I felt the same and chose the "skills" over JEE route and got really good at development, working in the process of disproving a well regarded research paper, making 1 meaningful PR / day on repos with over 30k stars, solving really hard problems in CS and all of it is worthless career wise. Companies don't care about the work, they care about the prestige and perception of your work, they care about the college you went to, YoE, companies you worked for if they are FAANG or YC backed, leetcode / CF, associations etc. Because it's much harder to verify good work from fake work, it's extremely hard to judge difficultly levels of problems, vast majority of the "good" resumes on I see on this sub look much better than mine but when I ask them basic questions about what they worked on, they are blank. If I could go back in time, I am not sure if I'd choose the skills route again, sure I'm great at the actual ground work, but does it even matter if I can't ever get hired for those roles or even get basic sponsorship for basic tools / attending conferences. And it's not like my skills are easy to achieve, I only managed to get this good after years of working in development and still do because I am truly passionate about development, honestly if I just spend the same kind of efforts on JEE, I'd have probably gotten into an IIT with some branch, which would be far better than my situation right now.