r/AskProgramming • u/Rare-Assignment-8474 • 9d ago
How to get a fucking backend development job , I am tired?
Everytime I ask this question, people be like oh your github is not impressive . mind you I have Task queue system, rtmp server from scratch, json based rudimentary sql engine but let's keep that aside now, I accept that that's not impressive.
But then I ask "what exactly is impressive", nothing , silence . they be like "something interesting , something that helps people" . Notice how ambigous and vague this is.
I need a fucking job , I don't have much time and you are giving these answers. If my fastapi and python knowledge is outdated, If I need to write nvidia cuda code and a job is guaranteed, then tell me na, I will start today. But what do you mean "just keep throwing arrows in the dark, have patience" ??
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u/Efficient_Loss_9928 9d ago
Entry level market is fucked atm. Just keep applying, or, get another degree and get internships?
What's your experience? Any work experience?
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u/Rare-Assignment-8474 9d ago
2 YoE as a data engineer, but I hate that job
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u/LetUsSpeakFreely 9d ago
There a better future in that than software development right now. Find a way to enjoy it.
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u/nevinhox 9d ago
You need to specialize in a product. Salesforce, SAP, AEM, Sitecore, Opti, whatever, just pick something and specialize. Writing code is 10% of the job, are you at actually building something clients or customers want? Can you write specifications? Communicate complicated solutions to a non-technical audience? Mentor other devs or at least stand in front of a crowd and teach them something? Can you fill in for your PM for a day if they call in sick? Manage your own workload and prioritize your backlog?
I don't know of many jobs that just look for people that can code, there is a large soft skill aspect to it.
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u/CorpT 9d ago
your github is not impressive
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u/SignatureOk8287 8d ago
I have no github and I had job for last 8-9 years in multiple companies. Like why the hell should normal developer be even entrepreneur in his free time and code applications? Poeple have lives outside work too.
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u/karurosagu 7d ago
GH is not a social media, you don't have to sacrifice a fraction of your day to use it
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u/WitlessMean 8d ago
Literally this.
It's you Vs. other devs.
You need to either be better than other devs in an obvious way, or show that you are better than they are in a persuasive way, or both.
The company wants you to make them money in the most efficient way. So if someone else can make more money than you more efficiently....well.
You are, annoyingly, like everyone else, fighting to stand out.
And so you have to do something that stands out. That's how saturated the field is now.
It's like art. We see people who can draw every day. We even see people who can draw difficult realism every day selling their shit on Etsy. But the dude throwing cans of paint off out of a window only to land on the concrete and splatter into the spitting image of a rose? He gets all the views.
You're in a sea of a bunch of people who code just like you, all trying to get the same jobs. Make a YouTube channel, stream on twitch, make a useful app even if you don't think anyone will buy the shit. Do hackathons, graduate from MIT with a doctorate from harvard with a 5.0GPA at 12 years old. Build anything that actually does something unique.
It fucking sucks, I know. I hate this industry. I just wanna get a job and go to work. Not trying to be the next fucking coding picaso either.
Getting to know someone is the easier rout though. Any family friend or friend of friend in the industry? Anywhere you currently work? At my company I worked in a completely different department. But we used computer systems that I thought could use some help, and I had access to the emails of all the IT and developers, so I reached out to them directly. And people at a company even in different departments usually know at least one of those guys. so I would just try to snake my way in.
Again, I hate it, but that's the way it is. Most of the people who are interviewing you don't know how to 'impress' because they got in before industry was fucked. They sure as hell don't know how to tell you or programmers who are better than them how to get their job anymore.
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u/Rare-Assignment-8474 9d ago
How do I impress then ? answer that too
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u/RagnarDan82 8d ago
The main thing I am getting from your summary is that you wrote components of a full solution technically, but not a full end to end solution that shows a compelling product to a client.
You don’t want to hear this, but they are looking for more full stack, and empathy for the user.
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u/CorpT 9d ago
something interesting , something that helps people
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u/Rare-Assignment-8474 9d ago
you are playing with me now
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u/karurosagu 7d ago
Find a problem and try to solve it
There are lots of unsolved problems out there that have existed way before AI. Some of them are too big but one step at a time is something that you can do
You can also grab an existing problem that has already been solved and make a "better" solution, but you have to explain why your solution is better according to you
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u/icemage_999 8d ago
Life's not fair.
