Tech Job Search Buzzwords and What They Really Mean
Finding a job in technology is difficult. Before you go hunting, you need to have the right skills, the right contacts, and a carefully crafted resume. What you don’t need are the often complex, semi-meaningless job titles and buzzwords floating around in many job descriptions. Let’s take a look at a few of the most abused ones and what they actually mean to real people.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but just a few that caught our attention. They have been filtered out of their inevitable Silicon Valley origins to the rest of the world, not thanks to human resources and hiring managers who want their companies to appear “trendy” or “relevant” in the language of startups. You’ve probably heard them before.
Growth hacking
” Growth Hacking ” has only been around for about five years, but it has been replaced by the word “guru” in almost every sloppy marketer’s bio on LinkedIn or Twitter. The hot new job (especially in business or marketing) is to be a “growth hacker,” that is, to say that you are truly a marketing professional and your job, as without the fancy name, is to grow your business.
However, this phrase has not always been a buzzword. When Sean Ellis posted this phrase on his blog back in 2010, he lamented the lack of marketing professionals specifically using analytics and data to creatively drive their business growth. He described this role as follows:
A growth hacker is someone whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized for potential impact on scalable growth.
… A common characteristic seems to be the ability to take responsibility for growth and entrepreneurial drive (taking this responsibility is risky). The right growth hacker will have a burning desire to associate your target market with your must-have solution. They must be creative to find unique ways to drive growth in addition to testing / developing methods that have been proven by other companies.
An effective growth hacker also needs to be disciplined to follow the growth hack process by prioritizing ideas (their own and others in the company), testing ideas, and having sufficient analysis to know which tested growth drivers should be retained and which ones should be reduced. The faster this process can be repeated, the more likely they are to find scalable and repeatable ways to grow their business.
Ellis’s description is solid enough, but if growth hacking is not something that marketing professionals do (and requires a whole new role to be created), what are marketing professionals doing ? After all, if the goal of marketing is to grow your business by connecting with customers, isn’t that description — something that marketing professionals have been doing for decades — not right for them too? The answer, depending on who you ask, is that growth hackers have technical, not business, background, or use data to make decisions instead of … what marketers would otherwise use.
That’s it: there is no real difference between a modern professional marketer with modern skills and a “growth hacker,” aside from the name and the quirky connotation that the phrase “aspiring, ready, aspiring entrepreneur” carries. The real problem with this buzzword is that people call themselves “growth hackers” to differentiate themselves from “marketing professionals” or “business analysts” who use the same skills. Just rename yourself, work for a startup or tech company, and enjoy the shine as one of the cool new guys. You can attend hot new conferences and talks, join new professional associations, and read tech blog posts about how important you are and how marketing will never be the same because you are here.
Even if it all started differently, at the moment the name is a difference without a difference. In a way, you could use this to your advantage – some start-up somewhere will inevitably announce that it is hiring “growth hackers” when in reality they are simply expanding their marketing team. Know your jargon, and even if you have a resume that has been busy with marketing activities for a long time, you will be a great candidate – just rename yourself as a “growth hacker” and end it.
DevOps
It’s a buzzword, but the job itself isn’t really a joke. DevOps describes both the software development methodology and the type of IT professional who works together in an integrated team of engineers, operators, and developers. Short for development and operations, DevOps names a subset of software development, systems administration, and engineering that has always existed, but not formally. The goal of companies hiring DevOps engineers is to build a team responsible for creating great software on the development side, which is then properly tested and implemented by engineers, and then supported and supported by operations. Ideally, communication between all of these groups is high, and people from these groups may even work together or in the same team.
Again, this is not something that tech companies didn’t grapple with before DevOps was a thing, but it is a new approach to breaking down walls that are too common and lack of communication between these groups, except at the very top. This is the problem most organizations with any technical staff face, even if the company is not a technology company. By working closely together on development, design, and operations, companies hope to build, test, and deploy faster, and respond quickly to feedback. They also want to avoid situations where operations don’t have the tools to support a product the developers have proposed to them, or engineers don’t have time to test the platform before it launches, or where developers will support something that operations should be (but can »T for any reason.)
With that in mind, DevOps can be an exciting ring to toss a hat on if you’re on the hunt for your next tech gig. Whether you’re a developer, engineer, sysadmin, or support professional, working in DevOps can put you in a pretty hot and dynamic area … depending on the company. As with everything else, do your homework, talk to others in the same area, and of course, ask interview questions. In some companies, DevOps is a methodology, not a team. In other cases, it is a small group of people who need to manage one or more bosses or priorities. It might seem like mentioning “DevOps Engineer” on your resume would be appealing, but it still needs to be accompanied by the experience and work environment you’re looking for.
