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Ghost Kitty

What was your first role in the tech industry, and how did it shape your journey 🚐

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Hey Product Hunters! πŸŽ‰ Let's take a fun trip down memory lane. I want to know: What was your very first role in tech, and how has it shaped your career journey so far? Whether you're a founder, developer, marketer or just a tech enthusiast, I'm so sure that each one of us has a unique story to tell. Before ending up as a marketer in Contentrain, I was doing recruiting for IT companies. Let's inspire each other! Share your tale below. πŸš€πŸ‘‡
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Peyt Spencer Dewar
Quality Assurance Engineer for a year right after I graduated. Let’s just say I was happy to get laid off πŸ˜‚.
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Nirnimes
I had always been a Tech Enthusiast. But I am from a Non-Tech Background, I broke into tech with my Product Internship turning into an Associate Product Manager Role. I'm interested in knowing how you made the switch from a Recruiter to a Marketer. Sounds like an interesting story! @ako61142833
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Pir Ahmed
It all started from me taking the role and responsibility of web development in the first business I co-founded. Building websites, attracting hundreds of customers cemented my fascination with design and technology and now I am working as a product designer in an amazing startup from Pakistan. πŸ˜ƒπŸ™Œ Every step of this journey was worth it and I am so grateful to have chosen this career! This is just the beginning though, there's a lot more to come...
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Moritz Tomasi
I applied for a software developer internship at one of the more prominent startups in Austria back then. I didn't really think that i would get the position, but they were on a hiring spree, so they hired me as a junior backend developer instead. Those were great times! I learned an immense amount, made some good friends and my current business partner had started 2 weeks before me at the same company. Unfortunately the company didn't make it, but i'm insanely grateful for the mentoring i got there, without them i wouldn't be where i am now.
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Sebastian Varga
@moritztomasi That's so often the way IT careers start(ed), don't know if that's still possible today
Moritz Tomasi
@arviaja I just know that i was incredibly lucky. You might be right that today it might not be possible or that easy, but i think it depends heavily on where you are.
Georgina Healey
I started at Synap, a tech start-up, just over 3 years ago as a digital marketing apprentice after graduating from Uni with a Sports & Exercise Science Degree (a change of pace I know). I've been working there ever since take on projects in marketing, UX/UI design and now product management. I'm constantly learning and trying to adapt with the growth of the company. Every day is a school day!
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Allison Ly
my first role was a Marketing Design Intern for a company in collaboration with a club I was apart of in college. The club held consulting projects every semester and I wanted to add something to my resume so I signed up. It was my first ever internship. It was fun, it was stress, but overall rewarding and gave me insight in a workplace. And we even won Judges' pick at the end of my internship for our business proposals! We launch next week, would love your support! (https://www.producthunt.com/prod...)
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Dominic Pritham
My first impactful role was at a startup in Madison WI. It was also my first introduction into the world of ML and changed how I started viewing problems and solutions.
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Dominic Pritham
@ako61142833 We were trying to solve hospital acquired infections using computer vision. This was in 2011. It showed me how ML can be applied to areas where traditional software solutions don’t work best. It showed me how difficult challenges like occlusion were to solve. It’s both the opportunity and challenges in ML that attracted me to the field.
Gil Villamater
I worked for a company that let's you shop in multiple affiliated websites and have it shipped in one box, one package. It was a great concept though the company didn't last long.
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Neder Ghadhab
I was 19 years old, created the first 2 e-commerce professionally and for a country store and working in-house as an e-commerce specialist and all doer. I was doing ADV, social management, customer care, and taking care of orders and product research. Basically everything πŸ˜‚
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Neder Ghadhab
@ako61142833 I admit that it was a period of full exploitation. At 19 years old, in a small town in Sicily, you grow up with undeclared jobs (without a contract) and with embarrassing wages (I was getting 10 euros a day when I started, and then after 1 year I got to 750 € / month managing 2 e-commerce of 10k / month each and an 20k Ebay channel that was then going strong). In compensation I was able to enter professionally in the business world, I made my experiences and today I am here, CMO of an artificial intelligence startup of which I am the founder and on the way to launch a new project on blockchain, metaverse and NFT that aims to become the reference platform in italy for web 3). The lesson? It is thanks to the greatest and sometimes even "humbling" sacrifices that I have become what I am today. But I would have gladly done without it.
