Ask HN: I'm a generalist. Not a specialist. Getting a non-entry level job.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5496329

by skennedy • 13 years ago

5 13 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I have never acquired a super awesome ninja skill. Straight out of college (6 years ago) I landed a consulting job for Fortune 100 companies (later hired by competitor). Solved ambiguous problems in the Learning Management Systems (LMS) space working on a ton of technologies and the projects rarely lasted longer than 3-6 months. Learn it, program it, and move on. I worked with offshore developers, managed onsite resources, appeased project/product managers, turned vendor integrations into sexy solutions, and pushed out PowerPoint updates for CTO's.

It was fun...for a while. Learned a TON. And made a lot of money. But I left the job to try my hand at a startup. It failed. C'est la vie. But learned twice as much in half the time. Best experience so far but I am out of money.

Now it's time to apply for jobs. Need financial stability for a while and the "corporate" jobs want interviews but pass when I am not "the guy" on technology XYZ.

Trying my best to escape the world of LMS's -- where I have a good reputation -- but cannot seem to seal the deal on a job that is not entry level. Any suggestions?

iamdave• 13 years ago

I frequently have friends coming to me for resume help/career switching advice because of my past as a recruiter for a very large, local healthcare provider. (well, not local anymore, I moved)

In cases like this and many others where individuals aren't getting the interviews they want almost always comes down to the resume; or more specifically how you've worded the resume. Frequently, and to this day I encourage one to take their resume from a laundry list of duties to a utility belt of achievements and accolades.

By this, I don't mean promotions or medals awarded, but if you had to look at one line per resume and decide who would get the job, who would you call back:

Resume A: "Follow-up on sales leads and deliver cutting-edge presentations on our product"

Resume B: "Increased subproduct sales utilizing methods x, y and z; resulting in an n% revenue boost for Q1 2013"

skennedy3• 13 years ago

Getting the interviews never seems to be the problem. The resume and cover letter HR screening process is pretty predictable. But not having "5 years experience in XYZ" is continually becoming a thorn in the side during in person conversations.

vitovito2• 13 years ago

I wouldn't try to escape the world of LMSes at all, I'd go straight there if you want stability, precisely because that's where you're "the guy."

Being a mid-career generalist is like not having chosen what degree you're going to graduate college with in your second senior year. You haven't done anything long enough to become an expert at it, to have it be second nature, to be able to teach others, to be able to lead a team at it, to be able to architect it. You're just a very experienced dilettante.

Early in your career when you haven't decided what to specialize in, that's cool. Late in your career, when you've specialized for several years in several different things such that you can wear any hat as a senior person, that's also cool.

Mid-career? Not so cool in the eyes of companies, where they want specific roles filled, not "find a problem and fix it, rinse, repeat."

If you're going to truly escape, then you're essentially restarting your career as a generalist at rung 0, ground floor, grunt work development, and hoping your experience gets recognized and you are allowed to rapidly advance within an organization.

Either way, it's not an easy path at this point. (I chose to restart my career about seven years ago, and am just about now "where I was" but in a different field.)

skennedy3• 13 years ago

A mid-career generalist is like not having chosen what degree you're going to graduate college with in your second senior year

Well said. However, being a "very experienced dilettante" is exactly what I am hoping to capitalize on. When I left I was managing and mentoring people that were all older than me. Technology XYZ or tried-n-true architecture ABC is not always the best answer. I do not want to specialize because it forces me into a box.

Truly escaping and starting at run 0 sounds truly depressing. But then, so does the LMS world.

vitovito2• 13 years ago

Then you need to sell yourself directly to someone with hiring power, and skip the HR/phone screen/interview dance. It's possible: I've walked into some positions purely by my reputation. No resume, no interviews, just a conversation and a when-can-you-start. But that means working your network hard, networking more when that's tapped out, and there's no guarantee you'll find something any time soon.

Work your LMS network to find people who will recommend you to their friends outside the LMS industry?

Find an LMS startup that needs a senior generalist to be the "adult supervision?"

Or, yeah, what chaz said: management. Own and run a product team. Product (not project) managers often come from all walks.

dmor• 13 years ago

This might sound unexpected or unattractive at first but stick with me. A non-entry level job that requires intelligence, high judgement, and a lot of hustle is as an EA of a high level executive or the office manager of a tech startup. You pretty much need to learn to do a little of everything and anything that comes up in either case, and you'll be paid well and report to someone senior who will trust you to make things happen and give your honest opinion while using discretion.

I know a lot of people who have used this role to propel them in a new direction, and in the startup case you can have a huge positive impact on the culture and operations of a young company.

chaz3• 13 years ago

What are the roles that you've been talking to employers about? Your experience sounds most like a product manager to me: broad understanding of technologies, experience with end customers and the value proposition to them, ability to navigate an organization, and a technical background that drives credibility internally and externally.

skennedy3• 13 years ago

Sadly, technical roles as I yet to get an interview for a Product Management position. Companies seem to all require a certain number of years with that title and I have yet to find the right way of presenting myself. Maybe I should make a more concerted effort in that direction ... thank you!

chaz3• 13 years ago

Are companies actively telling you that you don't have enough experience, just not responding, or are you getting discouraged by the job description? Having written many job descriptions, a lot of it is a negotiable wishlist and actual numbers of years is maybe one of the squishiest bullet points on the list and is more indicative of maturity and overall work experience vs exp in the role. Lots of PMs (not junior/associate/assistant PMs) get hired with just some "business" experience (finance, consulting, marketing, etc.). I don't think you should have a problem as long as you can demonstrate the qualities of a PM.

