facinating how much advice here only applies to FAANG jobs & startups in SV/NY. there is absolutely not enough info in the OP to provide meaningful advice. wha

facinating how much advice here only applies to FAANG jobs & startups in SV/NY. there is absolutely not enough info in the OP to provide meaningful advice. what kinds of side projects were they? what tech stacks? how technical the implementations? etc. etc. there are plenty of well-paying software jobs that need neither leetcode nor a masters CS degree from MIT. telling someone that these are the current barrier to entry without any context is absurd. my 65yo father went from being laid off a $100k php job due to covid to another $100k php job 6mo later. the first at a small mfg company with 3 devs; the other at 10 person front-office online retailer with 4 devs. he is not a 10x dev, still prefers jquery and no one he spoke with knew or cared about leetcode. he's probably never written a merge sort impl in his life, though i suspect he has sorted lists in production a time or two.