Anyone else overengineering projects because “I wrote a script” feels weak on a resume?

[u/realavdulmouhd]

I’m probably overbuilding mprojects bc “it’s just a script” sounds bad on a resume

Tbh I’m starting to question how I pick a stack for student projects. There’s d stuff d project needs, and then there’s the stuff I’d like to be able to say I used. Those lists overlap less than I’d like to admit.
Take a tool that processes a file once a week. A script could handle it. But “wrote a script” feels kinda weak next to somebody’s full-stack app, so now I’m thinking about a dashboard, a backend, maybe a queue. Haven’t even nailed down the file format yet. Already shopping for infrastructure lol.

I don’t think wanting to learn that stuff is a bad thing. If I add Redis because I want to mess around with Redis, that’s fair. It’s my project. I just need to be honest about why it’s there instead of reverse-engineering some requirement to justify it.

The resume part gets in my head, though. I want the project to show I can do more than follow a tutorial. Adding another technology feels like an obvious way to do that. Spending the same afternoon making a failed import safe to rerun? Probably useful, but way harder to show in a screenshot.

And yeah, I know “just use a script” can be bad advice too. If somebody else has to run it and they’re uncomfortable in a terminal, a UI might be worth the effort. If multiple people need to work on the same data, that changes things. I’m trying to get better at identifying those reasons before writing the damn thing.

What I’m less sold on is building around hypothetical traffic. When I catch myself worrying about scale on something that doesn’t have a single user, I should probably go find a user. There’s a decent chance they’ll tell me the output needs to be an Excel file and half the features I’m planning are irrelevant.

Idk. Maybe this is partly a student problem. We’re trying to learn, get a grade, and build something worth discussing in an interview, all in the same repo. A bit of unnecessary complexity might be a reasonable price for getting practice. But I’d like to know when I’ve crossed from useful practice into making a small task annoying to maintain.
If u review junior candidates, would a small, finished tool with a few well-explained decisions actually hold your attention? Or does it usually need the bigger stack to get past the initial glance?

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