Full stack
Ah, full-cycle engineer: almost every company wants to. This phrase is easy to find if you’ve looked at job boards or LinkedIn profiles. But here’s the problem: A full-stack developer or engineer like the unicorn probably doesn’t really exist – at least not in the way these companies are asking for.
The great feature of Scott Hadfield, full stack developer is a myth , Medium explains it this way:
What is expected of a full stack developer goes far beyond the capabilities of the average person. They need to understand how to scale the application to handle millions of hits per day (or hour?), What does pets versus cattle mean and why it matters, why they should choose MongoDB over MySQL (or vice versa), CAP theorem. PaaS, IaaS, a dozen configuration management tools whether it makes sense to build an application in Rails, Django, WordPress, Swift or a combination of them based on requirements, microservices versus monolithic applications, and two dozen other things.
… As I said, there are people who are capable of this, I know some of them. But I know a lot more great developers, designers and project managers who don’t even come close to a full stack, and even more who call themselves a full stack, but can barely identify more than half a dozen words in the stack I posted. above (which maybe even skips layers like JRE or Node.js), not to mention the interaction between two or more components. And this is where the problem arises.
In almost all cases where I use the full stack (especially in job postings), the actual meaning of what the company is looking for is simply “someone awesome.”
The graph above, also taken from Hadfield’s article, gives a good indication of what the “stack” includes in the “full stack”. If your eyes fade just by reading this, don’t worry. This does not mean that you are not suitable for positions where overzealous HR professionals, managers, or startup founders have cut it into the job requirements. It simply means that you should take a closer look at the tools the company actually uses to make sure you are the right fit or have experience with them. If you need to dig more to find out more about the company (or better yet talk to insiders) to find out, do so. Unfortunately, this buzzword hides the real demands of a potential job.
Hadfield goes on to explain in his article what is true of many buzzwords — they are no different from “guru,” “ninja,” or “rock star,” they simply mean “good at what you want. I’m good at it, ”without a demonstration. Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to update your LinkedIn bio or resume title to say you’re a full-time developer. However, this means that you should not shy away from applying for this job if you know you are qualified.
Content marketing
Content marketing , like growth hacking, is marketing focused. In this case, it is a rather fashionable term for “uses media tactics to advertise.” It’s not that bad in itself, it’s just that this area (and the industry) is full of bad actors. There is nothing wrong with using the same tools that everyone else on the Internet uses (like blogs, videos, podcasts, etc.) for marketing purposes. If you can write really engaging articles, make really interesting videos, and record podcasts that people want to listen to – and do it all in the service of the company you are trying to promote – then you have more options.
Unfortunately, this buzzword takes on a mysterious and dark turn when looking for a job in the field. So many “content marketing” concerts focus less on “doing good things” and more on “hassling your client’s name and message for the money.” At Cracked, Mark Hill’s demonstration of one of these “content marketing” talks reveals what such jobs actually have to offer. Of course, there are exceptions, but they are always one or two steps along this side: “write an article that will be interesting and relevant to our clients or the people we want to be our clients”, not “write a brochure and convince influential people … sites to publish it “or” pay the Internet to talk about us. ” The latter is often referred to as “ native advertising, ” which itself manifests itself in many, sometimes questionable, forms.
For example, sites like the ever- awesome Preceonomics do it right – their articles are interesting, always informative, very well written and researched – but when you read them, you often don’t even know you’re reading a side blog. a company providing detailed analysis and data collection services. When you think about it, it makes sense: They make good use of their research and critical analysis skills by writing articles demonstrating what they can do. On the other side of the line? Well, you remember The Atlantic’s Scientology handout, right ?
This brings us back to content marketing. Since content marketing is essentially marketing a business through “content” (which is a rather nasty word that should put you off), if you see it in a job description or hear it in an interview as part of the job you are applying for, you should it is as diligent to ask about this work as if someone was trying to enroll you in a pyramid scheme. Make absolutely sure that the company you’re looking at stays on the right side of that line and doesn’t turn into “trying to write our name in every other paragraph” or “suggesting to the editor of a site I’ve never read. but you can hear that people often write about us for fifty bucks. ” If you are thinking of a career in marketing and your company wants you to take up content marketing or you see it as an element in your job description that interests you, be prepared to ask a lot of interview questions if you want to go out with your soul intact.
Applying for jobs in this new era of marketing and engineering is harder than ever. Startups are looking for buzzwords and phrases to separate themselves and their culture from the bigger business (and of course from the competition), so we get job titles like “growth hacker” that seem to mean a lot, but at the same time nothing do not mean. At the end of the day, ignore buzzwords and catch headlines, don’t be tempted by glittering jargon (especially when you’re done doing what people have been doing for years, only under different names), and stick to your skills and what you want from a career. You will be fine.