Should I leave the tech industry? If so, where can I go?
February 16, 2024 6:12 PM Subscribe
It's been a year since my last job. The tech industry looks increasingly disastrous for a job seeker. My experience doesn't seem to fit neatly into any particular box and I think this is hurting my prospects. But I know I'm smart and resourceful and can solve problems. Do I just need to start over somewhere else? (More details inside!)
I got laid off last year, took a bit of a break because I hadn't had longer than two-week vacations since I started working, and then began searching for a job late last year. It turns out I've picked maybe the worst possible moment in the history of the industry to do so.
My brief career summary: I'd spent about 15 years working in web development for a relatively large community-driven website in Canada. During that time, I rose up the ranks from a front-end web developer to eventually running all development and devops, and later making the jump to product, which I spent about two years doing officially and a year or two doing on the side while the company tried to fill vacant positions. In theory, this all sounds great. But there are strings attached to basically everything.
The product stuff is great but I only have a few years of experience and no formal training. While I was in the job I often felt like I was always trying to catch up: making sure the backlog had enough tickets in it, trying to do research to support those tickets, trying to meet with stakeholders and prioritize everything. It was a lot and I often felt like I wasn't giving developers enough work. Am I qualified to lead product at another company where I don't even have the rich domain experience I had at my previous job?
Okay, so back to development, right? I have the chops, I think I can hack that pretty well. Except that because I took a few years off doing product, everything I know is rusty. It's been a while since I've worked with React and our site wasn't super heavy on React stuff anyways. I don't have any experience with Tailwind or CSS-in-JS, and while Typescript doesn't seem like it'd be too difficult to figure out I don't have work experience with that either. A lot of companies have switched to Node as their backend system of choice, which I don't have work experience with either (though I've written Node scripts and packages for random non-web stuff before). There doesn't seem to be a lot of demand for PHP developers these days, which was the bread and butter for the site I worked on. I have Python experience but a lot of it is old, so I feel nervous any time I apply to a Django position (I did a recent upgrade of a personal app to Django 4.2 but otherwise most of my knowledge is 1.x, i.e. an eternity ago).
All of this makes me feel completely out of sorts in today's extremely competitive market. From what I can tell I'm not even passing automated resume checks. I don't like lying about my experience and don't really know how to properly do that anyways, but I think I could manage it if the jobs coming up were exciting but even that's not really happening. So I wonder if there's an industry out there that still needs people who know a lot of computer/development stuff, and are especially keen on someone who enjoys hacking together solutions and finding ways to combine different sources of data/info together for analytics/tracking purposes.
Right now it feels like no one needs me and that I'm never going to find a job, and frankly I'm scared. How many more months will I be out in the cold before I have to figure out my plan B? And what IS plan B? What if plan B requires a great deal of retraining? Can I survive on whatever money I have left until I finish that retraining? (If I wanted to become an accountant, I'd have to get a degree, but what if I run out of money before then? That seems really risky!)
I'm so worried that even posting this question has me worried. What if a prospective employer finds this question and decides not to hire me as a result? But the alternative is to sit here and not figure anything out at all, which sounds worse. So I'm taking a hopefully calculated risk.
I got laid off last year, took a bit of a break because I hadn't had longer than two-week vacations since I started working, and then began searching for a job late last year. It turns out I've picked maybe the worst possible moment in the history of the industry to do so.
My brief career summary: I'd spent about 15 years working in web development for a relatively large community-driven website in Canada. During that time, I rose up the ranks from a front-end web developer to eventually running all development and devops, and later making the jump to product, which I spent about two years doing officially and a year or two doing on the side while the company tried to fill vacant positions. In theory, this all sounds great. But there are strings attached to basically everything.
The product stuff is great but I only have a few years of experience and no formal training. While I was in the job I often felt like I was always trying to catch up: making sure the backlog had enough tickets in it, trying to do research to support those tickets, trying to meet with stakeholders and prioritize everything. It was a lot and I often felt like I wasn't giving developers enough work. Am I qualified to lead product at another company where I don't even have the rich domain experience I had at my previous job?
