HACKER Q&A
📣 throwaway45450

Need Advice/Help related to my situation


Hello HN,

First and foremost this has been a very valuable forum and I have learned a lot from it. I will be posting from a throwaway account to remain anonymous.

So here's my situation I recently switched my job from a reputable company I didn't really needed to but I decided to jump ship before I ended up being laid off so I tried to keep my self safe but now I am in totally different situation where I joined a new company in Fintech industry for a software developer role.

Sadly the role says its software development on the paper but in reality its a role where you are mostly doing customer support and dealing with support issues working directly with the customers and I am already few months on the job and I haven't really learned much and things are pretty much disorganized.

What should I do in that situation should I start looking else where?

I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback

  👤 jonahbenton Accepted Answer ✓
It seems counter intuitive but direct customer facing roles that actually involve solving customer problems- not programming problems- can be very beneficial for personal learning and growth and for a technical person's development in a business. When the business is in a growth space and can bring new customers on board, where it is possible within the context of the business to actually solve customer problems that one is directly interfacing with- sometimes with programming/feature engineering, sometimes with other approaches- and where the environment and culture are at least not negative, and are supportive of creative problem solving and customer-oriented solutions- this can be an opportunity. All successful startups always have technical people interfacing with customers at some stage in their growth- though of course failed startups do as well. The need for specialists comes later.

You'll have to make your own mind up about whether the environment is conducive to learning and growth even if it wasn't what you were expecting but the simple fact that you are customer facing is not in itself a problem.

👤 he11ow
You're like the person who's struck gold and believes it to be tin foil.

You're being paid like a developer, but spending your days in direct contact with real customers and their real pains? You say it's a fintech, so odds are this is a specific niche of customers, with specific needs, and you get to learn about what they are?

Ask yourself if by "haven't learned much" you mean "coding stuff".

As for the "things are pretty much disorganized" - again, it's a mindset thing. If stuff is holding back making customers happy, and you find a way to make it better, that's a direct impact on the bottom line. Whether it's through better documentation, or a set of processes, or writing a bunch of scripts...that's what ownership looks like.

And sure, you're not an owner in this company, but assuming you see yourself taking ever more senior roles (with compensation to match), this kind of experience will probably help you more than writing a couple of extra buttons on an app.

👤 helph67
Be aware that it's the company's clients who ultimately provide your income. You should (in the short term at least) embrace the opportunity to get to understand the client's views of the company and its products. Confucius may inspire? https://www.open.edu/openlearn/education/12-famous-confucius...