Ask HN: How do you pivot your career when jobs want years of exp in a stack

Any fancy wording will not hide the fact that you do not yet have work experience in the new stack. In fact, you should make your situation clear, to save you and employers time and effort. The sooner you find out you are not a match, the better. That's probably what has been happening. The companies you have been applying to are probably looking for specific experience, and you do not qualify. So they do not reply at all. Each non-response brings you one step closer to finding a match. You know another company which is not right for you right now.

Recruiters are paid by the company to bring in people with specific experience. With no work experience in a specific stack, recruiters are probably not the way for you to grab the bottom rung of the ladder.

You have to talk to people. Lots of people. Ask each one, " Do you know one company which is currently hiring junior people with little or no experience in a specific stack?"

Look for a company which WANTS a junior programmer with little or no experience in a specific stack. They are much harder to find, but they are out there. It's not easy, but it's possible.

I run coderfit.com, a niche tech recruiting agency in Zurich, Switzerland. If you look for Bay Area salaries in Europe, shoot me a mail!

>What incentive does a company have to train employees in that environment?

The normal incentive is access to a larger employee pool and cost. You have access to a much larger group of applicants if you're not looking for 100% productivity on day 1.

Also if you are willing to spend a bit of time training your employees, they are less likely to leave. Give them raises equal to what they're worth on the open market and most of them have no reason to leave.

Reducing employee churn is worth a lot of money. No employee is anywhere close to 100% effective on day 1, and from experience, training goes a long way towards improving employee retention.

Not providing training because you're afraid an employee will leave sounds a bit like a shop owner who is so scared that someone is going to steal a few pieces of candy that he locks down his store so tight no one wants to shop there. Sure a few people will take your training and run, but that's just the cost of doing business.

This was actually the weird part for me, because I did some contracting around here in the aughts, and the pay was slightly better than fte work, but at that point, few of the FTEs I knew had significant bonus or stock grants. (You'd get options, just not RSUs) - as far as I can tell, this change to compensating developers with RSUs and bonuses is something that happened this decade; FTE comp went up dramatically due to bonus/stock, and contractor income remained competitive with base.

Of course, it's way different at smaller companies, or if you have the connections to avoid the body shops at larger companies, but smaller companies usually pay their full timers dramatically less anyhow, and if you have the kinds of connections required to go direct with the big players, being an individual contributor is probably not the highest value use of your time.

And I imagine things are different outside of silicon valley. Things are... very different and weird here.

Edit: oh also, 'similarly skilled' - I'm a contractor now, and yes, I get paid less than the FTEs I work alongside, I mean, I get slightly more than their base, but no bonus or stock. But... I'm also not similarly skilled. The FTEs doing my job are obviously better, at least by the standards by which we are evaluated. I'd give myself a 1 in 10 chance of passing a technical interview for a FTE job at the company where I contract now, and that is, uh, displaying confidence. My point wasn't that things are unfair; I don't think I'm being treated unfairly, aside from a few minor points, but that after the body shop takes a cut, there's just not enough left to pay enough to get people as good as what you get when you hire for the ridiculously well-compensated FTE positions at the larger and more prestigious companies in silicon valley. And the company matters; I interview often and just a few months back turned down a FTE position at a lesser company, for reasons having to do with pay, prestige, and trust.