In the big companies senior developers are tired of the failed institutionalism. Most large companies I have worked at are Java shops and do everything the same way. They move so astonishingly slowly and spend a lot of time convincing themselves otherwise with agile. It’s not hard to feel like a 100x developer when working on an open source project that does 10x your corporate equivalent in a fraction of the time.
What I have learned from interviewing:
* front end skills are dead. If you are a startup use react for everything, otherwise you can dick around with Angular or some custom jQuery looking mistake. It doesn’t matter. Its all unimportant MVP that just needs to look good and will get fixed after business exit or lawsuit.
* for backend don’t worry about inverting binary trees. That’s so last generation. Now the interview process is to build an entire tech stack in 3 hours or play in a software toy box of a trillion dependencies or service tools. Good systems automation skills or just services are too boring.
* Open source contributions are resume line items, like education. If you want people to take that serious be very explicit about the value of your open source contributions on your resume. Even then be prepared to treat open source as a new business pitch deck if asked.
* If you are a non-management developer don’t bother with things of social value. These are commonly viewed as a harmful distractions. This includes professional certifications, social organizations, accreditation’s, security clearances, and so forth.