Okay, so back to development, right? I have the chops, I think I can hack that pretty well. Except that because I took a few years off doing product, everything I know is rusty. It's been a while since I've worked with React and our site wasn't super heavy on React stuff anyways. I don't have any experience with Tailwind or CSS-in-JS, and while Typescript doesn't seem like it'd be too difficult to figure out I don't have work experience with that either. A lot of companies have switched to Node as their backend system of choice, which I don't have work experience with either (though I've written Node scripts and packages for random non-web stuff before). There doesn't seem to be a lot of demand for PHP developers these days, which was the bread and butter for the site I worked on. I have Python experience but a lot of it is old, so I feel nervous any time I apply to a Django position (I did a recent upgrade of a personal app to Django 4.2 but otherwise most of my knowledge is 1.x, i.e. an eternity ago).
All of this makes me feel completely out of sorts in today's extremely competitive market. From what I can tell I'm not even passing automated resume checks. I don't like lying about my experience and don't really know how to properly do that anyways, but I think I could manage it if the jobs coming up were exciting but even that's not really happening. So I wonder if there's an industry out there that still needs people who know a lot of computer/development stuff, and are especially keen on someone who enjoys hacking together solutions and finding ways to combine different sources of data/info together for analytics/tracking purposes.
Right now it feels like no one needs me and that I'm never going to find a job, and frankly I'm scared. How many more months will I be out in the cold before I have to figure out my plan B? And what IS plan B? What if plan B requires a great deal of retraining? Can I survive on whatever money I have left until I finish that retraining? (If I wanted to become an accountant, I'd have to get a degree, but what if I run out of money before then? That seems really risky!)
I'm so worried that even posting this question has me worried. What if a prospective employer finds this question and decides not to hire me as a result? But the alternative is to sit here and not figure anything out at all, which sounds worse. So I'm taking a hopefully calculated risk.
I work for a university, and I love my job. Sure, we don't pay FAANG rates, but it's a decent living, with government benefits, a mission I feel good about, life-work balance, job security, and (at least in my lab) delightful colleagues. And we struggle SO MUCH to hire. Part of that is the $$, and a bigger part is that our job advertisements just don't get exposure ... you'd have to dig through our not-great HR website to find the openings.
I'm not in your geographic area, or I'd be sending you job openings. =)
(If you were applying to my university, I'd tell you that the HR system is so borked that you should try to figure out the hiring manager and email them a few weeks after submitting your app, just in case it got lost in the bowels of the bureaucracy. One of our last hires had to do that ...)
posted by Metasyntactic at 6:43 PM on February 16 [7 favorites]
I'm not in your geographic area, or I'd be sending you job openings. =)
(If you were applying to my university, I'd tell you that the HR system is so borked that you should try to figure out the hiring manager and email them a few weeks after submitting your app, just in case it got lost in the bowels of the bureaucracy. One of our last hires had to do that ...)
posted by Metasyntactic at 6:43 PM on February 16 [7 favorites]
So I wonder if there's an industry out there that still needs people who know a lot of computer/development stuff, and are especially keen on someone who enjoys hacking together solutions and finding ways to combine different sources of data/info together for analytics/tracking purposes.
Yup - small and medium-sized manufacturers. Small things like pivot tables can blow people's minds. You can automate something they do manually now? Galaxy Brain. Completely unglamorous, but there WILL BE WORK UNTIL THE END OF TIME, as any little bits of automation and data visibility can make so many gains.
Building internal tools and solutions, are the types of tasks to look for. Having SQL or similar DB quarry knowledge is very helpful for working with the ERP systems, but, frankly, you could probably pick that up quickly on the job as well.
posted by chiefthe at 7:05 PM on February 16 [7 favorites]
Yup - small and medium-sized manufacturers. Small things like pivot tables can blow people's minds. You can automate something they do manually now? Galaxy Brain. Completely unglamorous, but there WILL BE WORK UNTIL THE END OF TIME, as any little bits of automation and data visibility can make so many gains.
