[not_your_vase]

Working on interesting things and being a corporate code droid requires the same skillset[1].

  > unqualified for senior roles

Lol. You just landed one 3 months ago. On a different note, "senior developer" is such a joke-title, don't you think? In what other profession can you be a "senior" with less than a year of experience? It's only in sw dev...

The inconvenient truth is, you can't make a living of hobby projects - some can pull it off, but that's always exceptional. That's why they are hobby projects - they usually cost money rather than make any. On the other hand you need to skill up for hobby projects also. You can write a compiler in JS, sure. But should you? Upskilling is required anyway, so why not get on it, regardless of how you decide about your future

[1]: corpo jobs require also ass kissing, which is an art in itself

[abhnv]

They just offer senior titles to justify the paycheck, I think.

I just want an out of this fullstack web dev work. I was considering targeting HFT companies for money and complex technical work (but there are very few openings). Or maybe invest some time in golang, and target getting into dev teams that build AWS, GCP etc. Or something niche like VMWare, that builds virtual computers.

But the skills required for these are very different from my current skillset. I don't want to end up investing time and effort in something, and get nothing in return.

How do I take calculated risk? I already need to be proficient in NodeJS Typescript, JS frontend frameworks, using docker / AWS.