What is a good tech role for someone looking to travel?

Question

I've been looking to get out of my current gig (apps programmer) for a while now. Been turned down at least once by each of my top-5 interesting places to work, so I'm thinking maybe I'm going about this wrong. One of my big want-to-haves is a reasonable amount of travel. In the modern business climate, remote access seems to have basically removed the incentive to send a techie anywhere - even front-line support can be done from the comfort of a local workstation, as long as you can convince one or both sides to come in late/early.

So the question is this: Are there any roles out there for a programmer that are likely to have world-hopping as a key part of the job? And what are the "ins" to these markets if so?

Answer 1

tech evangelist; almost every major product / programming language / system service has one. e.g Amazon's AWS evangelists; Microsoft's .NET evangelists. etc.

Answer 2

I've worked on a few different continents since 1996, both in short and long engagements... there are three ways to do this:

1. Join a huge consulting firm that will send you places. This is a huge hassle as they will not even send you where you want to go, and when you get there, you will do nothing but work. I know this from friends who have had such jobs.
2. You become a God and travel around the world as an independent consultant. For this, any niche is good, because you'll be the point man in some really complex space in which only you are known to solve the problem.
3. I could never become a God (for lack of interest, talent, luck, or whatever) so I tried to become as standard as possible (for example, I fit 90% of the J2EE developer profiles when I got to Spain). This worked pretty well.

That being said, it's not exactly true. I started working in Spain because I also had teaching experience and eventually did corporate training in J2EE... so what's the point? Keep yourself general and in popular technologies so people can hire you. But, at the same time, work in areas that you like, because you will also get hired for your particularities.

If you like travel, why would you want to work remotely? So much of travelling is working with the local freaks (no offense to the freaks of any nation out there).

Only now am I able to work from anywhere with remote clients. I don't know of any tricks to get those jobs, and luck and loving what you do help.

Answer 3

On-site consultant for any company that sells enterprise software. They will by nature of the job send you to customer sites all over the country and/or world (depending on org structure) to work on-site for varying periods of time. Note that you have pretty much no control over where you go, and you will be spending most of your time in hotels, airports, and client offices. If you make a point of doing so you can usually find a little time to take in some local interests. However, it depends largely on what you're doing. When I did on-site consulting work, I frequently had to put in long hours and there really wasn't time to play tourist. On the flip side, my friend works as a consultant full time and he seems to often find opportunities to enjoy the places he visits.