
Ask HN: Industry-specific devs, your experience? - josephmx
Those of you who are industry-specific devs (eg, developers working solely in oil&#x2F;finance&#x2F;adverts&#x2F;etc) - what&#x27;s your experience? Do you command a premium? Do you find it difficult to find a new job with only a few potential employers?
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RogerL
I was in defense - avionics, mostly. It was pretty great in the mid-late 90s
as military aircraft were retrofitting to use GPS and digital navigation.
Things got harder after most of the airframes were upgraded. I ended up doing
an augmented reality thingy for the Air Force and I was able to leverage that
into an industry position It's kind of dumb, but people lack imagination, and
are unwilling to see a career path as evidence of any kind of skill at
learning and executing if you don't have their exact set of requirements. So I
lucked out in that I had essentially done the project already.

So, yes, it can be hard. Not sure about the pay in defense- you can be one of
three people that know something, but with the way contracting goes I'm not
sure it matters. Companies bid, supply some more or less random collection of
resumes to 'prove' they have the skill set, somebody wins, they slap the
cheapest people they can on the project, and so on. If you price yourself high
the bid will have to be high, and the bean counters in Washington aren't going
to recognize that you are the precious snowflake you know you really are ;)
Probably the far better route there is as a contractor/consultant - they
seemed to command arbitrarily big fees.

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ramtatatam
I was starting as industry-specific, then gradually moved towards general IT
so I could acquire more broad skills within dev/ops and then armed with that
experience and knowledge came back to industry-specific again. I discovered
there is a gap in IT knowledge within my industry - so there aren't many
engineers who would posses industry-specific knowledge as well as IT skills
(dev/ops + security). And that works pretty well even though there are not
that many major players in this sector.

