How to add depth to my career and profile?

Question

TLDR: How to pick side projects

This might have been answered multiple times and a very well-known answer would be working on side projects but I want the answer to be more in-depth so it can be helpful for many engineers.

Please don't answer in a generic way but try to answer this by posing in my shoes

Let's say you have 1.6 years of experience as a Software engineer and 3 years of experience in IT but not in development now if you want to stick to the SE career. This market is very challenging for me to get a job with 1 plus year of experience. I have to convert my IT experience into developer experience and try. But when I give interviews I tend to fail the Hiring manager rounds because they can see the depth of my SE career.

So how to convert my IT experience to SE experience? I have put a lot of effort into Leetcode and now I have gotten to a decent stage the same thing applies to System design as well I have read books blogs etc and getting the depth would be my next target.

We can hear a lot of stories in the past where a person who started his/her career as a tester or a QA and got it converted to Senior software engineer etc by working on problem-solving skills but I don't think this works in the current market.

So I felt I was missing depth. How to achieve a mid-level engineer status where I can effectively tell a lot of stories and challenges I have faced in my career and show bias for action etc

The most simple answer would be to do side projects but selecting a repository and a project is very hard as there are countless repositories and projects.

All I need is a small ignition to start on the side projects then I think discipline would take care of the rest as I was at zero questions at LeetCode a few months ago and now I have solved 250 plus with discipline.

Alex Chiou · Accepted Answer

Congrats on being able to go from 0 LeetCode to 250+! That's definitely an achievement. If you truly have discipline, you're a step above 75%+ of engineers.

If you haven't already, I recommend checking out our resume course, particularly this lesson: https://www.jointaro.com/course/get-more-interviews-write-a-stellar-resume-as-a-software-engineer/the-real-secret-for-a-top-tier-resume/

In short, the 2 main things you can do that are under your control and concretely improve your technical skills are:

Build side projects
Make meaningful open-source contributions

As a heads up, I think we might have different definitions of a side project (yours seems closer to open-source). A side project is just a piece of software you build outside of work and publish to the world, so you are creating your own repository and not selecting someone else's.

I personally lean towards side projects as that's just isolated to you (you can open it up if you want, but I think solo projects are the best for simplicity). It's easier than open-source as you don't need to select a repository as you mentioned.

When it comes to what sort of side project to build, that's up to you, but I heavily recommend building something dead-simple. Your goal is just to get users, and in order to get users, you need to be able to launch and iterate quickly. That is impossible if the underlying idea is complex, especially for an earlier-in-career engineer like yourself. Check out this thread for inspiration: "Finding a mobile app idea - How to do it?"

After that, I highly recommend taking the related masterclass (it's on my backlog to convert this into a course): [Masterclass] How To Come Up With 100k+ Users App Ideas You Can Build For Free

How to add depth to my career and profile?

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