends to drive for a long time
This is not wrong though.
I suspected you my be projecting a bit of your own insecurities here.
Unfortunately HN has become an increasing hostile place, and I think rather extreme reactionary response to a simple recommendation is becoming the norm.
In a weird way, thanks for finally waking me up to the realization that is community is not what it was and not one where I should be spending time anymore.
HN, by the mere fact that it is a discussion community, is about sharing perspectives and opinions. No one here is forced to read or believe anything anyone else says.
I appreciated your comments and would hate to see you go.