Career Options For Software Engineers – Over the past five years, I have given many guest lectures at many of the coding bootcamps in Chicago.
Some questions never fail to come up: “What language should I learn next?”, “How can I prepare for technical interviews?”, “Are you hiring?”
Career Options For Software Engineers
But one question that bothered me was, “What if I don’t want to be a software developer?”
Software Developer Career Paths What Suits You Best
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. After nearly ten years leading product and engineering teams, I realized I was ready for a new challenge, so this summer, I started freelancing in technical writing. I didn’t know when I got my first client, but I soon realized that
This post will go over many of the career paths available to software developers, especially recent bootcamp graduates. I’ll explain what each job does, how you can get your foot in the door, and the long-term prospects.
Whether you’re looking for an alternative career because you couldn’t find a job as an engineer or because you realized that software development wasn’t for you, this guide will help you find a career that matches your skills.
While software engineers benefit from having people skills, some bootcamp graduates I’ve spoken to aren’t keen on sitting quietly and writing code all day. If you want a career that offers more opportunities to interact with people, these jobs may be right for you.
Engineering Career Paths At Big Tech And High Growth Startups
As more companies strive to build relationships with the developers who are their customers, users or advocates, the field of developer relations is growing rapidly.
Developer relations professionals (what some companies call developer advocates, developer evangelists, community managers, or “DevRels”) help them establish and build a community around their company’s software.
They are often involved in creating demo applications, writing blog posts, speaking at conferences, and managing social media accounts for technology-focused companies. Most of the big tech companies (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.) employ teams of developer relations professionals.
If you are interested in this area, read what Mary Thengvall and PJ Hagerty are doing. They are two of my favorite influencers in the space, and they put out the Community Pulse podcast together.
Computer Programmer Or Software Developer, What Is The Difference?
Marketing to developers is incredibly difficult because we don’t like to sell to, so many of the more aggressive marketing tactics that work for other markets are at risk here. As someone with a technical background, you naturally understand the way developers think, and have more influence than a traditional marketer can.
SlashData puts out a lot of great content on Developer Marketing, including a book on the subject in 2018. If you want to start in this field, learn online marketing: SEO, social media, content marketing, influencer marketing, etc. You can practice many of these skills on your blog to demonstrate your knowledge before applying for jobs.
Many engineers are turned down from any job with “sales” in the title, but that’s only because we’ve all met bad salespeople.
The truth is that everyone is in sales. Whether you’re “selling” a job candidate during the interview process or proposing a new framework to your engineering team, selling means matching customer needs with the right solution.
Career Options For Software Engineers
Sales engineers are unique in that they have some level of technical expertise. This can be a great match for developers who don’t want to write code all day but understand software engineering.
The other nice part about selling is that you don’t need any specialized certifications to do it. Hubspot offers a great introduction to some skills and resources you can get started with. As more companies build software tools and services for engineers, sales engineers will likely be in even greater demand over the next decade.
I’ve met some honest, true tech recruiters (Taylor Dorsett and Matt Hoffman from my hometown of Chicago, for example), but I’ve also met some terrible, clueless recruiters who are totally focused on getting candidates to hit the ground running. their quota. . .
The good news is that you will have more empathy and credibility than many other technical recruiters with a background in software development. Like sales, this field requires an outgoing and relationship-oriented personality, but does not require certifications or specialized courses.
Career Paths: Computer Engineering (2nd Edition)
Unfortunately, most entry-level jobs in tech recruiting are at low-quality firms, so be sure to check their reputation on Glassdoor before applying.
If you want to stay on the product team, but you’re not sure you want to be a software developer, there are many fields you can branch into. These roles work closely with engineers, so your coding knowledge will help, but they also require other expertise.
Although there are subtle differences between quality assurance and testing engineers, both deal with testing software before it goes live.
If you have an eye for detail and like to find creative ways to automate repetitive tasks, this could be a great career. It will probably require some coding as well as some manual testing work.
How To Become A Software Engineer (from Scratch)
Software engineers at smaller companies test each other’s code, so dedicated testing and QA roles are more common in larger organizations. How companies do testing varies widely, so be sure to ask them about the tools they use, how automated their tests are, and how much manual vs. automated testing your role will involve.
On the other side of the product development life cycle are business analysts. They typically work as a bridge between the business and technical teams to ensure that requirements, constraints and timelines are understood. They can jump in and help with testing and quality assurance, depending on the team structure, so they need to have a wide range of product knowledge.
If you have a background in business, product development, or design and some coding skills, you may qualify for an entry-level business analyst role. If not, I would look into some online courses to help you develop a basic understanding of the role and what it entails.
The main difference is that project managers usually go deep into one project. They often define the tasks and resources for the teams working on the project and track the progress of the project as it approaches release.
Software Engineering Master’s Degree Program
Smaller companies may combine business analyst, project management, scrum master and product manager in different ways, but larger companies may define separate responsibilities.
Excellent organizational skills, business acumen, and people skills are critical to your success as a project manager. This role relies on your ability to manage expectations and motivate people who may be more senior or experienced than you, so you need to build trust quickly. The multifaceted nature of this role makes it good for analytical and technical people who no longer want to write code.
In Agile teams, the Scrum Master helps ensure that everyone knows and pays attention to Scrum theory, best practices and rules.
This ends up being very similar to project management, but with a particular focus on serving the other teams involved in building the product. Again, this is not always their job, but in larger organizations, it can be.
Career Path Of A Software Tester
The ability to manage expectations and limitations is critical to your success as a Scrum Master. You also need to know Agile best practices, so I recommend finding a suitable course or book on the subject. Agile has been widely adopted by organizations of all sizes, so this career path is likely to continue to grow over the next decade.
I spent a lot of time in 2019 learning about product management to improve our product delivery process at The Grade Network.
Product managers look holistically at the company’s products to ensure they are desirable (customers want it), viable (business means), and feasible (we can build it). The ability to think at such a high level is rare, so if you have and some technical background, you can do well as a product manager.
Entry-level product managers may start with smaller product parts or as project managers in some organizations. This can give you a taste of product development and help you build relationships with all the necessary stakeholders before you are assigned your own product to manage.
Why The Aging Developer?
If you come from a design or art background, becoming a UI or UX designer with some coding chops is a great way to stand out in your field. This combination of skills will allow you to speak more effectively with engineers and create interactive mockups in HTML/CSS rather than just static image files.
If you don’t have much design experience, take a course, and start building a portfolio. Many companies will hire people without a degree if they can demonstrate their knowledge and skills. Dribbble is the most popular portfolio platform I’ve seen, but you can also use your own website.
The explosion of no-code and low-code development tools in recent years has opened up opportunities for companies looking to build software quickly without hiring a development team. These tools allow you to create a mobile or web app in hours instead of weeks, and because they’re getting better every year, more companies are embracing codeless apps.
Makerpad and No Code Jobs are good places to start looking for these types of jobs. Because of this
