HACKER Q&A
📣 wtracy

Moving from the "tech industry" to LOB/internal software


Like a lot of people right now, I'm between jobs and struggling to land a new developer role. My career so far has been all in "tech companies" in/around Silicon Valley. I know there's lots of software development that happens outside of tech-focused companies, but I'm not sure how to access those roles.

Has anyone here transitioned between the tech industry and line-of-business or internal software at non-tech companies, in either direction? What was the transition like? What can I do as a candidate to make myself attractive to companies outside of Silicon Valley?

The most obvious difference to me is that industries like banking look for people with .NET experience, which I really don't have. I'm happy to sit down and teach myself C#, but my impression is that hiring managers in these fields only care about actual "work experience" and are unlikely to take portfolio projects seriously. Is my impression accurate?

And of course, if anyone is hiring a generalist with recent C++ experience, I'd love to talk!

  👤 PaulHoule Accepted Answer ✓
Years ago I got a C# job based on my experience w/ Java which is not that different (plus at that point I'd just gotten off my own Annus Mirabilis where I had gotten an enormous number of broken projects out of the doghouse and/or in front of customers for a failing web agency and demonstrated that I could pick up any kind of tools and get it done.)

Personally I think hiring managers love portfolio projects: people who don't have them are always complaining that they spend 10 years coding Cold Fusion or something but can't talk about or show anything because (1) it is all proprietary and (2) they didn't really understand a lot about it.