I'm a software dev/sysadmin mix, ~8 years' experience, looking for work again after some time off. (Based in a capital city in Australia if that's relevant)
I have no idea how to characterise the projects that I've enjoyed the most or would like to do in the future.
The projects that I've found the most enjoyable are not the ones that you see advertised by recruiters and companies; Kubernetes, cutting-edge, greenfield projects, massive cloud accounts... meh.
Some fun stuff I've done or would like to do:
- Upgrading that weird service everyone is accidentally relying on but afraid to touch
- While money pours into LLMs in healthcare, fax machines were still used every day
- Working out the "low-level" part of the system colleagues put off for 2 years because nobody wanted to read through the boring 400-page ISO spec
- Maintaining that abandoned 500K line Java system with most errors being
RuntimeExceptionwith anulldescription - Working in small teams, max 8-10 people
Any tips to characterise this kind of work to focus my job search? I know it's different from working at a software company pumping out features.
Tight deadlines and shoestring resources don't bother me (as long as I get my salary!). Having people who don't take it all super seriously along the way is super important.
How do I look for this? Trial & error? I feel like there must be... consultancies? ... working on these kinds of projcets. Perhaps there's some name or buzzwords that I need to use? Or would I need to talk with one of those mega big consultancies like Accenture?
Of course very open to the possibility that I'm being totally unrealistic and way too picky in a down market.
My bread and butter is working in Go, Python, backend and OS stuff. Networking, Linux, BSDs, that kinda thing.
Thanks all!
I don't know if this will actually work out for you--but when I did tech support, I noticed that there's a lot of little companies out there making extremely niche products and charging out the ass for them because they're SO obscure and niche, but for the people who need it, they NEED it and like to stay with the weird old niche company's software to avoid migrations and such which are considered big headaches for non-tech companies. And it's those niche products that have weird-ass old code that depends on the most obscure things. And they'll have one or two old programmers that know their shit forwards and backwards on staff--but if one retires or whatever, then they desperately need a replacement with that same mindset of keeping the old stuff running instead of chasing the newest trends.
Maybe target the manufacturing sector--companies building physical machines that need software to control them and have to roll their own in-house stuff? Or the medical sector? Or maybe something like traffic light programming or other infrastructure that will require some niche in-house software being rolled to run really old industrial or infrastructure machinery?
Like, maybe target the non-tech sectors that still have some weird in-house thing that needs to be maintained. Or look for software companies that target those markets and produce one really weird bit of software that maybe only 1,000 customers use but are charged like $25,000 a user seat or something for.
This actually describes what I would do when I was doing projects in the broadcast space (TV, radio, streaming etc.): writing software to interact with weird, badly documented hardware or some protocols that only they would understand. What I could do is list vendors and perhaps target people who are specifically in the broadcast space, instead of just being randomly assigned to projects ad-hoc like before.
Thanks!