Any tech jobs where you sit around giving opinions but produce little?

HangTime

HangTime

HangTime

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Weird thread title but here goes. My career was on a steady but unspectacular path until the pandemic. I then quit my job and have done slightly different roles in a similar sort of tech space since.

What I'm finding is that I'm really struggling to end up doing something that fits well with my skills. I think I'm really good at things like reviewing the work of others and enhancing it, offering constructive feedback, spotting issues, thinking about how it will land with others etc. I can draw inferences and deductions extremely well (have been tested empirically on critical thinking a couple of times), spot patterns, identify risks early, synthesise data from different sources. I can sit in meetings and know when to chime in with relevant experience etc. Essentially I think I'm a very good collaborator that can take something that is already 80% there and get it to 95% when others might top out at 90%. I have a fairly broad range of experience in my field and can bridge business and tech pretty well.

However, if you give me a blank sheet of paper and ask me to come up with something, unless it's something that really interests me I struggle to come up with that initial 80%. I'm unsure where to start, procrastinate, I'll get distracted when an email comes in that I know I can give good advice on, and in general I think I'm mediocre at personal delivery. I can write prose pretty well but am terrible at drawing and not great at coming up with plans (although as per above I can often review and improve plans). This reads like I'm talking about documentation but it applies more broadly to "stuff I'm responsible for". One more focussed activity I'm quite good at and enjoy is logical problem solving (figuring out why something might have happened) but this tends to be adhoc and often isn't really my remit anyway, more like I'm solving the problems other people are supposed to be solving.

The job that I quit I could sort of get away with this because it was as a manager in an area I knew quite a lot about so doing people leadership, setting priorities and sitting on SteerCos etc could fill my day. But my recent jobs have been more hands-on and I'm struggling to pivot back to 10+ years ago where I think I was more effective at 'doing real work'. It feels like if I could have a job where I sit in meetings half the day, react to new scenarios springing up and review the work of others, floating around with quite a broad remit, I'd be pretty happy.

Any jobs out there where enhancing the work of others whilst doing FA myself is a thing?
 
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I think you just described being a Software Engineering Manager (manage multiple teams / department), or Development Team Lead (manage 1 tea,), or maybe higher, Technical Director (can be anything), VP Engineering (manage department), CTO (media-facing tech leader), depending on seniority and drive.

I'm in a similar position tbh, tech is so fragmented I'm ruled out of many jobs just because of tech stack. I can still carry a team in my stack, but it might be an easier life to try to go hands-off. I produce just as much value using experience and making decisions as I do writing code, and usually when I'm in a hands on role I feel like I'm also doing the jobs of the hands off people.
 
Sounds similar to me. I'm interested in transport and have lots of ideas of how we can use data to improve transport infrastructure.

Unfortunately my career is in advertising which I have zero interest in and zero ideas in. Currently at an AdTech company that's supposedly changing the world of advertising. In reality they have software that can put adverts on websites and come up with a load of BS as to why it's revolutionary. Everything we do is pointless, the only ones who really earn their money are the sales people who manage to sell this crap.

I would say pick an industry you're interested in. I think that's the answer, though I've never got the opportunity to work in an interesting industry so don't know for sure.
 
HangTime said:
Weird thread title but here goes. My career was on a steady but unspectacular path until the pandemic. I then quit my job and have done slightly different roles in a similar sort of tech space since.

What I'm finding is that I'm really struggling to end up doing something that fits well with my skills. I think I'm really good at things like reviewing the work of others and enhancing it, offering constructive feedback, spotting issues, thinking about how it will land with others etc. I can draw inferences and deductions extremely well (have been tested empirically on critical thinking a couple of times), spot patterns, identify risks early, synthesise data from different sources. I can sit in meetings and know when to chime in with relevant experience etc. Essentially I think I'm a very good collaborator that can take something that is already 80% there and get it to 95% when others might top out at 90%. I have a fairly broad range of experience in my field and can bridge business and tech pretty well.

However, if you give me a blank sheet of paper and ask me to come up with something, unless it's something that really interests me I struggle to come up with that initial 80%. I'm unsure where to start, procrastinate, I'll get distracted when an email comes in that I know I can give good advice on, and in general I think I'm mediocre at personal delivery. I can write prose pretty well but am terrible at drawing and not great at coming up with plans (although as per above I can often review and improve plans). This reads like I'm talking about documentation but it applies more broadly to "stuff I'm responsible for". One more focussed activity I'm quite good at and enjoy is logical problem solving (figuring out why something might have happened) but this tends to be adhoc and often isn't really my remit anyway, more like I'm solving the problems other people are supposed to be solving.

The job that I quit I could sort of get away with this because it was as a manager in an area I knew quite a lot about so doing people leadership, setting priorities and sitting on SteerCos etc could fill my day. But my recent jobs have been more hands-on and I'm struggling to pivot back to 10+ years ago where I think I was more effective at 'doing real work'. It feels like if I could have a job where I sit in meetings half the day, react to new scenarios springing up and review the work of others, floating around with quite a broad remit, I'd be pretty happy.

Any jobs out there where enhancing the work of others whilst doing FA myself is a thing?
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Have you any project management qualifications or certs.
 
HangTime said:
Weird thread title but here goes. My career was on a steady but unspectacular path until the pandemic. I then quit my job and have done slightly different roles in a similar sort of tech space since.

What I'm finding is that I'm really struggling to end up doing something that fits well with my skills. I think I'm really good at things like reviewing the work of others and enhancing it, offering constructive feedback, spotting issues, thinking about how it will land with others etc. I can draw inferences and deductions extremely well (have been tested empirically on critical thinking a couple of times), spot patterns, identify risks early, synthesise data from different sources. I can sit in meetings and know when to chime in with relevant experience etc. Essentially I think I'm a very good collaborator that can take something that is already 80% there and get it to 95% when others might top out at 90%. I have a fairly broad range of experience in my field and can bridge business and tech pretty well.

