Evaluating my experience
Posted by Serial_Hobbyist_@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 8 comments
I’ve got a CS degree and have worked on a couple personal projects.. I have a hard time knowing if I’m totally a jr or if I may pass as a more experienced dev.
I’m selling my current project to the company I work at and plan to have about 75 active daily users to start.
To sum up, it’s a sales org and the company changes pricing 3-4 times a week. Standard practice is to print the price sheet (basically 30 pages of excel) and evaluate line by line what changed/whats a good deal. I thought that was crazy and hated doing it. So..
I made a web app that scrapes the company website for pricing. Cleans it, collates it to fill in incomplete data and stores it. The frontend displays it in a very easy to read way. It has filtering, sorting, display options, mobile and desktop view, and can calculate financing all very fast. It has user auth with admin permissions
The stack Backend: python - fastAPI, selenium, sql database frontend: vanillaJS - MVC pattern Deployed using docker containers
Is this something to be proud of? Or is it something that would take you an afternoon to make?
Careless-Dance-8418@reddit
Just curious, are you mainly trying to share your app and get feedback on how hard it is, or are you seriously asking about your skill level?
If it’s the former: Getting something into a deliverable state and selling it is an accomplishment. But on the merits of what you described, this isn’t especially impressive by itself. I’d expect a decent dev could knock out a working version in a week or so. The real questions are: what makes your solution stand out? How robust is it? Can it be extended? Is it maintainable long-term or just a glorified script that works right now?
If it’s the latter: You need to share way more context. What’s your actual experience? How long have you been a professional dev? What are these other “personal projects” such as open source contributions or toy repos you abandoned? Why is your company buying software from you if you already work there? Without this info, nobody can realistically judge whether you’re junior or more experienced.
Right now there are too many unknowns. Anyone trying to give you a concrete answer off what you posted is basically guessing.
Serial_Hobbyist_@reddit (OP)
Fair point. I guess a bit of both. I’m not employed as a dev, I’m in sales. So my company pays me w2 for sales and 1099 for the tool.
I built it to be extendable so I could add functionality as time goes on.
Really what I’m looking for is an assessment of how capable I might be as an SDE. My peers are impressed by excel shortcuts… lol. So I just don’t know how my skillset stacks up.
Not sure if that’s enough context but would be happy to expand if you care to continue the convo!
Careless-Dance-8418@reddit
Sorry for the delayed response, was busy. But if you're still interested in a convo:
I think you’d probably be competitive with other juniors. Folks in that sub 1-2 year range who are still getting comfortable with production-level workflows.
The big gap between personal or hobby projects and real-world dev work usually isn’t raw coding ability; it’s the supporting stuff like testing, deployment, and the team-specific tooling that makes production systems maintainable. Most small, self-contained projects don’t force you to think about those things, which makes it hard to benchmark against what happens in a professional environment.
If you want to keep leveling up, I’d start looking at how to test your app: how do you know a change doesn’t break something that already works? Building even a small test suite or automated checks is a great next step toward production-quality code.
And don't undersell excel. While it’s not “real code", it does train the same kind of logical thinking and problem decomposition that carries over really well once you’re working in proper codebases.
Serial_Hobbyist_@reddit (OP)
Right on, thank you. Yeah I definitely don’t have formal testing. Just smoke tests or manual testing.
I did built it to be very easy to work on, extend( for me).
The traffic isn’t high enough to worry about load balancing or it being extremely optimized. So that’s something I don’t know much about
I appreciate the dialogue!
CompetitionOdd1582@reddit
That's above what I'd expect a totally inexperienced dev to do.
The thing that I'm really impressed with is that you saw a problem, recognized that this is somewhere software can help, and created a solution that actually solves the problem. That's good thinking, and speaks very well to how you view software.
Too many juniors think that writing code is an end to itself. It needs to be useful to someone.
Serial_Hobbyist_@reddit (OP)
Thank you. I worked in a non technical role at a large tech-automotive company for a long time.. and this new company has just ghastly inefficient processes. So someone’s gotta fix it!
I figure if they are buying software from me im not a jr dev. But also wouldn’t want to be in over my head if I go for a mid level dev position
RickJLeanPaw@reddit
Yeah, it’s a head scratcher!
First, most-important bit is “I thought that was crazy and hated doing it”. I suspect that most successful devs at SMEs, or even large employers outside ‘tech proper’, are in the same boat; have technical skills, like assisting others, enjoy problem solving, hate doing ‘work’, so you’re on the right path.
Thing is, you have a different skill set to others; there’s many a young developer on here with apparent technical skill but with little interpersonal or business acumen. I’ve observed that these three traits are also listed by the ease that people acquire them, with you lacking the easiest to get.
At the moment; you’re not a square peg, but neither is there a round hole that you can easily fit into.
You already know all this though!
Is there a team you can transition to (or collaborate with) within your existing company to get more, and broader, technical experience?
If not, I’d just keep an eye out for roles that seem to be roughly whatever the flip your shape is, and see if they can’t jam you in somehow.
Best of luck to you.
Serial_Hobbyist_@reddit (OP)
Thanks for the response! My company doesn’t hire technical people. They shell out lots of money to buy software from other companies. But maybe I can open their eyes to what more internal tooling can do for them!