First of all, yes, the job market is tough. Yes, it's understandable many people are looking for ways to improve their situation.
However, I am baffled by how many people focus on building up their portfolios, resumes, and profiles instead of setting a goal of doing meaningful work. Recently, lots of people, even when contributing to open-source projects, do not do that because they want to help someone but to make their profile look better (which already causes problems: https://dev.to/jitendrachoudhary/stop-contributing-to-open-source-13nb).
Yes, it's tough, but we must ask ourselves why we want to be software developers. This line of work aims to optimize processes and information flow- in short, to make other people's lives more convenient.
We have the almost unlimited liberty to create whatever we want, whether an app, website, or any platform, yet we choose to focus on finding ways to optimize how we want to drain money from an employer. Is that what this is about?
It's hard to find a community of people who want to create, build, experiment, and challenge the status quo. Almost everywhere, it's just the same story all over again: " I finished boot camp but can't get a job. What should I do?" "I can't get a frontend job. How can I become a fullstack?" " Should I get a degree?" " Should I accept the job?" " Where should I apply?" etc.
Does anyone want to be creative and think about others? What happened? Yes, I understand finding a job and making a living is hard. But even at the point in life where it's necessary to do any job to make a living, I think it's still essential to preserve the internal drive and ambition at all costs - to create something good and beautiful instead of constantly chasing ways to impress an employer without any meaning behind it.
It feels like we are just wasting potential and making it harder for ourselves. There are only so many resources to take from the market. We need to create to make it grow again. Stop listening to influencers blindly - start thinking for yourself.
Top comments (6)
A lot of people are lost, and the current market, layoffs, and uncertainty due to AI are just making everything worse. But I do agree with your points. Focusing on getting a job just for the sake of having any job will lead to software being made badly and people getting burned out. Everyone loses.
Too much of everything is bad, following money and neglecting the dream is bad and sticking to the dream so much that you don't receive the worth of money from the product you create is also bad. My advice is we as developers should learn how to be balanced.
@mcharytoniuk thanks for this post. I finally had the time to read it and process it. I think that's what I'll do for my portfolio build something meaningful instead of doing the resume challenge (no offense). No matter how horrible what I add is it will show effort into what I was doing, and I can talk about it with my interviewer.
Well… One can’t be creative if one's basic needs aren’t covered. When people feel that financial security they can start thinking in something else and change perspectives. Reaching the point of saying “is not all about the money” is a privilege itself that many people don’t have.
I’d call it a problem only if one can’t break that cycle and endlessly chases a better paycheck or the next high-end employer
To a certain degree I agree, but it's a closed circle. Of course we need money, but let's be realistic - there is never enough money, and only few and far between reach full financial security early in life. We can postpone that moment indefinitely - I think it's a false trope.
The point is - we should guide ourselves with something more than that no matter what our job is. It's more about the mentality.
The moment in which one can say "ok I have enough, I will now turn around my life 180 degrees" will most likely never come. It's absolutely not about money, but the way we see the world. Look at the recent "open sourcing" trend - people try to maintain the "image" of helping instead of actually helping and that causes problems. Whatever we do, whather our life situation is, we can maintain the goals, the attitude. We should at least strive to do something.
Yea I agree with that, and I think most people see software as their winning ticket right now, which explains the situation mentioned in the post. What you mentioned got me thinking about career pivots and the reasoning behind it. Are people turning toward software because of the current salary rates or because they truly want to build something? I think we know the answer