Distozion

Past few years I've been feeling more and more that no matter where I look, no matter to what companies I talk to, a lot of the jobs in the market around me essentially boil down to be exactly the same.

- A basic app (just because it’s thousands LoC, doesn’t make it less of a CRUD app)

- Deployed on AWS/Azure (rare occasion GCP), using pretty much the same setup to deploy

- The difference is the copy - quite often even most of the styling is similar…

Only challenges so far came from having more customers on the app at the same time, but even then it leads to more conservative tech choices, nothing else of note.

Yes, I know my skillset is quite generic - heavily JS/Node/React based, with a few years of experience in Python and very light knowledge of some lower level languages (had some passing interest in Go, Rust, no commercial experience to back it up).

I went through quite a few industries, but at the end of the day, all of them just feel the same. Working on a platform for a hedge fund felt no different from building for a retailer or a real estate company. Everything behind the scenes is so much of the same that unless the devs intentionally made some random tech choice or decided to use a barely stable new framework - you could hardly tell them apart from code PoV.

I’ve tried startups - but majority of them, until a pretty late stage are mostly smoke & mirrors, where you do everything to acquire customers while pretty much lying about the capabilities of your tech. Can be fun in the beginning while figuring out what the product is, but so far, all of them end up being a CRUD app, just with a different skin. When going large corporate, you get an extremely small part of the bigger stack to work on, which might be interesting first time around, but gets old after changing the search bar for who knows how many times that year for marginal gains (yes, while the changes are marginal, I do realise they can translate into millions every month).

I’ve had little luck of going for roles that do not directly correlate with my current experience. It seems that recruiters have very little interest in talking about any roles other than ones that fit my current stack exactly (node/react/python). Even had one that was a bit more direct than others and blurted out - “Why would you want to change with so much experience in your current stack”. I get it, easy payday for them if they hire someone who can work full on from day 1, but there's nothing in it for me to encourage a change. Sadly, recruiters are often the gatekeepers for a lot of the roles and as far as I can tell, unless I’m an easy hire with experience in the stack being hired for - they have little interest in a “wildcard”.

So here’s the question - is there a way out?

Any experiences of a major transition and how did you pull it off?

Is contracting the only way - accept that I'll be making CRUD apps and might as well maximise income from that?

Almost every week I see new software books being published, sometimes on extremely niche topics. A good number of them get outdated within the year it was published.

At the same time, every workplace I worked at had some books, but mostly it was books-as-decor or ones that the management liked the title of (The Lean Startup, agile/scrum ones, etc). And no one ever read them.

When it comes to the software engineers I know of, a few mention they do read books, but AFAIK, it's mostly hobby reading and almost never work related (I think the closest I got was the 4h workweek or The Lean Startup).

So who is the target audience reading all these books? Is there actual demand and I just happened to miss all those hidden readers who churn through swats of these technical writings on their free time? Are they all published just for the sake that the person in question becomes a "published author"?