They can choose jobs. Starting with my 3rd job in 2008, I always chose my employer based on how it would help me get my n+1 job and that was based on tech stack I would be using.

Once a saw a misalignment between market demands and current tech stack my employer was using, I changed jobs. I’m on job #10 now.

When did you get your last 3 jobs?

Mid 2020 - at AWS ProServe the internal consulting arm of AWS - full time job

Late 2023 - full time at a third party AWS consulting company. It took around two weeks after I started looking to get an offer

Late 2024 - “Staff consultant” third party consulting company. An internal recruiter reached out to me.

Before 2020 I was just a run of the mill C#/JS enterprise developer. I didn’t open the AWS console for the first time until mid 2018.

If one wants to optimise career, isn't it better to become an expert in the _less_ mainstream technologies that not-everyone can use?

Honestly, now that I think about it, I am using a pre-2020 playbook. I don’t know what the hell I would do these days if I were still a pure developer without the industry connections and having AWS ProServe experience on my resume.

While it is true that I got a job quickly in 2023 and last year when I was looking, while I was interviewing for those two, as a Plan B, I was randomly submitting my resume (which I think is quite good) to literally hundreds of jobs through Indeed and LinkedIn Easy Apply and I heard crickets - regular old enterprise dev jobs that wanted C#, Node or Python experience on top of AWS.

I don’t really have any generic strategy for people these days aside from whatever job you are at, don’t be a ticket taker and be over larger initiatives.