[idlehand]

If you're targeting well paid jobs at interesting companies, maybe. But we're at the point where practically every municipality, every government subdivision, and every corporation has IT development needs.

Developing and maintaining these boring systems is the primary source of employment in my corner of Europe.

[solar-ice]

In my experience, the companies that are developing these things are either about 5 developers and can barely keep the lights on for them - so aren't hiring - or have standardised their employment procedures so much that they probably won't hire you unless you hit every point on the job listing (including experience in arbitrary tech that only they and 3 other companies use) and can talk about your personal SWOT analysis and a bunch of other stuff that is more about signalling a specific cultural background than ensuring you're able to do your job and learn quickly. If you have that cultural background, cool, if not...

I could not get hired through most companies' cold interview processes - not "we make internal widgets in C#" companies, not "we're changing the world" companies. The most competent devs I know can't get hired that way. The only way that it's worked in my experience is to get someone internal to the company to champion me.

[roschdal]

> If you have that cultural background, cool, if not...

This sounds like another version of racism to me.