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> But my background kept leading hiring managers to suggest putting me on cloud teams doing orchestration in Go around a database rather than working on the database itself.

This is extremely annoying. This also means if your first job is doing X, it is very difficult to break into Y even if you know quite well about Y, and even have side projects. I have tried attaching cover letters indicating even if my current experience is in X, I am quite familiar with Y, to no luck. (No one reads those stuff).

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To me it seems like the majority of recruiters barely read past company name and job title.

I switched from Dev to SRE at the same company, and within like one week of remembering to update LinkedIn job title, the random recruiter messages switched from Dev to "oh we are looking for someone like you with lots of SRE experience" (having worked in SRE for <3 months).

So yea, it's difficult to get traction for something that isn't already your job title.

>> the majority of recruiters barely read past company name and job title

This is a failing of the hiring manager. If the recruiter can't tell who is and isn't a good fit, the hiring manager should have corrected the situation or not partnered with the recruiter.

Disagree. The most common reason I've seen for this is the recruiters using largely or entirely automated tools to comb LinkedIn, Github, and many other sources and auto-blasting out those cold emails. They don't even look at the resume until you reply with interest. It's not (usually) the hiring manager's fault. They frequently don't even know that is occurring.

I find that practice disgusting personally and will never do it myself or condone it in others, but it does seem to work.

It probably doesn't work. It seems to work because you will never know the opportunity cost of not hiring a better person, after you already hired a worse person.

The hiring manager can set the expectation with a recruiter that all candidates submitted must meet a certain standard. If the hiring manager let's the recruiters send garbage and/or fails to guide them, that is 100% a hiring manager problem.

> and within like one week of remembering to update LinkedIn job title, the random recruiter messages...

The LinkedIn random recruiter messages are a different game than resume screening. Most of those recruiters are using the LinkedIn search tools. Searching for keywords like "sre" is essentially useless because so many people do keyword stuffing. So instead, many recruiters will either be given or will ask for a list of companies to try to pull candidates from.

My entire career was switching from one discipline to another.

For me, the key was twofold:

1) Spend a lot of extracurricular (not work) time, exploring new tech that interests me. This often included purchasing expensive kit, and attending classes, on my own dime (but I could usually use the spend in my tax write-offs).

2) Be willing to accept being paid a lot less than my peers.

My career is a fairly eclectic one. I’m now retired, and spend a lot of time learning stuff, which is fun.

How do you have the time to do this? I already barely have free time, let alone time to attend classes

In my case, I'm a bit obsessed. I'm "on the spectrum," and that helps me to concentrate and understand stuff.

Also, I just like doing this stuff. My work is also my hobby. There's not that many things that I'd rather be doing.

I have also had a very good venue for doing volunteer work, and that has always provided a driving force.

Of course, now that I'm retired, I have the time.

This is me to a big extent. Sometimes I feel like I to learn for learning's sake. Which is okay, or at least that is what my therapist tells me. I struggle with the fact that I "think about doing" vs actually doing.

My work is my hobby too, that is why I struggle sometimes wondering if I will ever retire. Why retire when what I'm doing is for the most part fun. Sure, there are days that I'd rather be "doing X", or more like "studying X" than actually working but I'm enjoying work so much lately that it soon passes.

Work also forces me to actually DO instead of thinking about doing. I have to perform. People are depending on me to get stuff done and that is a big motivator. With my personal projects, no one needs it or is expecting it so it is too easy to abandon.

> With my personal projects, no one needs it or is expecting it so it is too easy to abandon.

In my case, I was fortunate to have projects that people depend on. Even my "hobby" work has always shipped.

The overwhelming majority of people who work around 40 hours a week have plenty of free time.

"I don't have freetime" is usually a tell sign that people either don't know how to manage their time / prioritize free time activities, or have made choice that they refuse to see as choice but as obligations instead (which implicitely just means they prioritize this activity a lot)

Yeah. I worked 30 hours/week when I went to undergrad full time for CS. Later I went back to grad school while also working full time. There is a lot of free time in many people's day. I'm also not saying it all has to be productive, I know mine certainly isn't, but it should be deliberate. I love sitting down to watch a movie or play a game, and I hate when I get sucked into some social media for 30 mins or an hour without realizing it.

> The overwhelming majority of people who work around 40 hours a week have plenty of free time.

Overwhelming majority? Plenty of people don't make enough from their 40h/w job to pay all their expenses and have to get another job or have to share responsibilities with a working spouse. Having kids or aging parents is also a common demand on ones time.

The average weekly hours of US employees is ~34 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP

"Only" 5.2% of US job holders hold more than one job https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat36.htm

If you want to argue that this doesn't add up with "The overwhelming majority of people who work around 40 hours a week have plenty of free time." then please provide sourced numbers rather than baseless internet doomerism.

