I’m a software developer (desktop/enterprise) working full-time. I made a lateral move to this position without a CS degree. The tech stack in the workplace is niche, down to the language, consequently limiting my marketability. Here and there I picked up some experience with some industry-standard languages on the job (Java, Python, C++, SQL), but in very limited scope. It’s been several years, I’m in my late 30s and in a spot.

I did not expect to be rejected in competitions for years, at 2nd and 3rd interviews, but here we are. Now the market is tougher, and employers have their pickings of candidates experienced with popular technologies. I may be completely screwed, but now racing to save my career.

I have a choice to make. From best to worst, as I imagine:

a) focus on accruing more FOSS contribution experience, highlight this everywhere (including blog/homepage), then network aggressively. How much, I have no idea. Banking on the idea that demonstrated experience trumps everything, and that dinky personal projects like CS graduates do won’t impress, particularly not from an intermediate developer.

b) develop a “big” project e.g. saas, idk. This could require way more time than I’d like, and I don’t want to do it. I still would.

c-1) Pivot to IT. I could grind out certs in the former case in a few months time. Less ideal than coding. Were the market as competitive as it is for software, I’d be placing myself in the same situation, making it a waste of time.

c-2) do this for devops instead (Docker, Kubernetes certs). As I understand it, these are usually senior positions (internal promotions?), so coming in as an outsider without the tech stack exp may not fly.

d) write often, share it, pivot to what may value communication skills like technical sales.

Some wisdom and an extra pair of eyes would be much appreciated. Am I missing something? I’m trying to check boxes to appear like an obvious asset. Maybe broadcasting more will boost trustworthiness, I don’t have a good read on what tracks the most outside of worksplace experience.

I also picked up an AWS cert, for what little that’s worth.

Thanks

  • MajorHavoc
    7·
    7 days ago

    Of the approaches you are considering, I’ll share what I’ve tried and how I feel it went. And I’ll throw in a bonus idea:

    a) focus on accruing FOSS experience.

    I now have substantial contribution history to a variety of projects on GitHub.

    And an interesting thing happened - people stopped asking me to write FizzBuzz during interviews. Technical questions stopped pretty much entirely. Interviewers now tend to jump directly to team culture and fit questions.

    I don’t know if my open source commits alone are responsible, but it certainly feels like it helped me.

    b) develop a big project.

    I tried this before “a)”, above.

    While I learned a lot, I don’t think it particularly helped other than what I learned along the way.

    I can’t recall being asked about any of my “big” projects on my GitHub, during interviews.

    I’ve also archived pretty much all of my big projects. Big effort weekend projects don’t age gracefully, for me.

    c) Pivot to IT

    I’m still a programmer, but I’ve taken on Cybersecurity and Management responsibilities, to get promoted. I’ve also made myself a DevOps expert, because otherwise I constantly feel like I’m dying on the “works on my machine” hill.

    I’ve had more and less code-centric roles. I have had teams add coding to my responsibilities as soon as they learned I can code.

    As a manager, I frequently pave the way for folks without coding in their job description to be allowed to code. Organizations are so much better off when subject matter experts participate in automation. But I have seen plenty of resistance to coding outside of the development team.

    c-2) I have made myself a DevOps expert.

    I’ve taken and given plenty of “developer” interviews that could have been called “DevOps”.

    Everybody needs DevOps. DevOps experience is always valuable.

    d) write and share

    I’ve kept up a technical blog for decades. I don’t currently (or usually) feel like it is paying dividends for the effort.

    A decade ago, I saw decent traffic on relevant topics. Today, I’m not convinced that any human being ever finds my site.

    Search and social media feel, to me, like they are in a very bad state, right now. I figure it can only get better, but I’m not holding my breath.

    It’s possible that my website full of technical articles (linked from my resume) plays some part in my not getting asked FizzBuzz anymore.

    One more that you didnt mention:

    e) giving technical talks

    I’ve learned that conferences are often desperate for speakers. Once I had a little evidence on my website that I won’t break down on stage, I started to have talk proposals get accepted.

    It’s scary as hell, but I’m not sure anything has the same professional networking impact.