Get really good in a specific field you care about - for me that was platforms and programming languages but you might really enjoy other stuff.
When I say really good let me emphasize that's not exceptional, I am in no means a great programming language designer or web platform person or developer in general.
Once you get beyond a threshold - you'll find a lot of people who deeply care about the technology and the conversations become a lot more "here's this cool thing". That often unlocks connections and opens the door to work on platforms and interesting startups.
My work history before going to Microsoft was 3 technical startups - before that I worked on automagically generating and auto-healing E2E tests which was a bunch of algorithms and chromium internals on a technical product, before that I worked on a distributed p2p CDN over WebRTC which was also a bunch of algorithms and code, yada yada.
I believe my open source work unlocked these opportunities and not my fancy CS degree.
That is interesting but what I find hard is getting a foot in the door when changing expertise field.
In my case, I'm generally a mix of full stack dev and game dev (specialised in HTML5 game dev). I want to do more systems stuff (particularly Rust), and I've recently created a scripting language with a VM from scratch for a game engine as part of a side project.
But I don't have any commercial experience or keywords for recruiters to find in my CV outside of what I'm already "expert" in, and it's hard to find companies that will understand that a good programmer can transfer skills from one language to another.
To give an example, I recently got rejected at one job at the CV stage for "not having enough React experience" because my last job was in Vue so I wasn't technically using React in recent years (even though it's an extremely similar area of expertise)
> ...I recently got rejected at one job at the CV stage for "not having enough React experience" because my last job was in Vue so I wasn't technically using React in recent years (even though it's an extremely similar area of expertise)...
Ah, yes, the same old story that HR (or hiring manager) took the job description waaaay too literal, and missing the idea that a halfway decent technologist or developer can/should be able to reasonably pick up any other similar tech/stack...and as such, misseed out on a potentially good candidate. I swear that HR more than any other time in my life behaves more like robots looking to check boxes (or not checking boxes such as in your example). Or, maybe i'm just bitter because i got passed up for nice, interesting jobs in the past, where the candidates they ended up with were less qualified or left the org too soon (re-triggering the same job search again too soon)...plus, i would have stayed a lot longer, and given said orgs lots more of my passion, etc. But, no, i'm not bitter. Not bitter at all. ;-)
Yeah, I'm pretty bitter about it too. I've seen it in both industries I've worked at, it's so bad.
Actual technical recruiters will contact me and be interested despite me barely matching their stack, and I once god hired on a job doing a technical test on a language I had (almost) never used before.
But if I try actually applying to a job with my CV? Often rejected because I don't have keyword X. The same company would probably hire me if I came from a recruiter lol
I’m actually hiring for a role that seems to fit what you’re looking for at a small team. There’s a significant graphical component (so game dev sounds relevant), it’s primarily in Rust, and the front-end is Vue!
And I think it’s in an interesting space, but that’s also why I started this company :)
It does seem interesting, I've wanted to get more into electronics since I played with HDL when following the nand 2 tetris book. Though I'm not super experienced in low level or Rust yet (which is why I want to get into it) and I'm in the UK, not US
It's just the default way to hire. You look at what you want/previously had and see if they have it. As a candidate you should treat this as a sales problem and address it directly. If they are left with narrative they believe it probably won't be a problem.
Any advice on how to contribute to open source? Everytime I want to, the project seems too big and the issues too complex. Either that, or someone else has already started working on an issue before I can ask to take it on.
It's a bit hard to find something. Usually, people who contribute do so because they're users of a project and want to fix bugs or add features, so that's one way.
Other than that, most of my open source work was just created by myself. If there's something you think could be useful or interesting, just make it and open source it.
Get really good in a specific field you care about - for me that was platforms and programming languages but you might really enjoy other stuff.
When I say really good let me emphasize that's not exceptional, I am in no means a great programming language designer or web platform person or developer in general.
Once you get beyond a threshold - you'll find a lot of people who deeply care about the technology and the conversations become a lot more "here's this cool thing". That often unlocks connections and opens the door to work on platforms and interesting startups.
My work history before going to Microsoft was 3 technical startups - before that I worked on automagically generating and auto-healing E2E tests which was a bunch of algorithms and chromium internals on a technical product, before that I worked on a distributed p2p CDN over WebRTC which was also a bunch of algorithms and code, yada yada.
I believe my open source work unlocked these opportunities and not my fancy CS degree.