Building internal tools and solutions, are the types of tasks to look for. Having SQL or similar DB quarry knowledge is very helpful for working with the ERP systems, but, frankly, you could probably pick that up quickly on the job as well.
posted by chiefthe at 7:05 PM on February 16 [7 favorites]
I am a technical product manager in the U.S. Federal Government. Yes, seriously, there is a LOT of great work happening in the Canadian Digital Service and in other parts of Canadian government. Check out talks at Forward 50 for other organizations doing good work. There are also contractors in this space who are hiring.
posted by rockindata at 7:29 PM on February 16 [2 favorites]
posted by rockindata at 7:29 PM on February 16 [2 favorites]
Also, feel free to reach out to me via memail if you (or anyone else who reads this) is interested in chatting about civic tech. There is great stuff happening right now. Also great big challenges! But great stuff.
posted by rockindata at 7:31 PM on February 16 [4 favorites]
posted by rockindata at 7:31 PM on February 16 [4 favorites]
While I was in the job I often felt like I was always trying to catch up
This is what being in product feels like. Congratulations, you are fully qualified!
While the market is bad now, tech has historically rebounded. Employers are (slowly) hiring. Keep trying
posted by shock muppet at 7:45 PM on February 16 [2 favorites]
This is what being in product feels like. Congratulations, you are fully qualified!
While the market is bad now, tech has historically rebounded. Employers are (slowly) hiring. Keep trying
posted by shock muppet at 7:45 PM on February 16 [2 favorites]
Response by poster: Have you looked into government work?
Sort of? A lot of the jobs that come up don't seem to be developer jobs and I'm unsure if there are other jobs that take advantage of some of my skills that aren't in development, and that I'd be an attractive candidate for. Maybe I'm not being imaginative enough? (Based on stuff I've seen recently it feels like I should be increasing the number of applications by 100x but it's hard when it feels like you're not a good fit for half the stuff out there.) I should keep better tabs on this though.
I work for a university, and I love my job. Sure, we don't pay FAANG rates, but it's a decent living, with government benefits, a mission I feel good about, life-work balance, job security, and (at least in my lab) delightful colleagues. And we struggle SO MUCH to hire. Part of that is the $$, and a bigger part is that our job advertisements just don't get exposure ... you'd have to dig through our not-great HR website to find the openings.
I did apply to one developer position at the local university, but as far as I can tell they've ghosted me on that one. I'm still in their jobs system at least, so I should in theory see more jobs as they come up. Most of them don't seem like they're remotely in my line of work though.
Yup - small and medium-sized manufacturers. Small things like pivot tables can blow people's minds. You can automate something they do manually now? Galaxy Brain. Completely unglamorous, but there WILL BE WORK UNTIL THE END OF TIME, as any little bits of automation and data visibility can make so many gains.
Are there specific job titles I should be looking for? I'm totally fine with unglamorous.
Also, feel free to reach out to me via memail if you (or anyone else who reads this) is interested in chatting about civic tech. There is great stuff happening right now. Also great big challenges! But great stuff.
I'll shoot you a mail! I did actually apply to a job vaguely in that realm (Citylitics) and there was another job that closed applications before I got one in that was about transit tracking systems. It actually fits a lot of the considerations I have (I'm interested in the work, and it doesn't seem immediately harmful or unethical--quite the opposite), the issue has just been finding open positions.
posted by chrominance at 7:55 PM on February 16
Sort of? A lot of the jobs that come up don't seem to be developer jobs and I'm unsure if there are other jobs that take advantage of some of my skills that aren't in development, and that I'd be an attractive candidate for. Maybe I'm not being imaginative enough? (Based on stuff I've seen recently it feels like I should be increasing the number of applications by 100x but it's hard when it feels like you're not a good fit for half the stuff out there.) I should keep better tabs on this though.
I work for a university, and I love my job. Sure, we don't pay FAANG rates, but it's a decent living, with government benefits, a mission I feel good about, life-work balance, job security, and (at least in my lab) delightful colleagues. And we struggle SO MUCH to hire. Part of that is the $$, and a bigger part is that our job advertisements just don't get exposure ... you'd have to dig through our not-great HR website to find the openings.
I did apply to one developer position at the local university, but as far as I can tell they've ghosted me on that one. I'm still in their jobs system at least, so I should in theory see more jobs as they come up. Most of them don't seem like they're remotely in my line of work though.
Yup - small and medium-sized manufacturers. Small things like pivot tables can blow people's minds. You can automate something they do manually now? Galaxy Brain. Completely unglamorous, but there WILL BE WORK UNTIL THE END OF TIME, as any little bits of automation and data visibility can make so many gains.
Are there specific job titles I should be looking for? I'm totally fine with unglamorous.
