Hey everyone, welcome back! I hope you all are doing good. First of all, I’m really sorry that I have been inactive for the last couple of days. But now I will definitely try to upload regular content on this website. So, today in this article we’ll be discussing all the available options you have as a technical person to build a career in this tech domain whether that’s programming, whether that’s something related to non-programming, and so on.
I am going to explore as many options as I can from a developer’s point of view and would also tell which one is good for you.
Table of Contents
Non-programming Role –
Let’s just start with very basic. As I mentioned in the title of this article as a technical person or as a techie or someone who knows how to work with tech, you have two options over here. Either you want to go into a programming role or you want to go into the non-programming role. Now, remember that the “role” where I’m saying non-programming role does not mean that you’re not writing code. It just means that you are not actively writing code for the company itself. You mighDev-Relt be writing code on the side, you might be a developer even, but this does not require you to write code, the code which gets shipped onto production for that particular company for which you’re working.
So let’s start with the non-programming part because this is relatively a few roles are here and then with programming, we’ll explore a little bit of more industry side of stuff. The non-programming role, I do believe I see so far includes a bunch of things.
Let’s start with Dev-Rel which is Developer Relation. So in this role as a person, let’s say you are working for a company that has developers as their users. As a Dev-Rel person, your role would be to maintain relationships, maintain contact with these people who are using your product and make sure that they have a smoother experience with their company. Similarly, with Dev-Rel, there is also a Developer Advocate. So Developer Advocate is like Dev-Rel in a way but you also get to make content, you also get to educate people around what sort of things you are interested in, and just make sure that people know about your company by the means of educating them in a way also.
Now, these are common rules because a lot of tech companies, a lot of tech platforms, also need to market it and they are more towards customer satisfaction and marketing roles than actively writing programming. But still, I put these roles into technical because as a developer or as a Dev-Rel advocate, even if you’re not writing code you need to understand the core value of the product you are advertising or working for. Or you need to understand how things and sometimes even code-level stuff is working. Because let’s say you’re writing a blog post as a developer advocate on some new features which is released, so you should be technical enough to understand the language, to understand the context, to understand things around that marketing push as well. So you have to be definitely technical but necessarily, you don’t have to be writing hardcore codes and algorithms and stuff.
Programming Role –
If you look at programming, of course, this is a vast field and you can pretty much pick up any sort of programming language job stuff, anything like that. But that’s usually not the way I would recommend you to go ahead. What you should do as a very first step is actually realize which industry you want to work for. When I say industry this means very broad overview, very broad skill set. Now, a few come to my mind. Front-end web development, Back-end web development, Front end and backend combined to say Full-stack. There could be ML or AI kinds of things you might be interested in. There could be mobile application development. Maybe you want to be a mobile developer. So this could be Android or iOS. This could be Data Scientist. Maybe you like working with sets of data and seeing patterns inside them. This could be DevOps. This could be something like a system engineer also. I would say these are all broadly speaking overall categories and then the new one over here these days Web3 as well.
You first have to roughly realize which industry you want to be part of because all of them require you to code, right? Write active code for the company or analyze the code and systems and stuff. So once you figure out the industry, then it becomes easier to know what to learn. Because this is a hard part.
If you are learning HTML then you are switching to React-Native. Then maybe you try a little bit of Python, you try to set up an AWS account. This is going to be a mess, right? Because all of these things in themselves are very deep in a way and would require you a lot of time to master. If you are really looking to break into a singular field, you have to be willing to go all into that particular domain itself. And the way you do that is, the first step, understand which one you want to pick up and eventually build a career out of it. Because trust me you can just pick one skill out of them to build a career. You cannot be a great ML Developer and a Full-Stack Developer. You could be but it will take a lot more time compared to just focusing on one thing. And when you have to focus on the one thing first then move to the next thing. So even if you’re thinking of becoming the best ML Developer and best Full-Stack Developer, you still have to pick one first and then complete it and then move to the next.
Full-Stack Developer –
So obviously let’s say you picked up full-stack as your career option which is, by the way, a great option in today’s time, then you have to realize all these resources of things or what all things I need to be able to learn or I need to know to apply to a company. Now a lot of times what you will see is that companies would be using all sorts of technologies. You might be learning React but the company might be using something different. So one very thing important is you have to start and learn basics in a much better way. Because these basics the HTML, CSS, JavaScript world, Databases, Back-end, Linux. This stuff would not change irrespective of any tech stack that companies are using, right? So once you pick up any sort of this field, this basically applies to all the fields. That is to start and learn the basics first and then build your specific tech stack on top of that. When I say specific tech-stack I mean these frameworks and libraries.
Maybe you’re a good React Developer who knows how to work with MongoDB, for example. Who also knows how you know deploy it on AWS. So this is like very specific, specific technology, specific cloud providers. But if you know the fundamentals, you know what HTML, CSS, JS is, you know how the databases work and you know what are the benefits of the cloud. If you are aware of these basics also, it will not take a lot of time to swap these technologies. MongoDB could be swapped with SQL Database, AWS could be very well in Google Cloud, and React could become Swelt or whatever you want, whatever the company wants.
Once you figure out how to work with basics and you have learned the basics, you’re good enough to start looking for or start applying for jobs or even learning parallelly along with things. But yeah, hopefully, this gives you more clarity on all options you have as a developer, as a technical person.
Conclusion
There might be a lot more roles in the non-programming part, strictly depending on what the need of the company is. There could be very well a customer success role that requires you to be technical but most of the things you can cover in DevRel and Developer Advocate roles. This is where you actually write code for the company.
These are a bunch of fields where you could probably write code and for a bigger company involved in Web, ML, Mobile Apps, Data, Systems, DevOps you pretty much have teams for each and every one of them. So you could probably just jump and hop into any single department if you want.
This is pretty much it for this article. Hopefully, this gave you a little bit more clarity on all options you have as a tech person. You just have to start working, you just have to start learning and apply for these jobs. These companies are looking for people like you all the time. So there’s a huge demand and moderate supply. The supply is definitely lesser than the demand as a developer. So you get good enough, it’s guaranteed that you will land up a decent job.
Thanks for reading till the very end!!