[scarface74]

I stayed at one job too long until 2008. I was looking to restart my career and I spammed every ATS I could find. I didn’t have a network and I had no choice. I found a job that paid around $80K as a mid level .Net dev - still more then I was making. But about $10K below the local market.

Over the next three years, I did build out my network of local external recruiters who had relationships with the hiring managers.

I hopped around between various corp dev job - one generic corp dev CRUD job looks about like any other - by leveraging recruiters. By the beginning of 2020, I was making $150K and hearing opportunities of $165K locally. Then Covid hit and external recruiters had absolutely nothing to offer me paying more than I what I was making.

I hopped on the FAANG bandwagon because of an internal recruiter in mid 2020. Almost two years later, I still haven’t had an external recruiter ping me about anything mildly interesting.

[fecak]

I'd bet your LinkedIn isn't optimized at all for discovery. Populate a skills section with languages and tools you use, and you'll often see an immediate uptick.

[scarface74]

The companies paying in the BigTech compensation range don’t care about what languages or tools you are using.

The same recruiters see I work for BigTech and they are still sending me “exciting opportunities for .Net leads paying up to $150K”.

[fecak]

They may not care about what languages and tools you are using when they hire you, but that's how they find you. They aren't on LinkedIn search for "Software Engineer" in most cases - at least I wasn't.

[scarface74]

You would be surprised at how wide even internal recruiters at BigTech companies throw their net. My very light LinkedIn profile had a bunch of no name companies where I was doing CRUD C# work yet and still I had internal recruiters from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook reach out to me. No I wouldn’t have passed the initial tech screen without practice. That would be obvious to anyone who knew their own interview process.

Since 2020, I’ve been working as a “cloud consultant” at BigTech. That’s all it says on my LinkedIn profile. Yet the recruiters from Facebook and Google are emailing me about senior software engineering and even engineering manager positions. I have never been (nor desire to be) a manager. Even internal recruiters aren’t really that good.

Another anecdote, I’ve had internal recruiters reach out to me at my current company on LinkedIn even though it shows I already work here.

On the other hand, my development background from 2008-2018 is doing C# CRUD “full stack development” the salary ceiling for that isn’t high. No matter what tools I say I’ve used - C#, Node, Python - they aren’t going to say “let’s pay him $200K+ to write a CRUD app!”. My one saving grace that let me overcome that without “grinding leetCode” is that all of the major cloud providers have internal cloud consulting divisions.

[selimthegrim]

Your entry point was sales engineer, was it not?

[scarface74]

Technical consultant in AWS ProServe. I specialize in enterprise app dev/architecture + cloud.

Solution Architects are pre sales.

Consultants are post sale doing billable implementations. There is some overlap though. I do some SA type work and depending on the day of the week, I’m lumped in with the SA organization.

Out of curiosity, why did you (correctly) suspect I didn’t “grind leetCode”?

[selimthegrim]

You have mentioned it in the past here.