| This. I got laid off a few months ago. All in all, I was unemployed for about three months before landing a new position. Whenever I checked Indeed or Monster, I saw lots of positions that required extensive J2EE or .NET skills, plus a bunch of webdev and a handful of mobile jobs. None of those I have. I have lots of Java experience, sure, but it's all core Java and thoroughly divorced from the web. I was passed up for some jobs I thought I was going to get because the internal recruiters were really excited about me only to get shot down by the hiring manager because I had no webdev background. My background is half in core Java and half in Linux platform and Python development; almost nobody in Dallas wants either. And, no I'm not interested in leaving Dallas, and even if I was, I certainly wouldn't move to the Valley. If I ever set foot in California at all, it'd be SoCal. What finally saved me was when an old friend of mine found a position open at his company and put in a good word for me. I got lucky. If not for him, I'd be staring down another two-year period of unemployment like I had in 2010-2012. |
- there's a shit ton of programmers on the market now, with universities producing more and more like sausage factories
- the job market is getting super-specialized - once they'd ask for JavaScript programmers, now they ask exclusively for "Angular experience" or "React experience" or "$random_two_weeks_old_framework experience"; whether demanding such specific skillsets buy companies anything over asking for just a $language programmer is arguable