[schwartzworld]

I'm a web dev, so I can only speak from my own experience:

You say 5 years python, but based on your linkedin you mean hobbiest experience, so you should expect that it's going to be harder. I was a hobbiest for 4 years before I got hired. There's no link to your GitHub, so it's impossible to see anything you've written. Hopefully you're including links to personal projects in your resumes.

Your best bet is going to be cashstrapped startups. They will likely pay less and demand more than an enterprise role, but don't worry about the size of your first paycheck, because you can level way up in a year or two.

However, small orgs like to hire generalists, full stack devs that can do it all. I was hired for frontend, but I had to write code in Django Rest Framework and Flask too. With a backend focus, I'd recommend building the rest of your toolset out and learning some frontend if you haven't. You'll likely have to touch frontend, so youre only helping your future self.

Networking is big, and I spent a lot of time first going to meetups and later speaking at them. Even if you don't get a job this way, you will get more comfortable talking to other devs and increase your confidence. Feel free to shoot an actual resume or GitHub over to ian at schwartz.world and I will happily give you more thorough feedback

[ericfrazier]

In my experience so far on the job market, employers do not look at anything in your portfolio, github or otherwise. I've got github portfolio and a huge active site and app portfolio with excellent analytics. I can see who visits my online properties and out of over fifty jobs applied for, not a single hit from an employer on any of my portfolio even when I'd be getting to the 2nd and 3rd and 4th interview with five companies so far this year.

[schwartzworld]

Definitely true in many cases, but with no job experience it _can_ tip the scales. The job that first hired me didn't really scrutinize my projects either (and nobody cares after the first job), but I still think it's the right thing to do.

Going through the entire process of getting a portfolio online is a huge signifier. If you build the site, manage it with git, get it up on GitHub and somehow actually deploy it somewhere, that means you've at least interacted with a lot of the basic tools developers use. It's a thing that you've done, when there may not be many others, and doing it more than once means it's less things we'll have to teach you when onboarding. With a nice classless frontend framework like Sakura, it takes like 30 minutes tops to put together a small HTML page and you can drag-and-drop deploy with Netlify, so honestly the bar is quite low.

But I actually brought up GitHub from the standpoint of: I have no idea what kind of job he's actually trying to get and how his experience might relate to that. All we know is 5 years, can't get hired.