Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?

I have a wide-ranging self-taught skill set as well that I've developed over the last 14 years of running my own businesses. I'll share what I'm doing from a high level as it might not be the most common path.

I've been acquiring small but promising businesses that don't have the right team in place to move them forward. I bootstrap them on my own and replace my roles as the business can afford staff. Once enough roles are replaced, I'm able to start looking for the next business. I'm on my fourth business now. Sold the first two, the third is a productized service netting seven figures, and I just acquired the fourth, which is a SaaS business that I believe has great potential.

Currently, I'm formalizing this method and will build a team that can execute it much more quickly than me alone. I'll be shooting for a new business every 12-18 months to build a portfolio. We'll have a group of partners and a small staff that will be focused on getting these acquisitions straightened out and growing, then we'll install a team to run them full-time and we'll go on to the next one.

So just taking what I've been doing for years and everything I've learned from it and scaling it up to reduce the timeframe from acquisition to growth and then operation of the business.

If OP or anyone else who identifies themself in a similar manner wants to chat, email is in my profile. I'm actively looking for people like us to work with.

Product manager is great for generalist. I was a programmer who enjoyed technical challenge, but I eventually realized if I wanted to guide the direction of projects I would have to join the business side.

The challenge is endless, diverse, and there is no perfect solution to the problem if people. It is a strange domain, but being technical is nice when working with development. Worth a try if you are in to that

Smaller companies need generalists more than big ones do. You’re likely best off in early stage startups, small agencies, or your own consulting business. There are also incubators and such who can use that skillset to help bootstrap multiple startups per year.

Make your own software product. Requires to be a jack of all trades. Coding, marketing, writing, customer support, design. Because it's only you, you don't have to feel like "being the smartest person in the room". Downside: Takes quite some time to take off.

Put in a bit of a different view point here. I was the generalist a while ago too. Worked at a consulting firm that did custom builds with small teams, so not only did everything technology wise but also interacting with clients. So did part of developer, account management, sales, dev ops etc roles. Also did everything from backend to mobile in different frameworks and environments.

I thought the same, that I was a generalist and I did also enjoy the variety. But a couple of things:

1) while I thought I was proficient in everything I actually wasn’t. When I went to a big company where I focused on a specific area is when I discovered how little I knew about the topic and how shallow my knowledge was.

2) I discovered that I enjoyed diving into a specific area and being a specialist there was also fun. Gave me a different kind of rush and ego boost, knowing I can solve deeper technical problems in a specific area.

3) you can’t be both broad and deep in everything. Best is probably aim for a T shaped skill set.

I guess short version is, maybe give specializing a go. You might discover that it’s both enjoyable and sets you up well professionally.

DevOps

I had the same issues for many years, but the past 2 positions have been official "DevOps" positions and they more often than not have me doing so many random things that require all sorts of skills. I love it. It keeps things interesting, and it makes me very valuable to the company because I can do whatever they need.

Sure, some places have a very narrow definition of DevOps, but that's usually the large companies/teams. If you can find something a bit smaller, then you'll have more of a jack-of-all-trades role. At least in my opinion.

Become a Consultant at Red Hat!

Wonderful, wonderful place to be a "jack of all trades," while also allowing you the opportunity to carve out a niche if you find you do become passionate about just one thing.

In addition to working in DevOps roles, there are a range of consulting opportunities that are diverse, which adds another layer of keeping things interesting. You can do work with small companies, large companies, government, schools, incubators. And you don't have to stay put. It's encouraged at Red Hat that you follow your passion. Allowing someone like you, to chase whatever happens to tickle your fancy at a given moment.

https://www.redhat.com/en/services/consulting

If you are a “people person” IT consulting, technical sales engineering, and other “field” based technical roles at larger companies require a lot of generalist skills. Consulting and sales engineering are a lot more technical than I expected when I moved over from product engineering. The big downside is they tend to be high travel roles.

Early to mid career, the “full stack” developer has something going for them: odds are pretty high you have 7 years’ experience rather than “1 year [7] times”.

Something i learned about myself a little bit farther in was that I wasn’t a generalist so much as I was a serial specialist (once you haven’t touched something you used the be good at for seven years, can you still claim to be good at it? Turns out I can’t).

