HACKER Q&A
📣 thejedifromny

If I learn MapReduce or Golang, would you hire me?


I am 38M, with 17 years of work-experience in marketing and sales. I feel like my career is going nowhere. I am not a programmer but I like reading about technology. I visit HN daily and have been in the technology industry all my life (tech journalist --> content mgmt --> marketing --> sales --> client servicing --> marketing).

I went through this discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36104168) and the article, I was just wondering: If I start learning some of the top paying computer science skills (MapReduce, Golang), will I be hired and get a good well-paying job?

I am currently earning 55k USD annually in a European country working as a marketing manager in a venture funded B2B tech startup. Before that I was at Director level but in a developing country, earning 33k USD annually at an IT services company, heading client servicing. I'm a graduate from a normal university and not from a traditional top-tier university.

Thank you.

  👤 smt88 Accepted Answer ✓
Currently there are hundreds of thousands of tech workers (some with 10+ years of experience) who are being laid off. It's possibly the worst time in the last 10 years to make this transition.

You have a lot of other things working against you when competing for jobs, too. You might be able to beat your current salary in the US, where programmers are paid much better and there are more tech companies, but I doubt you'd do better in Europe.

Also looking at that list, the highest-paying jobs aren't high-paying because of the technology. It's because of what you're doing with that technology. All of the top things are adjacent to infrastructure engineering, managing massive amounts of data, etc. I'd guess that a lot of those salaries are coming from places like Netflix or Google.

You can learn Go (and should, it's very easy), but understanding how to configure, automate, and maintain things like MapReduce, Elasticsearch, and Kubernetes in a real production environment is not going to happen soon. Some of that stuff is so frustrating and complicated that most programmers don't want to touch it. You have to know a ton about a lot of different domains.

👤 Alexanfa
I think you could apply to product manager roles within your speciality and do very well… for instance at a sales saas tool
👤 codingdave
Yes and no -- learning news skills is a good start, but is not how you get hired. Applying the learned skills and showing that you know how to solve problems with them... that is what will get you hired.

Your experience likewise won't directly help you to switch careers, but it probably gives you a ton of insights into ways things could be done better.

So learn skills, think about problems and solutions, and make some simple projects to show what you are capable of. If you can do that, you can probably get hired.

👤 jantypas2
No one hires for technical bullet points -- that used to be thing in the 90s where engineers had a page full of "I know this language/framework". We found it didn't really tell us anything -- the languages and frameworks move so quickly, no recruiter or manager can keep them stragiht. If you want to get noticed for an interview, show me examples what you've actually done, and how it had a positive impact, or, show me what you've created -- cool and inspirational always wins. A professional photographer doesn't go into the interview with "I know this camera" or "I am an expert on lighting"-- that comes up in the interview, but they lead with "Here is my portfolio. As you see, I am particularly focussed on wild animal photography." If the company needs that, the rest is detail.