I am cutting my experience in the CV to show only last 10 years. In my mind there is some unreasonable expectation that in 20 years you should be able to show research papers or patents, have a network of friends who will refer you, then show leadership skills, i.e. manage people (successfully), and to be a genius who can solve leetcode hards in 20 mins. I do have a substantial number of OSS work but that rarely was of interest to anyone.
> I do have a substantial number of OSS work but that rarely was of interest to anyone.
This was a sad reality for me. I spent thousands of hours putting my heart and soul into OSS projects that people loved and used.. and for what? When I graduated university, recruiters never clicked the links. The companies I joined treated me like a baby who never worked on anything. I switched gears and grinded Leetcode to land a FAANG job instead, but I can't help but feel my engineering craft regressed in all this time.
There's you who insisted on a FAANG job to make 6x more than you probably need and then there's me living on 1.5k a month because I refuse to do anything that feels more than 1% useless (i.e. most things in the enterprise). I'm not saying my attitude is better than yours, but I do think you didn't really need to grind leetcode if you really didn't want to do useless things