I spent about a decade working in the finance industry as a software engineer. Most of my experience has been on brownfield systems, using technologies like Java, Python, and React. I’ve worked on a mix of things — building data pipelines, dashboards, and web applications — as well as doing a fair amount of maintenance and incremental improvements on existing systems.
I was laid off in 2024 and have taken a gap year career break. I’m now planning my next move and aiming to look for roles as either a Senior Software Engineer or Senior Data Engineer.
During this time, I’d like to upskill and strengthen my profile, but I’m unsure where to focus my effort for the best impact.
The online material is too trivial, talking about syntaxe rather than concepts or patterns. I also felt kinda bored like I already 'knew' them but didn't challenging enough.
What are the suggestions for good read to refresh and upskill?
The answer as cliche as it sounds network and figure out something that sets you aside from the unwashed masses.
Say you did upskill, why would a company hire yoh based on a side project over someone with real world putting things in production experience?
I didn't 'code' or read any CS related for almost a year. I agreed that now I didn't need more 'input' course material, but rather a 'learn and output' way to rebound.
Since last October, I have been using github co-pilot(because its free, unemployed) to write little python project helper for my finance admin and other daily stuff. Initially I had to 'plan' with AI, broke tasks into smaller tasks and modified a few things. I haven't 'written' a single line of code since January as the model is so powerful they can step thru the changes and debugging. Granted this is a very small project.
I aslo think contributions to the opensource projects would be helpful, for the sake of mental health and having 'real' practice.
I am also thinking about might be start with some opensource project that I have used, e.g. like pyarrows, pandas, jupyter for python, and spark for scala. However, I think I am actually more interested in building a system together, rather than writing 'libraries'.
Do you know how I can find one? I had tried searching via google but its not effective. I guess I don't know how.
I have also tried to find 'volunteer jobs' but not very successful. Again, I think I might not know 'where' to look.
I think my mind is still all over the place after the burnout so would need some brain power from the community.
Thank you!
People can debate the merits of LLM coding, but that's something every hiring manager will want you to know.
I do use basic LLM assistance, at a chatbot level. It is close enough and quick enough to give me a good head start when writing something new, and its problems are fairly quick to see and fix. But the fully baked tools are overkill for the value they offer, at least where I work.
I'd say that you need to know your environment, know what AI tools are available, and know which ones work best in your particular slice of the industry. Because if I ever go back to modern stacks, I know the AI tolls will have far more value.
Even in adjacent roles (design, PM, etc), I'm confident "how do you leverage AI?" will be one of the central evaluation questions.
Edit: for emphasis, again: whether I like it or not.
That will give you hands-on with the new AI tools, and deepen your understanding of key open source systems - far more than going through online tutorials. That might even lead you to making some contributions to the projects, which in turn will help you answer the interview question “so what have you been up to?”