u/Recent-Trouble839 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I'm older. Bootcamp grad. CS Masters. Zero industry experience. No internships. Inflated my resume, made bootcamp & grad school projects into "experience". It's got me nowhere. Still looking for my first SWE job. Given the landscape, is a SWE future likely not in the cards for me
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
Sorry to hear that and I understand the deflated feeling.
I would next look into SWE adjacent jobs that leverage your past experience.
For example, if you were customer facing - Solutions Engineer or Support Engineer. If you were on the business side of things Partner Engineer or Business Engineer.
You might still have a hard time though and you can lean even more into your past experience. For example being a customer support agent at a big tech company might give you a pathway to becoming a Support Engineer internally. Or working in IT Operations might give you a path to Business Engineer.
Getting into a really good tech company in any role really.
I even know someone who went from working in an Apple Store to doing corporate training-type work at Apple to then doing that job at Google.