8 years of .NET experience but struggling to land a job
I’m an 8-year .NET full-stack developer in London and I’m really struggling with the current job market. I’d appreciate some honest advice from other experienced developers.
I spent 7 of those 8 years at the same company, starting as an apprentice and working my way up to Lead Software Engineer. I’ve gained a lot of practical experience working on a large production system, using C#, .NET, SQL, APIs, frontend development, Azure, etc.
However, I think a lot of my experience became quite specific to the company’s product and existing architecture, which was also fairly dated. Now that I’m looking for a new role, I’m finding gaps in areas that I haven’t had as much exposure to.
Seems like the market is pretty tough atm and any jobs I’m getting interviews for I seem to do well then struggle on the technical tests/interview sections.
I’m being asked about things like system design, architecture, scalability, cloud infrastructure and virtual machines. Some of these are things I’ve worked with professionally, but I haven’t necessarily had to understand them deeply enough to sit down and design a system from scratch and explain all the decisions.
It’s made me question whether I’ve got quite a few knowledge gaps because I didn’t go to university and most of my learning has been through practical experience.
I have been trying to learn areas I think I’m lacking in but it seems like a never ending list of things I should know and things I wouldn’t of thought would be linked to a developer role.
I guess I’m looking for some advice from people who have been in a similar position. Is this a common situation after spending most of your career at one company? How much system design and architecture knowledge would you expect from a senior/lead developer? Are personal GitHub projects actually important when you already have years of commercial experience?
At the moment I’m feeling pretty defeated and worried that staying at one company for so long has held my career back. I’d really appreciate some honest advice from other developers who have been through something similar.