Most of my career has been at investment banks. My first attempt at a trendy Silicon Valley tech company was at one of the FAANGs where my friend had previousl

Most of my career has been at investment banks. My first attempt at a trendy Silicon Valley tech company was at one of the FAANGs where my friend had previously gotten in and referred me. I was told that I was going to have to do a homework project because my bank * background. I've applied to several other companies where I was told outright I was not being considered because of my bank background, or that the odds were against me because of my bank background. One company had me write an essay justifying why I would be a good hire in spite of my bank background. Ironically, one was a company that used .NET as their primary stack - .NET being the darling of banks and other big crufty old school enterprises and often shunned by other trendy tech companies. Speaking of .NET - most of my early career experience was as a .NET developer. That too opened up a whole bunch of discrimination so that I removed any mention of .NET or C# in my resume and LinkedIn once I decided I no longer wanted to work for banks or other old school companies. Being able to pivot to Python and JavaScript opened doors. Having said that, having a bank background is not a showstopper to getting a job at a Silicon Valley tech company. I've managed to make the jump, and many of my ex-colleagues from banks have also made the jump. The biggest hurdle seems to be whether you want to put in the time to grind leetcode or not. * "bank" here could probably be interchanged with most crufty old school tech-as-a-cost-center enterprises in general.