One thing I noticed having been on the job search for about a year now, is the amount of jobs looking for a specialist, whether that be in a particular domain, or technology. Often very obscure or “obsolete” stuff.
I remember applying to a government job, and in their little checklist application, one of the questions was basically “do you have experience writing software for [hyper specific domain]”. Of course, it was the only question on there I couldn’t answer “yes” to. Low and behold I was rejected for that reason. Not sure how they’re going to fare finding someone so unique at the price they’re paying.
I’m frankly ready to leave the industry, but unfortunately, there’s not really any other good options for me at this point.
"I built X system in [somewhat adjacent domain]", "[hyper specific domain] is a subset of my work in [more general domain]" etc.
At the same time, there is definitely some grandeur in top companies in being "the C++ guy". Or The COBOL guy: https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~uoi/Jokes/Cobol.html
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...
> You are not defined by your chosen software stack: I recently asked via Twitter what young engineers wanted to know about careers. Many asked how to know what programming language or stack to study. It doesn’t matter. There you go.
> Do Java programmers make more money than .NET programmers? Anyone describing themselves as either a Java programmer or .NET programmer has already lost, because a) they’re a programmer (you’re not, see above) and b) they’re making themselves non-hireable for most programming jobs. In the real world, picking up a new language takes a few weeks of effort and after 6 to 12 months nobody will ever notice you haven’t been doing that one for your entire career.
And I'm saying this as somebody who worked across a lot of tech stack levels
from writing c# backends + even c# webassembly running in browser (high level), to some dekstop, to background workers / cli tools, to having my own OSS lib, to compilers (using llvm), to uefi / firmware C development.
Sure, it is interesting to work across all those levels, you get a lot of understanding how things are connected or you're just aware of how this work, but very often this is just shallow knowledge. Strong knowledge and experience requires time. If you switch, then you ain't gonna learn.
When trying to find a job there's almost never such a overlap which requires those.
May be this doesn't happen in FAANGS but I see it is the usual thing around.
The person with one year of experience selling cellphones who now does the phone screen needs to see the exact tech listed on a resume or they pass.