reluctantconsultant
BAN USERI am a hiring manager for a web company. Your biggest problem will be getting past the resume screen. The C++ may be less of an issue than the nature of the work you've been doing. A resume with no front-end experience, no agile development, no small company experience, will be a lot less attractive to us. So I'd say put your effort into web technologies (LAMP is a good place to start) & try to end up with something to show for it - a personal site is all right, volunteer development for some non-profit would be better, and better still would be contribution to an open source project. Also be aware that "defense contractor" translates to "large, slow-moving company & projects" to many people. Emphasize any aspects of your experience that belie this assumption.
Once you get noticed & get your initial screen, the conversation will hopefully turn to how good a programmer you are, rather than your knowledge of specific languages. I work for a Java shop, but we've hired candidates who did all their interview questions in C++ or Python. But you should be able to deal with the kind of problems outlined in the books you cite.
Small company (especially start-up) experience is valued by big companies, no problem having that on your resume.
- reluctantconsultant April 27, 2012