some general questions about job market stuff

[plush raft]

hello, new to server so feel free to let me know if I should be posting this somewhere else. I haven’t looked for a job/been interviewing since like 2019 and I have a general idea of what the market is like right now but had some specific questions.

for context, I have about 2 years SWE experience (backend, big data ETL / cloud stuff) and did 4 year CS bachelors before that. based in the SF Bay Area

how important is it to have personal projects on a resume if I have professional experience? I feel like I’d rather mention important projects I’ve worked on at my company rather than small things I made in hackathons or for my personal life, so I’m not sure if I should include them

is grinding LC / DSA still really important for interviews these days? At our company I feel like the interview questions I asked were reasonable and any engineer with a general understanding of DSA could have answered them without having to grind LC or anything. But I haven’t looked at what the industry is doing outside of my company much, so curious about that. I’m not super interested in getting into a prestigious company or anything, just a less stressful job where I can get compensated accurately

also, do most backend teams have on-call shifts these days? that’s the part of my job I really hate, but from talking with peers it seems really common

might have some more questions / be looking for career advice, thanks!

[heady dome]

Generally personal projects are looked at as something you can talk about since you have no real projects to talk about.
That being said, this is a very unusual and difficult market right now, so there are no guarantees that recruiters aren't using personal projects in some way to winnow down candidates. I don't have insight into recruiter screening processes across the industry enough to say.

The leetcode grind is still the most common thing for interview prep. As you've noticed, many companies are not actually looking for people to regurgitate optimal algorithms to be hired, and that hasn't changed.

Many developer teams have on-call; some do not. Ones that do will vary in what on-call looks like. Many places, for instance, there may be an on-call rotation, but it only gets paged in a few times a year and so it doesn't really impact people's lives.

[plush raft]

thanks! that’s really helpful to know, thanks

we get paged several times a day and constantly have production issues and I was under the impression this was normal talking to engineers at similar companies :’) I think I just had a weird sample size

[heady dome]

Paged several times a day is unusually high for an SRE team

And if it's developers... there's a lot of something wrong happening