Comment by mettamage
My career started really rough, first 1.5 years didn't get a job and I have another 1 year gap. I don't have that luxury. I have experiences in stacks for 6 months tops with most. If it's longer it's an esoteric language. No one cares about my CS degree(s) and the experience I gained there, despite the fact I learned more in some courses than I did in most jobs.
This is the first job I can fully showcase all my skills, so that's amazingly good. In that sense I need to seriously reconsider how I can make a career out of being a data analyst. But I'm not that far in my thinking yet and still see myself as a software engineer for my next job and while this job gives me great skills to learn in marketing and soft skills (and some stats and some dev), it doesn't give enough engineering skills.
As a SWE I'm in an odd place. I have never been in a place where SOLID is a thing. I don't know design patterns that well (I can recognize them and in many cases they make sense). But I have engineered quite a bit and I have seen enough 1 million LoC or bigger codebases.
So I'm still in a bit of a weird in between state and could use some mentoring with regards to good software design and just good ol' engineering, which is why I was thinking to help out with some open-source software or something like that.
I agree that the "always be programming" culture is toxic. It is what it is. I'm the type that just rolls with the punches. Much of my life has been on hard mode for a variety of reasons, so a toxic culture like "always be programming" is honestly not the worst thing.
As much as I rail against it, I realize the privileged position I’m in now as a 50 year old, strong experience and a stint at BigTech on my resume.
If I were just starting out in my career, I would be spending whatever time it took to get into BigTech and adjacent companies - yes “grind leetCode and work for a FAANG” (tm r/cscareerquestions) and I would also be learning good software engineering practices and some g framework to be prepared for techno-trivia interviews on my chosen stack.
I guess my point is, there is a huge difference unfortunately between being prepared for a job and being prepared to interview. Contributing to open source doesn’t help the latter.