However, if you give me a blank sheet of paper and ask me to come up with something, unless it's something that really interests me I struggle to come up with that initial 80%. I'm unsure where to start, procrastinate, I'll get distracted when an email comes in that I know I can give good advice on, and in general I think I'm mediocre at personal delivery. I can write prose pretty well but am terrible at drawing and not great at coming up with plans (although as per above I can often review and improve plans). This reads like I'm talking about documentation but it applies more broadly to "stuff I'm responsible for". One more focussed activity I'm quite good at and enjoy is logical problem solving (figuring out why something might have happened) but this tends to be adhoc and often isn't really my remit anyway, more like I'm solving the problems other people are supposed to be solving.

The job that I quit I could sort of get away with this because it was as a manager in an area I knew quite a lot about so doing people leadership, setting priorities and sitting on SteerCos etc could fill my day. But my recent jobs have been more hands-on and I'm struggling to pivot back to 10+ years ago where I think I was more effective at 'doing real work'. It feels like if I could have a job where I sit in meetings half the day, react to new scenarios springing up and review the work of others, floating around with quite a broad remit, I'd be pretty happy.

Any jobs out there where enhancing the work of others whilst doing FA myself is a thing?
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That is management, at least the product side of it. People being the other.

I spent literally all my days in meetings and just chiming in to steer discussions etc. I do next to nothing myself.
 
There isn't one size fits all here.

Some people are good project managers and some are not. Some need hands on experience to be good at project management and some don't. Some people are good at coming up with ideas and some are not. But an idea that you can't action is mostly useless. Because everyone has ideas mostly useless it's hard to stand out. Even if you do have great ideas, many people won't use them for some BS reason.
 
trainsboatsandplanes said:
Currently at an AdTech company that's supposedly changing the world of advertising. In reality they have software that can put adverts on websites and come up with a load of BS as to why it's revolutionary. Everything we do is pointless, the only ones who really earn their money are the sales people who manage to sell this crap.
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I’ve had that suspicion about that industry for some time!

OP - What about software architecture? Seems to mostly be about telling other people they can’t do things or what they should be doing (that often they can’t) depending on your organisation’s particular preferences.
 
Sounds like a typical consultant job, all talk and mostly comprises of telling others how to do their job. Perhaps give that a try?
 
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Consultant for local council, but no idea who`s behind you need to kiss to get those jobs.
I get the feeling they go to the Bosses mates at the Golf Club.
 
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HangTime said:
I think I'm really good at things like reviewing the work of others and enhancing it, offering constructive feedback, spotting issues, thinking about how it will land with others etc. I can draw inferences and deductions extremely well (have been tested empirically on critical thinking a couple of times), spot patterns, identify risks early, synthesise data from different sources.
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As another poster pointed out above QA manager/team leader or perhaps a stint as an analyst if you have no experience of the role - the latter is riskier in that you'd maybe want some assurances of subsequent promotion or indeed might need to plan to job hop to a manager/team leader role in another company in 12 months after gaining some QA experience.

Of course the former has some possible risks too - especially if you're straight into a manager role with no experience, ideally, you'd be some sort of team leader or manager beneath another manager in order to gain some experience in that area.

QA (much like support/CS) is sometimes perceived as the ugly step-sister of engineering/R&D and indeed consulting/professional services, but that's perhaps more relevant at the individual contributor level. Obviously at a vendor consultants bill at an individual level and engineering (at a vendor) is building the core product + has some billable work too.

I think at the manager level though it can actually be a nice role that can be leveraged well. Obviously for a very ambitious person then trying to get into one of the more important engineering/dev teams, managing that and leveraging that role to become a director, VP or CTO or whatever is still the goal but... other lesser engineering teams exist.

In a mid-sized tech firm there are maybe several engineering/dev teams each with a manager and some of them are not particularly exciting or important. Whereas a QA manager might have a bigger and more important train set, maybe a QA team (with team leader and analyst) and a software delivery team (with team leader and ops guys) reporting to him/her + maybe a couple of developers who work on in house automation tools within the QA team rather than on the core product. One of the sub-teams reporting to you as a QA manager might be bigger than the whole team some engineering/dev manager looks after.

For a manager QA could well be a better role with a bigger train set than various dev/engineering managers and their single teams. That sort of thing could be leveraged into a bigger infrastructure role as a director and potentially into a CIO (rather than CTO) role.

also even in the case where QA is initially standalone, there are no rules that say you can't push to build your own train set and carve out a role if you're proactive - take over some other stuff (like software delivery - if that's a smaller team you work with constantly), push for some additional headcount for developers to automate stuff, build up the QA team into a larger team, without even officially changing jobs you might end up with more responsibility and headcount and then can push for a title change or substansive promotion.

HangTime said:
Essentially I think I'm a very good collaborator that can take something that is already 80% there and get it to 95% when others might top out at 90%. I have a fairly broad range of experience in my field and can bridge business and tech pretty well.

However, if you give me a blank sheet of paper and ask me to come up with something, unless it's something that really interests me I struggle to come up with that initial 80%. [...]I can write prose pretty well but am terrible at drawing and not great at coming up with plans (although as per above I can often review and improve plans).
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There's also the product manager role, you've outlined some weaknesses that might make it unsuitable but it could perhaps work if you're a PM for some part of an already well-established product and your role is to manage the incremental updates to it and possible enhancements/customisations.
 
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