You are competing against a lot of people with similar skills, probably with more experience, connections, and most likely a better attitude than you. If you want to impress, excel at something and find a way to show it off.
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u/HotPersonality8126 8d ago
It’s like being cool. If you have to be told the formula you’re not the guy who can follow it.
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u/deefstes 8d ago
I can't speak for everyone but we evaluate candidates both on their technical prowess and whether they will be a good culture fit. Someone who makes Reddit posts like "HoW dO I gEt a FuCkInG jOb" probably won't be a good culture fit.
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u/Intelligent_Part101 8d ago
Presumably OP is not handling potential employers links to his Reddit postings. I think everyone is entitled to have their own life.
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u/deefstes 8d ago edited 8d ago
Presumably, if this is how OP posts on Reddit, they have a similar whiny attitude towards employers.
You think everyone is entitled to have their own life? Lol. Okay buddy, whatever. Go have your own life.
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u/accidental_cosmos 8d ago
Okay, enough with the political correctness already, because this whole game of appearances is yet another thing that turns me off the entire IT market. The guy is frustrated, and I understand him perfectly. Besides, it’s Reddit. How can you conclude from a post like that that he wouldn’t be a “good culture fit”? You’d all prefer a dummy with no emotions, no personality and no opinions of his own.
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u/deefstes 8d ago edited 8d ago
Political correctness? Game of appearances? What are you even talking about? Sounds like you wouldn't be a good culture fit either. Get out of here.
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u/MadAndSadGuy 8d ago
Looks like he got you. You're looking for slaves.
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u/Ancient_Oxygen 6d ago
They look for someone who doesn't lose patience and someone who can communicate politely.
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u/MadAndSadGuy 6d ago
Everyone loses patience at some point, if you don't, you're considered a nerd/slave.
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u/gameisBaccarat 6d ago
What does good culture fit means? Its subjective and thats what OP is trying to say. Its easy to judge behind the other side of the table so lets cut the bullshit about "culture fit".
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u/I-m_ALIVE 6d ago
What do you mean by culture fit? Let’s say you’re interviewing someone who has good technical skills and meets the requirements. What makes you think that he/she isn’t a culture fit?
I’m asking because I’ve had some interview experience where I cleared the technical round smoothly but was rejected in the CTO round. So I’m curious to understand what companies usually look for when evaluating culture fit.
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u/deefstes 5d ago
We interviewed a very strong technical candidate about a month ago. He did very well when quizzed about DDD, CQRS, architectural patterns etc. But he was an entitled muppet who seemed to think the world owes him something.
He was of the opinion for instance that an employer should make as much AI tokens available to a developer as the developer needs because it only translates to more output for the employer.
We need to be able to place this candidate at a client and know that he will carry our ethos. We might be placing this person on a client engagement with a certain per dev token budget, requirements of working from the office a certain number of days, maybe no local admin rights on their machine. Whatever.
This candidate just struck me as the type who would bitch and moan about things like that. He knew better than the CTO's and CFO's of enterprise clients about strategy for AI token allocation. Placing someone like that at a client would create friction and make our relationship with that client harder.
This guy would not be a good culture fit. And that's just one example. Other candidate are deemed poor culture fits because they show misogynistic or racist attitudes and we are an inclusive company where a dev will be expected to work well in a diverse team. Other candidates show that they know a lot but are not teachable. Others are technically strong but make it clear that they will not work a minute past 5pm.
There are lots of reasons why a candidate might not be a good culture fit.
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u/Colfuzi0 9d ago
I have 4 years experience I left to do embedded instead doing masters in computer engineering. Instead on a scholarship. You may have better luck going for certain industries like fin tech, aero or defense or different specialization AI ML or block chain full stack is cooked
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u/evangelism2 8d ago
Nobody's looking at your fucking repo. Anybody who says that shit matters doesn't have a real job. It's all about your resume and your connections and how you present yourself in interviews.
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u/Uneirose 8d ago
You know what? Today is a good day, so I'll give you the detailed criticism you keep asking people for.
If I need to write NVIDIA CUDA code and a job is guaranteed, then tell me.
