There are two sides to this coin. You can be good as in, you know fundamentals very well and can make connections with familiar concepts, or good as in, readil

There are two sides to this coin. You can be good as in, you know fundamentals very well and can make connections with familiar concepts, or good as in, readily employable because your skill sets check the right boxes of keywords and names for a recruiter or HR person. The former doesn't necessarily guarantee the latter. I'm gonna answer with the path less traveled in this thread with regards to your question. When you mention competitiveness, do you actually mean in terms of the job market? If so, unfortunately most people that are your first eyes to your resume when you hit that submit button are not as technically inclined as a programmer. Which is why it's often better to directly reach out to a team lead of the programmer department. Fundamental concepts don't work with 3rd party recruiters either, as most of them are not very language agnostic when it comes to matching you with job opportunities. The exception is with the largest of companies. They'll value fundamental skills more highly because they can absorb the risk of hiring someone to ramp them up with their work environment. Most medium to smaller companies can't afford much ramp up time. From my experience they want you to hit the ground running (seems to be a popular phrase with them) in whatever web framework they use. So for your benefit, you will look more appealing to hire by applying to larger companies. Smaller companies tend to interview more in concrete framework trivia while the large ones tend to test you on algorithms and other language agnostic concepts.