If you were to quit your developer job today and move away from the tech world for a little while, what job would you do? Or what domain would interest you?
I would write. Im not sure if that means novels, short stories, movie scripts, or something else entirely. It would be interesting to be a travel or food writer.
In fact I know a travel writer who travels the world and writes articles for magazines. If my writing could just pay for my travel that might be worth it.
I don’t think money is the objective with this sort of question: if you could drop a very well-remunerated job to do anything else, chances are you wouldn’t do it for more money.
If I were to change careers, I think I’d go into politics and become some type of political operative. I like the process, I like the issues, I like the strategy. It would flex a completely different set of mental muscles than my software engineering job and to me, that would be quite a welcome challenge.
It takes something to realize you may have over generalized. Thank you for the apology. I appreciate interactions like these on the internet as opposed to animosity.
My friend worked for a large bank in the credit model division and a large political consulting firm. He said the credit card people were nicer by far. The political operatives just saw voters as sheep.
I would move to sales. Sales is the only skill that helps you make money fast, if that's your goal. What I really mean by that is as you get better at Sales, you increase your "personal conversion rate" - which I define as a person's ability to convert someone into a paying customer.
When you're good at sales + you're already a developer, you can build your own Saas and sell them (like most solo founders do, except excel them at selling it).
When you're good at sales + you work for someone else, you can still get rich fast by taking up a commission based job (most tech startups I know of these days, provide around 10%).
You should broader your point: percent based compensation can make you money fast. Far faster than trading your fixed hours for money at a capped rate.
Trading time for money is doing a thing that doesn't scale.
A good friend made enough money he was able to quit his job as an engineer to provide telecom consulting services directly to small healthcare providers in the North Carolina mountains. Started a small phone company, hired a sales guy, who closes the deal, my friend comes along and walks the company through integrating.
He describes it as a hybrid between being a reseller and a managed service provider, but 100% of their revenue is residuals from services his partner sells, and they both live pretty comfortably and happily.
Partnerships and advisory roles can have % based compensation.
Brokering typically has % based compensation.
These don't inherently involve any more 'sales' than selling yourself in an interview for any other kind of role. They can involve more sales if you need them to.
I know developers working at consultancies who earn a percentage of their day rate as part of their compensation. Though I think this is quite uncommon.
Sales is not just about cold calls. This is a common misconception. Cold calling is just one aspect of it. You can skip cold calling as a channel and pursue other channels of interest. In fact, these days, cold calling doesn't work well as it used. People have moved on to other channels such as linkedIn, chat based applications, etc.
If you can do all the above, then you already have some basic sales skills.
A developer - needs to "sell" his solution to his teams/managers
A trainer needs to sell his trainings to get students to come visit.
A tech conference presenter needs to "sell" his ideas to the audience so they can "buy" it.
Actually, training and sales is an extremely good combination to have. Case in point: Most people on the internet get rich by teaching others to become rich rather than doing what they teach themselves :) Such as - eCommerce courses, become a consultant type courses, etc.
Not realistic, but when I was 13 or so my father worked for the Forest Service, and we spent a week at a cabin in a California wilderness one summer. While we were out there, we ran into a young guy who was working a summer job where he wandered around the wilderness, camping and taking notes in a little book whenever he heard an owl. I've always wanted to get paid for something like that. Of course you can't demand $200 an hour, and it probably gets scary at night.
Would want to try my hand at cooking, although not really sure if I would enjoy high-pressure restaurant cooking as much as I do for myself & my family.
I would be a carpenter or custom furniture maker. My childhood was spend working with grandfather creating broad range of wooden products starting with kitchen furniture and finishing with music instruments. As an electrical engineer I could create new electrical tools my grandpa never imagined and be way more efficient than he was. Also open source CAD tools open new horizons.
Likewise. I'm already trying to make the transition. Honestly, if I didn't have to write another line of code, professionally, I would be over the moon.
Woodworking is my choice as well. I have not done a single project yet, but really want to try it out. I watch a lot of woodworking videos on YouTube and find them fascinating, especially the Paul Sellers ones. He has a very popular tutorial for building a workbench with just hand tools, while it seems to a lot of fun I also find it a bit daunting in terms of the time and mental dedication. I hope I will be able to make the commitment soon.
Some form of agriculture is pretty appealing. More scope for being outdoors during daylight hours, and (somewhat) more tolerance for people who prefer to work alone.
The money side of things doesn't look great, though.
business or finance combined with original passion of electrical engineering. I probably will still go that direction as I find that those who control the money are in control and I am tired of being a peon subject to other's deals.
