Are there any ways to look for tech jobs which are more social and have more in person time?
I've considered going into hardware so I have to be physically present in a lab with other people, but is there another way?
A lot of consulting is technical planning and brainstorming with leadership. I used to have that kind of role, and you had a mix of heads-down work prototyping and heads-up work trying to understand requirements and think with different leaders on the best path forward.
Related: Staff or Principle Eng
Similar role to consulting above, but you're in house and often part of leadership...
It's not easy to find people who are personable but can also explain the underlying tech clearly to potential customers... and the best tech in the world isn't with a hill of beans if it isn't being used by sutomers. If your an inherently social, dependable and trustworthy person, I believe the sales part of it comes naturally.
This way you set your own limits on the environment, rather than joining a new place that might be too much of an over correction six months from now.
Even in the time before wide spread WFH this was an issue, during good times it feels great to go into work and get all your social needs met but when layoffs come or companies collapse suddenly that great work friend everyone loves gets let go and in a few more weeks they effectively don't exist anymore.
It's great if you can meet people at work and create a real friendship (I've certainly done that). Now that you're remote you can put more time into keeping up with those people. Schedule lunches, video calls etc.
Get to know your neighbors better, join local interest groups, schedule video chats with friends you haven't chatted with in a while that live far away, and make sure to get lunch with local friends whenever you can.
It will be a bit of transition but ultimately you'll have a much richer social life and honestly enjoy work more as well since you have more outlets in the day that have nothing to do with your 9-5.
I work in a technical role and I miss my colleagues immensely. I feel best when I am around people I know, and when my job entails keeping a small group of people happy.
Working in sales, consulting, or relationship management is about working with strangers.... of balancing the joint demands of both your employer and the client. I get very self-critical and anxious in these roles.
I work in a platform engineering organization on internal tools, which means basically the entire engineering org are my "customers". At the moment I'm in a weekly meeting on OS-level configuration. I started a weekly meeting on our build system which has turned into a reading group of Google's SWE book. Our larger group (everyone under my boss's boss) has a weekly presentation series. I have a variety of less-frequent meetings, including a 1:1 with another engineer in a very different part of the org, some cross-team meetings, etc. And I regularly have all sorts of ad-hoc meetings. I do interviews pretty frequently. So it feels like I'm spending most of the day talking to people; I actually have very few blocks of time for writing code (let alone reviewing code or reading/writing docs) by myself.
I mean, maybe I'm just an introvert who's in an extraverted culture, and to you, this would also count as isolated and boring :)
If you're interested in in person time with the general public along with office people, consider healthcare.
Some of the mid-sized and smaller-sized healthcare companies offer technical people lots of opportunities to interface with the actual people who benefit from their work.
For example, my company does healthcare largely for the poor and underserved. Every person in the company from C-level down to button pushers like myself is required to attend public-facing events a certain amount of time each year.
In my case, while I'm helping these people in other ways, I also get to actually ask them face-to-face "What kind of computer do you have?" and to look at the actual phones they carry with them and to experience the kind of internet service they have in their neighborhoods. This hand-on intelligence is invaluable. Server logs are great in theory, but they are no substitute for actual field work.
Even with the 'rona scattering a lot of us behind-the-scenes people to the four winds, remote workers are still required to put in a certain amount of face time with the clients, whether that means flying back to the mother ship or driving to work regional events.
If general public isn't your thing, get into internal IT support. Walking around a call center watching people doing their jobs helps you think about the systems you build in ways that plowing through trouble tickets doesn't.
I have seen hardware shops that are eerily quiet and sparsely populated, so being in an office is not a precursor for social interaction.
I'm not the most social person in the room, but I've met so many fascinating people through this channel. Even though it's not the same as sitting with those people in the same room, I was surprised to see how much energy, satisfaction, inspiration I get from those calls.
It also makes it easier for me to meet people IRL and helps my consulting gig.
Half of us are "in person people" and the other half have never been happier working remote, so we're doing it team by team. My team has decided to be in-person. We show up 3+ days a week, have in-person happy hours, grab lunch together, and optimize our meetings for in-person. I love it.
But now hiring for this team has become impossible. We have other teams that will take on remote engineers, but ours looking for someone who also prefers in-person is just filtering so many people so early in the pipeline.
On the surface, that would seem to indicate it is a polarizing topic.
It's too risky for everyone involved. Conduct which is okay at a bar or a party has no place in an office.
That said I have made great friends at work. This should be a bonus. If you want to make friends and date do that at a bar , alumni events , concerts, etc.
If you step to a girl and ask if you can buy her a beer at a pub, the worst that happens is she'll say no. If you do it at work, you might come off as rude , seriously don't date co workers. It's easy for HR to get rid of you.
For my part I've had a gay co worker aggressively hit on me. At a bar I'd laugh this off ( or even let him buy me a drink ). At work I felt very uncomfortable. No I don't want to know I look like your husband, why is that an appropriate thing to say in the office!