> 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