What you list sounds quite a bit like what devops was supposed to be but nobody does it that way. Instead you should probably look at small companies. In a large one the only way to wear that many hats is to stick your nose into other people’s responsibilities. At a small company there are gaps everywhere, and people are just glad when someone can fill them.

If you have any ability to mentor, you might want to look at lead positions as well, or think about what you need to get there. That gets you some management responsibilities but you still get to make things.

I have a pretty similar story: Worked in enterprise for the last few years and recently I ended up leading and coordinating a "scrum" team in a technical lead position.

I do not spend as much time as I would like contributing to the codebase (the devs in my team do often a better job of it), but rather tend to act as a solution architect. I often bootstrap projects, do a lot of research and development, build proof of concepts, and overall push the team towards best practices.

I am very proud of some of my achievements (we are lucky enough to have freedom in the tech that we use and are currently testing out Elm for a small app, we moved the team from Java to Kotlin..) but I feel like I have lowered my value in the general market.

I would be curious to know in what form you contribute to your current team. I do not feel like my job is done here, but I am also going back and forth on whether I should get back to a more coding-oriented job, rather than doing my coding in my free time just to keep in touch with the craft.

Jack of all trades is okay, but it's best if you pick one thing that you like best and specialize in it. Your other skills will help you in your day-to-day, but the deep specialization will help you with career advancement. Also don't forget to change the "one thing" if it becomes too untrendy... PHP developers aren't making what they once did, although PHP is still used all over the place.

Are you sure you're a "jack of all trades"? It sounds like you have interests that cross different domains, but can you execute in those domains? You're not likely to get a job as a generalist if your pitch is "I like everything", unless you can demonstrate your accomplishments across a broad range, which takes years to develop. With only 7 years expereince, it is not likely you've achieved that.

That being said, I think you are a budding generalist and should continue to take focused jobs in multiple areas and develop your depth professionally.

There is a reason why generalists tend to be in the 40's and 50's: it takes a long time to get there.

EDIT: I want to point out that over 30+ years in the industry I can say that the "generalist" disposition is rare. MANY engineers just want to put their heads down, do their one task, and grind through life without ANY upsets. Seriously, I've left companies, come back after years of absence, and seen people doing the same tasks they were doing 10 years ago. That's fine if that's your jam, but having the desire to learn and grow and be new at things is RARE. So run with it!!!

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)[1]. Read the SRE book (https://landing.google.com/sre/books/). Study any gaps you have. Tailor your resume and talking points to the job/direction you want, meaning de-emphasize some things, while still showing your career path and depth. Look to work at a big-ish company that is respected for engineering quality, where you can learn from others and from existing good practices. It doesn't need to be a Google or Facebook sized company, something around the size of Dropbox, Lyft, Stripe, and similar would be good.

[1] Really, "Development (full stack), server admin, data center management, DevOps, project management, managing teams, VoIP, routing/switching" is a perfect fit for SRE, and SRE probably is the most in-demand and highly paid of all the related fields (software development, etc.).

I’m also a generalist and I’ve found my “place” as a systems integrator. The work requires me to know/learn a bunch of different systems and patterns and be able to transfer knowledge across domains. It requires that I understand infrastructure, programming, and distributed systems, as well as be able to collaborate with a bunch of different teams during the course of setting up integrations and messaging systems.

I really enjoy the work and I’m very rarely bored.

If you have something in the sciences/engineering that fascinates you enough to consider it, maybe grad school?

I guarantee that none of the IT skills you have acquired will go to waste. Plus -- by choosing a fascinating area -- you might actually NOT BE BORED!

On the other hand, if you are at all hesitant, don't go to grad school. With the wrong adviser, it will chew you up and spit you out in tiny bleeding little pieces.

Just my 2 cents...

Try to become a full-fledged mechatronics engineer and then we can talk about the woes of spreading oneself too thinly across too many disciplines, instead :)

Really appreciate all the suggestions in this thread.

Very similar story. Beyond doing the full stack development of their web properties and internal database, design, IT, networking, I've created a marketing, seo, and advertising role handling all of that to bring in clients. It's a busy day but have automated as much as possible. Currently looking for something that checks all the boxes and that'll have me. Hardest part is remote is a must. Definitely don't have an issue traveling for work but relocation would be tough. Recently bought a house in the midwest with my wife.

