Honestly, I’m so done. None of the YouTube videos are helpful. Some videos have projects that are so basic and lazy, some are very much tied to a specific platform, like Cloudflare, AWS and GCP, and some are so insanely difficult, I am not sure what project I’m supposed to do.

Some say: to-do projects are too basic. Some say that URL shortener is not worth it. Some say that real-time chat apps are overdone. There’s also front-end stuff, like React, Vue and Svelte. And if that’s not worse, there’s also opinionated answers, for back-end like for example, Rust being the future, avoiding JS or Python, or using niche backend like Phoenix or Laravel and micro-framework in some niche functional language. Then there’s also this low-code/no-code stuff. We’re also supposed to learn extras like Docker, Kubernetes, websockets, service workers and what-not other stuff.

I’ve wasted most of my time worrying about the stack and idea, that I’ve left them incomplete. What do I even make then as my project? A git hosting platform replica? A live-streaming social media? Almost like as if people are looking to hire a one-man army to handle the entire department. I’ve also completed the core lectures for FSO, but I’m still struggling.

  • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml
    2·
    9 months ago

    Manager at a FAANG here. It sounds like you’ve been mostly talking to people at small companies who use terms like “code ninja.” I have no idea what they’re looking for, and I honestly doubt they do, either.

    What I’m looking for is someone who can help me solve the problems that I have and that will be coming up. A candidate should be able to answer some basic questions about the programming language(s) they claim to know if they’re relevant to what I need (sometimes people will simply list everything they’ve heard of in an attempt to game resume scanners). They should be able to whiteboard an algorithm (like an elevator controller) on the fly and explain their thinking on it. They should be able to walk me through their resume work history and explain the projects they listed, as well as detailing their roles. I want to know who made the decisions on the project - the tech, architecture, implementation, and so on. I want to know what the candidate did, and what they’d do differently knowing what they now know. If they lost publications, I’m going to do the same (and I might skim at least the abstract). Basically I’m looking for someone I can be working with for at least the next five years, and who can continue to learn and grow.

    Oh, and don’t list emacs (or in one notable case, “emax”) as a technical skill.