When people hear I’ve worked in tech for about 15 years, they usually assume I’m an engineer. I’m not. I’ve spent most of my career in operations, and I’ve watched a lot of smart, capable people rule themselves out of tech because they think it’s all code.

I didn’t even start in ops. My first job in this world was as an SEO consultant at a digital marketing company. I eventually became their director of social media, and that opened the door to full-time roles at Apple and Uber, among others. None of it followed a tidy plan.

To be fair, I’ve been obsessed with computers my whole life. Not in the “I coded my Myspace profile” way. In the “I had my own domain at 12 and built iframes and blog-style sites with the other underground Expage girlies” way. IYKYK. And still, the jobs that built my career never asked me to write code. They asked me to understand how things work, explain them clearly, and fix them when they broke.

Behind every app you use, there are whole teams doing exactly that, making sure it actually works for real humans. A few of them:

The roles, and what they actually hire for

• Operations: keeping the product and the business running every day, and fixing the process when it doesn’t. They’re hiring for someone who notices a broken process and fixes it instead of working around it forever.
• Customer experience: support, quality, escalations, and turning what customers say into changes that stick. They’re hiring for calm with upset people, clear writing, and the ability to spot the one pattern behind fifty tickets.
• Trust & safety: keeping users and the platform safe, from fraud to policy to the genuinely weird edge cases. They’re hiring for judgment, consistency, and comfort with gray areas.
• Program management: getting big, messy projects across the finish line with a lot of people pulling in different directions. They’re hiring for getting people who don’t report to you to do things on time.

The part nobody tells you

Your skills probably transfer. The problem is usually the wording. Most people describe what they did. Hiring managers are scanning for what changed because you did it.

Here’s the difference (example numbers, use your own):

• Before: Handled customer complaints.
• After: Resolved around 40 escalated customer issues a week, and flagged a recurring billing error that cut repeat contacts.
• Before: Front desk at a dental office.
• After: Ran scheduling for three providers and cut no-shows by adding reminder calls the day before.

The formula is what you did, plus how much or how often, plus what got better. You don’t need to inflate anything. You need to stop underselling it.

And if you’ve been home with kids for a while, that gap didn’t erase what you know how to do. It just means your evidence is a little older, and it still counts.

Where to start

• Search these titles: support operations, operations specialist, trust & safety analyst, program coordinator, customer success.
• Pick one job description and highlight every skill you’ve already used. Then write one before-and-after line for each.
• Talk to someone already doing the role. Ask what a normal week looks like, not whether they can refer you. The referral conversation goes better when it isn’t the first one.

Want a deeper dive on breaking into tech ops specifically? Tell me, and it’s the next entry in the changelog.