I think you will do very well in IT security, those who dabbled in many things can join the dots and appreciate the bigger picture, which is necessary for security due to its "cover all bases" nature

The SRE role seems to be the most wide role there is. By definition you'd have to build systems in a highly available fashion some guarantees. Systems like databases, queues and orchestrators. You will have to be part of the design of the deployment pipeline, the user management, the secrets management, etc. Hell you might end up being part of the security boundaries too (container, node, namespace?).

Since you'll most likely be part of setting up the deployment pipeline, you have to understand to some extend various git flows. You might end-up consulting developers on how to build applications that will run on a docker container, what are the best practices and what pattern the app must follow (e.g. circuit breaker) in a micro-services environment.

You surely will want to automate some management. So apart from DSLs like terraform and configuration management systems (puppet, chef, saltstack, ansible) you will have to write some API here and there, an application tailored around the need of your systems. This application might end up being written in python, ruby, golang or C.

Now, consider that you have build the CI/CD, the orchestrator, alongside the entire pipeline and logic to drive an application from staging to production. You'll most likely be on call and you'll have to deal with networking issues at TCP, HTTP or DNS level, load balancing, autoscaling, etc. You might have a say on that query which is too heavy because the data is un-indexed because, well brings down the database every now and then.

There is no role I can think of in a modern institution which has the breadth of technologies that an SRE (or DevOps engineer as they are often called) will have to gain expertise.

In short you have to be: A medium-level programmer in terms of concepts, have networking experience, learn dozens of new tech, face ever-evolving problems eventually at scale, design end-to-end systems, debug applications others written sometimes without having context, understand trade-offs of new tech stacks only to explain it to others (which might end in a PITA due to the back-and-forth but you'll eventually end up knowing lots of things you didn't ever thought about).

If you like all that, then an SRE role is ideal IMO even in medium to big corps.

NOTE: The role could be called SRE, DevOps engineer, Infrastructure Engineer and/or quite a few other things depending on where you work. Responsibilities tend to overlap significantly though.

You are not alone. I am also a big fish of your kind, was living another pond until recently, I started my own business

Fullstack Developer?

Btw big companies like FAANG interview generalists all the time.

Oh shit.

>I've been at the same small company for over 7 years. I started at the bottom, worked my way to the top after 3 years, and I've been here since. For a couple years I created new positions for myself because I hate being stagnant, but there's nothing else to do here.

I've been there and I thrive on it to this day. There are ups and downs with this, but you have something that will serve you very well if you choose to have a change of perspective/attitude.

You can either take this as a blessing or as a curse. Have you thought about going into an executive role and leading the company in a larger capacity, and helping it grow further?

At a certain point you have to drop off all of these duties that you are performing so that you can leverage the people you have around you.

You may think you still enjoy doing all of these things, but this stagnancy is going to haunt you, because there isn't an infinite growth in these areas. People, and companies, like predictability. Your voracious appetite is an anomaly. And you can't keep it up forever, either, because eventually you'll just plain get tired of it.

>I also feel like someone that is filling these roles at another company probably knows/does it better job than I can.

Questionable. There are a lot of muppets in other companies that don't know what they are doing.

Did the company grow over the years that you were there? I'm assuming it's not as "small" now as it was when you started. If so, you grew along with the company and you have a very good grasp of how to introduce and manage things within a company over time as it grows (ie. transitioning/pain points).

>What roles out there fit the skill set of someone that is good at a whole lot of things, but doesn't feel like a master/senior in any one of them?

People here are already playing Startup Bingo bullshit.

I doubt working at a startup will satisfy you, because that shit will feel like Groundhog Day much like how it currently does for you. You'll get to go through all the same nonsense over and over again.

Furthermore, the startup hustle is far riskier (with even less guarantee of a payout) than the position that you are in, because your position is much rarer. Anyone can choose to start a startup. Very few people can choose to be at the top of the food chain in a company that is alive (and healthy, I hope) after 7+ years. You didn't stumble into this position by accident.

You can leverage knowledge you don't know you have to do things that you couldn't do at a startup, all while having financial backing, a solid team and processes in place.

