Ask HN: How to get web development career on track from being homeless?
I think you&#x27;re shooting yourself in the foot looking for &#x27;web developer&#x27; jobs in the homeland of hipsters. Of course all the postings are going to be for trendy technologies.<p>Look for more boring jobs that require web development skills, unless you&#x27;re really stuck on the title.<p>You know PHP. I did too, once. I made the mistake of taking on a Magento project a decade ago, suffered through it, and I still get hounded by recruiters <i>desperate</i> for PHP developers who know Magento. That fucking platform still powers 99% of the entire e-commerce space; version 2 was released recently and by many accounts it&#x27;s even worse than v1, which means people who made the mistake of using it are going to need support for it. The demand for PHP developers is still very much there.<p>You know Python. You can get jobs knowing just that. There are lots of relaxed junior-level *-analyst positions in many domains requiring nothing more than scripting skills and a brain, which you clearly have. I see job postings all the time looking for Django devs. Lots of businesses need reporting-type stuff done, business analytics, ETL, that sort of stuff. Shady businesses always want web scrapers written.<p>With 10+ years in web development, you might also want to take a shot at jobs involving web application security-- either securing or breaking it.<p>Just to put it in perspective-- my job title has nothing to do with web development, yet it is an incidentally significant portion of what I do. Best job of my life, and I never would have found it looking for &quot;web developer&quot; jobs, since that&#x27;s not what they thought they needed when they hired me.<p>Crawl LinkedIn, not Craigslist. All you&#x27;ll get from Craigslist are couches, crabs, and people who want you to build out scalable PCI-compliant e-commerce solutions with a full complement of product photography for their hobby business for $500, payable upon delivery. And when they sense your desperation, they&#x27;ll withhold even that until you go away.<p>Best of luck to you.