I got some great opportunities from that post but lately, it has been a nothing burger. I have been without a job for nearly a year and have applied to many positions on that thread with just one reply and that fizzled out despite being objectively qualified (a take home assignment, successfully completed within the allotted time of 24 hours).
I recently interviewed for a senior level role for a complex domain (payments), this is an area I have more than a decade of experience. The interviews went flawlessly because I know payments inside out, not just in US but in UK and most EU jurisdictions. The funny bit is that the role being senior, influencing, soft communication skills and managing conflict are even more important than the subject matter expertise and I nailed those areas as well (they threw an obnoxious senior manager that kept interrupting me as I calmly answered the questions, the follow up was that my performance was a masterclass in handling conflict). The final round was with a business person who fancied himself the defacto subject matter expert and kept throwing trivia questions about payments. His plan was to go through as much trivia as he could until he could find something to justify a no. His last question (he literally stopped as soon as he got his way after this question), the question was, have you got personal experience working on real-time payments? I do, in more than one countries (US introduced this very recently as part of fednow), he pushed me about the fednow and obviously this is so new that I only have read the specifications and evaluated a few vendors to decide whether to build or buy. He used this as justification to make a negative reommendation, claiming I don't have real-time payments experience.
Honestly, I don't want to work in an environment like that, it was a large US bank and where their biggest problems are not product innovation or focusing on customer but production failures! An area I have rescued several large companies in, apart from payments expertise and made sure I communicated this. But sometimes you get lucky and don't have to find out the hard way that this place is not pleasant.
I am currently working on building a lending platform. My goal is to both run it as a product loaning money to businesses and sell the software as a service to other investors as well. Very early phase, talking to a few friends who are currently in this line of work. I have a couple decades of experience myself but as an engineer and leader, not as a product or business owner, so if you have advice or ideas, please respond here, I would love to hear from you.
Resume: Java engineer with deep experience building payments, risk, investment banking, embedded finance and data engineering capabilities, building APIs and rescuing difficult to maintain codebase. Well versed in Java, kafka, flink, Cassandra, Postgres, AWS, terraform and scripting. Experience with automation using shell, C and java. Significant leadership experience with teams ranging from 12 to 120 people, including remote and geo-distributed teams.