>My issue is I haven't had formal training in a lot of it

Most of what you know that is vital (that you've dismissed, I think) has no formal training. I can get formally trained monkeys to sling code all day if I wanted to, and while it wouldn't be done as well as I would have done it, it would satisfy the larger picture and keep things moving forward. Sacrosanct words for "engineers" who keep themselves busy writing more useless unit tests I'm sure.

>So finally to my question: what role/job title I should be looking for?

Before you jump ship, see what options at the top of the company pyramid are available for you, because if you leave and go elsewhere, and if you market yourself as a "PHP Developer" or "Systems Admin", you'll more than likely just move the clock back by 7 years and have to start all over again, in a different company, doing the same shit you've done for the last 7 years.

I have seen this so many times it isn't even funny. Talented people start off their career at a startup and then kind of camp there forever. The "Hate being the smartest person in the room" quote is classic as well. You end up being the best programmer you ever met because... well... you are at the top of your little mound. It's not even that you are necessarily the smartest or best in your group. But who is going to challenge you? It's a no go from the start.

Young (in experience) programmers need to move around a fair bit early in their careers, IMHO. It's good for getting perspective and seeing things from different points of view. But it isn't all roses and sunshine. It will be very challenging in a number of ways, but if you don't do it you will stagnate.

So what should you do? Get a job in an area and do your best. Don't try to do everything. Try to learn from others. Get to see their perspective. Do it wrong many, many times so that you can really understand why it is wrong. Or why (surprisingly) it is not.

But most important of all, don't try to do it all. I'm sorry to say this, but you are not a big fish in a small pond (yet). You are a fish that doesn't yet know what "big" means, or else you would have asked a very different question. What potential you have to grow will be determined by the attitude with which you take your next steps.

Try freelance focusing on making MVPs or early-stage products. I’ve always been a jack of all trades, and it never felt like an asset until I started freelancing. Oh, the 3D engine you want me to optimize is Typescript, not C# as advertised or C++ as I was hoping to talk you into? Guess I’m learning Typescript today, ... Oh, your iOS app needs an AWS server set up? Never had to use AWS before (I do mostly apps, not servers, and it was a native iOS project), but some old Linux sysadmin knowledge enables me to jump in and get something running.

You’ll inevitably need to learn something brand new, and you get to pick your clients. After a few successful projects you start looking really appealing as a generalist.

Try Toptal or Moonlight, post on the monthly HN who wants a freelancer post, and reach out locally for clients.

Two things that come to mind are sales engineer (tech skills, sales, training) and consultant (tech skills, project management, team management, sales). If you've worked with a particular software vendor's products, it could help you get your foot in the door as a sales engineer for that vendor. You could also do technology consulting at one of the Big Four or a similar consulting firm. And you can leverage your reputation and network to go back into industry if consulting isn't a long-term fit. (A few years ago, I was in a similar place career-wise and went to one of the Big Four for a while. It was a good experience for me because it basically forced me to improve my weaker skills, and it exposed me to new domains outside of my areas of expertise.) The downside is that you'll travel a lot in either job.

Either a Site Reliability Engineer (SW-SRE/SA-SRE), startup founder or farmer. ;) (It's also true: farmers often do welding, machining, industrial maintenance (hydraulic/electrical/mechanical), surveying, geology, botany, chemistry, accounting, marketing and more.)

Work is real experience, don't discount it. :thumbs up emoji here:

If you're worried about knowledge gaps, here's a badass career development project -> self-pace audit a quality CS degree:

- Find the required course list for a particular university, let's say MIT or CalTech.

http://catalog.mit.edu/degree-charts/computer-science-engine...

http://cms.caltech.edu/academics/ugrad_cs

- Select a sequence of courses based on their requirements.

- Go through each and every course syllabus and textbook to learn the big ideas.

- Write and keep notes in your own words to summarize each concept.

- If you get stuck on any concept, scour the internet, MOOCs and youtube until you get it. As a last resort, SO/HN/Reddit.

- Do the syllabus homework at a minimum.

PS: I was self-taught (Pascal, assembly, C89, C++, and Java), built beige PCs, was an assistant manager at a software store (Egghead), and had a sysadmin consulting company installed an ISDN modem, made NIX and Windows place nice and helped port a BWR/PWR simulator from NIX to Win32 before I was 18. Then I spent 10 years, money and took on some debt to get a degree that ultimately proved worthless trying to appease HR people and family... don't do that.

