Ask HN: How to get out of making CRUD apps?

What you might try doing is to first decide what kind of non-CRUD stuff you want to do, find a company that does both that and web work, join the company, and then work your way around to an internal transfer after proving yourself there.

While I do not expect to go for very niche jobs, in part of them being quite heavily location specific, even things that seem dev adjacent do not feel very easy to get into.

As you mentioned, straight out uni funnels seems like one of the best ways to go into niche tech, but even few years back when I tried to go from senior to a junior role in a different space people were skeptical (at that point it was software engineering -> data engineering). I guess they do prefer someone they can train vs someone who comes with their own experience - be it good or bad.

> I’ve had little luck of going for roles that do not directly correlate with my current experience. It seems that recruiters have very little interest in talking about any roles other than ones that fit my current stack exactly (node/react/python).

Yes! so frustrating! this is the reason why I left SF Bay Area circa 2016. No one wanted to talk about what I wanted to do next and my prof interests. Only about past experience and existing skills that I could immediately contribute.

I started my career as a fullstack dev doing crud at startups. Eventually I got interested in FP and learned Haskell in my free time. Then little bit of Scala. After I got laid off from a startup, I knew that FP and/or large scale systems was what I wanted to work on next and wasn't willing to compromise.

Eventually a F500 company with an office in Portland OR agreed to hire me as a contractor because they were looking for strong FPers to program in Scala and local programmer market was almost non-existent.

That's how I pivoted to working on distributed systems and products with millions of users, and never looked back.

Generalized advice: learn a skill with a high barrier to entry that is also in demand.

I did try to do it, currently not yet successfully.

Since I had interest in law, I started working on a LLB (a law degree that would be first step to be a lawyer in the UK) on the side, thinking I could pivot into a niche of legal tech (combining CS degree + law degree). At least that seemed like a potential possibility. While I'm quite happy with the skills I gained going through the law degree, it has yet to payoff when it comes moving to a more niche position.

Next goal is probably committing more time into Rust, since I at least found it enjoyable (at least when compared to Typescript...).

Do personal projects in some other lower level language you're interested in. Keep a personal blog and write about what you've done. Then apply to companies that are interesting to you. Obviously you will likely have to apply for more jobs in whatever new domain you're interested in than if you were applying for web development jobs.

I did this myself and after ten years of writing Python/Go professionally I switched to C++ and work on interesting low-level problems not related to web apps. I don't know exactly what you want to do but in the first job I got writing C++ professionally I was grilled pretty hard in the interview loop about my C++ knowledge specifically. Once you get your first job though things will be way easier because you'll have the right stuff on your resume and you'll also have day-to-day fluency with the language.