Talking with People in Tech
October 12, 2025
As I know the number of years that I work for the federal government is limited, my girlfriend suggested that I start talking / networking with individuals that work at technology companies that I am interested in. As I am not currently looking for a new jobs, these conversation can be more relaxed and less transactional.
Companies that Interest Me #
I worked for the federal government because I am interested in that space, the domain of politics and how government operate. I believe I am interested in it both because I care about it functioning well and because the general concepts of governments and society are intriguing to me.
My goal is to find a company where I both care about the mission and company successing, as well as having interest in the domain.
An easy split to first categorize companies is whether they are technology companies or not. There are a lot of interesting companies in both categories and different characteristics of companies in those categories are used to determine whether I would want to work there.
Technology Companies #
The category of “tech” company is actually very large, as “tech” can mean other things than just software. I am more interested in the companies that provide products for developers or “tech” people, as I find the doamin of “tooling” to be extremely interesting.
Single / smaller scoped
Cloudflare, Hashicorp, Akamai, GitHub
I use these companies products and I think they bring real, strong value to their users.
“FAANG”
With Microsoft, Amazon, or Google, I would like to work on their cloud platforms. I think this is an interesting problem, and I find myself enjoying the cloud experience when a great service is provided
These companies are the “pinnacle” of software engineering careers. They definitely create amazing technology for users and are big enough that
Another section of technology companies are cloud hosting. Of course there are the hyperscaler clouds attached to Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. There are also some other players in the game
Fly.io or Railway
There is PlanetScale which provides database hosting for MySQL and PostgreSQL. There are very focused on database hosting, which makes the technology very cool.
You can also look at YC for job postings for the start-ups that they are incubating now.
Non-Tech Companies #
I would likely still be doing software development within these non-tech companies. These companies offer a lot in the way mission and I would need to find a domain that I find interesting. One downside of non-tech companies is that, by definition, they are less focused on technology and therefore software development. Unless this companies is a start-up or just tech-forward, IT and developer roles are not as funded as within a tech company.
Military has cool tech but I am not a fan of killing people.
Finance has interesting math and CS problems, but I think they are just pointlessly moving money around.
I did apply to a lot of law firms after graduating college. I did not get any interviews, but maybe they would not be interested in my experience within a federal court. In today’s landscape, I would either be working as an applications developer or doing AI related work at one of the larger players (e.g., Thomson Reuters).
Robotics or other mechanical related companies (space, satielites). These are somewhat military adjacent.
Energy is also a very cool (I do enjoy and did study physics) field and clean energy is actually good for society.