Look for jobs that are outside your comfort zone. Leverage your existing experience to convince a new company you can do X even though you've never done X, but based on your history of doing Y which is related but not the same. You didn't know Y when you started it either, but you got Y done and know the impact on the business.

Look for Systems Engineering(not a title used much anymore TBH), DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineer, Developer Experience engineer(or whatever).

A lot of these roles will be very cross discipline and non-functional. Always be on the lookout for cog-in-machine roles; DevOps can be "The buck stops at you for our companies site reliability" or "you write Chef cookbooks and test kitchen scripts all day".

Don't let anyone tell you your skill set doesn't exist. Let's face it, most college grads do the bare minimum of learning for their degree. Most people don't to TOO much more than what they need to keep their career viable. Being a "generalist" is like taking 20 electives you don't need to graduate; it's inconceivable to many people. Mediocre engineers and specialists will rail against the idea to protect their ego. Generalists will rail against specialist value to protect their ego. Don't get too caught up in the BS.

Be prepared to be pigeon-holed. Nearly every person you meet at your new employer will see your last job "title" and generalize you. Typically the only exceptions will be the recruiter and maybe, incredibly maybe, the hiring manager.

GL/HF

I gave this advice just today: Don't call yourself "A jack of all trades" on a resume or in an interview.

Instead refer to yourself as a "Swiss Army knife" or something.

The reason is that "A jack of all trades." is often (mentally at least) followed by "Master of none".

After 9 years as a programmer at a small polyglot dev shop, I moved to a publicly-traded industrial hardware firm as a systems engineer a few years ago. There's a bit of overlap between programming and systems engineering (requirements analysis, testing and test design, failure cause analysis, et c.), but I knew nothing about hardware. (I was very open about this, and they hired me anyway. So far, so good.)

On the balance, I've found it to be remarkably similar to being a software generalist. You have to know something about everything and everything about something (I stretch a little, but my core competency is programming; the rest I learn as I go). You get to be engaged at all points by all people throughout the product development life-cycle. For my part, it's taught me a lot and definitely made me a more critical thinker.

Downsides include more red tape, similar mentoring problems due to personnel churn, and occasional tensions due to aligning more on shareholder than employee goals. Our project management is also a bit dicey.

I've toyed with getting back into programming full time, and the career switch has cost me a bit there. While I think my coding chops are still decent (I program daily and grab a few minutes sometimes for personal projects at home), my vocabulary has suffered, and that definitely cost me in recent interviews.

Learn about distributed computing patterns and Protocol or Open Cooperativism? https://ceptr.org / https://developer.holochain.org, https://dat.foundation/, https://scuttlebutt.nz?

I feel pretty much the same and have recently applied to a position of Logistician with Doctors Without Borders.

I got really surprised when I first read about the attributions. I had never seen all my interests forming such a harmonic whole before.

Lots of great suggestions here, including JOAT doing better at small or startup companies. One other thought I'd like to add is, if what you actually dislike about your current situation is the isolation, then you should start a group for JOAT's, and set up a forum or other method in which such people can lean on each other's experience and skills. I see from the responses to this question that there are a lot of people in your situation, and it may be that what is needed is a professional organization tailored to their type of role. This would fix the issues of brainstorming, someone to ask for advice on a tech decision, sharing war stories, etc.

On the other hand, if you're really just looking for a different employer, then either find a similar position at a different small company, or go DevOps, because that is the one right now where the need is so desperate that they will hire someone with mixed experience instead of insisting on a specialist. But, beware, people who fell naturally into being a JOAT, often don't like becoming specialists after a year or so.

This resonates strongly with me. I founded a startup as the technical co founder and now do a mix of product and engineering management. I agree with many of the others here: a small company / startup as an early engineer or a technical product manager sounds like it would fit well. Or, if you have the desire, founding your own company means you get to wear many hats.

I consider myself to be a bit of a Jack although I've been doing database development / design / data mostly for the last 2 years. I've also been doing Java, JavaScript, C, .Net, mobile, some admin, DBA.

I'm currently working as a technical architect that allows me to do some low level work but also work across several areas/technologies. A senior support engineer might also do the same. I've noticed quite few integration jobs which might involve working across technologies. I'd apply for technical roles in your desired pay range and location where you have some of the skills and see what happens. You don't really know too much about jobs until you get there.

