Did you ever get a job in another stack without lowering your grade?
Posted by Affectionate-Mail612@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 37 comments
I always found it extremely stupid that nearly every job strictly requires X YOE in certain stacks and tools and nothing else. If I have 6 years in dotnet, I typically can't expect to get a job requiring 3 years in Go. Yes, I know that those are different languages, I just don't see a big deal to transition, that's literally a couple of months of reduced productivity, other than that my experience in building stuff isn't going anywhere. It's even more absurd in age of LLMs.
I'm aware of just one such case where a person got a job without cut in pay and grade. I'm curious if there are ways to increase my chances in case I would like to make a transition like that some day.
Unfair-Sleep-3022@reddit
I don't think this is really true
Cheap-Upstairs-9946@reddit
I’ve found that at least 90% of the time it’s not a strict requirement. Especially if your resume shows that you’ve jumped around between different stacks. I’ve gotten salary increases jumping into new stacks every time. I’ve honestly never seen a paycut related to someone not having experience in a stack.
Are you sure these paycuts you’re seeing are just because of your past experience? The market is bad for job seekers compared to 6 years ago.
Also, you can learn and work in new stacks outside of your job. I usually recommend people to stay away from the Microsoft stack, so the only other thing I can think of is that employers are pigeon-holing you as a one-trick.
cretnikg@reddit
Genuinely, why? I've build my carrer on .NET and I know plenty of others
Cheap-Upstairs-9946@reddit
It has absolutely NOTHING to do with the stack or skills of developers. It's just culturally not "cool" in some markets and some people consider .NET developers to be career or company "lifers".
I'm from the bay area, so engineering culture here is like fashion. I know .NET is popular in many other places, like the midwest. My advice purely comes from having worked in the SF bay area my whole career.
ccricers@reddit
It's probably because places heavily in .NET have a reputation for being more stubborn as pointed out elsewhere and this is encouraged by having more vendor lock with proprietary tools compared to other stacks. Makes it not as forward thinking and opposite of FOSS culture
GlobalCurry@reddit
I was checking out midwest job listings recently and Ruby on Rails is still really popular there too apparently. It's like large companies are dot net and small companies are ruby on rails. Saw a posting saying they wanted people up to date with the lastest tech trends and it listed stuff like jquery, angular, bootstrap, and ionic (is ionic even around still?).
HayatoKongo@reddit
I have experiences in the .NET ecosystem and outside of it. Modern C# as a language is great, but the companies who buy into that stack have a lot of negative qualities in common. It's just my experience, but every .NET team I've worked with exhibits the same resistance to change and refusal to keep up with modern practices.
I think generally, other non-C# employers won't hold it against you as much as the C# employers would hold a lack of .NET experience against you.
GlobalCurry@reddit
I generally agree, but at least in the current job market I've been in some phone screens where I get hard declined for not having x years of experience in a specific stack. I suspect it's because the recruiters don't know better but that's mind of the market lately.
Affectionate-Mail612@reddit (OP)
TBF I didn't fully commit to job search in other stacks. Just was curious and tried it a handful of times without much success and abandoned it.
> I usually recommend people to stay away from the Microsoft stack,
I can see why it could be said about .NET 4.5 and prior, but not last 10 years at least.
LogicalPerformer7637@reddit
Just recently switched from C++ win desktop to ASP .NET backend in C#.
Affectionate-Mail612@reddit (OP)
I can see that. No language is challenging after C++.
LogicalPerformer7637@reddit
It is not about language in my opinion. It is about the way you think. Learning specific language is just a cherry on top.
drew_eckhardt2@reddit
Several times.
A consulting customer hired me to do bandwidth shaping in Java which I'd never used.
Microsoft hired me to do distributed systems in C# which I'd never seen before.
Box hired me to do storage in Scala which I'd never seen.
My current team uses Go which I'd never used before.
halfway-to-the-grave@reddit
I recently switched entire stacks, and having never worked in the stack before, picked it up in a few months and now am earning more money than ever before
waterkip@reddit
I dont think it has ever stopped me from doing things. But maybe I program in a niche market, both location wise and language wise. So ehh.
The_Other_David@reddit
For my second job I switched from 5 YOE Java/C# to Golang. They knew I'd be able to pick it up, and I did. I also switched from Oracle DBs to Mongo. Again, professionals are expected to pick things up.
HR doesn't always understand these things, but the tech guys do.
cretnikg@reddit
How did the transition to Golang been for you? I plan to do something similiar in the future as I see reliable companies switching to GO
The_Other_David@reddit
After working with Java so long (Spring, actually), I loved how clean and straightforward Golang felt. That was six years ago, and I still love Golang as a language.
