I’m a 23 year old software engineer at a large tech company working out of NYC. I’ve thought of the following ways to try out jobs:
Rotational programs - Some tech companies offer programs where you can rotate roles every 6 months, like this one. But I’ve pretty much applied to all of them.
Full-time jobs—I could work full-time as a PM, UX Designer, university researcher etc. but this would probably require a 1-2yr commitment per job
Startup cofounder—As a cofounder I’d gain exposure to a lot of skills—sales, product, engineering etc. but I feel that I’d get such a small exposure to each function that it wouldn’t really be useful
Any other ideas or thoughts? I’m trying to figure out what sort of work I’m best at (which I imagine is where I’ll have the most impact).
I think I’d expect you to be able to get quite a bit of information on roles without having to actually do them full time. I’d expect, for example, the level of information you get from doing some sales at a startup to give you pretty good information about whether you like sales. That’s definitely not going to be fully generalisable—sales for a startup will look different than for an established company, and things like the culture of the company you work for will make a huge difference. But taking a sales job to try it out will similarly not be fully generalisable.
One way of thinking about how to learn about different roles is to try to build a ladder of cheap tests—starting with things like reading a bit about a role, then trying to talk to people doing that role, then perhaps doing a short project. Ways of testing things that don’t go all the way to getting a role could include: doing a course, volunteering for a charity (there are usually ways of finding charities in your local area looking for volunteers, along the lines of this one for Oxford) or doing an internship (sometimes these are pretty short, so you might be able to take a couple of weeks holiday from work to do one).
Thank you for your response! My concern is that cheap tests that only last a few weeks or months, will not provide accurate information about how good one is at a role. I’ve been a software engineer almost two years now. If I were to have only worked as a software engineer for six months and stopped and reflected on whether I had the potential to get very good at the role, I might have concluded that I had little potential based on my performance. But now on month 19, I think my prospects are quite good. There was a really long onboarding and skill-building period that had to be done before I could really start contributing and determining how good I could get. While there might be shorter onboarding periods in other jobs that are more oriented around soft skills—e.g. sales, consulting, marketing, etc., I imagine it will still take a long time to be sufficiently onboarded to be able to assess one’s potential.
However, maybe there is a happy middle ground between the extremes of working on a role for 2 years and doing a small project for a few months. I think the charity option is interesting—one could work for a charity in a role for a year or more to see if they’d be good at the skills involved in the role. Probably a lot of roles—e.g. sales, marketing, accounting can be tested out this way. But some roles like product management seem to be particularly hard to find in the volunteering space. I’ve scoured Google for “volunteer product management” positions and only found 3 that seemed to be open to applications. I interviewed for one of the three and it turned out be more of a project management role, where the volunteer had little agency/ownership.
That said, maybe it’s the case that the vast majority of skills can be tested in volunteer roles. While it may be hard to find a volunteer product management position, it probably would be pretty feasible for a capable person to find roles that involved customer research, project management, web/mobile analytics, marketing, etc. at volunteer orgs, so one could potentially test out all the component skills used in product management separately. In practice though, testing all these skills might be very difficult.
How many jobs are you looking at trying out? I think if you’re trying all the rotations in your company, that should give you a lot of information which you can then use to make slightly more focused decisions for your next step.
I’d push back a little on the idea that the work you’re best at is definitely where you’ll have the most impact. I agree with you that’s probably true, but I’d recommend thinking about what cause you’d like to work on before you decide exactly what kind of job you’d like to do.
Any thoughts for trying out jobs post-university?
I’m a 23 year old software engineer at a large tech company working out of NYC. I’ve thought of the following ways to try out jobs:
Rotational programs - Some tech companies offer programs where you can rotate roles every 6 months, like this one. But I’ve pretty much applied to all of them.
Full-time jobs—I could work full-time as a PM, UX Designer, university researcher etc. but this would probably require a 1-2yr commitment per job
Startup cofounder—As a cofounder I’d gain exposure to a lot of skills—sales, product, engineering etc. but I feel that I’d get such a small exposure to each function that it wouldn’t really be useful
Any other ideas or thoughts?
I’m trying to figure out what sort of work I’m best at (which I imagine is where I’ll have the most impact).
I think I’d expect you to be able to get quite a bit of information on roles without having to actually do them full time. I’d expect, for example, the level of information you get from doing some sales at a startup to give you pretty good information about whether you like sales. That’s definitely not going to be fully generalisable—sales for a startup will look different than for an established company, and things like the culture of the company you work for will make a huge difference. But taking a sales job to try it out will similarly not be fully generalisable.
One way of thinking about how to learn about different roles is to try to build a ladder of cheap tests—starting with things like reading a bit about a role, then trying to talk to people doing that role, then perhaps doing a short project. Ways of testing things that don’t go all the way to getting a role could include: doing a course, volunteering for a charity (there are usually ways of finding charities in your local area looking for volunteers, along the lines of this one for Oxford) or doing an internship (sometimes these are pretty short, so you might be able to take a couple of weeks holiday from work to do one).
Thank you for your response! My concern is that cheap tests that only last a few weeks or months, will not provide accurate information about how good one is at a role. I’ve been a software engineer almost two years now. If I were to have only worked as a software engineer for six months and stopped and reflected on whether I had the potential to get very good at the role, I might have concluded that I had little potential based on my performance. But now on month 19, I think my prospects are quite good. There was a really long onboarding and skill-building period that had to be done before I could really start contributing and determining how good I could get. While there might be shorter onboarding periods in other jobs that are more oriented around soft skills—e.g. sales, consulting, marketing, etc., I imagine it will still take a long time to be sufficiently onboarded to be able to assess one’s potential.
However, maybe there is a happy middle ground between the extremes of working on a role for 2 years and doing a small project for a few months. I think the charity option is interesting—one could work for a charity in a role for a year or more to see if they’d be good at the skills involved in the role. Probably a lot of roles—e.g. sales, marketing, accounting can be tested out this way. But some roles like product management seem to be particularly hard to find in the volunteering space. I’ve scoured Google for “volunteer product management” positions and only found 3 that seemed to be open to applications. I interviewed for one of the three and it turned out be more of a project management role, where the volunteer had little agency/ownership.
That said, maybe it’s the case that the vast majority of skills can be tested in volunteer roles. While it may be hard to find a volunteer product management position, it probably would be pretty feasible for a capable person to find roles that involved customer research, project management, web/mobile analytics, marketing, etc. at volunteer orgs, so one could potentially test out all the component skills used in product management separately. In practice though, testing all these skills might be very difficult.
Edit: Found the right link for ladder of cheap tests lower down!
How many jobs are you looking at trying out? I think if you’re trying all the rotations in your company, that should give you a lot of information which you can then use to make slightly more focused decisions for your next step.
I’d push back a little on the idea that the work you’re best at is definitely where you’ll have the most impact. I agree with you that’s probably true, but I’d recommend thinking about what cause you’d like to work on before you decide exactly what kind of job you’d like to do.