I don't care that you have software engineering experience, you are answering to a thread talking about leetcode interviews by saying you didn't have to leetcode because you took a non-software engineering job. Good for you, but nobody cares.
2008: when the director of software was looking for someone with a weird combination of VB6, C#, and low level C and C++
2014: when the new director of software engineering was looking for someone to be on a “tiger team” to go after a new vertical
2016: when the new director of IT was looking for someone who could lead the effort to move from PowerBuilder to C# and JS and to lead the integration efforts as they were acquiring companies
2018: when the new CTO was looking for a developer to lead the effort to make their development and CI/CD processes cloud native
2020: current job.
From 2008-2020 it was mostly developing in C# and JavaScript with a little C++ early on.
In 2018 I started getting into Python.
It’s amazing what you kind of crap you can avoid when you have 12 years of professional experience (in 2008) and a good network.
Yes my career before 2008 was unremarkable and there is a pattern that I gravitated toward positions where I was one of the first technical hires by a new manager.
Each of the jobs I mentioned between 2008-2018 were a recruiter reaching out to me that I knew from network where the director/CxO was looking for someone to help them with some type of strategic initiative. All of them were more interested in my ability to technically lead strategic initiatives than whether I could reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard.
When you can talk to a technical director about how you optimized 65C02 code as a hobby in the 80s and how you wrote inline x86 assembly to speed up a batch processing system, they don’t wonder can you maintain a compiler for Windows CE devices.
