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by agentultra
1375 days ago
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The vast majority of jobs out there in software development are CRUD applications. As you're well aware there is hardly anything novel required for these jobs other than domain expertise. As an engineer you're there to essentially do the busy work of gluing together frameworks and libraries. Even startups are rarely doing anything novel with software engineering, computing systems, etc. They're usually stumbling around in the search for a market niche to exploit. It happens that they mostly use software these days to achieve that but it's absolutely a secondary consideration and hardly the most important. If the company manages to survive and gain adoption it's likely that the original code they wrote will get thrown out the window or wrapped up behind layers of glue code. There's very little work outside of that which isn't dominated by people with decades of experience and expertise who aren't going anywhere because the jobs are few and far between. Compilers? Real-time operating systems? Traffic control systems? Filesystems? Operating systems? Media codecs? Security? Typically the funnel for these jobs come straight out of universities. They don't need to hire generalists, there's a smaller market of job posts for these projects, and they have a well-established base of people who've built up these niche skills and rarely leave jobs like this. If you want to get out of line-of-business CRUD applications I think the key is specialization. You need to work one something niche and become a known contributor in that niche. It's more about who-you-know and being connected with the community in that niche. |
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Of course, to get a specialization you have to become an expert. No one is going to pay you for that. There are more ways in than just out of university, but they typically require a lot of additional work/effort.
A buddy of mine always wanted to make games. He's done it successfully... after several years working on "normal" software in Big Tech, he successfully transitioned to the games industry and is now a graphics engine expert. Victory! But it took a long time to get there: he had to learn a LOT in his spare time, and then it's been ~10 years of crappy underpaid jobs (with multiple layoffs!) for him to finally build up enough industry cred to where he can do the work he loves and get paid well for it.