Ask HN: Non technical HN users, what do you do for a living?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14824464

by jkkorn • 9 years ago

15 11 9 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

shostack• 9 years ago

I guess I'd consider myself "quasi-technical." I do digital media, marketing, and analytics.

I can hack together a website, have been teaching myself Ruby, RoR, some basic devops, etc. in addition to my knowledge of HTML/CSS/JS. I know enough to have a somewhat technical conversation with engineers or PMs, and I know enough to setup my own conversion tracking most of the time. I'm also intimately familiar with many of the technical reasons tracking can be off or break since that is critical to understanding performance.

My core responsibility is to make my company lots of money by efficient and effective deployment of our marketing budget through various efforts. I spend a lot of time staring at spreadsheets and analytics dashboards "reading the runestones" in search of insights that will improve growth. I then take those insights and craft them into a strategy and business case to sell it in to key stakeholders so I can get the resources needed to execute on my strategy and make it a reality.

Marketing in general has actually gotten very technical over the last decade. My personal opinion is that one cannot be considered a "10x marketer" (if there is even such a thing) without having some understanding of the technical aspects that go into it. This means things like understanding data (how it flows, what it means, what it doesn't mean, where and why it breaks, etc.), how various channels play together, testing, automation, etc. At the very least you need to know enough here to hire the right people who are experts at those things since this industry is plagued by people claim to do more than they are really capable of.

On top of that there's the softer skills. Understanding messaging and positioning and the overall creative process. Marketing is just as much an art as it is a science. There's also a lot of people skills required for collaboration across teams of very different skill sets and personality types. You need to work with a team of creatives VERY differently than a team of engineers for example. Being able to effectively serve as the glue between various functional groups is a skill that has paid off in spades for me over my career.

chrisfrantz• 9 years ago

Same here. Same general technical skills such as RoR and some JavaScript, able to hack together random things and way too much time spent in various analytics dashboards.

There are dozens of us.

tixocloud• 9 years ago

I've moved from being very technical (software engineer) to business (strategy and analytics). I still maintain my software development skills and try to keep with what's out there but I have gradually moved from building data warehouses and reporting infrastructure to doing quick analysis to help make business decisions. I work with the senior management team to help them understand their business.

A large part of my work involves asking questions, interviewing, exploratory data analysis and developing business strategy.

innertracks2• 9 years ago

Just started my new career as a real estate broker north of Seattle. Programming can go back to being mostly a hobby.

isuckatcoding• 9 years ago

Wow that's quite the jump. Do you have a software background originally or were you previously in real estate and now just getting back into it?

innertracks2• 9 years ago

No background in real estate other than as a client! I've been doing software consulting locally for a number of years. Prior to that I was doing database related development. (Warehouse design, ETL, and analytics.)

In case anyone might be considering career options some semi-random background and bits of my thought process:

I haven't been getting any traction on the tech side locally as much as I enjoy the engineering and problem solving. So I started looking inside myself for assets/skills and limitations as well as around my community for where to find the opportunities.

My basic questions became: What can I do without being concerned about my age (in my 50s as of last year) and have high levels of autonomy regarding scheduling my time? Where is the money flowing locally? How do I put myself in the position of being a revenue center instead of a cost center?

What do I bring to the table? Computational thinking, problem solving, and picking up processes and systems fast. (Seems to help quite a bit with following the paper trail in a contract.) My demonstrated non-tech assets/skills (Argentine Tango instructor, math and software tutor, flight instructor) include connecting with people and being very calm in stressful situations.

As far as age goes, a number of people are real estate brokers well into old age. It's a great retirement career from what I am seeing.

Locally, real estate has been strong relatively speaking for a number of years. Seattle and Vancouver BC home prices are making my town very attractive as an alternative. Especially for those who can telecommute.

So I knew I could quickly learn the systems and processes of being a broker. I have the personal attributes/skills to connect and work with clients. As long as I am willing to learn from role models doing business successfully how I want to do business, in time I will be successful.

Plus, working under established brand/company has been very nice.

Considering all of the above learning how to be a successful real estate broker made sense for me. Now I can explore areas like infosec and cryptanalysis for fun. No pressure to monetize.

cm2012• 9 years ago

Marketing. Shostack said it best.

justinv• 9 years ago

Financial analyst. Similarly to shostack, surprisingly technical field at the entry level stage now - you'll have a really hard time if you can't learn (SQL is a must; VBA is very good to have; R is also really useful depending on who you work with). Finance is basically a BI type of role with some longer term forecasting.

Generally speaking - we use our (light) technical skills to analyze data and use it to help provide insight for strategy, both in the short term and long term. We are also the team that builds the longer range operational plans (working with PMs, Ops partners, other orgs etc-).

snikis• 9 years ago

Still studying medicine, but working part-time as a lab assistant, teaching high school students biology twice a week and freelancing with R on small data analysis projects. Three cheers for multitasking!

Powerofmene• 9 years ago

I am a founder who does a bit of everything but mainly focuses on business strategy and growth and product development. I work to create new viable products utilizing lots of analytics, user feedback and testing and then direct product improvements based on user feedback. Rinse and repeat. I am not incredibly technical(am learning day by day) yet can do the basics and have a very solid understanding of the data flow and can utilize technical services to drive development and product offerings. Have great technical people who can develop programs to give our team the data in a myriad of forms that allow us to make good decisions.

Over the next few months a great deal of my role will be in working with the technical team to implement the user friendly app and locking down our contractual agreements with the back end payment processors as well as locking down our hundreds of partner businesses. The majority of these have already committed it will just be a matter of getting the contracts together and inputting payment info for the back and forth payment streams.

Then it will be all about team growth and management and rapid user growth.

I also do the finance and marketing as a small startup. So far we have bootstrapped it all and we have talked about potentially applying to YC or looking at VC for funding to really bust it on growth, just uncertain if this is a viable path to growth given we are beyond the typical demographic (not in our 20s and low 30s). We do not want to put energies somewhere that would take away from the progress we have been making. Our founding team will make a decision on this in the next 30-45 days

jamesmp98• 9 years ago

Have been unable to find a developer job for months. I work as a stocker at a grocery store.

Ask HN: Non technical HN users, what do you do for a living?

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