[austin-cheney]

My personal side projects have helped me land jobs multiple times in the past, but they are absolutely not the way to advance your career.

Let me be very clear: career advancement and competency are entirely unrelated.

If you want to advance your career get a masters degree. Get promoted out of development as early as possible and learn to manage people, assets, and finances. You can be absolutely horrible with both software and dealing with people and still advance into more money and responsibility in the software industry.

If you want to be a better software developer spend lots of time writing original software progressively solving harder and harder problems. Odds are, I mean this absolutely overwhelmingly, you will have to do this entirely outside of work. Becoming brilliant in software is the equivalent of being a mindless patent clerk and toying with ideas about physics at night. You won't get hired for being brilliant until you make something brilliant. Sometimes that means asking for help. Consider that Einstein needed help with advanced math.

Why is this the case? Because the economics of software is not well understood and there is no established baseline of competence. The industry cannot even figure out how to tell competent developers apart from people who simply most enjoy hearing the sound of their voice.