I did. The projects I work on now only involve dealing with mitigating the effects/lowering the things that produce climate change. There is a lot to do in this area and most organisations that work with it don’t have good IT teams.
This can be good and bad. If they don’t understand IT then they don’t value it, but if they get it then there are very interesting jobs to be done.
Can you share your company or examples of others like it? Besides some non-profits, I can't seem to find very many and it's something I'd like to do but remain a developer.
Check my profile. There are quite a few companies that specialise in things relate to lowering our emissions. Solar, power networks, electric cars, heat pumps, new types of transport (electric boats, trains, planes), urban agriculture and more.
They are all going to need good control systems, machine learning for optimisation and much more. Just some ideas.
If you have software skills, electric utilities are hungry for good developers, are a key piece of infrastructure for fighting climate change, and are going through an IT revolution (from a host of special purpose systems to well-integrated sensor and control platforms).
I tried to do this on a volunteer basis. I wrote to a bunch of professors in the field but they all had zero interest in software engineering help. I had assumed it would be incredibly useful and they jump at getting it for free :-(
I’ve spent a marginal amount of time thinking about it, but my first thought would be to go back to school for forestry at a big state university and go from there.
Something involving food, maybe line cook/prep and work up? I love to cook at home-and sort of miss the hustle and grind working in kitchens during college.
This fascinating story from The New York Times -- https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/opinion/sunday/dinner-and... -- dives into the daily work of a high-end waiter. The author talks about the repetition of the work, and that seems like something I'd really enjoy.
If I were unconstrained by economic imperatives to feed me and my family, I‘d love to try my hand at writing for tv/movies - it’s one of the most creative jobs around.
If I still had to provide, then I’d be curious about plumbing - the sort of job that cannot be automated or offshored.
yup - the trades will be one of the last things to go automated (hopefully). I think I'm gonna jump into one (from sysadmin), but still can't work out which.
Each of them has their trade-offs though - building is super rewarding, but very hard on the body. Or becoming a sparky is probably more interesting, but lots of climbing round inside in small tight spaces running wires etc. and spiders. lots of spiders.
Plumbing.... also interesting, but you gotta be prepared to deal with other peoples shit.
Arborist/tree cutter-downer person. All the fun of climbing and crevasse rescue skills combined with being able to use a chainsaw attached you your belt. The videos in YouTube look fascinating.
102 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadWhen you're good at sales + you're already a developer, you can build your own Saas and sell them (like most solo founders do, except excel them at selling it).
When you're good at sales + you work for someone else, you can still get rich fast by taking up a commission based job (most tech startups I know of these days, provide around 10%).
You should broader your point: percent based compensation can make you money fast. Far faster than trading your fixed hours for money at a capped rate.
Trading time for money is doing a thing that doesn't scale.
A good friend made enough money he was able to quit his job as an engineer to provide telecom consulting services directly to small healthcare providers in the North Carolina mountains. Started a small phone company, hired a sales guy, who closes the deal, my friend comes along and walks the company through integrating.
He describes it as a hybrid between being a reseller and a managed service provider, but 100% of their revenue is residuals from services his partner sells, and they both live pretty comfortably and happily.
Brokering typically has % based compensation.
These don't inherently involve any more 'sales' than selling yourself in an interview for any other kind of role. They can involve more sales if you need them to.
But I know deep inside that I can never be a salesperson. It's just not in me. The Dilbert gene.
I think it's true of a lot of developers, too.
A developer - needs to "sell" his solution to his teams/managers
A trainer needs to sell his trainings to get students to come visit.
A tech conference presenter needs to "sell" his ideas to the audience so they can "buy" it.
Actually, training and sales is an extremely good combination to have. Case in point: Most people on the internet get rich by teaching others to become rich rather than doing what they teach themselves :) Such as - eCommerce courses, become a consultant type courses, etc.
The money side of things doesn't look great, though.
This can be good and bad. If they don’t understand IT then they don’t value it, but if they get it then there are very interesting jobs to be done.
They are all going to need good control systems, machine learning for optimisation and much more. Just some ideas.
If I still had to provide, then I’d be curious about plumbing - the sort of job that cannot be automated or offshored.
Each of them has their trade-offs though - building is super rewarding, but very hard on the body. Or becoming a sparky is probably more interesting, but lots of climbing round inside in small tight spaces running wires etc. and spiders. lots of spiders.
Plumbing.... also interesting, but you gotta be prepared to deal with other peoples shit.