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Alternative to Individual Contributer Programming Jobs

2 points by jzer0cool ↗ HN
What are some good alternatives to individual contributer, programing jobs that relatively has a similar pay range. Should involve a lateral move where you have no experience yet into that specific position.

Examples:

* Technical Product Manager $xxx / What is the probability for hire without previous role in product management, what exp is needed. * Engineering Manager $xxx / ... * Data Engineer $xxx / ... * Program Manager / ... * UI Designer / ...

3 comments

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cyberdrunk
Regarding chance of being hired into those roles without previous experience, I'd say they are minimal, unless you join a scrappy, low-wage startup (or other low-pay environment - perhaps government, academia?). Everybody else can afford to hire people with experience, and will likely choose them over you.

Instead, the way to laterally move into those positions is to work somewhere as a developer and express interest in moving into the desired position. There, you (hopefully) already have a product and org knowledge that is an asset over hires from outside company. Also, before the transition, you can just pick up some work that belongs to the target field, so people will over time see you as the "X" guy and the move will be very natural.

BTW Data Engineer is basically IC Programmer.

jzer0cool
Great feedback. Data Engineering sounds interesting but also appears to require heavy statistics. Unsure if an introductory course here is sufficient, or if whether one would have more success familiarizing with the tooling/software available.
cyberdrunk
> Data Engineering sounds interesting but also appears to require heavy statistics.

That's Data Science. Data Engineering is just writing code (pipelines in Spark usually) which moves data from system A to B and perhaps applies some machine learning code, supplied by data scientists, to it. But, most of the work is just moving data around. I work with dozens of Data Engineers and none of them know even basic stats (and if they know, they don't get to use it anyway).