Ask HN: Industry-specific devs, your experience?

I was starting as industry-specific, then gradually moved towards general IT so I could acquire more broad skills within dev/ops and then armed with that experience and knowledge came back to industry-specific again. I discovered there is a gap in IT knowledge within my industry - so there aren't many engineers who would posses industry-specific knowledge as well as IT skills (dev/ops + security). And that works pretty well even though there are not that many major players in this sector.

I was in defense - avionics, mostly. It was pretty great in the mid-late 90s as military aircraft were retrofitting to use GPS and digital navigation. Things got harder after most of the airframes were upgraded. I ended up doing an augmented reality thingy for the Air Force and I was able to leverage that into an industry position It's kind of dumb, but people lack imagination, and are unwilling to see a career path as evidence of any kind of skill at learning and executing if you don't have their exact set of requirements. So I lucked out in that I had essentially done the project already.

So, yes, it can be hard. Not sure about the pay in defense- you can be one of three people that know something, but with the way contracting goes I'm not sure it matters. Companies bid, supply some more or less random collection of resumes to 'prove' they have the skill set, somebody wins, they slap the cheapest people they can on the project, and so on. If you price yourself high the bid will have to be high, and the bean counters in Washington aren't going to recognize that you are the precious snowflake you know you really are ;) Probably the far better route there is as a contractor/consultant - they seemed to command arbitrarily big fees.