Also, feel free to reach out to me via memail if you (or anyone else who reads this) is interested in chatting about civic tech. There is great stuff happening right now. Also great big challenges! But great stuff.
I'll shoot you a mail! I did actually apply to a job vaguely in that realm (Citylitics) and there was another job that closed applications before I got one in that was about transit tracking systems. It actually fits a lot of the considerations I have (I'm interested in the work, and it doesn't seem immediately harmful or unethical--quite the opposite), the issue has just been finding open positions.
posted by chrominance at 7:55 PM on February 16
Response by poster: Oh, and regarding the AI resume analyzer, nope! That's not a thing I really knew existed, but I'm looking into it now.
posted by chrominance at 7:57 PM on February 16
posted by chrominance at 7:57 PM on February 16
I also got laid off by a tech company last year. Fortunately I was in admin, so my skill set can transfer - and I've just recently been rehired by a private non-profit agency working in child and family welfare.
So I'd say - yeah, if your skill set can be applied anywhere outside the tech industry, do that.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:32 PM on February 16
So I'd say - yeah, if your skill set can be applied anywhere outside the tech industry, do that.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:32 PM on February 16
Agree that small or mid-size manufacturing would likely have a similar vibe, just with different measurement and manufacturing equipment.
posted by Alterscape at 8:46 PM on February 16 [1 favorite]
You've had a year's break, but probably spent it ruminating on getting a new job. Any employer can have horrible people or poor internal teamwork or build the wrong things -- these aren't special to software engineering -- so look out for a good team and good managers whichever direction you choose.
Your skills sound solid and your willingness to pick up new things gives you space to try at-home projects to refresh React and try typescript (VS Code is the best partner for the tsc typescript compiler). I wouldn't change industry, but I'm not in your shoes.
Maybe you need to flip a coin and see not the result, but how you feel about the result?
posted by k3ninho at 4:56 AM on February 17
Your skills sound solid and your willingness to pick up new things gives you space to try at-home projects to refresh React and try typescript (VS Code is the best partner for the tsc typescript compiler). I wouldn't change industry, but I'm not in your shoes.
Maybe you need to flip a coin and see not the result, but how you feel about the result?
posted by k3ninho at 4:56 AM on February 17
I moved into municipal government last year, and rejigging my application according to this super helpful document (direct link to Ontario government PDF) got me interviews and a job very quickly. Also, government/university jobs don't make it to LinkedIn and other job sites as often as they should, so keep an eye on their own job portals.
As you're the reason I joined MeFi in the first place 20+ years ago, I will keep my eyes open for postings and send 'em your way. Good luck!
posted by avocet at 7:57 AM on February 17 [4 favorites]
As you're the reason I joined MeFi in the first place 20+ years ago, I will keep my eyes open for postings and send 'em your way. Good luck!
posted by avocet at 7:57 AM on February 17 [4 favorites]
The university dev/software jobs are starting to coalesce under the title of "research software engineer", and I second the encouragement to take a look there as well as in civic tech. I have hired RSEs and your background is definitely the kind that I would consider - RSEs tend to include both tech people who are either intentionally getting out of Big Tech or who have taken non traditional trajectories, as well as people from the research side who are primarily self-taught programmers with relevant subject area expertise. Meaningful experience that doesn't feel quite "real" to you can be a big plus, so please don't leave these things off your resume! We pay less than big tech, but at least in my neck of the woods we are also very flexible about remote work and weird schedules, and try to cultivate a more sustainable working pace.
I also want to encourage you that for both the civic/government and research work, there are LOTS of people coming into jobs from more traditional kinds of tech - this is a very normal kind of career move from my perspective, so you don't need to feel as though you're uniquely missing some secret sauce. You *do* for both of these kinds of jobs need to communicate that you are seriously interested and understand the tradeoffs - "I am a skilled developer" is not the only message you need to send.
posted by itsatextfile at 10:51 AM on February 17 [2 favorites]
I also want to encourage you that for both the civic/government and research work, there are LOTS of people coming into jobs from more traditional kinds of tech - this is a very normal kind of career move from my perspective, so you don't need to feel as though you're uniquely missing some secret sauce. You *do* for both of these kinds of jobs need to communicate that you are seriously interested and understand the tradeoffs - "I am a skilled developer" is not the only message you need to send.