Some people really value a diverse skillset and others just want you to churn out x lines of Java code per day...

I'm in a similar situation, with a similar mindset and education (i.e. none)

Sure, a broad skillset would make an excellent case for starting your own business, but I think that being a "jack of all trades" is a sign of a certain personality: great vision and engineering talent, but lack of disciplin to really follow through.

Trying to start my own business has been the most frustrating chapter of my life. I would drop projects regularly to work on something more exciting. I never got anything done until I randomly found a job with a good boss.

Good management is crucial. Someone who can keep up with new ideas and who can delegate the burden which comes with project work. The field is in my view irrelevant; you would pick up the skills anyway.

This sounds like a full stack skillset. You want to "Jack up your trades"? Break into something else.

The next closest thing is Phone Stack Programming! That space has a lot of interesting challenges, and can leverage your current skills.

A good way to be the dumbest person in the room is to diverge hard. NLP, Security/Privacy, Image/Audio/Language Processing, Compilers, Operating Systems, Statistical Modeling.

I consider myself a Jack of all trades from the opposite side. I had 8 years industry work before my first opportunity to Full Stack. Hard switches are hard in every direction, but I am a big fan of "drowning to the top".

I'm also a generalist, and I've been wondering if it might be a good idea, for my next job, to only market myself using one of my skills.

My role at the moment involves doing several different things, some of which I'm not very good at, which tends to make my work quite difficult.

I find myself being envious of other members of the team who only need to do one thing, and don't even need to do it that quickly (they probably get paid the same, too). If I had their lives, I think to myself, I wouldn't find work so exhausting.

You need to look into the book 'Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World' as it might boost your spirit a bit and also give you some ideas.

You can do any 'job'. If you have communication skills you are particularly well-suited to be a leader coordinating a team of specialists, connecting them and finding value in the overlap of their specialities.

Most of the people are too narrow now in my opinion. It is your great advantage that you can see a bigger picture than an overspecialized PHP Developer for example.

Lots of great suggestions in this thread.

Another you might consider is starting your own business.

This path is not for most people. However, being successful as an entrepreneur does require a wide breadth of knowledge, and plenty of new things you'd need to always learn.

If you go this route, keep your (current) full-time job while you start building it on the side. Your one and only test of when you're ready to go solo is your ability to make consistent profit.

I'm a generalist too, or as someone else put it - a serial specialist. You could just stagnate until you retire. That's basically what I'm doing, but for slightly different reasons.

Promotions and ratings at my company are very subjective and political. I've had quite a few people over the past 4 years thinking that I was a level higher than I actually am (I'm a dev, people have even mistaken me a tech lead), one of them even offered me a next level position. The subject and technology were not interesting and it was a dead end career-wise (prior to my acceptance ofstagnation). But I have also had a couple of managers that say stuff like 'not everyone has the potential to get to the next level' or 'I hired you because I could see you being a senior dev or tech lead in a couple years, but I don't think that anymore'.

Basically, you might be better off just accepting that you hit your peak and enjoy the brief moments that you find yourself doing something interesting rather than torment yourself with looking for the next promotion or change.

Not what I'm up to presently, but I would advise you to not worry about title and really shoot for company size and sector. In a nutshell, big companies hire specialized cogs, small companies hire general purpose cogs. If you want to be able to roam about and do everything, go for companies that are small but need the skills of a generalist to get them going.

Project managers with technical skills are worth gold in product companies (possibly in other companies as well).

Run a few product implementations at customer side and there will be no monotony.

If you grow older and start appreciating more the routine in your life you can go into product management using the knowledge accumulated on customer side implementations and finally consulting.

In my previous job, I was a data scientist at a start up company, and developed skillsets in a few areas, mostly by working as a technical lead on projects by myself. When the time came for my next role, the most important advice I got was to take the time to figure out what I want to do next, based on the skills I had.

Given that, I ended up applying to jobs that satisfied two criteria. 1) I'd be on a good technical team, and not working as a sole developer on a project 2) The company has a great learning opportunities and mentorship.

From my experience, "jack of all trades" usually just means "all the things we need, at company X, right now", and one "jack of all trades" or multi-skilled position may not overlap with another, it's entirely context dependent. Thus, these positions tend to evolve from something else in smaller, less structured companies, and one option for you would be just trying to join a similar company!

