[walolla]

Meaningful is often a very flexible term, depending on the situation and the circumstances it's definition can change a lot. For example, when working in a small start-up the development velocity is crucial, because you have limited resources and no revenue to support you, so building something that works is more important than building it perfectly. It's a very generic explanation, but what I'm trying to say, is that there are always reasons for everything and they often form a long chain of causes, that are hard to see sometimes. But let's try to tackle some of your concerns.

Finding a job right now, especially without a lot of experience is hard, in my understanding, the main reason is that the companies at the moment are not ready to invest a lot of resources in new developers and would rather find someone with experience. If you are looking for job, try making something practical, like a pet-project, that would show your skills directly. Find some people with more experience, first of all, you can learn from them and secondly, they can reference you as someone they know, who might be a good fit in their company, that level of trust can be very important and help you a lot. And of course, keep learning, there will always be something you don't know and it's okay, the question is how your approach it, if you are willing to push yourself out of your comfort zone and get more exposure to different things, your opinions can become more valuable.

About AIs and stuff like that, your code is just a tool for solving problems, but what is unique to you is how you approach these problems, how you think about them, of course, if all you can do is build CRUDs by following precise instructions it won't be very valuable. Basically, work smarter, not harder, it's not the amount of code you can write, but the reasoning behind it.

Okay, let's say you landed a job, congrats, but you still feel useless. In such cases, for me, it's always communication, in a decent team you should be rewarded for asking "how can I be better?" or "what should I do differently?", because it means that you want to grow and be better, therefore providing more value to the company. Don't be afraid to talk to people, ask for advice and learn from their mistakes.

I'm sure you will get there, just don't stop trying to improve yourself and your surroundings, at some point, hopefully soon, someone will recognize your efforts and potential value.

I know that this response was kind of chaotic and I'm sorry for that. It's just a slice of my thoughts not long after waking up. If all of this seems to broad and generic, try to specify on one topic, like "but how should I approach X" or "what can I improve in Y", I'm sure you will get a lot of relevant recommendations. Best of luck, buddy!

[findingMeaning]

Okay! let’s get slightly more specific!

How to showcase problem solving? Especially for someone who is quite methodical about it and mostly rely on what others did. Meaning that the default response is looking into literature to see what others have done and solving after looking through previous examples.

This approach worked so far, but seems like might not work anymore.

[walolla]

I know that it sounds like a chicken and egg problem, but in my personal opinion, the best showcase is an actual result of a solved problem, for example: "i proposed this approach to team and afterwards our development speed increased by 30%" or "i had a personal problem, so I made this solution and made it useful for other people". Please note that I'm talking mostly about hiring here, as it can be very useful to gracefully outline your prior experiences. But once you're in, it's just natural, you solve problems, you don't hide the results, you talk about it, people acknowledge our skills.

When we talk about literature, of course, it's very important, as it makes learning things faster than just imperial trial and error, but practice and theory should be side by side.

I'm frankly sure, that you've been doing some practical stuff and not just reading about someone's experiences. I mean, it's easy to study and understand how facebook became so successful, but repeating that success is nearly impossible.

Sorry if I misunderstood your point, please correct me, if I'm going in the wrong direction.

[findingMeaning]

That is a nice response! Somewhere along your answer, you wrote a line > "i had a personal problem, so I made this solution and made it useful for other people"

This was the original motive of my original question. How to validate if someone's personal problems are only their own or there are people who need share it?

> you've been doing some practical stuff

Yes, but these are toy problems that only work on small scale. Currently, anything requires designing a large systems, which is seemed rather difficult. Maybe it's just an excuse to be lazy. Weirdly the projects blow-up with their scope after one/two day and just doesn't give that satisfaction.

[walolla]

Great! I think I get your concerns now.

When we talk about problems for potential solving there are pretty much always a group of people, I'm yet to see a case where there is only one person, who uses something. Even if you publish your riced-up arch linux config on github, someone will clone it and it's a pretty niche area :). Of course, if we are talking about starting a business it's better to perform a market analysis, thankfully there're communities for everyone. Let's say you want to do some integration thingy for a cloud-based CRM, you can find a reddit page, telegram/whatsapp group, or something like that, where the most involved users are located and just ask them some questions. Of course, there is always a limit of how many potential customers you can attract, but if you're building something small and niche, you probably won't need to spend a whole lot on development. There are many examples on youtube of devlogs or reports from guys, who made some little thing, like a webtool, that automatically checks TLS certificates and notifies you (idk, just a random idea) and with the right outreach are getting some clients. To get more clients you can post on a themed subreddit, producthunt, HN, etc. It may be small, but it how cool if it works!

Okay, scale. Of course, no one expects you to build huge and complex projects on your own. The point is how you write your small ones, how flexible is it? what about performance, potential for scale, etc. Basically, it's a small example of how you personally think about technical problems and solve them. Sometimes companies give you a small test task, I personally once wrote a pdf invoice generator with an API, just a small thing, but it has shown the employer how I do things. Please keep in mind, that you are not supposed to know everything, "Never worked with some specific IAM system?", don't worry, if you are used to learning new things you will quickly pick up what you need.

Once again, it's not the absolute truth, it's just a part of my experience, I'm sure, that other people will have something else to add or disagree with.