posted by itsatextfile at 10:51 AM on February 17 [2 favorites]
If you do go the university/civic route, make sure you present as confident intermediate across the board, rather than expert in some areas and weak in others. I've done a fair bit of mission-driven consulting and many orgs of this type will need you to cover a lot of surface area decently and won't necessarily want to accommodate your cutting edge/best practice ideas in your areas of expertise. SQL is a hole in my skill set (lots of ORMs and NoSql and front end rather than writing raw SQL) and I was the second best candidate for two different interesting jobs in that space last time I was looking because they just have some SQL databases that they want you to write raw SQL against and I couldn't do it "confident intermediate" in the interview. (Still in big tech, still not writing a lot of SQL)
posted by Kwine at 7:01 AM on February 18 [1 favorite]
posted by Kwine at 7:01 AM on February 18 [1 favorite]
Networking and inside-info hiring is the most effective way to go about what you are trying to do, including your flexibility to step into other roles. If you have hesitated to make a general announcement to everyone you know that you are looking & you are flexible, I would get on that. Increasingly the "front door" for corporate hiring is an elaborate set of rejection contraptions.
Headhunters are the second most-effective way. But they've been awfully quiet lately. (Don't turn down one if they call you! It could get you in the door somewhere)
You are generally qualified and talented. You are not someone with skillsets that are stale by two decades. React still has a big market share, and knowledge of front-end stacks with React and/or Next.js is highly valued. Make sure "React" is on your resume. And Node. Do not worry about not-having Tailwind, Bootstrap, etc. - employers would be crazy to narrow down by CSS frameworks, hiring is hard enough as it is.
Hiring is a numbers game and you just have to apply to a crazy number of jobs. The advice to look into deeper nooks and crannies in the job market - e.g. the employer-specific career boards that don't get syndicated to the major job listing sites - is counteracted by the fact that it goes against the numbers-game-mentality and it is still front-door-hiring, e.g. even the prettiest cover letter doesn't really give you a leg-up on anything if something behind the scenes is rigged against you. And those employer-specific applications are sometimes archaic as hell, requiring you to retype your whole resume into form fields, so it's pretty clear from that situation that developers and product people don't have a lot of juice in that kind of organization? I wouldn't avoid, but I would consider these as yellow flags (not red flags) considering that a company that has bad IT products that are long out-of-fashion isn't likely to have a great web product team. (In fact, the whole crux of the hiring problem is that so many companies have decided not to prioritize updating their web platforms - saving little money in the grand scheme of things - even though the need for the work is at DEFCON 1)
Which is to say - if you can only go through the front door at all the companies in your market, prioritize the ones that make applications really easy. There is no indication of a correlation between "easier applications" and "longer odds", although you'll have to contend with the facts that job applications that are "easy" probably get more applicants and are probably heavily ATS-governed.
The idea is, apply to all the rapid-apply jobs first, then the ones that require a bit of info-filling (including having to setup a login in their system) and cover-letter-writing but otherwise aren't having you hand-input your whole resume, and leave the "typing in your whole resume" jobs for last while sorting those by relevancy and any other leg-up factors you think you have. It is quite possible that you will get to all of these jobs but if you were to miss any of them for time purposes, I'd rather miss the one job that was buried on a recruiting site by an organization that was clearly bad at web communication AND recruiting, rather than miss 30 jobs that had the Easy Apply button on LinkedIn.
Cover letter? Practice a bit with this first, but, use a template where all you have to plug in is the name of the company, the name of the job, one factor that makes you fit into this job particularly well and one factor that makes you want to work for this organization. The rest of the prose should be pre-made, not-too-long, and based on generally positive ideas about your candidacy. I believe few tech recruiters and tech hiring managers read cover letters, and almost none of them are using the quality of the letter as a decisive factor in anything - writing skill, in general, is a distraction to them. So you're just covering your bases here with something that fits all scenarios & still does what a cover letter is supposed to do, just not in a maximalist way.
