HACKER Q&A
📣 hnthrowaway0315

What kind of programming jobs involve some travelling?


Hi friends, Canadian here.

I have experience in Cloud Ops + ETL engineer but would like to introduce some travelling into work. I know consultants tend to work on a lot of different projects so they travel a lot. What other choices do I have? Is there any non-tech industry that I should reach out to?

By saying travelling I mostly mean out of city travelling (e.g. Toronto<->Edmonton).


  👤 pabs3 Accepted Answer ✓
Open source companies often require their employees to present their work at conferences, along with a yearly or more often conference for the company. For eg, Igalia and Collabora do this. Some resources for open source jobs here:

https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources


👤 version_five
Lots of on-site work, companies like Accenture or Deloitte will have jobs like this, but my impression is they don't treat developers very well (ie see them as very junior to the businessy folk). The shots are always called by someone who doesn't understand the technology side of the work.

You could also try e.g. BCG or McKinsey (quantum black) but the same will apply. The challenge is, it may be hard to turn it off and on, like you'll get assigned to fly to Minneapolis every week for 6 months, not just the occasional client visit. With the fancier (McKinsey) type firms you're more likely to get variety, but you'll travel every week

You could also consider looking at solutions architect type jobs. Especially at startups there may be some that let you go to client sites and do software work, but it will focus more on configuring for the client (at a startup that may still mean fresh coding). Some may be closer to just pre-sales, you'll have to ask a lot of questions in the interview


👤 cratermoon
I've seen titles like sales engineer, product support engineer, technical support engineer involving lots of customer travel. The down side is that you're not usually involved in much new work, mostly providing technical expertise alongside a sales pitch or going in after a sale to hold the customer's hands. I remember the time at a job long ago that IBM sent two sales people and a tech guy to try to get my employer to not only buy the product they probably needed, but a whole lot of other IBM products that the layered on in the sales pitch.

Worst case, you'll end up being asked to draw the Seven Red Lines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg


👤 larrykubin
Developer Relations / Developer Advocate jobs involve a lot of travel.

👤 _448
The term you are looking for is TME i.e Technical Marketing Engineer.