I wish there was a job site for people like us. I'd love to be able to find a job at a small, niche company like this.

Thing is, many of those niche companies are single-founder businesses, where founders do not want to hire employees. Many reasons, not necessarily financial: in my case, I just got tired of dealing with people and their issues and decided I want to depend only on myself.

So, jobs of this kind are rather scarce.

Also, in a tiny business, the founder will usually be super-efficient and productive. Most employees are not. There is an impedance mismatch: a hired programmer will talk about the latest and greatest JavaScript framework and the need to rewrite everything in YaddaOfYadda, because that's what the World is doing these days, while the founder will think about the benefit for the users (usually none) and the immense costs (in terms of money, bugs, and time wasted).

Because of all this, it's not very probable that you'll find a job at a niche company like this.

It doesn't have to be as tiny as in the article, but more just a small, bootstrapped company with a good niche to serve. These sorts of company should be very common and jobs at them should be plentiful (due to number of shops, even though each would be small), yet they are nearly impossible to find. I bet they have an equally poor time of finding people. Seems like an under served market.

I think there used to be a lot more small software companies about but as the industry has matured the trend is towards consolidation.

Some niches can be very big, too! It's perfect when it's small enough to not be interesting for BigTech, but big enough to pay a few up to a few hundred employees!

Indeed. Software is mostly written by young white men for other young white men. Consequently there are loads of under exploited niches, while all the 'sexy' niches are incredibly competitive.

I don't understand where gender, age, and ethnicity come into play in this.

Not trying to make a poltical point.

Pick an interest that young white men have. You'll probably find loads of software that caters to it. Pick an interest that an equal number of retired women have. You will almost certainly find a lot less software that caters to it. It is simply because people write software for markets they understand. Most programmers (in my experience) are young white men. A lot less retired women have the skills or motivation to write software.

Sounds like an underserved market waiting to be tapped. How do we address it?

Talk to your older relatives and female friends.

The market isn't there since the petticoat 5 covered all bases

LOL. I hadn't seen that before.

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/8nzz23/pe...

It sounds like the view of some person with zero experience in the real world of professional software engineering. My experience is the opposite. The USA has a very diverse software workforce.

I don't understand the downvotes... I think it is true that there are under exploited niches, probably in fields that most developers aren't familiar with.

+1 this is the dream career!

Emphasis on ride.

El camino es mejor que la posada.

I accidentally many years ago fell into a job where I worked on parking automation and fee computers for parking garages, airports, cruise terminals and rental car agencies. It’s a niche but fledgling industry. Not many people know how much software runs parking garages and the like. It didn’t pay very well but the firmware was written in Turbo C and the GUI portion was written in Borland C++ Builder 5 with Delphi. There is a surprising amount of sensor integration with inductive loops and sensors from gates, etc

I tried to create some modernized software at that company with a License Plate Inventory application product using C#, VB .Net, SQL Server, SQLCE (for Windows XP Embedded) and ActiveSync. We sold a hundred copies of it.