Embedded dev struggling in a web-first world

Career Advice
1

Hello everyone! I am an engineer in Toronto who’s worked at multiple companies, usually doing embedded software development or sometimes even hardware/circuit board design. I have been pretty successful and always adapted to new skills and tools. Sadly as I progress in my career (4 years after university now) I notice that Intermediate and Senior roles always demand specialization in a single language + framework and companies don’t seem to be open to general software devs anymore :frowning:

This is sad for me because I want to move from embedded to web technologies so that I can reach a larger audience/user-base and generally have more impact instead of building consumer electronics and gadgets.

Has anyone found a way to get over this hump? Do online portfolios help with this, for example? Are the Javascript projects you do in online courses good enough to showcase in a portfolio, or should it be “your own project” that you show off?

P.S. I am actually great at Python and am wondering if that is something I should be advertising more to companies in my search. What would I need to excel in with Python to get an Intermediate or Senior role? What do interviewers look for usually?

2

In short,
Yes, supplement curriculum projects with outside projects.

Many success stories say that they worked on open source projects and showcased projects that were outside of freeCodeCamp to supplement curriculum projects.

When I do the projects for freecodecamp, I always do more work than is required and try to utilize different syntax and play with it, and I have realized how little freecodecamp projects actually utilize, but it definitely gives a good foundation.