First of all, yes, the job market is tough. Yes, it's understandable many people are looking for ways to improve their situation.

However, I am baffled by how many people focus on building up their portfolios, resumes, and profiles instead of setting a goal of doing meaningful work. Recently, lots of people, even when contributing to open-source projects, do not do that because they want to help someone but to make their profile look better (which already causes problems: https://dev.to/jitendrachoudhary/stop-contributing-to-open-source-13nb).

Yes, it's tough, but we must ask ourselves why we want to be software developers. This line of work aims to optimize processes and information flow- in short, to make other people's lives more convenient.

We have the almost unlimited liberty to create whatever we want, whether an app, website, or any platform, yet we choose to focus on finding ways to optimize how we want to drain money from an employer. Is that what this is about?

It's hard to find a community of people who want to create, build, experiment, and challenge the status quo. Almost everywhere, it's just the same story all over again: " I finished boot camp but can't get a job. What should I do?" "I can't get a frontend job. How can I become a fullstack?" " Should I get a degree?" " Should I accept the job?" " Where should I apply?" etc.

Does anyone want to be creative and think about others? What happened? Yes, I understand finding a job and making a living is hard. But even at the point in life where it's necessary to do any job to make a living, I think it's still essential to preserve the internal drive and ambition at all costs - to create something good and beautiful instead of constantly chasing ways to impress an employer without any meaning behind it.

It feels like we are just wasting potential and making it harder for ourselves. There are only so many resources to take from the market. We need to create to make it grow again. Stop listening to influencers blindly - start thinking for yourself.