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Anna Carmichael
I started in sales and then moved over to product! I have found quite a few parallels between the two roles as the two seek to understand and solve for pain points from users. The drive to help solve and resolve for pain points is really key and keeps me going every day!
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Kunal Mehta
My first role in the tech industry was actually as a developer, and it had a profound impact on my journey with ProApp. Working hands-on in development allowed me to understand the intricacies of building a powerful edtech platform like ours. It also taught me the importance of user-centric design and how technology can truly transform education. By the way, speaking of edtech, we just launched our application ProApp on Product Hunt today! It's an exciting platform that helps you learn design in an interactive and engaging way. If you're interested in checking it out, here's the link: (https://www.producthunt.com/prod...)
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Feyzan A.
Hey everyone! 🌟 As a frontend developer at Contentrain, my tech journey began with a passion for creating captivating user experiences. Building the interface for Contentrain 2.0 has been an incredible learning experience and has shaped my career path in ways I couldn't have imagined. I love being part of this innovative team and can't wait for you all to see what we've created! πŸš€ #frontenddeveloper #Contentrain2.0 #TechJourney
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Iren from FirstHR
At some point, it became clear that I had much more chances to prove myself in the IT industry: my first role - project manager.
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Angela Cvetinovic
Internship in marketing in b2b SaaS company, followed by full-time position in marketing, then as sales representative and account management, which led to current role, product manager. As a young curious freshman with non-IT background, I find now these not-so-IT roles crucially shaped my current skills and knowledge, since m&s positions pushed me to go far with understanding people needs and emotions, although they're often neglected in b2b IT industry.
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Travis Christensen
Fun question. I started out in cold call sales at Yelp which was a brutal introduction to the business world, but it taught me a ton of valuable things that have served me well throughout my career. Through putting in the 10,000+ cold calls there, I developed the ability to sell, build relationships, and assess the needs of a wide variety of businesses. I also saw firsthand how rare it is to find genuinely hard-working people, and how quickly you can grow in a field if you are such a person. As I transitioned into a copy/content writer, I was able to combine early-career skills I learned with my education/passion for writing to build a successful freelance brand and serve a ton of great clients worldwide. Question for you Deniz - of the skills that you learned in IT recruiting, which have been most useful in your role as a marketer? (and do you have a recommendation for a book or blog post that would help me get a foundational understanding of those skills?)
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Niroshan Ranapathi
What a great initiative! It's amazing to see how diverse tech career journeys can be. Looking forward to reading everyone's inspiring stories. πŸŒŸπŸ“š
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Dr.Arunakiry Natarajan
Moving from a clinical domain (almost twenty years of combined clinical and academic practice), my first experience was an internship and master thesis researcher in an e-prescription health IT firm. I worked on analysing their UI, workflows and a drug allergy database. It was a rewarding experience for both ends and I am ever thankful to this firm. Thanks @Deniz for this question and for opening up a can of nostalgic thoughts :)
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Cyril Gupta
Well, my beginning was rather unusual. I dropped out of school to start as a products creator.
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Sebastian Varga
Started coding at the age of 11, good old assembler on C64 and later Amiga. Then studied law (of all things), hated it, took a job for Berlitz (the language school) in Germany to run their IT. They had an old Pentium 133 MHz server running Novell 4.0. I converted all of that into a proper server infrastructure. Now, 22 years later, I'm trying to productize my consulting business...
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Arda SanΔ±l Onay
Actually, as an intern at the beginning of his career, my journey started as a content writer. Then I became a website editor at Marketing Birds. After this process, I met Contentrain. After learning the necessary information about the ecosystem, I started to work as an intern in the field of "marketing" at Contentrain.
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