[ghaff]

>I wouldn’t move somewhere that there weren’t other jobs in the area.

While a good principle, I'll posit there are a lot of more or less specialized professional jobs--especially at more senior levels--where you can't just walk across the street and slide into a similar role at a different company. Even if it's in the same general area, a 2 hour commute each way is probably not sustainable.

[scarface74]

And thats why I have a 25 year of paranoia about being overly specialize.

Yes I’m self aware enough to understand the irony of the only reason I fell into my role at $BigTech at 48 years old is because I did become overly specialized in enterprise dev + cloud.

[ghaff]

It's hard not to be at least somewhat specialized as a very senior person.

If you're an embedded systems programmer, maybe you can hack on some Javascript but no one is probably going to pay you very senior comp to do junior programmer work.

It is certainly true you don't want to be too specialized in general. You didn't want to be the Y2K guru in 2001 or the world's expert in performance optimization for some specific computer architecture that isn't manufactured any longer.

When I took my current job, there were probably a few companies in the general area that would have been somewhat obvious potential matches. But it was sheer coincidence that the one I connected with first through a connection happened to be the closest major tech company to my house.

[scarface74]

Is that really true though? How many of the 2.7 million developers in the US are just your generic enterprise CRUD developer writing apps using Java, C#, etc? They are basically interchangeable and for most of my career, I could throw a resume up in the air and get multiple offers for yet another generic enterprise CRUD job.

On the other side, how many jobs are (were?) available to the generic software engineer who could do the DS&A monkey dance (junior/mid) and “design Twitter” and talk about “scope” and “impact@ in STAR format (senior).