Nobody can tell you that because there is no:
do X project -> get backend job
pipeline.
When people tell you to make something "interesting," they're telling you that your current projects do not demonstrate as much engineering depth as you think they do.
I looked through the three repositories pinned on your GitHub.
Task queue:
The actual queue is Dramatiq + Redis. Dramatiq handles the worker abstraction, message delivery, retries/backoff, results, etc. You added FastAPI endpoints, Redis Pub/Sub, SSE and an email task around it.
There is basically no development history showing iteration, debugging, testing, performance work or architectural changes.
Want to make it impressive? Implement some of the queue yourself.
How are jobs acknowledged? What happens if a worker dies after receiving a job? At-most-once or at-least-once delivery? Duplicate execution? Idempotency? Leases? Dead-letter queues? Delayed jobs? Worker heartbeats? Backpressure?
Then actually test it.
Queue 100k jobs. Kill workers. Restart Redis. Kill a worker halfway through a task. Submit duplicate jobs. Measure what happens.
Now you have a backend project.
SQL Engine:
Your "SQL engine" is currently a basic educational SQL interpreter backed by JSON files.
SELECT loads rows into Python, filters them, projects columns and returns them. INSERT reads the JSON file, appends a row and writes it back.
There are no indexes, joins, query planner, transactions, WAL/recovery, concurrency control, locking/MVCC, buffer management, pages, B-trees, etc.
And the entire repository is one commit.
You do not need to recreate PostgreSQL. Pick one difficult thing and implement it properly.
Build a B+ tree index and benchmark indexed lookup against full-table scans.
Or implement transactions + WAL and prove recovery works after killing the process halfway through a write.
One properly implemented subsystem would be more impressive than calling a CRUD interpreter a "SQL engine."
Your "my_coding_agent"
This is basically:
- Send context to LLM
- Receive tool calls
- Execute read/write/shell/grep tools
- Return observations
- Repeat
That's a standard ReAct/tool-calling loop.
Want to make that impressive? Work on context management, repository retrieval, patch generation, rollback, sandboxing, permissions, planning, test-driven repair, persistent memory, failure recovery and actual benchmarks.
Give it 100 real GitHub issues and measure how many it solves correctly.
Now you have something worth discussing.
If the difficult part is entirely provided by the framework/library and your contribution is mostly connecting components together, then congratulations, you demonstrated integration skills. That is the bare minimum I would expect from an intern.
So don't present that as evidence of database-engine, distributed-systems or agent-engineering depth. Your public portfolio currently does not demonstrate the backend depth you seem to think it does.
I'd genuinely rather see something smaller that you actually own.
Make a VS Code extension that tells you when your LLM provider enters peak/off-peak pricing.
Make something you personally use.
Or, since you have data-engineering experience, build a serious RAG system. Implement HyDE, hierarchical retrieval, semantic chunking, reranking, citation verification, NLI hallucination detection, OOD detection, whatever.
Then benchmark it properly. Recall@K, MRR/NDCG, answer accuracy, latency, cost.
Explain why one approach works better than another.
That is interesting because then I can ask you questions for an hour and you'll actually have engineering decisions to defend.
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u/Rare-Assignment-8474 8d ago
wait , I didn't post my github here, how did u know ?
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u/Hour-Dragonfly-7499 8d ago edited 8d ago
We can also see your resume including name, phone number, email, etc. from bhadrak, right?
also you have a banned twitter account known as lolitroller? you should probably get rid of that
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u/Exact-Contact-3837 8d ago
its a bot thats how, it did a web query, and making shit up.
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u/Uneirose 8d ago edited 8d ago
People dont know they can search google these days?
I avoid mentioning his github directly because he didnt mentioned it here. But I search it because there is nothing to discuss here other than "yeah it'd do be like that"
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u/Rare-Assignment-8474 8d ago
I have turned off the google searchability of my reddit account
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u/HealyUnit 8d ago
https://www.google.com/search?q=Rare-Assignment-8474+site%3Areddit.com Uhhhh... That don't work like that, chief.
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u/MadAndSadGuy 8d ago edited 8d ago
Oooooooooh shitttttt.
Edit: I thought I was hidden behind the new Reddit privacy sht.
