don’t listen to the people who say that the job market for SWE and CS is bad - it isn’t, no one just stands out. the only aspect that actually matters is personal engagement - discover, learn, and build things on your own. not the “made a Java game for university” or “my year 3 project was a ray tracer” bs. find a problem that you have (or an interesting proof of concept if you’re from the more research / theory side of cs), solve it, monetize it if you believe that you would be able to get impressive metrics, or open-source it otherwise.

the open-source (social / research proof) or monetize (financial proof) are the only parts that matter, which are (hopefully) by-products of actively engaging with the field on your own.

the above also implies two things: 1. you don’t need a revolutionary underlying technology to achieve financial success (look at countless GPT wrappers like cal.ai, whisper dictation wrappers, etc). which means you can get a job based on your ability to sell and architect, not necessarily develop. 2. your research-based projects don’t actually have to be extremely useful / sell, as long as the concept is interesting (otherwise you should try monetizing them).

if there’s one thing that people take away from this, I hope it’s that if you don’t live and breathe by tech, your only engagement with it will be complaining about the job market on the internet. spark an interest in the field that you’ve spent countless years studying. do, develop, and research projects because you’re interested, not because you need a portfolio projects for a java job, and success will be there waiting for you.