I agree with others that a smaller company seems the best fit since they need generalists. Potentially a manager role might be good if you've got the non-technical skills for it. That lets you hire people for areas you no longer want to be hands on with.

As an example, at my current job over the last two years I've done data engineering, devops, sysadmin, security, machine learning, backend api, people management, product management, project management, and probably some things I forgot about.

It does help to have a core set of skills that you are particularly good at and experienced. Mine is data engineering followed by machine learning and devops (devops being a recent addition). I avoid boredom in those areas by building better systems at every company based on past experience and the specific business goals of the company.

As a Research Software Engineer (https://us-rse.org/what-is-an-rse/) you will have a chance to work on challenging projects that require wide technical experience and a lot of learning.

I was just like this in the laser field. As an engineer, my skills were middling but my physics was good. I hung around the product managers, who were chemistry PhD fraternity boys. In return for understandable answers for the tougher customer questions, they taught me product management.

> Development (full stack), server admin, data center management, DevOps, project management, managing teams, VoIP, routing/switching, training, sales... the list goes on.

I was a 'generalist' for most of my career. I had started, run and sold a successful business that required me to touch all parts of the business.

Until a Sales Director absolutely schooled me in the theory that underpinned his work. He seemed insulted that I claimed to be proficient in sales. It was an insult to his specialism.

I would suggest you really test yourself in one of these areas before claiming you're proficient. I've never met a single person who was proficient in all the above. I've met plenty of people who could trudge along in those areas.

Have you worked in ETL? With AI/machine learning work, it's probably the most important non-AI aspect of a workflow. Getting data to an expected format is not always an easy task, and it requires knowing a lot of different things to get it right.

Presales consulting (also sometimes called Systems Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer, Sales Consultant or Solutions Architect) can be a very fun and rewarding job with lots of personal growth (but of course there’s a spectrum). So if you love technology, sales and Business you could explore that. You’re basically part of a sales function within an organisation and your role in the sale centres heavily around solution definition, architecture and security (incl objection handling), business case creation, (some) detailed product demonstrations, vision/thought leadership etc. I’ve been doing it for like 15 years or so and love it.

I would market yourself as a generalist. Small and medium sized companies under rapid growth need generalists more than anything; especially if your soft skills are good and you can mentor/lead other engineers.

I went through triplebyte as a generalist and it literally changed my life; I had lots of competing offers well beyond what I thought was in my reach.

My role is now 'engineering manager' but I was hired as a staff software engineer; but into an org on a stack I had zero experience with.

If I did it again I would probably do the same thing; but I would also be looking at sales engineering roles; something I wasn't really aware of at the time.

Look into the security field. Your broad base of knowledge from bottom to top would be helpful.

Find a great security team and hope that they will bring you on and mentor you.

Security is a great specialty for you in that it is very broad and always changing.

Well, your ultimate goal should be to be an entrepreneur or a the technical co-founder (and #2); but that's not only easier said than done, it's not for everyone. Is it you? You and only you can know that answer.

In the meanwhile your best bet is to market yourself to cash-strapped startups, pre-prototype to hack together the product/service. You might have to work for a dozen or so start-up that fail before finding the rising star; In such case make sure that you get enough equity so that, by the time "professional management" comes in, you're protected by your equity.

In my experience, the job market looks for a specific niche. You are well compensated for a niche technology instead of generalist "jack of all trades". (e.g Salesforce, AWS, Mulesoft, CyberSecurity etc)

Even though a person has experience with lot of tools and languages, I believe it would be better to market yourself with specific set of tools/technology/language which are in demand. This has been my experience and worked out well.

If you have any questions, my email is in profile. Good luck with your search.

I will run contrary to many suggestions already here. It seems (from the 3 example titles you give) that you want to stay technical/individual contributor. If that’s the case, you can absolutely take your breadth of skills to a big company, whether an established tech company or a technical team within eg the F500. I personally identify as a generalist also, and I (through complete accident and happenstance) moved into cybersecurity (not appsec to be clear, appsec is a team within cyber). Basically one of the most lucrative niches out of my broader range of experiences. It has worked out well for me.

