It helps to be be entering areas where demand is exploding and the supply of experience people is thin. I have a long track record of being fast to pick up the methods of a new domains and I’ve frequently had people riding my tail to help them out with a project in a new domain, even if I wasn’t really that interested in the switch.

It’s a part of my origin story because the whole reason I left physics and went into software development was that I watched one of the best physicists of our time crying every night because he had no idea where his next job was coming from despite having written half of a very good textbook and numerous great papers. He made it big in the end but I had neither the tolerance for that nor the talent or motivation. I’ve had the occasional job search that took most of a year but I’ve had some that lasted 72 hours.

Thus I skip all the fancy programming languages and work in the big commercial ones in demand unless I get cash on the barrelhead. For years I avoided Python but I worked for a few people who needed “data science” so they paid for my education.