u/Acceptable_Breath477

I’m a software engineer with 4+ years of experience, mostly working across full-stack, backend, and blockchain/crypto.

I’ve been looking for both freelance opportunities and full-time work, and honestly, it’s been surprisingly difficult to find anything.

I’ve applied, reached out, networked, and tried different approaches, but the response rate has been extremely low.

Curious to hear from other engineers:

• Is freelance work particularly slow right now?
• What’s actually working for you when it comes to finding opportunities?

trying to understand the current market and figure out what I might be doing wrong

Hey everyone,
I’m at a point where I’m open to almost any opportunity.

I have 4.5+ years of experience working with early-stage startups as a software engineer, building products from scratch and wearing multiple hats. Over the years I’ve worked across the stack with:
MERN (MongoDB, Express, React, Node.js)
Golang
TypeScript
Distributed systems
APIs and backend infrastructure
SaaS products (built and shipped from idea to production)

Most of my experience has been in startups, where I’ve owned features end-to-end and worked directly with founders.

Right now I’m actively looking for:
Full-time roles
Freelance/contract work
Startup projects
And honestly, even internships if the work is interesting and there’s room to grow.

If you or your company needs an experienced engineer—or knows someone who does—I’d really appreciate a referral or a conversation.
Happy to share my resume, portfolio, GitHub, or chat about how I can help.

Today,

our health data is fragmented across hospitals, labs, prescriptions, scans, wearable devices, and messaging apps.

Every doctor visit starts from scratch, and important context gets lost over time. I imagine a system that continuously builds a living memory of your health.

You can upload reports, scans, prescriptions, and test results, and the AI understands them, tracks changes over years, identifies patterns, explains trends in plain language, and helps you make better decisions before problems become serious.

I don't think it should fully exist yet because we're still figuring out how to balance AI, privacy, trust, and medical responsibility.

But if built correctly, everyone could have a personal health intelligence layer that grows with them throughout their lifetime. Imagine being able to check your vitals graph from your past blood tests, or how your weight has changed or talk to an app about how you are doing compared to previous tests, see all other data from other apps integrated to this app.

Would you try it

I genuinely enjoy working at startups. The speed, the ownership, the fact that what you ship actually matters - I've never been drawn to big tech or FAANG-style environments. Every role I've had has been at an early-stage company and I've loved that, even when it was chaotic. So this community felt like the right place to ask.

That said, the job hunt has been rough.

I have 4.5 years of experience as a backend engineer — Go, TypeScript, Rust — with a background that touches blockchain infrastructure, distributed systems and protocol design. I've shipped production systems, worked across the full backend lifecycle. I am not getting any calls

My honest read on why maybe: the market is noisy, my background has "Web3" in it which I think triggers automatic filters at a lot of companies, and applying cold through job boards in 2025 feels increasingly like a numbers game I can't win by volume alone. my resume get's lost somewhere in them. I try reaching out to the recruiters, but it's another challenge to find and the to be able to send a personal message to them.

i also try to find the founder's social if a small startup, but this is a bit time consuming as most of the time either they won't accept my connection or on x/twitter i can't dm them as i don't have premium. not easy to find email as well i guess, have tried using hunter but it only works in some cases

Which brings me to the two things I'm actually trying to figure out:

On recruiters — I've heard cold outreach to recruiters works but I've never done it deliberately. I don't know how to find the ones worth talking to (agency vs internal, startup-focused vs general tech), and I don't know what to say that doesn't immediately read as desperate. If you've done this successfully, what did that message actually look like?

On standing out generally — not looking for "post content on LinkedIn" advice. Genuinely curious what has moved the needle for people here, whether that's referrals, communities, specific job boards, or just a different way of approaching outreach entirely.

Last year during a Thailand trip I impulsively bought a DJI Mini 4 Pro Fly More Plus Combo for around 34k Thai Baht because I was super into cinematic travel videos and drones at the time.

Honestly, the drone itself is amazing. The footage, tracking, portability — everything feels futuristic. But weirdly, after the excitement wore off, I barely ended up using it. I think I’ve flown it only a handful of times in almost a year.

Now it mostly just sits in my bag and I’m realizing it was probably one of those “idea of a hobby vs actual hobby” purchases for me.

Curious if this happens to other people with drones/cameras too? Did you eventually get back into it or just move on from it? Should i sell it in delhi?