A software developer's glorified Resume

The Problem

Everything in tech has turned more into a show and tell, doing everything with the aim of making it big in tech, suffering through DSA questions, finding tutorials upon tutorials just to glorify our resume, with no meaning or purpose behind them.

Every newbie in tech wants to make cool apps/websites. As we begin to learn more, we realizes how complex these cool apps were, we needs to learn different technologies and frameworks. We browse courses and find someone making a cool project. We do that course, learn tons of stuff and now even have a cool project to put in the resume. Few weeks pass, and bam! begins self doubt. " Do I really know, oh I made that project looking at an instructor code, I don't remember ".

In the hustle of learning everything out there we have forgotten the true meaning of becoming a software developer.

The Scary DSA ghost

We all know that being good in DSA can get us high paying jobs in big tech companies. Some people keep whining about how unfair or unrelated to Development it is. Some try to learn it just to get a job.

Only if we can change the perspective and instead of thinking why or where we need it, just enjoy the process of problem solving. Technologies will die, but your ability to tackle problems wont. Problem solving should be a habit, DSA questions are just means to improve that skill, and it makes much more sense than doing random aptitude questions. For example - You are creating a website which has search functionality, wont it be better that you know which algorithm will be used for your specific use case.

Companies ask these coding questions because they need problem solvers and this gives exact idea of how we think. So instead of fearing DSA and treating it like a mandatory syllabus, it should be our desire to be great problem solvers.

Tech-Stacked

You might have heard of tons of tech stack, MERN,MEAN,LAMP .. and surrounding technologies PWA,AWS,npm,yarn,webpack,ssh,jest,ServerSideRendering,SSG,HeadlessCMS, JAM-stack, CI/CD(Jenkins),WASM, etc.

Does that make you feel anxious, do you feel bombarded with choices. Well congrats ,that's how we get derailed from our goal to make something for ourselves or solve a problem. We feel the urge to learn everything, or we wont be able to code our project. That glimmer we had when we first saw our site display a heading or that hello world program, we've lost that.

Why do so many choices get in our way to create something for ourselves. Shouldn't we just learn enough to start building something. Worst case scenario, we wont have enough knowledge for that dream project.

Why do we need to find courses with code-along projects for our Resume's. Isn't the purpose of resume or portfolio to represent you, does that "course" project represent you, it might use tons of technologies and stuff but it isn't our idea, its not a challenge we tackled. It took away our chance to be a great developer.

All these technologies do make sense for large scale companies with millions of users, but is it needed by you for your personal project. Weren't people building really cool things few years back. If we start focusing more on Solving the Problem, our resumes will look a lot different and the way we feel about ourselves will soon change.

To sum up

• Enjoy DSA : Solve DSA questions because you want to be a problem solver, not because you have to complete some syllabus. Aim of these type of interviews is to check your problem solving skills.
• Tech-stacks can become restraining : Being good at particular technology is good, but sticking to it for every use case might not be best idea. Focus on a real problem(no matter how trivial) you solved with your project instead of a fancy social media clone you watched in a course.

Conclusion

Let money or reputation not be the motivating factor, and let your passion for computer sciences/software development take over. When you will be true to yourself instead of glorifying that resume, you will feel more confident and have better opportunities.

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Article by Arjit Sharma