Oh and I'll add that the average commute time in the US is among the shortest in the OECD, since the long commute boogeyman always end up popping up in these discussions.

you're describing people who work MORE than 40 hours a week

Good point. Still, plenty of households can't get by on one 40h/w job. And regardless, childcare and elder parent responsibilities are things that I'd consider taking away from 'free' time, not a part of it.

definitely. you're right that "free time" is a luxury

Idk if it's about my demographic, but everyone in development positions who I know has to work till 7pm. There are people at less serious positions who leave at 5.

Do you have a kids and a spouse? What’s your age range? I found that the time I had in my 20s is filled by life obligations.

Wild guess: gp is self-employed and can manage their own time. I’m assuming that with some planning you can carve “learning time” across contracts.

No, I always worked for companies.

However, there was never the "996" shit, you see, these days. I generally did about 50 hours per week. Sometimes more; sometimes, less.

Sometimes, if the extracurricular stuff also benefitted my day job, I could get the company to help out, there.

I see, thank you for correcting me!

How did you manage to write off for your expenses for tax purposes? I thought this was not possible for regular employees in the US (your profile says you're in the New York). I'd love to be able to do this.

It’s been awhile, so I can’t remember exactly how it worked (I’ve used an accountant for the last 30 years or so), but I was able to argue that it went to benefit my day job (which it actually did), and I mixed in a lot of stuff that directly benefited my day job (like taking my team out for a holiday dinner, on my personal expense, as the company didn’t do that kind of thing).

I wouldn’t do it without a decent accountant. In my experience, they always paid for themselves.

I don’t know your exact circumstances but it sounds like your “decent accountant” was helping you commit tax fraud.

Prior to TCJA there were a wider range of allowed deductions for W2 workers.

You would not be able to (legally) do that today

I believe that. It's been a very long time, since I declared anything like that. I think I remember my accountant telling me that I couldn't anymore, so I shrugged, and declared what I could. Also, I retired in 2017.

Thanks for not immediately going on the attack.

For programmers it wasn't that big of a deal. Maybe some electronics purchases were no longer deductible, or a little bit of software, etc. Home office could be sizeable.

Some other professional got royally screwed - e.g. a concert violinist can no longer deduct a $50,000 violin purchase if they're employed by an orchestra as a W2

Doubt it. Don't forget that they also have a stake in things. That's why we pay them.

That's why I say we should have accountants.

I'm always thrilled to have strangers on the Internet attack me, and even attack an accountant that they never even heard about before. Thanks!

Have a great day!

I didn't attack you, I'm sorry you took it that way.

Have a great day, or whichever passive aggressive sign-off you'd prefer!

what works for me: I need to establish a "normal state" that includes some of this, achieve momentum and then add a little more. Most of us have a lot of slack hiding in the required activities, but you can't recapture this all at once. Do something scheduled but onyl a few hours a week. Once it ends, keep doing something scheduled in that timeslot - even if it's not "official" (ex: I go to the library on a specific day/time and study low-level electronics). It is way easier to keep going with your normal routine and supplement than it is to make big changes all at once.

Never gets old:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/4k994j/if_...

I have come to the conclusion years ago that it is easier to work on a consulting agency, where everyone is "jack of all trades master of none", than trying to apply to regular HR positions.

In agencies, a bit like startups, everyone "knows" everything up to the point of winning projects.

While everyone knows here how famous some of those projects end up being, but if you can take this ongoing pressure to "know" everything, it is much easier to switch between roles and programming stacks, than the usual HR looking for X on the CV and nothing else.

I find it's easier to prove that within a small company after you're in. You just fix a problem in the area you want to work in, then you fix another problem, and soon after people want you on their team or a team is created around you to fix that class of problem. But lots of engineers just wait to be picked while only doing the stories assigned to them. Or they are in big companies, of which I don't know about.

Is there a way to work around this?

Lie on LinkedIn, get a foot in the door and explain in the interview

Risky. If I interview somebody and their resume is inflated or wrong, at best as a candidate you wasted my time reviewing your resume and scheduling interviews and what not, and now you're starting from a disadvantage because my first impression of you is one of being misled. We're a high-trust organization and anything that causes doubt on your integrity puts you at a disadvantage. If I'm interviewing you, it's because I considered you against the torrent of other applicants, and I likely excluded one that is more qualified than you based on your misrepresentation. That also doesn't work in your favor.

If you are a truly exceptional dev in your previous field and can convince me of that, along with an up-front and transparent explanation of why you lied to me as our first interaction, it is possible to overcome this. However, that is a pretty small pool of people.

Though, it definitely can work at some companies.

Definitely fair but for the candidate considering this, it's a numbers game. They're just looking to get their foot in the door for a new career path. You care, and you're right to care, but there will be others who don't.

Then next time, it's no longer a lie and they can (in theory) get by on merit

references, apply for a company rich enough to fund various projects ( like crypto company, if your moral compass allows ).

If you're interested in working on database internals, it's worth looking at startups—even if you don't have prior experience in this exact area. At my company, we hire engineers with strong systems backgrounds who haven't necessarily worked on databases before. If that sounds like you, feel free to check my profile for more details.

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