u/michaelnovati replied ·
I can give my 2 cents as someone in industry for a long time.
I don't think anyone is lying to you, there are hundreds of legit technologies/frameworks/tools companies use that you could learn, and thousands of common combinations / tech stacks using those frameworks.
The truth is that there isn't just one answer. And if you seek answers from people without any real experience here, on Blind, or on YouTube you get people SUPER CONFIDENT that their way is the right way.
I see so many junior people jumping from stack to stack and project to project after getting one sentence of advice from an influencer who has zero experience or a comment in this subreddit. I see people post a success story and then someone comment "which bootcamp?" only to spend months obsessed with that bootcamp, never getting in, and then finding out that the "success story" person actually had 13 years of programming work experience on their resume that they conveniently left out in their "success post".
I have a thread with dozens of industry leaders from top companies trying to help justice impacted individual with re-entry find jobs and everyone wants to help, but it's just really hard to figure out the best way to help these individuals because very company wants something different!
**The largest source of this problem is big tech VS non-tech**
At big tech companies (e.g. FAANG) - stack and frameworks don't matter. The companies have their own stacks and frameworks that are proprietary and they teach you those stacks themselves. Now they might want to see you have exprience with ANY stack and can demonstrate that you achieved a certain level of expertise, but generally that stack doesn't matter. For these companies they care about **fundamentals** like DS&A and problems solving, teamwork, work ethic, raw smarts, etc...
At non-tech companies (e.g. banks, insurance companies, web dev agencies, tire stores) they use more off the shelf technologies, they don't have robust training programs, and they don't invent new technologies themselves like big tech does. **These companies want to see existing experience with SPECIFIC stacks.** They want you to show up and work in a MERN stack from day one perhaps, or work on a Kafka message queue. Since there are thousands of common stacks and you can't learn them all, then you have to make a call on what you learn. Do you learn one stack REALLY well and apply to all the jobs requiring that stack? Do you learn a lot of stacks minimally to try to apply broadly and cross your fingers you know enough to get the job?
At the end of the day, this is why expensive career coaching exists. My company does this for a large sum for engineers that already have work experience so I'm not advertising that to you in any way whatsoever, but I'm making a point that people with 10+ years of experience in the industry genuinely do have more valuable help to offer than people 6 months out of their bootcamp, and try to learn from THEM - for free if you can.