Engineering with travel/public speaking/etc
I’m a senior/lead software engineer with a decade of industry experience, but I’m kind of getting sick of programming all day every day. On the side I’ve been speaking at conferences and helping run events, and I’d love to find a role that is a mix of the two. Problem is my resume screams Senior Full Stack software engineer and most recruiters can’t get it through their heads that I want something that is more than just sitting at a desk programming websites. I don’t know if it’s rare for good engineers to also be good at public speaking or what, but I can’t for the life of me find an opportunity that involves travel or conferences or anything beyond sitting at a desk programming 100% of the time. Just had an onsite at a company for a role that involves building their open source SDK components for use by third-party developers, but even they made it very clear that all of the actual developer evangelism/advocacy happens within different group and I wouldn’t be allowed to do any of that. I revamped my resume to highlight the events I’ve spoken at and startup I founded and cross-team product stuff I’ve done, but it hasn’t seemed to help. I know people who have the kind of roles I want, but they usually come up from the sales side and not engineering, or they grew with an early stage startup. You all have any advice for how to transition your career? I don’t want to give up programming completely or take a massive pay cut to go to an early stage startup where roles are more fluid.
At Google, this is called DevRel (for Developer Relations). Given that you already have experience with advocating technology and have a strong tech background, might give it a shot.
I interviewed with gTech which seemed like a good fit but they didn’t move forward, no explanation. The interviews were super easy on the technical side so not sure what the issue was.
TRY AGAIN MAN! Don’t give up after one go. Google isn’t great at getting everything right. Maybe an interviewer just didn’t like you. Apply again
Research scientist involves a mix of coding, experimentation, paper writing, travel and giving talks. I've also been invited to 20% on Developer Relations to give more talks, though I haven't taken that offer. So I would say that your ideal role does exist at Google.
Sounds like that would be an awesome gig. Any way you could just do that as an independent consultant? (E.g. assuming you already have the connections to the conferences/events)
Try Confluent. They have a lot of ‘evangelist’ type of roles.
Customer Success Engineer or Sales Engineer roles sounds like your thing at Google.
I have no idea what you’re so confused about. You wouldn’t find a better place than Capital One for: 1. Being an engineer by title and role 2. Doing very little engineering work 3. Talking about your work to no end
Haaah 100% agree
I was told I was not allowed to talk about my work at conferences, and frankly my day job work wasn’t worth talking about. I had to take PTO to go speak at conferences about side projects and non-dayjob-related stuff.