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Comment by eatonphil | Hacker News Reader

I think the most interesting jobs technically are in developer tools or developer infrastructure companies. This includes companies building databases (e.g. Cockroach, Neon.tech), compilers (e.g. JetBrains), CDNs (e.g. Fastly, Cloudflare), hosting (e.g. Digital Ocean).

These companies hire frontend developer, backend developers, core systems developers. You don't have to be a genius or a CS grad. You can always get in doing what you already know and do more of the core stuff over time if you like.

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That's probably true. The work I always love the most is building tools to help other people at work...

On the other hand I've found those companies hard to break into because they often expect you to have specific expertise in things like "very high scale applications" or specific low-level things.

I only tried Gitlab I think, and never really heard back.

Even worse, I have the experience, just no way to put it on my resume to avoid getting ATs screened out.

In my last job search, I swore up and down that I’d not settle for money again, but would actually put effort into getting a job I wanted. It didn’t work out.

Almost every job I applied for, I got ATS screened out of. I remember looking at one job and thinking “oh yeah, I could do this”. The job wanted experience with some tool I’ve used numerous times over years to assist with debugging/hacking etc. Unfortunately, that’s not a concrete job or project I can place in my resume.

In the end, the only people willing to talk were people who had jobs that were basically what I’ve been stuck doing my professional career.

There are way I can think of to get around or, but they’ll just take so much time, that I’d rather just waste my time/money going to learn how to do something else. I’ve been burnt out on programming since before I did it professionally anyway.

Yeah my last few job searches went a bit like that too. Sending CVs to try interesting new things gets not replies, meanwhile I get dozens of recruiters offering me well paid jobs as long as I stay in the same general areas.

It's really hard getting out of the boxes we're typecast in.

I still like programming a lot when I do it on interesting things (which are side projects really), but I haven't had interesting programming at my job in years.

My favorite example would be big datish startups too. The likes of Imply, Dremio, Starburst who develop in a not-too-low-level language from an average developer's PoV. But they are obvious to anyone familiar with the domain.

It used to be the case that the answer to the original question would be "in the Bay Area, London, Berlin, Hyderabad". I guess this constraint is less rigid now but I'm fairly certain it's still there.

These guys already rejected me next my resume wasn’t exciting enough.

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