Having just been on the job market, my experience was that career pivots are much harder now. I initially intended to transition to a neighboring field after an education break - but none of the companies in that field would speak to me. At most I had a recruiter call with one who decided to reject. To complete this transition I had been planning on a massive pay cut.

When I focused on areas I had some more credible experience in, I got significantly better engagement and eventually found a very narrow niche where I had substantial success.

I think we're partially adjusting to a world where employers expect a very narrow experience match to their role. Employers are also paying a premium within that narrow match.

Companies are primarily hiring on the spot market and paying through the nose for it.

To be fair, in the best of climates that is still searching in a niche market with an attempt to do something new with an engineering experience gap

How was your detour into product? What kind of skills/instincts you developed being in product? I always imagined it being kind of freeing -- leaving behind engineering implementation details and thinking more in terms of the final results.

A lot more of my time was spent fighting to keep the resources I needed to execute my roadmap than I liked. I spent waaaaay too much time explaining why my product area, which covered business critical data and internal processes, was worth funding to an audience that didn’t understand what I did, and by extension, did not really understand their own business.

When it’s ideation from customer interviews with a designer and an engineering manager, it’s fantastic. I like solving problems and I don’t really care about the specific technical approach, so that’s where I want to be. However I will happily write the code (or review it, or just wrote specs or whatever it is we do now since December 2025) if there’s no one else around to do it.

Be sure to talk with and apply at https://charmindustrial.com/ I dont have an in / network I can share with you, but Peter was a great person to work for :)

can you talk about the art installation section of your resume? it sounds really cool. how did you get into this niche and found projects? and is this kind of work not suitable as full-time freelance work?

Started with attending Burning Man starting about 12 years ago. Got jealous of my friends who were doing “real” engineering on these kinds of projects, and started volunteering, applying for and winning art grants, meeting other artists, and climbing the skill ladder.

If you attended Burning Man in 2019, Climate Week in SF in 2023, or Verge in San Jose in 2024, you may have seen my project Awful’s Gas & Snack. I also worked on the Love Blocks and the Jacks at the Conservatory of Flowers in SF (among many other projects).

I now run a small art fabrication business that just barely makes my studio rent most of the time, and is currently supplementing unemployment to pay my bills. It’s really, really hard to turn this kind of work into a livelihood, but it’s happening by necessity because I have no other work right now.

It’s also given me legitimate hardware experience — I’ve written code from scratch in Arduino and written modifications and extensions to WLED, and built custom controllers, remote sensor devices, and power systems (solar and batteries, relevant to the clean energy field). But I don’t quite know how to present this work as “legitimate”, even the stuff I’ve done as a full-fledged professional (like the work I did at Urban Putt San Jose, which you should definitely go see, it’s fun!)

Good luck, brother.

I suspect the third criteria might be the hardest.

In my experience HW companies are rarely interested software engineers from other, non-related domains unless they’re hiring a team to do web interface or something.