[mikekchar]

If you were in the same industry (potentially the same company) for 12 years, you may be getting tagged with a bit of a "career employee" stigma. I'm 49 now and took 5 years out between the ages of 39-44 to teach English in Japan. I'm back in the industry now. It took me about a month to get a job when I came back.

The key is really flexibility. If you have a a very narrow focus, you will have difficulty getting work. You need to be able to take on anything. In my career, I've worked in health care, Windows productivity apps, telecom and now I'm doing business systems/web development.

There is absolutely nothing wrong being a pre-sales guy. There is tons of work in that area. But if you try to stay in a particular technology area, you may find that there just isn't much work. You need to show that you can branch out and be productive in whatever a company needs you to do.

For me, having a portfolio and a solid side project helped a lot. If you are working now, I recommend spending the next year taking 8-10 hours a weeks to build a good portfolio that show-cases what you can do. A side project is fine, or several projects, or concentrate on writing blog posts -- whatever you think will be able to sell your skills in the future.

Also, take time to go to meetups, coding dojos, etc. Again, if you spend one day a week for the next year in these kinds of activities, you will find that you will be well plugged in to the local scene.

And yes... I realise that this is pretty difficult when you want to also have a life outside of work. But it will pay considerable dividends for your career.

[innomansland]

This is gold! Can't thank you enough for your input.

Just as a side note, while my professional life is very "narrow", I have been doing stuff on the side! I own 3 dropshipping sites (WooCommerce & Shopify) and 2 pseudo-SaaS sites (one MEAN stack and the other Meteor.JS). I started these projects last year just so that I can get my hands dirty in the latest web technologies (last time i made a full fledged website, I was using LAMP and/or Perl!) and also, hopefully, generate some side income for myself (my FI goals is a story for another day).

Anyway, I did include these projects in some of my applications where appropriate but it seems to be ignored. There was another Ask HN thread on this particular topic [1] and it seems that side projects are generally ignored?

You did raise an interesting point on meetups, coding dojos, conferences, etc which will provide an avenue for me to meet people to hopefully build a network outside of my current profession. There is one thing I am absolutely confident with is talking to people! I love being in customer support. :)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13463105

[whack]

Off topic but I had the same experience as well. I had a side project which was twice as challenging and impressive as anything I had developed in my 9-5 job. But for some reason, interviewers only ever wanted to know what I did 9-5. I never did figure out why. My best guess is that they figure it can't really be all that great if no one paid you for it.

[mikekchar]

I've heard other people say the same thing... It's interesting. My projects have definitely got me interviews, but I admit that it has generally happened when I met someone at another event. You get to talking about what you've been working on and I just pull out my laptop and show them. So maybe that's the difference. I know that when I've been hiring, I always look at people's side projects. If they have a nice project I might not even bother looking at their CV. I might be strange, though...

[probinso]

The term side project is often associated with Hobby. Those who do not appreciate side project also do not appreciate the amount of work that can go into 1. If you put real hours into it, your best interest is sharing your side project as if it was a part-time contract. You never have to divulge how much you made on a side project.

This is a lot harder if your side project is a solo work.

Just treating your project like this, can allow for you to control the conversation better during an interview.

[jagtesh]

Your prospective colleagues and bosses would have been impressed by it. However, to impress the recruiter is a different ball game. Especially the inexperienced recruiters, who don't always understand the challenges of one technology vs another. Another possibility could be you were person #25 or even #7 to apply to the job and they already found a pretty good fit in the first 6.

[yoshyosh]

At the end of the day, the person is hiring to fill a specific job. A side project can represent every aspect of a business/product, it's the interviewee's job to spin it in a way that makes it relevant to what the interviewer is trying to hire for.

I think a big mistake a lot of people make with side project marketing is throwing the entire kitchen sink at the interviewer.

[sharemywin]

I was told I was to business focused and not technical because of my side project. Even though I learned a completely new language on mobile.

[tmaly]

As others have said, a side project has been a huge help in getting me into avenues and opening up doors. Start with something small but relevant to the skill set you want to have.

Also, blogging about the industry you want to get into also helps establish yourself as a thought leader. You can re purpose the content for linkedin, medium etc.

[vvvv]

>There is absolutely nothing wrong being a pre-sales guy.

Good pre-sales people with technical knowledge and some commercial acumen are like gold dust.

[siculars]

Ya, I didn't even know what "pre-sales" meant before getting the pre-sales architect job I have now. Know your tech, know how to dev something, but mostly know how to communicate. It's the communication thing that often separates folks. I really like having that customer interaction in different industries and solving different problems, also traveling.

[innomansland]

Exactly!

There is one thing I am absolutely confident with is my ability to not only deal with customers but to also lead technical teams to deliver what they require. I have great references from both my clients and internal teams hence why I thought this will be an easy enough transferable skill to other industry. Nope! After applying for similar pre-sales roles in other industries, I get the feeling that most require actual experience in the industry that role is in (which is fair enough).

[privateprofile]

TL;DR: That's me, but I can't understand how a presales specialist with broad experience and a demonstrated skillset can't get anything other than offers for "developer" or "project manager" or more presales.

This is something that I have given a lot of thought in recent years.

I'm in my early 30s and have a CS degree, ~11 years of experience in business intelligence and analytics, and I worked my way through consulting roles that ranged from developer, technical lead, project manager and presales. My CV also includes a startup and a senior advisory role.

I excel at presales because I have a broad technical skillset and it's easy for me to understand diferent industry problems and advise/communicate with people on any step of the corporate ladder.

However, the feeling I get is that presales only lead to more presales roles, where most of your time is spent meeting clients and producing countless presentations to get to an eventual prototype...and there's more presales to do, so your involvement on most projects (even those you sell) is marginal at best, and that makes it harder to move to other roles.

This is a problem when I apply to roles other than "consulting", because even though I have designed and planned (and sometimes delivered) technology solutions for basically any business problem that has been thrown at me, I didn't actually have a hand in delivering most of them, even though I excelled when I did.

My experience with recruiters is that most of them disregard (or don't understand) the knowledge and skills necessary to designing and planning business solutions, in detriment of actually implementing the technology, and this makes it hard for them to consider you knowledgeable on a specific domain.

The depressing thing is that, where I work (small EU country), the industry is dominated by numerous middlemen ("consulting" firms), so hiring is mostly for outsourced "developer" and "project manager" positions where you are basically "in the grind" of projects that are most often poorly planned or managed, and thus turn into a nightmare for the teams.

What baffles me is that my skills and experience seem to be of great value for Clients I've worked for in different industries, yet those same Clients prefer to recruit people with a more limited scope (both in terms of tech and business knowledge). It's either "developer" or "project manager".

I'm describing my experience applying for roles...fortunately, I get considered for positions that actually require my skills, but never through traditional recruitment processes (that just seem to get worse).

[apohn]

>> However, the feeling I get is that presales only lead to more presales roles, where most of your time is spent meeting clients and producing countless presentations to get to an eventual prototype...and there's more presales to do, so your involvement on most projects (even those you sell) is marginal at best, and that makes it harder to move to other roles.

This was one of the main reasons I left PreSales. I love technical work and I did really well with and clients who needed somebody who could deeply understand hard questions and solve problems that took longer than 1 day to solve. But at the end of the day most PreSales organizations reward demo experts who can sell quickly, not people who sell based on solving tough technical problems that take longer to solve.

The end result is that a lot of PreSales people either lose the deeper technical skills they once had and IMO the profession attracts a lot of people who had a technical background but truthfully weren't very technically strong when they did have a technical role.