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I transitioned from liberal arts degree -> telemarketing / inside sales -> field engineer -> education company teaching IT to underemployed communities -> big IT consulting firm -> normal software engineering job, You have an awesome background, Some surprising types of companies that helped me transition into a software engineering role where i am today and am happy with: -education companies teaching software/IT (lots of online/non-profits doing this nowadays in the US, pays not great, but its fun to teach and you are working with software which is a step in the right direction), i found education hours are usually pretty structured (when you are with students), so that gives you time to continue to ramp up skills outside of those hours, i initially enrolled as a student at my program, at least you will be able to tell your friends/family what you do all day if quitting your job is on the table, and then went on to work for the school for a brief time -field engineering (installing software systems/robots/machines on client sites), sounds like you have a good background for that, a step in the right direction in my opinion, being on client sites can be pretty brutal though in terms of not having time to improve skills out of work hours due to work deadlines/exhaustion of physical nature of the work and the traveling. -big consulting firms, big IT consulting firms like Deloitte, Cognizant, Capgemini, handle staffing software engineering/IT departments at a lot of big US corporations. So like Google engineers might mostly be normal Googlers, but there is probably still thousands of IT consults working at Google full time (on projects with like 10 year contracts, obv easier to get hired by IT consultant than a firm like Google) These firms hire both extremely qualified/experienced engineers and newbies like us who might be getting in the industry. Might not be the dream job for someone getting into software engineering, but I found working with senior engineers at Fortune 500 companies to be a great step in the right direction. |