Ask HN: Career advice for people not on engineering tracks?
I write code occasionally but I&#x27;m not a developer. I work in Operations and Security land. Essentially my entire career has been &#x27;Work in tech but don&#x27;t be a software engineer.&#x27;<p>If I had to throw out a list of things it&#x27;d probably be this:<p>Move to a decent sized city where at least a couple of the big 5 have outposts. Pittsburgh YES. Harrisburg NO. Massive bonus points if you go for a CS undergrad in said city (apply often and be willing to eject from school if they hire you, you can always finish later). If you&#x27;re not willing to do this for at least a couple years don&#x27;t bother at all. Why? Because of item 2.<p>Be willing to switch positions often unless you have a good reason to stay. Every 2 years (IMO now it should be 1 year) I ask myself 3 questions. Is the pay good? Am I still learning useful things? Am I not going home pissed off every day? If I answer NO to any of these questions it&#x27;s time to go. Employer loyalty is a joke and you&#x27;ll be actively mocked for having it. Good reasons to stay can be family related (kids school, not just &#x27;my family lives here&#x27;), you&#x27;re waiting on something (like a profit share check you&#x27;re pretty sure you&#x27;ll get), or Bush Jr. tanks the economy for a couple years (uuuuugh, that was 3 years I want back). Incidentally you can&#x27;t do any of this in rural fuckoffistan. Believe me, I tried.<p>Train yourself on new tech. If you&#x27;re not willing to do this don&#x27;t bother, you&#x27;ll be irrelevant in 3 years. Companies will not do this for you, YOU have to actively seek it out. If you&#x27;re a PM and don&#x27;t understand half of what your &#x27;resources&#x27; are saying go smash your face against some of the buzzwords they throw around. If you&#x27;re in operations actually look at the frameworks the stuff you&#x27;re supporting uses. This is a hard one because there&#x27;s a lot of &#x27;new&#x27; tech that turns out to be &#x27;garbage unused&#x27; tech (Openstack anyone? What a joke that turned out to be). Developing a keen nose for vendor bullshit is absolutely key. Whatever &#x27;personal development&#x27; or &#x27;continuing education&#x27; perks the company has, use them. If you&#x27;re going to do it anyway get someone else to pay for it.<p>Don&#x27;t be a contractor. Non-Developer contractor positions are shit. If you have to be a contractor working for yourself ask for 3 times as much cash as a full time employee, otherwise you&#x27;re making 1&#x2F;3 what you could be due to taxes and health care. Working for a contracting company can be okay, don&#x27;t be a doormat or a subcontractor which is the same thing (full time employee at an MSP is fine). If you&#x27;re contract to hire and they jerk you around on the contract end date LEAVE.<p>Certs are not useless, but there are a lot of useless certs. Treadmill cert you have to retest for every 3 years? If it&#x27;s not either required for your job or you don&#x27;t use it every single day NO. The thing everyone got 10 years ago? Hell NO (looking at you CCNA). Anything CompTIA? NO. Certs are an HR checkbox. Check enough boxes and HR is going to pick you because HR is lazy and these are easy to understand. Some YES options are the CISSP&#x2F;CISA in security land, AWS Solutions Architect pretty much anywhere, and the OSCP in red team land (CEH is NO unless you&#x27;re doing government stuff since it&#x27;s on this list <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iase.disa.mil&#x2F;iawip&#x2F;pages&#x2F;iabaseline.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iase.disa.mil&#x2F;iawip&#x2F;pages&#x2F;iabaseline.aspx</a>. The DOD loves their arbitrary checkboxes and hates thinking).<p>Everything I just said about Certs? Applies to degrees as well. The sole exception is if you think you&#x27;re going to want to eject from Tech land at some point or want to work for Colleges&#x2F;School Systems (because they&#x27;ll arbitrarily require an undergrad degree for no reason). In that case definitely get &#x27;some&#x27; kind of degree.<p>Don&#x27;t go to graduate school. Or rather, go to graduate school if you are 200% sure it will help you for SPECIFIC THING you&#x27;re going to specialize in, you&#x27;re a manager in a fortune 500 and want to get an MBA so you can be a manager at a fortune 50, OR you want to educate yourself to unemployability. That&#x27;s it (I guess hiding out in the recession was a good reason as well but it&#x27;s also left us with a bunch of people with useless masters degrees). TBH I&#x27;d rather see some certs or an interesting minor than a graduate degree.<p>Hardware sucks. Try really hard not to have to deal with hardware (or specialize in it and make a fuckload of money doing what I won&#x27;t do anymore).<p>If you were in the military KEEP YOUR CLEARANCE UP TO DATE. Then go to the DC area and make a fuckload of money as a contractor. Massive bonus points if you worked in intelligence or procurement. If you don&#x27;t have a clearance don&#x27;t bother with the DC area at all.<p>Don&#x27;t specialize in Java stack. Why would you hate yourself this much? Java is last decade tech, a constant security problem (and target, struts vulns anyone?), and the application quality is garbage. Moreover it&#x27;s the single easiest thing to outsource to India because of Tata International and Infosys. Just don&#x27;t.<p>You can do a lot more at small companies (like 120 people). Flip side, you&#x27;ll be expected to do a lot more at small companies.<p>Lose some weight fatty. If a company has a choice between a relatively fit person and big chungus it&#x27;s going to be Thank you for your interest but we decided to go with another candidate. Figure out your BMI and try to stay within the healthy range (you&#x27;re not a powerlifter, the &#x27;bmi doesn&#x27;t accurately portray muscle mass&#x27; line doesn&#x27;t apply to you). If you&#x27;re fixing this do Calories In, Calories Out with MyFitnessPal or LoseIt, anything else is just wasting your time. You can do literally just that and sit on the couch for 6 months and lose weight.<p>Don&#x27;t put your information on Indeed.com, they are trash. Don&#x27;t put positions on your Linkedin profile that aren&#x27;t relevant to what you want to do (unless you like random headhunters calling you about positions you don&#x27;t have the slightest interest in because you came up in a keyword search).