04-01-2019, 04:27 PM
With regards to the BlackBerry layoffs, I worked at Communitech during that period and helped with some of the programming offered to the affected BB folk. One of the biggest challenges they had in getting jobs was the tech community's unwillingness to train people who are obvious highly skilled but lack experience in a specific tech stack.
The discussion around such things is better now - more and more job postings explicitly say "we're looking for strong programmers and will train on our stack" but if you have only ever worked in C++ it's still pretty unlikely someone's going to hire you to do React development.
Additionally, there's a lot of concern in small and scaling companies about people who have spent a long time in one place, and especially at a place like BlackBerry. It was perceived as old and boring and slow, and people who worked there for a decade or more were perceived as being stagnant, even if they worked on many different projects in many different places. Also the Enterprise versus Startup perception worked against BB employees.
The discussion around such things is better now - more and more job postings explicitly say "we're looking for strong programmers and will train on our stack" but if you have only ever worked in C++ it's still pretty unlikely someone's going to hire you to do React development.
Additionally, there's a lot of concern in small and scaling companies about people who have spent a long time in one place, and especially at a place like BlackBerry. It was perceived as old and boring and slow, and people who worked there for a decade or more were perceived as being stagnant, even if they worked on many different projects in many different places. Also the Enterprise versus Startup perception worked against BB employees.