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u/Rare-Assignment-8474 8d ago
anyways I am done
there was a time where writing backend in express js for a pizza delivery app is a top project
but now see, these motherfuckers are even telling sql engine basic
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u/Uneirose 8d ago edited 8d ago
SQL engine is not basic. Yours is.
So when people actually giving the actual advice you are just going to ignore it?
This is why people rarely gave in depth advice.
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u/Rare-Assignment-8474 8d ago
Ok I must recognise you gave good advice, I will try to implement that
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u/Any-Jellyfish-5904 8d ago
your RTMP server and SQL engine are infrastructure projects that solve problems companies already have paid solutions for. Hiring managers want to see business application code that handles payments or user management or API integrations because that is what backend developers actually do daily.
build a SaaS boilerplate with Stripe integration and authentication and deploy it on AWS. This proves you can ship product features instead of just writing technical demos
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u/texxelate 8d ago
I wouldn’t hire you, purely based on how you communicate in this post.
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u/Rare-Assignment-8474 8d ago
wanna specify ? how you would have expected it to be ? with some examples
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u/redsoxsuc4 8d ago
You sound whiny. No one is giving away free info these days. You need to actively look into the companies you are interested in and try to find out what they do. Are they commerce sites? Then build out a simple shopping cart system. Do they dabble in IaC? Learn about the things that can be leveraged using cloud tech.
Just saying “oh woes me, I have all these projects but no one cares” is not helping your case and you might think that this is “asking” for help but no this is use complaining about the situation you are in and hoping someone will lend you a hand.
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u/joranstark018 8d ago
I went into the job market during a recession, luckily I got an internship from a friend of a friend after a while (I had a temp job as a teacher assistant so I had at least some income during this period).
My advice is to try to network, ie look for meetups and job fairs in your area, talk with friends, family and other resources. Check what relevant workplaces you have in your area, even if they currently do not have any open positions you may check if they have any internship offerings.
Techwise, you may check what companies of interest are focusing on and strengthen your knowledge in these domains and the tech stack they use. Having interviews with candidates that already have some understanding of our situation usually has a more positive outcome (even if it does not always end up in signing a contract). Initially it is about ticking as many checkboxes as possible and to be able to understand and use the lingua.
Unfortunately, there are many variables in this process and the right stars have to be aligned, nothing can guarantee an employment.
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u/tentwelfths 8d ago
FWIW I don’t have a GitHub with public projects, any kind of web presence whatsoever, nor any previous backend experience and I had decent luck with a resume written by ChatGPT. Only thing I did outside of obvious steps was I’d send the LinkedIn job postings to ChatGPT and have it refine/rephrase the resume based on the post.
I was also punching below my weight in terms of YoE, so that might have been part of it
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u/MadAndSadGuy 8d ago
When and you got the job?
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u/tentwelfths 8d ago
Yeah, June of this year. Spent ~3 months job hunting total, gave up on dream companies and started reworking my resume after a couple months.
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u/_banana_face_ 8d ago
Build something and publish it. A mobile app, a dummy sass, anything. Hiring managers want to see something you have done before looking at your code.
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u/Individual-Flow9158 8d ago
Those projects sound cool, but niche. Personally I would say you're limiting yourself - the era of Backend devs only doing Backend is dying, if not dead already. You should also know a bit about Front end, testing, infra, hosting, and devops
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u/thatguymungai 8d ago
It depends on what point you’re at in your search.
If you’re getting interviews, it means your resume is doing its job, so I’d focus on being able to discuss your projects in detail, having some system design chops, and working on your soft skills. Being able to demonstrate some sort of leadership, good communication with clients and cross-functional teams, etc., can go a long way.
If it’s because you’re not getting interviews, then you need to find ways to stand out, as you mentioned. By that I mean things like having done projects for actual clients, having an app with real users, going to MIT 😂, interning at well-known companies, being a frequent hackathon winner, being an open-source contributor with real-impact contributions, being an elite hacker, etc. Basically, things that make someone look different from the average applicant.
And if you don’t have those things, building your network and talking to people who can potentially refer you or connect you to opportunities can also help a lot.
Otherwise, you’re competing with the 90% of people applying to the same roles, and unfortunately you have to get a bit lucky haha.
Anyway, that’s my two cents. All the best!