Tl;dr - figure out which of your experience areas align with an area that’s either lucrative to you or of high interest for you for other reasons, and pursue that at a large company. At higher technical levels, your soft-skill and cross-dept experience will further accelerate your career.

Not so much a role as the team I think a lot of people with wide reaching skill sets enjoy. The platform team. Basically responsible for cross cutting concerns between teams. Lots of infrastructure. Lots of defining best practices. Lots of jumping into projects to save them. Team kind of ends up being the roving jack of all trades team that dives into really hard projects that no one feature team has the skill set or time to focus on.

Hey. Do you want to work with a startup going through good scaling up growth? Also, want to learn from your experience on VoIP and scaling the infra. Let me know?

I have a similar background and went into technical management. I found that i didnt like the people management side of things and preferred delivering new things to help the business and so i shifted to a project management role. I now am involved in delivering cutting edge new solutions for our business but dont need to be hands on, my tech knowledges also helps in discussions with engineers - hope this perspective helps.

Try looking for a top digital agency. I know they get a bad rap from HN, but good ones do a ton of interesting work for a big variety of different clients and product types and there is usually wide open opportunities to dip your toes in pretty much every aspect of every kind of digital product. They're also active in a ton of different markets so don't need to be in SF or NYC.

I have a similar situation, I enjoy building electronics, increasingly analogue, projects, Finding efficient ways of deploying hardware (Wireframe spot welded). Using interesting software (Like M/Mumps, have a look you will be impressed). Really am a jack of all trades master of none, but I have a lot of fun. I dont have a lot of billable work which is a bit of a problem at times

If you have some discipline and can focus on projects you are the perfect candidate for starting your own business. As a business owner you need to be able to do many different things as you start out. Eventually you'll need to focus on one role but that's in the future and you can always start another business if you feel the need.

Did you ever think about becoming an entrepreneur? You have an interesting set of skills that would give you at least some start, of course, you would have to learn some things about marketing and branding. Check indiehackers.com maybe you get some ideas. I have the same problem as you, it seems product managers and CEOS have multiple skills.

You could consult if you enjoy the human relationship and light project management aspects of being a jack of all trades.

SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) or CPE (Client Platform Engineering) or DevOps.

All of these will use 50-60% of your skills.

Any you can shift your focus to. I don't see a future being a JOAT, especially not if you're transcending vast ecosystems like Windows, Linux or proprietary and open source.

Choose one such ecosystem to focus on, but within that can be many exciting things like Javascript and Python or Rust and Embedded.

You should consider starting your own company, or being a CTO for an early stage co.

The last time I felt this way I went to go work on VR software and learned all about 3D graphics, game development, and real-time networking in games for a few years. I recommend it.

Product management is an excellent role, the jobs are not easy to land. You often need specific product execution and delivery experience.

In addition to job title, consider also company size/phase. Small companies benefit from and appreciate generalists more.

Smaller company. Master their domain. Streamline all their business processes. CTO role or something like that.

Why don't you just do contract short term work? This is where a jack of all trades has best prospects.

Depends what your trades are. Devops/security jack of all trades are super in demand for consulting.

Kind of sounds like you could be in a leadership role. Do you like working with people?

Surprised that no one has mentioned solutions architect. Sounds like a good fit to me.

quality assurance, either straight up manual testing or automation. in my experience, way less stressful than any other hat i,ve worn: sysadmin, netadmin, coder. salary will be about 80% of a dev, still decent.

To me, all of those roles are the same “IT” job. I’d expect all of them from the same person. There are plenty of people that are bobsleigh racer butcher quantum physicist night club deejay art critics applying for C# financial database platform architect roles.

Consultant, and develop some specific targeted cvs to give companies.

You are not alone. I am just in another small pond.

Early startups love jack of all trades

Move into managerial/sales role.

the full quote goes: jack of all trades master of none but better than a master of one.

Maybe launch your own company?

Solutions Architect

sysadmin is the standard one. CEO is the other. :)

Support engineer

> Hate being the smartest person in the room.

More likely than not this is not true. Dunning-Kruger effect and all that.

Especially if, by your own assessment, you are "proficient" in devops and sales.

CEO

Another "jack of many trades here". I can write super fast assembly, can do db, networking, web, sysadmin stuff. If anybody is looking to hire for part time remote work.