I knew I had to get into BigTech or adjacent after my son graduated as a software engineer.
Around 2016 I belatedly discovered cloud consulting where consultants would come in and “transform” organizations. I learned in hindsight that they were a bunch of old school net ops folks who only knew how to do bad lift and shifts that costs the company more money and treated AWS like a Colo.
I wanted to do the same but focus on what I learned the term for years later was “modernization”. Bringing in a software developers mindset on cloud consulting. By 2020, I was no longer thinking about BigTech and was focused on getting into consulting. I had never heard of AWS’s Professional Services department until a recruiter told me about it. Even then I didn’t know it was full time working for AWS directly until that was also explained to me.
[1] yes in hindsight I know that a title of “senior” to someone who pulls well defined tickets off a Jira board is laughable.
Is it? I don't know anyone who can code proficiently outside of people who work tech jobs (or used to).
Even if you are targeting a major tech, if you are trying to differentiate yourself by how well you can reverse a btree on the white board, there are plenty of people who can do the same. It’s not a differentiator that you have previous experience in BigTech any more. So do thousands of others.
I think software is going through what scribes went through when education went universal.
At one point, just knowing how to read and write gave you a cushy job. It didn't matter what, maybe you were in government, maybe you were a clerk organizing trade.
Somewhere in the last 20 years, this happened with coding. At the start of the millennium, knowing how to code meant you could fill some role. Now, everybody knows enough of how to do it that it's assumed for many roles, just as reading and writing is for every office job.