Dear HN, So far in my (admittedly fairly short, at 7–8 years experience) professional life, I’ve always entered employment as a software engineer. However, I study a lot of things outside of this: leadership, economics, site reliability engineering, writing, queuing theory, product development, extreme value theory, lean, survival analysis, etc. This means when I find the right employer, my job often extends well beyond the programming I was hired to do, into things like: – statistical analysis of customer health, – cross-functional KPIs for alignment on current priorities over a diverse set of departments, – improving development methodologies and workflows, – adjusting on-call compensation to improve join rates and employee satisfaction, and more. Over and over I encounter the advice to “come up with and practise the elevator pitch of what you do”. I struggle with this. In an ideal environment, I do so many things I have trouble summing it up — and if I do, it ends up being something too abstract like “I optimise all your systems”. I realise the things I do are basically the job of a CTO, but with my short professional experience it would be ridiculous if I said that’s what I wanted to work as — I know I lack a lot side skills that would be necessary for that job. (And I don’t think everyone would appreciate the joke “assistant to the regional CTO”.) I can sell myself as a software engineer and hope that I end up in a crowd that appreciates the other things I do, but I would like to try to find a good summary of what I do to begin with. How have you approached this?
Story Published at: December 27, 2022 at 08:04AM
Story Published at: December 27, 2022 at 08:04AM