Stop obsessing over tech stacks (how I pivoted roles)
Context: 6.5 YOE, Backend lead. I've been looking to pivot into a broader product engineering role since January last year. I'd seen signs of my org getting way too bogged down in legacy code and knew 'twas time to bolt. But it's not that easy. Back then - knowing one solid language meant hey not bad, people still spoke to you and considered your profile. These days, they treat you like Ebola if your resume doesn't perfectly match their exact hyper specific tech stack for the last 3-5 years.
Anyway, so the majority of my time searching for roles was the shitty Easy Apply or trying to match keywords perfectly. Suprise suprise. It doesn't work. I kept getting rejected because I was a Java guy applying for Go or Node roles. I was still employed and not nearly as motivated as someone who's unemployed, but it felt hilariously like hitting a brick wall.
Cut to reality: Tech stacks are completely irrelevant. My whole team used to argue about frameworks and what the hottest new thing was. In hindsight hearing the horror stories of people spending months learning a niche language just to get passed over. I'm grateful for the realization I had. I'll be honest, it contributed heavily to my mental stability I stopped caring about the stack, I had leverage, I didn't have to run for the first shitty opportunity that asked me to invert a binary tree in Rust.
The How I did it (why you struggled through the above stream of consciousness)
I stopped applying as a language expert and started applying as a problem solver. Wrote to 40 engineering heads with one pagers on how i'd scale their systems regardless of the code base. 5 replies. 3 interviews. 2 offers - didn't take em cuz they were super early stage or terrible pay. Kept changing my narrative on my profile to focus on system design and architecture instead of syntax. Got me 6 calls, 3 interviews and 1 conversion last Wednesday. The new place doesn't even use my primary language and nobody cares.
This is brilliant. Kudos to you.
Wish folks complaining here saying "ooh I applied for 100 jobs, no response. Is the job market bad?" learn from your post.
The post in itself makes sense to me. But are you Product marketing manager as per new role or in your old role? I am curious how are these languages and tech stack used in your role?
Its not you though, its a general thing for people to dismiss something when they can't grasp it. Here's a nonexhaustive list of the same ->
- Languages don't matter (yes because not knowing things is universal, so if you don't know kotlin, you might as well not know rust and a bunch of other paradigms)
- Perfection is overrated (yes, because if you are doing a few things sloppy, you might as well do everything sloppy and use this quote)
- It is what it is (absolutely, and if we allowed things to play out they way they should, human civilization would have been extinct a long time back)
