Meh, I've worked 15 years almost entirely at companies using almost entirely in-house technology. Maybe it's because I don't interview for web-tech roles, but I really have never had any problems getting opportunities, and I don't think I'm unique. I think buzzwords are less relevant if you have any amount of specialist skills or significant experience.

For instance, I constantly head hunted for jobs with Unreal Engine and/or Unity, and the fact that I haven't used them significantly doesn't really affect that much.

I agree with this. It's true that there may be less liquidity in the market outside of web tech stuff, but it's not all jobs. There are plenty of companies looking for people with either a) specialist skills which aren't web or b) good engineer skills generally (agnostic as to specific tech)

Not all companies are playing buzzword bingo.

To counter your experience, mine (in London) was almost exactly what Animats described. I worked on the same application for a decade, we introduced new tech when appropriate, but we also stuck with the fundamentals we chose right at the start simply because they weren't broken. That did mean, however, that when I came to looking for a new role I was _way_ behind other candidates.

Adding my anecdata for London, yeah, if you haven't been tracking the bleeding edge of JS framework and node insanities, people will mark you down because everyone* is looking for "full stack devs".

* Unless you want to do Perl maintenance or C++ for fintech, I suppose.

This defaults to the assumption we are still talking about computing / programming skills and domain knowledge related to that. As another poster mentioned, do you think you would be constantly headhunted if you had a very narrow skillset in something more niche like nuclear fusion?

The lens of the HN community is technology == computer science, when the main tool you have is a hammer. Everything looks like a nail.

I used to work on an in-house framework. The trick is to write like "used proprietary JS framework xyz.js, a framework similar to react.js". The scanners will still pick it up.

And of course to keep an eye on the ecosystem. Honestly, if you're a decent developer, learning something you're not familiar (e.g. React) takes a day at best to get at a good enough level to be productive at a new job. It's just a different way to cough up HTML in the end.

> Maybe they can get a job fixing legacy C++ applications.

There's big money in that - those legacy applications are vital to the functioning of big corporations. Specialising in large in-house C++ applications obviously doesn't help develop a career in trendy webdev (and nor should it), but it absolutely gives you some good options.

Hell, there's good money in legacy COBOL applications (both maintaining them, and trying to modernize them.)

Money ain't everything. Folks who are after comfortable pay and a W/L balance don't work for a VR startup.

Facebook and Google hire tons of C++ programmers. Despite what you may think, the back-end of the internet runs on C++.

Also: If you've done VR development, you have marketable skills. Unreal Engine is C++, and learning the specifics of the engine isn't particularly hard. If you're willing to work under the low salaries and often poor management found in the gaming industry, that shouldn't be too much of a barrier.

There's also gaming-adjacent companies, like Epic, Unity, Roblox, Twitch, and so on.

Being attractive to buzzword scanners is a more important career risk. I'd rather be rejected by those automatic systems so I pay more attention to offers from real people that know me from the industry.

TBH I always thought there should be a calculus for this - value a job for its opportunities, location, stated skill levels required, technologies=marketability etc.

Apply to an AR hardware company?