RefactorCareer

I'm not necessarily afraid to jump out of the box, I'm just unsure which direction to jump. I could work myself into a product manager (I've done stints to fill in for short staff), but I guess it would take some research to see if reinventing myself in any specific direction is worth the effort in the long run, because in the short term, I expect to not be considered for a senior-level in that position, same as with any other development skill.

But you mention "adopting entirely new strategies for finding where your skills have value...those types of jobs aren't posted on HR job boards.", which would bypass the HR filter that I would worry about. Do you have any examples of these types of strategies? Is it more of networking? Cold calling into industries you've worked in? Anything that works for people who aren't natural sellers?

I know there was the developer agent idea (agent like an entertainment agent) floating around several years back. But this area really seems like an industry ripe for innovation. Starfighters.io has a take on the security world, but anyone out there looking for a business idea: there seems to be a large group of talented engineers out there who are being passed over by HR systems today.

I've had unofficial DBAs roles in the past, and it wasn't really the type of job that suited me personally (I like UI work as much as db work). I know they're in big demand though, so definitely a good path to look into if you're okay with all of the things listed.

I just wanted to add that I do have professional WebApi, Angular and JQuery work on my resume, but the big thing that seems to be the blocking point is MVC. I don't code traditional webforms development anymore (I don't use controls anymore, it's more JS calling json services), but there's no resume-friendly name for it because I'm not using a specific framework, and I'm guessing that to an HR person, all that means is "not MVC".

It's a crap-shoot on which technology is going to take off. Microsoft was pushing heavily that MVC was just another way to do things during the events I went to. I tried to push the boundaries of what my company let me work in, and that just happened to not be where the market went.

In hindsight, keeping my eye open on the job market is something I should have done more.

Thanks for the honest assessment. It's definitely something I need to consider.

No, I've been happy in my career. I want to find positions that I enjoy again, but it just seems like that sector of the programming world left me behind while I was selling out.

Thanks, will check them out.

That sort of goes along with the question of is pivoting myself into a front end engineer worth the effort? I'm comfortable using ajax and json services to create a UI--that's how I write my "webform" pages today.

That sounds like a good path as well. Thanks for sharing your personal story; sounds like it would be worth it to take a temporary paycut to gain some experience.

This does sound like a path, and like I mentioned in another post, it'd be easy to take an opensource webforms project and convert it. I'll probably try that out soon.

I have a bootstrapped project already, but as you probably can infer in my postings, I'm not good at sales. I'm toying around with finding a business partner and maybe get more out of it. Side projects will probably always be a part of what I do, but I really want to find something to replace the 9-6 I have now.

I thought money and flexibility would be enough, but working on simple client requests is boring me to death, and I miss the ownership of working on a product. I'm sure I could milk this out until I retired, but there are other issues with the company, and I don't want to be miserable at something that takes so much of my day.

I guess I wish the positions I applied for had hiring managers as open as you are. To be honest, with the majority of the places I've applied to, I get no response at all.

I haven't found positions like that open to people without MVC experience on their resume, but that seems like a good possibility to focus on. I could easily take an open source webform app and convert it to MVC as a portfolio builder.

I guess because I don't really have the experience of things going wrong there. I can tune a troubling sproc into performing well, but that won't make me seem like a senior dev when EF isn't syncing with an autogenerated db properly and I haven't been through that scenario before.

I'm honest with myself about what I know and don't know, and I'm willing to work on side projects on my own to learn more if I felt hiring managers would count it for something. I'm just at the crossroads of what I should try to focus on next.