You may also want to recraft your resume to be more pointed about your PM experience and less focused on your engineering aspects. Here are two great threads on Quora that can help you pitch yourself to the questions hiring mgrs might want to see.

http://www.quora.com/What-are-frequently-asked-questions-in-... http://www.quora.com/Recruiting/What-are-useful-interview-qu...

narayankpl• 13 years ago

"right way of presenting myself"... I constantly faced this problem. There are lots of people I know who can write resume to suit the job for which they are applying. May be resume writing skillset could help in this.

creamyhorror• 13 years ago

I'd like to ask about the traditional technology consulting industry. Is it worth venturing into as a relatively inexperienced developer who wouldn't mind being a product manager?

There's a clear divide between the traditional IT services provider and the tech startup. Often (especially in secondary hubs like my country) the IT services players view developers as commodity labour to be hired as grunts or simply outsourced, while tech startups are often developer-centric and offer a much better experience and paycheck. What seems to matter is the orientation of the top management of the company; the traditional firms are often not run by software engineers or compsci people, but instead by general business folks.

Has any recent startup managed to become a significant player in tech consulting while retaining a developer-centric company culture? I'm interested in the idea of developers collaborating with sales/bizdev people to offer tech consulting services with a different spin. I don't know if the gung-ho hacker spirit meshes very well with the more, um, stodgy business types who'll make up the clientele, though. Anyone have successful examples?

It seems like the current tech consulting model undervalues developers and development, and I'd like to see that shaken up, especially in an industry as profitable as that. Or is it really all about marketing presentations and sales relationships in the end?

----- Here's a good post on the topic by Paul Gallagher:

MNC's with a strong R&D focus, or the very successful software companies already do technical career planning quite well (I've worked in a corporate research lab that had a technical career ladder all the way up to chief scientist - who could actually be more senior and with better benefits than the CEO, depending on the incumbent).

However, in the "real world"(!), the IT industry is predominantly sales, service and agency focused. i.e. businesses that are either selling/integrating existing products, or selling people/time/projects. There are very different dynamics at work than in R&D/PD:

- For consulting firms and agencies, it is usually the case that the best revenue contributors (the cash cows) are the mid-level technical staff (3-5 years experience). Beyond that, their margin % often drops, and it is also harder to sell full utilisation.

- The pressure to be than just a pure technical contributor ratchets up pretty quickly: you are expected to take on pre-sales, delivery management, and even business development the higher you go

- Despite many of the larger firms operating locally (Oracle, NCS, Accenture, IBM etc) having a focus on technical career development, you learn pretty quickly that it is not the way to earn the big bucks. If you have the aptitude, get into sales. Pre-sales is the best bet if you want to remain largely technical, but also earn more and do less (although my friends in pre-sales would probably argue that last point!)

- The net result is that there's a general expectation that you will grow into other responsibilities pretty early in your career and leave hard-core development behind (for the next batch of grads). It is not just a local problem, but it does vary in degree:

- My own experience is that it does vary from country to country, but not by much. On the whole by the time you get to late 20's/early 30's you better be moving on up or there's trouble!

- And there can be cultural idiosyncrasies in some countries - like older generations who want to judge your "success" by the number of people working for you.

It is in places where the services sector dwarfs the product development sector that this becomes the dominant industry practice (i.e. most of the world outside of Mountain View, Redmond, Silicon Valley).

from https://groups.google.com/d/msg/singapore-rb/QsaJ-K5mQu4/61c...

chaz3• 13 years ago

It absolutely can work -- I used to work at one. The model is for a few principals / partners who are responsible for finding clients, negotiating contracts, and attracting talent. The clients tend to be sales, marketing, or finance organizations who are looking for projects to be built, but need a separate team from the internal IT group because of either a) bandwidth, b) expertise, or c) politics. The day-to-day project managers act as product managers, lead consultants, and team leads. Developers are encouraged to work closely with client contacts and attend all of the relevant product meetings.

These shops tend to stay small and maintain an specific expertise. It probably doesn't fit most definitions of a startup (clear business model, slower growth, requires little capital, not product focused), but it can be a good business opportunity if you can keep your pipeline packed. A developer-centric culture can indeed thrive, but doesn't appeal to everyone. You're building something new, but you're walking away from it in 3-6 months, and getting started is usually untangling and navigating an existing mess. There are tons of business rules that require some laborious and byzantine exploration of the business, and doing something new because it's cool and interesting usually isn't an option. You're far less likely to have the freedom to pick fun new technologies, but instead need to pick existing stuff that the internal IT team knows how to maintain when you're out, even if it's two major versions behind and you're not allowed to access the machines directly.

xauronx• 13 years ago

Have you ever considered that you actually downplay your knowledge? Saying "I'm a generalist, I don't have in depth knowledge with technology XYZ" might be killing you right out of the gates. If you're proficient in PHP, then just take that as a positive. Doesn't matter if you know 10 other languages just as well. You say you're not "the guy" on techology XYZ. Who is? If you were a consultant, you should have enough experience to get shit done. What else would most companies want? Also, be aware that while most companies say "We want an XYZ ninja with 5 years of experience", that's in hope of scaring off the really worthless people. Get in there, tell them all of the things you're good at. Leave all of the negativity out of it.

Instead of "I'm a generalist, I don't have that in depth of knowledge with PHP" say "Yes, I've done some PHP projects. I did [whatever] for company [whoever], which was a great experience and they were really happy with it".

Ask HN: I'm a generalist. Not a specialist. Getting a non-entry level job.

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