Jobs in the “geek interface” space
Tiffany asked the following question in the comments to my earlier post about Michael Schwern’s Geek2Geek Communications talk:
My lateral question, should anyone have spare time, is which interface jobs exist between geekdom and the rest of the world? (Or more specifically computer geekdom, as a concentrated nexus of paying geekdom). Which ones are open to people with no programming training?
My first two thoughts are QA and tech writing. Both of these are jobs that are best done by people who can swing both ways. There are also lots of domain-specific roles if you have an interest in one particular area; for instance, if you happened to have a qualification as a librarian, you could look for work around the edges of library IT, or with a company that’s doing something library-like (eg. LibraryThing), where the technical team might need to have someone around who knows the non-tech stuff and can explain it the right way.
But I’d like to open this up to everyone else and see what else might be suggested. Readers, over to you!
4 comments4 Comments so far
Also product management, sometimes. And, of course, technical support.
Monica: good call on both points.
There were some comments to this effect on the Livejournal feed to your blog. In case you can’t read those, someone said technical support and technical support management, and business analyst.
I would add Project Manager – needs to know how to motivate geeks and needs to understand the high-level technical stuff, but also needs to be able to interface with the rest of the management. I concur with PRoduct Management and Business Analyst of course.
I decided after years of programming that my real skill lay in requirements analysis. I think you still need some technical skill though so that the things that you come up with aren’t completely out of the realm of possibility.
We had a consultant in this week – a process consultant – and he said that people do not exist who are both able programmers and good with people & business process. I disagree, but maybe I’m not an “able” programmer, just a mediocre one. I think it would be best if people tried to develop both sides of their skillset, then we’d need fewer interface people. My old consulting firm loved to send me out on gigs because if they sent me out, they only needed one person – one person who did their own project management, business analyst, AND programmer skills. Plus training & documentation. I do it all – and I think this is the secret to not being outsourced.
At least some web development jobs have that interface component; I’ve had two now where I was a one-man-band webmaster inside of a marketing department. Being able to talk nerd to (at least some of) the IT people and also to talk marketing to my boss and other marketing folk has been very helpful. And to help the the two groups understand each other’s concerns, too.
To this day, I’m very proud that my previous boss knew about blogs & RSS before the head of IT did. ;)