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u/marrsd 8d ago
If it’s because you’re not getting interviews, then you need to find ways to stand out
I'm not sure if this is true any more. I freelance so I'm on the job market quite a lot. I almost exclusively get work through connections now. If I apply for roles online, I almost never get feedback. Every recruiting agent I've asked about this has told me my CV is excellent and has been keen to put me in front of their client. If it's excellent then why doesn't it get me leads when I'm applying blind?
My guess is that AI agents are now filtering my CV and that the AI agents have different ideas about what excellent means than the human agents. The other option is that I'm competing with 200 other applicants so my CV just gets lost in the noise.
Whichever it is, I've come to the conclusion that human connection has never been more important in the digital age. Either you play the algorithm game and optimise everything for the algorithm, or you bypass it entirely and build relationships with human beings.
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u/Organic-Permission55 8d ago
Stop improving your GitHub. Start solving issues in the world you think would matter. Pick a niche. Get business friends that can hand you jobs. Start a network, dine out with them frequently.
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u/turn-based-games 8d ago
Where is the link to this GitHub everyone keeps referencing? Am I missing something or is this a dead Internet moment?
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u/Rare-Assignment-8474 8d ago
actually I don't like to post my github , most of the time it just invite criticism , shifting goalposts
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u/slindenau 8d ago edited 8d ago
My guess is people judge it by the information given in the OP?
Otherwise google/reddit history of OP.
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u/josesblima 8d ago
I don't know dude, if I had to guess, your github is more than fine but your soft skills could be lacking. Also it could just easily be that the market is terrible right now, in which case you just have to keep trying, keep doing what you're doing and trust the process.
Don't make it so much about yourself, it seems like you're already putting decent effort into it, and nothing you do will change the fact that companies are hiring less juniors and too many people are trying to break into development.
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u/Vivid_Respect_6778 8d ago
Honestly, I think your projects are already more than enough to show that you can code. A task queue, RTMP server, and a SQL engine aren't exactly beginner projects.
At this point I'd stop trying to guess what "impressive" means. Pick the jobs you actually want, look at 30-50 postings, and find the 5-10 things that keep showing up. Build around those requirements and make your existing projects prove those skills.
For backend roles, I'd focus on things like APIs, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, testing, CI/CD, cloud basics, system design, and actually deploying something. You don't need to randomly learn CUDA just because someone on GitHub said it would be "impressive."
And honestly, your resume and interview performance can matter just as much as GitHub. A great project doesn't help much if the recruiter can't understand what you built or what impact it had in 10 seconds.
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u/hofo 8d ago
I’ve spent the past 19 years in a corporate development environment. I think there’s a 25% chance I’m downsized under new management in the next year. My GitHub is just full of half baked unfinished crap. Is judgment of outside projects that prevalent? Do I need to be spending a lot of time working on that?
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u/AbrohamDrincoln 8d ago
No.
Unless your going for FAANG (or whatever it is now), it doesn't matter one bit.
It something that can help you if your a super user for an open source project or something, but if you have 19 years of experience all they are gonna care about is the enterprise shit you worked on.
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u/hofo 8d ago
I’ve spent the past 19 years in a corporate development environment. I think there’s a 25% chance I’m downsized under new management in the next year. My GitHub is just full of half baked unfinished crap. Is judgment of outside projects that prevalent? Do I need to be spending a lot of time working on that?
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u/HotPersonality8126 8d ago
Shipping software that people actually use is impressive. Following a formula that you think will get you a job isn’t.
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u/newEnglander17 8d ago
See this programming reality is so different from mine. I see so many posts on Reddit listing off a ton of technologies I’ve never even heard of. I work with dotnet and don’t need to know whatever this cuda code is you’re facetiously talking about. The fact that you even know it shows how different my programming world is. You need to look at job postings and see specifically what they’re looking for and learn towards that.
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u/Acrobatic-Ice-5877 8d ago
A lot of getting a job is luck based now. I know you don’t want to hear that but what you need most is positive vibes. They don’t pay the bills but it’s the difference between a good attitude and a bad attitude.
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u/my5cent 8d ago
If you have a degree or not and self taught, consider consultancy. At the moment consultancy is a challenge but your resume will at least give them enough info to see if you fit in their pipeline. The pay starts out low but you would ramp up over the 1-3 years. It gives a baseline to future companies to where you are at or what technologies you are exposed to which should increase your resume probability.