The last bit of bleak advice I have here is that you are not going to be able to role-jump with these front-door-applications and your "transferable skill set", because of how ATS and recruiters work. Networking is the only way to do that, and I think you already know that requires genuinely thoughtful, well-connected people in your network to pull that off. Someone who is very heads-down in their work or is a meeting monster is going to be useless in this pursuit. I do not think anyone is scanning developer resumes to find people willing to jump to other roles. I have been going at this for about six months now, plus I have a PM certification and a Scrum master cert, and, with a similar skillset as you, I would have had a bite on something like "business analyst", "product owner", "data analyst", "solutions architect", "technical analyst" or "requirements analyst" to name a few. All these jobs are tough hiring for the companies right now, so if they were seeing applications from developers come in with slightly misaligned stack experience and otherwise healthy client-facing/communications skills, wouldn't they reach out to see if these people were interested in a jump? Especially because mature web developers are somewhat receptive to getting out of the "ever changing tech stack" game?
I think a follow-up question is, "How can I ethically/truthfully update my resume to apply to those other roles and win the ATS game?" and I really don't have a solid answer to that. I don't think you want to lie on your resume to trick ATS - if you get past it now, you'll have to explain what you've written later to a real human. You do want to be creative in an honest way if you can, but it'll be laborious. Up to you to figure out how much time you want to put into this with online job applications vs. opportunities to do this via personal referrals (I would definitely put urgent focus on that). If you know a real human is going to be reading your resume for a non-developer job, use one that is tailored to your skills (including your soft skills) relevant to the role & avoid dumping a whole package.json worth of tech stack packages in there.
posted by brianvan at 9:33 AM on February 18 [2 favorites]
Headhunters are the second most-effective way. But they've been awfully quiet lately. (Don't turn down one if they call you! It could get you in the door somewhere)
You are generally qualified and talented. You are not someone with skillsets that are stale by two decades. React still has a big market share, and knowledge of front-end stacks with React and/or Next.js is highly valued. Make sure "React" is on your resume. And Node. Do not worry about not-having Tailwind, Bootstrap, etc. - employers would be crazy to narrow down by CSS frameworks, hiring is hard enough as it is.
Hiring is a numbers game and you just have to apply to a crazy number of jobs. The advice to look into deeper nooks and crannies in the job market - e.g. the employer-specific career boards that don't get syndicated to the major job listing sites - is counteracted by the fact that it goes against the numbers-game-mentality and it is still front-door-hiring, e.g. even the prettiest cover letter doesn't really give you a leg-up on anything if something behind the scenes is rigged against you. And those employer-specific applications are sometimes archaic as hell, requiring you to retype your whole resume into form fields, so it's pretty clear from that situation that developers and product people don't have a lot of juice in that kind of organization? I wouldn't avoid, but I would consider these as yellow flags (not red flags) considering that a company that has bad IT products that are long out-of-fashion isn't likely to have a great web product team. (In fact, the whole crux of the hiring problem is that so many companies have decided not to prioritize updating their web platforms - saving little money in the grand scheme of things - even though the need for the work is at DEFCON 1)
Which is to say - if you can only go through the front door at all the companies in your market, prioritize the ones that make applications really easy. There is no indication of a correlation between "easier applications" and "longer odds", although you'll have to contend with the facts that job applications that are "easy" probably get more applicants and are probably heavily ATS-governed.
The idea is, apply to all the rapid-apply jobs first, then the ones that require a bit of info-filling (including having to setup a login in their system) and cover-letter-writing but otherwise aren't having you hand-input your whole resume, and leave the "typing in your whole resume" jobs for last while sorting those by relevancy and any other leg-up factors you think you have. It is quite possible that you will get to all of these jobs but if you were to miss any of them for time purposes, I'd rather miss the one job that was buried on a recruiting site by an organization that was clearly bad at web communication AND recruiting, rather than miss 30 jobs that had the Easy Apply button on LinkedIn.
Cover letter? Practice a bit with this first, but, use a template where all you have to plug in is the name of the company, the name of the job, one factor that makes you fit into this job particularly well and one factor that makes you want to work for this organization. The rest of the prose should be pre-made, not-too-long, and based on generally positive ideas about your candidacy. I believe few tech recruiters and tech hiring managers read cover letters, and almost none of them are using the quality of the letter as a decisive factor in anything - writing skill, in general, is a distraction to them. So you're just covering your bases here with something that fits all scenarios & still does what a cover letter is supposed to do, just not in a maximalist way.