HayatoKongo@reddit
Same here. Switching from a C# backend to a Golang backend was great. But I have a bit of a personal preference towards concurrency and systems-level programming.
HayatoKongo@reddit
Same here, switching from C# to Golang felt extremely freeing. I love programming in straight C as well, so I might have a bit of a low-level bias.
failsafe-author@reddit
I switched from C# to Go (still prefer C# and use it for personal projects). It was fine. My first project was tolerable. My second much better, and my third I think is probably rivals the highest level of code quality in the company.
Affectionate-Mail612@reddit (OP)
Typically you don't get past HR in such cases. But good it worked out for you. Sounds like luck.
_slagwire@reddit
Them's some sour ass grapes, bud
ColumbaPacis@reddit
He isn't exactly wrong.
It USED to be you were expected to pick things up.
But now with the huge number of SWE workers flooding in, employers can be far more picky and only hire people who have experience in that specific tech stack.
Affectionate-Mail612@reddit (OP)
Why would I be sour? I do not doubt his competency. I was talking about HR's who don't know shit.
Careful_Ad_9077@reddit
This market seems pretty bad, but it has not been a problem for me before.
I will use a random unit for proportionality and the start-end salary of the job.
3k C#
4-5k php, flash
5k-17k java, flex, javascript sql
12k-24k C# , videogame industry
9k-10 C#, sql
12k-20k C#, javascript, sql
people who have worked in the videogame industry will undertand why the "jump down"
Arctan13@reddit
My first job switch was a lateral move (mid to mid) from a .net shop to a js shop. I was referred and I didn't get a "real" interview so much as a conversation with the CTO to make sure I had a brain, but it's definitely doable. Your skills should aim to be language agnostic IMO, learn how to solve problems not how to program in {x} language
HayatoKongo@reddit
I find it more true the other way around. The companies using .NET and C# are often incredibly stubborn and usually not very engineering minded. Microsoft has their own proprietary variants of just about every popular and modern technology, which means that even though no one should struggle to pick those up, HR will nitpick that you don't have Azure experience and your AWS experience couldn't possibly be equivalent.
However, if you even have a mention of C# or .NET on your resume, recruiters will spam you with jobs from companies that are begging you to maintain their legacy systems. In my experience, you really will just be maintaining the spaghetti they wrote because that stubbornness I mentioned also extends to refusing to upgrade the ecosystem or use more appropriate tools for microservices.
Anecdotally, I worked with an employer who wanted the company to train our own in-house AI models. He heavily resisted the data scientists' preference to use Python for this, instead insisting they should use ML.NET and train the models within C#. This kind of thinking seems much more pervasive in "Microsoft shops" than outside of them.
failsafe-author@reddit
I did, but I knew the VP of engineering, and he recruited me.
I wish that this wasn’t an issue- I have great devs I want to bring on board, but because they don’t have experience in Go, it’s a tough sell.
jacobissimus@reddit
I’ve switched stacks with pretty much ever job without ever lowering my salary
Affectionate-Mail612@reddit (OP)
What stack are we talking exactly
AmosIsFamous@reddit
Not comment OP but in ~15 years I’ve gone from: 1. C++ in OS kernel 2. Java on AWS 3. C (variant) & Python in distributed file systems 4. Kotlin/Java on AWS 5. Rust on GCP 6. TypeScript on AWS And never had a problem in interviewing due to the change in stacks. Granted a few of those jobs were network referrals (including the last two), so maybe that’s not consistent with the industry.
Affectionate-Mail612@reddit (OP)
Cpp and C are close and Java\Kotlin are as close as it could get. But other than that, indeed switch is huge.
sarakg@reddit
Yes, I switched from Salesforce to fullstack typescript (react, node, postgresql) as an intermediate dev.
Worked at that job for 5 years (intermediate, senior, team lead) and then switched from that job to now react with .NET backend as a staff dev.
When I switched the first time, I had side projects in react, so that helped.
And the when I switched the second time, I was brought in as a primarily front end dev, to help guide big tech debt cleanup and user facing upgrades. I had an established pattern of being able to adapt to new codebases and drive improvements. That was more relevant than the fact I knew very little about .NET.
Affectionate-Mail612@reddit (OP)
> I usually recommend people to stay away from the Microsoft stack,
How you can have any established patterns when it's a new job?
08148694@reddit
They’re all the same now that the language of programming is just English
Ok maybe not quite, but that’s quickly the way it’s going. I can quite easily just make a new project in a completely unknown language with Claude code, the fundamentals are the same, the patterns are the same, the syntax might look foreign but it’s an incredibly low barrier
AllOneWordNoSpaces1@reddit
I switched from RPG on IBM i to Java with spring & javafx to Kotlin on android at a previous job (until I was laid off because I ‘didn’t have the skills to move the company forward’).