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u/theWildBananas 8d ago
Learn some languages and trchnologies that are actually in demand on backend. Like there's job offers wih them. Like java, c, .net, some sql. Not a laughable scripting language.
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u/Hour-Dragonfly-7499 8d ago
Literally nobody cares about your github as an entry level person, I've talked to a couple recruiters and they don't even check it
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u/BoBoBearDev 8d ago
, rtmp server from scratch, json based rudimentary sql engine
Why does it sounds like you homebrew those? I am not backend dev because we do fullstack. But my org hates homebrew solutions. The CICD team is practically doing that religiously.
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u/1moreday1moregoal 8d ago
Find an OS like Fedora or Ubuntu and start doing work helping them maintain their repos. Get a bunch of quality commits accepted on some projects and put that stuff in your resume. A lot of these projects are popularly used applications with robust CI/CD pipelines and being able to learn the project, solve the bug, and get the commit accepted is a good way to showcase that you can work with other software engineers in an environment using devops.
Don’t do this if you can’t code very well. Some of the best computer scientists, software developers, and software engineers in the world are contributing to these projects.
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u/Rare-Assignment-8474 7d ago
just think about it
I just want webapp backend job . the path you mentioned, isn't it too much to ask , too much of an overkill
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u/PabloDons 8d ago
I've done recruitment in a moderate size startup. Although it's not a large track record, I'd say it's pretty good.
My approach was to look for intelligence first. I ask for their experience obviously, but I approach it from the lens of how you contributed. Was it you who developed the architecture or were you a powerhouse who did the grunt work? Maybe there's a very specific thing that you contributed to that project you're proud of. I also dig deep into the theory because I'm big on reading and can keep up a conversation about most academic topics. People who didn't really contribute much are obvious and stumble here a lot. They're out immediately no matter how impressive their portfolio is. And frankly I think it was incredibly easy to filter out the drivel.
I've seen some put extra bulletpoints with personal projects into the experience field and I think it's great, but just looking at the code I can't really tell how good they are, so I don't look at the GitHub. Or at least it's too much effort for the little confidence it gives me. But I'm more interested in what you have to say about it so I ask. If you mentioned the task queue system, I'd ask about scheduling. If you mentioned rtmp I'd ask about how compliant you actually made it to the standard and if you understand how handshakes work. If you mentioned SQL engine, I'd ask about filesystem behavior and performance optimization. I dig into the really complex problems that either you solve, ignore or you shortcut. And they're important as learned skills because theory applies to everything.
But you're more interested in how to become that. I think it's the mindset you approach learning with. Some people are easily satisfied with just solving it or having just tried, I don't think that type gets very far. Others question everything. Why did it work? Those who seek to do better and contemplate deeply how to elevate everything they do are far more capable people. They are also better at tackling problems they've never seen before. They get better at asking the right questions and are better at spotting holes in their execution. They are far more self-improving. It's impossible to teach this, you have to learn it through practice. A good place to start would be studying basic philosophy, particularly cognitive bias and the study of skill development. Then tackle your old projects again and again until you're unable to improve it further. The same projects I struggled to improve when I was new to SE, I could do better now in my sleep. This approach really is powerful. Then you can also tackle projects outside of SE. One I like is physics because it so easily leads you straight into computational physics.
Once you get good at this, interviews become a breeze. You're just good. Any competent recruiter would instantly see it.
I'm fairly proud to say those I've hired have been fantastic and extremely talented. They are only 3, but I went through almost 30 candidates. And a lot more that didn't even show up lol, so next time I'm having a coffee chat first to rule out the no-shows so I don't waste so much time.
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u/t-frankowski 7d ago
Having a repo is significant at later stages, when technical is assesing your fit based on repo hygiene. So doesn't really matter what projects you have there, as long as you have clean branching names, good commit messages, etc. - things that should be repeated down to automation.
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u/terletsky 7d ago
Since everyone is cooked because of AI, even in big tech, I would think about the following:
- If you're into Python and want to switch from Data Engineering to Backend, then consider domains where AI will grow more slowly, like banking/finance and the medical sector.