The last bit of bleak advice I have here is that you are not going to be able to role-jump with these front-door-applications and your "transferable skill set", because of how ATS and recruiters work. Networking is the only way to do that, and I think you already know that requires genuinely thoughtful, well-connected people in your network to pull that off. Someone who is very heads-down in their work or is a meeting monster is going to be useless in this pursuit. I do not think anyone is scanning developer resumes to find people willing to jump to other roles. I have been going at this for about six months now, plus I have a PM certification and a Scrum master cert, and, with a similar skillset as you, I would have had a bite on something like "business analyst", "product owner", "data analyst", "solutions architect", "technical analyst" or "requirements analyst" to name a few. All these jobs are tough hiring for the companies right now, so if they were seeing applications from developers come in with slightly misaligned stack experience and otherwise healthy client-facing/communications skills, wouldn't they reach out to see if these people were interested in a jump? Especially because mature web developers are somewhat receptive to getting out of the "ever changing tech stack" game?
I think a follow-up question is, "How can I ethically/truthfully update my resume to apply to those other roles and win the ATS game?" and I really don't have a solid answer to that. I don't think you want to lie on your resume to trick ATS - if you get past it now, you'll have to explain what you've written later to a real human. You do want to be creative in an honest way if you can, but it'll be laborious. Up to you to figure out how much time you want to put into this with online job applications vs. opportunities to do this via personal referrals (I would definitely put urgent focus on that). If you know a real human is going to be reading your resume for a non-developer job, use one that is tailored to your skills (including your soft skills) relevant to the role & avoid dumping a whole package.json worth of tech stack packages in there.
posted by brianvan at 9:33 AM on February 18 [2 favorites]
Are there specific job titles I should be looking for? I'm totally fine with unglamorous.
Some ideas: Business Process Analyst or Engineer or Developer, Internal Solutions Specialist, Process Automation Specialist, Systems Specialist, Program Analyst, Data Analyst, Data Scientist, etc. The title can vary a lot based on what the company *thinks* they need, so it might be any of the above above words in some sort of word-salad title. brianvan also lists a number of good ones.
Bonus on this, small and medium size manufacturers are often don't have great skills at finding people, and may not pay for headhunters, or very good ATS systems, so you could luck out be following them on LinkedIn or seeing what they post to their website and *may* even have your stuff read by a human.
posted by chiefthe at 5:46 PM on February 18 [1 favorite]
Some ideas: Business Process Analyst or Engineer or Developer, Internal Solutions Specialist, Process Automation Specialist, Systems Specialist, Program Analyst, Data Analyst, Data Scientist, etc. The title can vary a lot based on what the company *thinks* they need, so it might be any of the above above words in some sort of word-salad title. brianvan also lists a number of good ones.
Bonus on this, small and medium size manufacturers are often don't have great skills at finding people, and may not pay for headhunters, or very good ATS systems, so you could luck out be following them on LinkedIn or seeing what they post to their website and *may* even have your stuff read by a human.
posted by chiefthe at 5:46 PM on February 18 [1 favorite]
It won't be long before PHP is in demand precisely because new people aren't learning it. There's a LOT of PHP out there. Even if that isn't glamorous.
I think as tech constricts there is going to be less hiring based on framework buzzwords and more on value per employee and breadth of knowledge.
Brushing up on Python may make you feel better rather than worse. Python 2 to 3 was a big jump anyway, and you'll probably find that all the added features make life easier, not harder.
From what I can see online, rather than trying to catch up to the last evolution with Typescript, catch the next wave. Go, Rust, maybe Elixir.
Or play up your management experience and try to move up the hierarchy, or laterally.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:47 PM on February 20
I think as tech constricts there is going to be less hiring based on framework buzzwords and more on value per employee and breadth of knowledge.
Brushing up on Python may make you feel better rather than worse. Python 2 to 3 was a big jump anyway, and you'll probably find that all the added features make life easier, not harder.
From what I can see online, rather than trying to catch up to the last evolution with Typescript, catch the next wave. Go, Rust, maybe Elixir.
