June 17, 2023

Finding work by solving problems...

New to the industry and looking for some pointers for getting hired? Let's go.👇

1. Choose a direction.

Have you heard of ikigai? It’s the overlap of:

• What you love
• What you're good at
• What the world needs
• What people will pay you for

This is a good starting place, but it's easy to get hung up on "what people will pay you for." How do you figure that out?

This advice can be adapted to most skills — designers, project managers, etc. But let's say you're good at engineering and passionate about fixing public transportation issues. How do you turn that into a paycheck?

2. Find the watering holes.

Who has money and is focused on fixing public transportation issues and needs engineering help? Searching uncovers a few options: government agencies, startup founders, specialty agencies.

You decide you like the hands-on nature of a startup, so now you're on the hunt: Where do startup founders focused on public transportation gather?

Look for conferences focused on public transportation. Look for online forums like Slack or Discord where startup founders meet up with other startup founders. Look for mailing lists on the topic. Look for discussions about public transportation on LinkedIn or Twitter.

3. Identify key pain points.

Once you've identified places where your potential employers are gathering, start listening strategically. Pay attention to what they value. Identify their key engineering problems.

• Conferences: Who are the speakers? Who are the sponsors? What are the session topics?
• Forums: What questions are they asking? What questions come up over and over? Who is answering those questions?
• Public Discussions: Who is participating in those conversations? Which questions get the most traction?

As part of this process, you may also discover common tools or platforms used in this industry that you may need to investigate or learn. Look for communities centered around those tools and platforms. You can often forge key partnerships with smart people solving related challenges.

4. Deliver value by solving real problems.

If you find the watering holes and identify the key technical problems of your potential employer, you are far more likely to have an opportunity to solve some of their real problems, not just hypothetical problems posed in a coding bootcamp.

A lot of the work that needs doing — for product design or engineering — requires learning, experimenting, and iterating. You may not be able to do actual work on real projects at first, but if you’ve been listening at the watering holes for real problems, you can start thinking about how you would solve those real problems and, depending on the problem, come up with ways to solve them.

When I’ve gone through this, I like to think about this like a degree or certification program. I’m technically paying myself to do the work I’m doing at this point (whether from savings or another full time job), but I’m also deepening my knowledge of the space I’d like to be in, sharpening my skillset, and developing point of view. Ideally, someone will pay me to solve these problems and deepen my knowledge, but until I can connect with that someone, it’s a way to get started.

5. Document it.

Solving real problems is a great way to generate helpful (and popular) technical writing. This writing can attract potential employers and likeminded peers, and better establish your professional reputation.

⭐️ To sum up:

If I'm a startup founder considering whether or not to hire you, and you come to me with:

• an understanding of the challenges I'm facing
• a firm grasp of the tools and platforms used to solve those challenges
• a network of people who are facing similar challenges (Medium followers, mailing list subscribers, GitHub contributors, Discord users, etc.)
• a body of public technical writing that proves this (e.g. Medium, LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub docs)

That’s going to make the decision to hire you much easier.

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Cheers,

Up Next: The QWERTY phenomenon

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