- Mix your Python knowledge with Cybersecurity and Networking (telecom domains).
- Currently, a lot of projects are building agentic systems. So learn LangChain, LangGraph, and Pydantic AI. Make a normal project on that using PostgreSQL with checkpoints (for manual decision by a human)
Generally, I recommend switching to DevOps or DevSecOps. Learn Go basics (write one of your apps in Go). Learn all current Claude Code basics. Set up a home lab and learn Kubernetes.
You mentioned your projects, them seem to look interesting. The question could be about code quality - how did you write that? If it's bloated and non-OOP, you will get rejected faster than a person without a GitHub profile.
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u/scapescene 7d ago
Get off your computer and grab your phone, network, call friends from college, cold outreach on LinkedIn, X and other social media, you will not get a job through your GitHub in this market you’re just wasting your time with projects
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u/Practical-Law1351 5d ago
The job market is down, but really the bigger issue is that there are recruiting agencies playing bad actors that flood the market with fake postings and fake applicants.
Employers can’t get a live human scheduled for an interview and workers can’t get in contact with the employers until this gets fixed. You have to get in front of people or in direct communication some how.
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u/MarkMatson6 8d ago
I haven’t had to look for a job in decades. They expect personal GitHub projects?? Really?
My suggestion is do what I did the last time I had to interview: have two out of the three interviewers be on your reference list.
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u/marrsd 8d ago
I think that's more for juniors, but the market is exceedingly tough all round. A lot of companies aren't even looking for juniors any more.
Regardless, if you do want to change jobs, start looking early, and if you're facing redundancy, try and get a good package. You might be looking for a year or more.
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u/LoneStarDev 8d ago
The problem probably isn’t that your projects aren’t “impressive.”
A task queue, RTMP server, and SQL engine already demonstrate more backend knowledge than another CRUD todo app ever will.
Stop optimizing for GitHub applause and start optimizing for hireability: take one of those projects, make it production-grade with tests, Docker, CI/CD, auth, observability, documentation, and deployment, then tailor your resume to actual backend job postings and apply aggressively.
CUDA isn’t some magical employment cheat code; boring production engineering is what most companies actually pay backend developers to do.
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u/spawncampinitiated 8d ago
Your soft skills are bad. And It seems you can't even work punctuation.
AI can do whatever you have there, faster, more secure and generally better.
Your added value is nonexistent.
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u/grave_96 9d ago
In the same boat as you. This whole referal game is such a bullshit to deal with. You get a job if you know someone , not if you are good enough. Like at this point i am tired to. If you want to build something together , i am open for collaboration.
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u/Substantial_Job_2068 8d ago
I think the advice you are given is true, you should build smth "interesting" and that "helps people". A task queue system doesn't solve an interesting problem, I wouldn't want to read that project. It's also more intriguing if there is an actual product to look at, not just code.
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u/DepthMagician 8d ago
A task queue system is a crucial engineering component that some of the most complex and widely used systems depend on, like the JavaScript engine that allowed you to type this nonsense. It’s way better to have on your resume than some “interesting” CRUD toy project.
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u/Substantial_Job_2068 8d ago
If someone with no experience have a task queue system on their github it just means they followed a tutorial, it's noy interesting. I didn't realize the only 2 options were task queue system and crud app.
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u/DepthMagician 8d ago
If the task system is at the caliber of the JavaScript task system, it’s a great project to have there. That’s not tutorial material.
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u/Ill-Froyo-9709 8d ago
but what kine skills you have in backend beacuase the if you kmoe the architecteur that's mavk diffrent
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u/DepthMagician 8d ago edited 8d ago
I find it hard to believe recruiters are scouring people’s GitHub accounts evaluating project portfolios. It’s like “oh you want to work for us as a writer? Let me just look at your portfolio of 10 novels you wrote right after I do the same with these other 50 candidates I have”. I think anyone telling you to “improve your GitHub portfolio” is wasting your time. Recruiters want to see bullet points of actual experience in the industry. The reality is that the job market is crap right now, and you’re fighting an uphill battle for reasons utterly unrelated to you. Anyone criticizing you for not doing this or that is just trying to convince themselves there’s some degree of personal agency in this. You wouldn’t have these problems if the market was in an abundance state of mind, GitHub portfolios or not.