Or play up your management experience and try to move up the hierarchy, or laterally.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:47 PM on February 20
I wanted to chime in here as I'm in a similar place in my career. I have been in tech for 23 years and wonder if I want to continue. I am trying to figure out what would be next and although I don't have great thoughts on an alternative, I have had good luck continuing to get jobs even though I'm 48. I have had times where it was hard though and these are things that have worked for me:
* Using a resume writer: I've used a resume writer 3 times in my career and each time it was worth it and got me a job. It's $500 so people balk at it but if you are feeling stuck and that your resume isn't getting you an interview I think they are totally worth it. You will want to know what kind of job you want. They will usually ask for 2-3 examples of job listings for the specific job type that you are interested in. What usually happens to me is that I get the new one from the resume writer and then can use that as a template for 7-10 years.
* Sending emails to contacts on linkedin: I really do believe that asking people that you know at a company to help is the way to cut through the noise. If I don't know someone at a company I am interested in, for my current job I cold emailed a recruiter that worked at a company I had worked at before, not even during the years I worked there, but I was desperate and just thought, what the hell and sent a short message saying I was interested in the company and that I applied. He was happy to help and that little light helped my resume get through the noise. I am not someone that usually will do that but really people are happy to help most of the time and it's worth it.
* I keep a list of companies I'm interested in: I start by going through sites and services I use, places i follow on twitter, GitHub, etc. Then keep a google doc of those companies and their jobs pages. I scan them sometimes and apply if i see something interesting. The place this helps is that my cover letter can contain information about why i want to work there that is genuine and I think that actual caring about the company helps when someone looks at it and it helps when im talking to them. That actual care helps in the interviews too.
I'll post the message I cold sent through linkedin here so you can see what it looked like:
Hi Bryan,
It looks like we were both early Acme and I hope you don't mind the quick message. I'm very interested in the Technical Support Position that BetaCo has posted and applied today. I was brought on at Pinterest because of my experience doing support at rapid growth companies and making improvements to the customer experience. I'm also a developer and since all that seems like a good fit for this job, I hope the quick note highlighting my application is ok.
Thanks for your time and have a great weekend!
Lastly, I think the others here are right, you are not out of the running for these positions. Looking for a job for a long time is really hard and demoralizing, but you totally have skills that companies need!
posted by Jungo at 5:29 PM on February 20 [1 favorite]
* Using a resume writer: I've used a resume writer 3 times in my career and each time it was worth it and got me a job. It's $500 so people balk at it but if you are feeling stuck and that your resume isn't getting you an interview I think they are totally worth it. You will want to know what kind of job you want. They will usually ask for 2-3 examples of job listings for the specific job type that you are interested in. What usually happens to me is that I get the new one from the resume writer and then can use that as a template for 7-10 years.
* Sending emails to contacts on linkedin: I really do believe that asking people that you know at a company to help is the way to cut through the noise. If I don't know someone at a company I am interested in, for my current job I cold emailed a recruiter that worked at a company I had worked at before, not even during the years I worked there, but I was desperate and just thought, what the hell and sent a short message saying I was interested in the company and that I applied. He was happy to help and that little light helped my resume get through the noise. I am not someone that usually will do that but really people are happy to help most of the time and it's worth it.
* I keep a list of companies I'm interested in: I start by going through sites and services I use, places i follow on twitter, GitHub, etc. Then keep a google doc of those companies and their jobs pages. I scan them sometimes and apply if i see something interesting. The place this helps is that my cover letter can contain information about why i want to work there that is genuine and I think that actual caring about the company helps when someone looks at it and it helps when im talking to them. That actual care helps in the interviews too.
I'll post the message I cold sent through linkedin here so you can see what it looked like:
Hi Bryan,
It looks like we were both early Acme and I hope you don't mind the quick message. I'm very interested in the Technical Support Position that BetaCo has posted and applied today. I was brought on at Pinterest because of my experience doing support at rapid growth companies and making improvements to the customer experience. I'm also a developer and since all that seems like a good fit for this job, I hope the quick note highlighting my application is ok.
Thanks for your time and have a great weekend!
Lastly, I think the others here are right, you are not out of the running for these positions. Looking for a job for a long time is really hard and demoralizing, but you totally have skills that companies need!
posted by Jungo at 5:29 PM on February 20 [1 favorite]
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Have you run your resume through an AI analyzer?
Have you looked into government work?
posted by soelo at 6:32 PM on February 16 [4 favorites]