It's very heartening to see all of the stories here.
I've put the last few years of my life into working on komorebi, a tiling window manager for Windows[1], https://notado.app, a content-first social bookmarking service, and https://kulli.sh, a "bring your own links" comment aggregator which shows you comments from hn, reddit, lobsters, lemmy etc. on an article all in one place.
Unfortunately I was laid off after 5 years with the same company last month, and nobody seems to care about any of these projects when it comes to recruiting. There are people who use them that have reached out to me very kindly offering to make referrals, but the job market and mainstream interview processes value LeetCode more than shipping real code these days.
In my experience that's true mostly of large companies that have very standardized interview process. All the startups I worked at so far had some kind of coding question but it was not very leetcode-y and more conversational; Trying to get your thoughts about how you'd solve the problem and assess whether you had the right intuitions about software challenges.
I'd encourage you to exercise your network and see if you can find a small to mid-size company that does something interesting to you. You'll likely have a much higher success rate!
I have a similar life story. This field is toxic and hates developers that build useful software. Look at Max Howell and so many others like him.
Reading through the thread it's all about vibe and liking people. Most of the success stories are products that went nowhere and nobody used. But they got paid and had fun.
I've put the last few years of my life into working on komorebi, a tiling window manager for Windows[1], https://notado.app, a content-first social bookmarking service, and https://kulli.sh, a "bring your own links" comment aggregator which shows you comments from hn, reddit, lobsters, lemmy etc. on an article all in one place.
Unfortunately I was laid off after 5 years with the same company last month, and nobody seems to care about any of these projects when it comes to recruiting. There are people who use them that have reached out to me very kindly offering to make referrals, but the job market and mainstream interview processes value LeetCode more than shipping real code these days.
[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi