New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Elevator Pitch for a Polymath?
Ask HN: Elevator Pitch for a Polymath?
9 by kqr | 5 comments on Hacker News.
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?
9 by kqr | 5 comments on Hacker News.
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?
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