Looking for a job in tech is tough. You have to have the right skills, the right contacts, and a finely crafted resume before you even go hunting. What you don't need are the often-complicated, semi-meaningless job titles and buzzwords floating in many job descriptions. Let's take a look at a few of the most frequently abused ones, and what they actually mean to real people. This isn't a definitive list by any means, just a few that have caught our eye. They've filtered out from their inevitably silicon valley origins and into the rest of the world, no thanks to HR people and hiring managers who want to make their companies seem “hip” or “relevant” by appropriating startup language. You've probably heard them before. Growth Hacking “Growth Hacking” is only about five years old, but it's replaced “guru” in just about every sleazy marketing person's LinkedIn or Twitter bio. The hot new job (especially in business or marketing) is to be a “growth hacker,” which is to say you're really a marketing professional, and your job, just like it would be without the fancy title, is to grow your business. The phrase wasn't always a buzzword, though. When Sean Ellis introduced the phrase in a blog postback in 2010, he lamented the lack of marketing professionals specifically using analytics and data to creatively encourage the growth of their businesses. He described the role as this: A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth. ...The common characteristic seems to be an ability to take responsibility for growth and an entrepreneurial drive (it's risky taking that responsibility). The right growth hacker will have a burning desire to connect your target market with your must have solution. They must have the creativity to figure out unique ways of driving growth in addition to testing/evolving the techniques proven by other companies. An effective growth hacker also needs to be disciplined to follow a growth hacking process of prioritizing ideas (their own and others in the company), testing the ideas, and being analytical enough to know which tested growth drivers to keep and which ones to cut. The faster this process can be repeated, the more likely they'll find scalable, repeatable ways to grow the business. Ellis' description is solid enough, but if “growth hacking” isn't what marketing professionals do (and demands a whole new role be created for it,) what do marketing professionals do? After all, if the purpose of marketing is to grow the business by connecting with customers, wouldn't this description—something marketing professionals have been doing for decades—fit them as well? The answer, depending on who you ask, is that “growth hackers” have technical and not business backgrounds, or use data to make decisions instead of...whatever marketing people use otherwise. That's just it: There's no real differentiation between someone who's a modern marketing pro with up-to-date skills and a “growth hacker” aside from the name and the fancy, startup-go-getter-entrepreneur connotations the phrase carries. The real problem with this buzzphrase boils down to the people calling themselves “growth hackers” as a way to separate themselves from “marketing professionals” or “business intelligence experts,” but who bring the same skills to the table. Just rename yourself, work for a startup or a tech company, and bask in the glow of being one of the new cool kids. You get to attend the 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're here. Even if it started out differently, at this point the title is a distinction without a difference. In a way, you could use this to your advantage—some startup somewhere inevitably will announce they're hiring “growth hackers,” when in reality they're just expanding their marketing team. Know your lingo, and even if you have a resume long in the tooth with marketing gigs, you'll be a great candidate—just rebrand yourself as a “growth hacker” and call it a day. DevOps This one's a hot buzzword, but the job itself isn't really a joke. “DevOps” describes both a software development methodology and a type of IT professional that works together on a combined team of engineers, operations, and developers. Short for “development” and “operations,” DevOps gives a name to a subset of software development, systems administration, and engineering that's always existed, just not formally. The goal for the companies hiring “DevOps engineers” is to build a team responsible for building great software on the development side that's then properly tested and implemented by engineers, and then well-supported and maintained by operations. Ideally, communication among all of those groups is high, and people from those groups may even work together or on the same team. Again, this is nothing that technology companies haven't struggled with before “DevOps” became a thing, but it's a new approach at breaking down the all-too-common walls and lack of communication between these groups except for at the very top. It's a problem most organizations with any kind of technology staff face, even if the company isn't a technology company. By getting development, engineering, and operations to work together closely, companies hope to build, test, and deploy faster, and react rapidly to feedback. They also want to avoid situations where operations doesn't have tools to support a product shoved on them by dev, or engineers have no time to test a platform before it goes live, or devs wind up supporting something operations should be (but can't, for whatever reason.) With that in mind, DevOps can be an exciting ring to toss your hat on if you're hunting for your next technology gig. Whether you're a developer, an engineer, a sysadmin, or a support professional, working in DevOps can put you in a pretty hot and fast-moving field....depending on the company. As with everything else here, do your homework, talk to others in the same field, and of course, ask questions in your interview. In some companies, DevOps is a methodology, not a team. In others, it's a small group of people with one or multiple bosses or priorities to manage. Getting “DevOps Engineer” on your resume may look hot, but it should still come with the experience and the work environment you're looking for.
