One thing that I think can get lost is that to "Get into VR" if you are already a great software engineer you may not need to learn anything new, just find a place to work where you can immediately apply the skills you already have, towards a VR-oriented product. From there, look for opportunities to develop VR-specific skills like the ones mentioned in this article.
For example, at our company (AltspaceVR) we have a huge need for engineers of all stripes, not just the types of folks you'd normally think of for what is traditionally thought of as a "game" (this term, too, is probably about to become very stale.) It's a huge challenge for us to get great engineers who are not in the games industry to realize that working in this space, depending on the application, can be much like hopping, say, from a web app to a mobile app. Are there new skills to learn? Yes, tons. But that doesn't mean you are starting at ground zero nor that your current skills aren't going to highly valued and critical to an organization's success.
We need people to help build our backend systems (Rails, Kafka, etc), manage ops (Ansible, Datadog, AWS), create deployment tools, build UI (React, but rendered in VR!), work on our mobile app (React Native), build analytics pipelines, the list goes on. In fact I'd argue if you are looking at an organization that doesn't understand the need for such a wide spectrum engineering talent to deliver a great application, you should be careful!
Basically for VR companies who are working on applications that will leverage VR, the "VR-specific" slice of the engineering work is probably a lot smaller than you'd expect, just like for companies developing mobile applications, the "mobile specific" part of engineering work is only a part of the effort.
In other words, don't think you can't get into this field just because you aren't a graphics geek.
For example, at our company (AltspaceVR) we have a huge need for engineers of all stripes, not just the types of folks you'd normally think of for what is traditionally thought of as a "game" (this term, too, is probably about to become very stale.) It's a huge challenge for us to get great engineers who are not in the games industry to realize that working in this space, depending on the application, can be much like hopping, say, from a web app to a mobile app. Are there new skills to learn? Yes, tons. But that doesn't mean you are starting at ground zero nor that your current skills aren't going to highly valued and critical to an organization's success.
We need people to help build our backend systems (Rails, Kafka, etc), manage ops (Ansible, Datadog, AWS), create deployment tools, build UI (React, but rendered in VR!), work on our mobile app (React Native), build analytics pipelines, the list goes on. In fact I'd argue if you are looking at an organization that doesn't understand the need for such a wide spectrum engineering talent to deliver a great application, you should be careful!
Basically for VR companies who are working on applications that will leverage VR, the "VR-specific" slice of the engineering work is probably a lot smaller than you'd expect, just like for companies developing mobile applications, the "mobile specific" part of engineering work is only a part of the effort.
In other words, don't think you can't get into this field just because you aren't a graphics geek.
(Oh yeah, we're hiring :) https://altvr.com/careers)