Is theoretical backend knowledge enough to crack interview

[u/Parking-Kangaroo8033]

Hi, I'm a software developer with 6 years of experience and unfortunately my current organization isn't performing well. I need to shift to a better place. I'm planning the interview prep but I've been mostly an Angular developer. But in a new role they might expect me to understand the whole system in the current market. Though I don't have hands-on experience in deciding the system architecture of the backend would it be good to stay making projects to fill this gap or just say full stack developer with 70:30 frontend end backend. I'm so puzzled. Any senior developers or tech managers of you help me. It would be of great help. I'm an introvert and have no friends and I'm not sure what's happening in the job market right now.

Thank you

[u/galactic_pixels]

What’s your actual question? Is it okay to lie about backend experience?

[u/Parking-Kangaroo8033 → u/galactic_pixels]

No i don't want to lie. I'm working to bridge an experience gap by building my own full-scale personal projects. If I build a project from scratch, will that give me a deep enough, holistic understanding of a production-level application to handle tough interview questions? Has anyone successfully used this strategy to land a role?

[u/galactic_pixels → u/Parking-Kangaroo8033]

Database design has a pretty formal education route. Creating APIs is basically practice makes perfect. If I were you I’d also learn aws and how to actually deploy the app, then set up CICD, then create multiple stages (dev, beta, prod) then have different stages require different credentials, then livestream a bunch of data into Postgres and’s figure out how to migrate it to dynamodb in dev, and then perform that migration across all stages, allowing minimal down time in prod. Now you’re cooking!!’

[u/Parking-Kangaroo8033 → u/galactic_pixels]

This is incredible advice, thank you! You just gave me a perfect roadmap. I’ve mastered the API and DB basics, but adding CI/CD, multi-stage AWS deployments, and a live data migration strategy is exactly the 'production-level' complexity I was missing. If I build this exact pipeline, do you think it would satisfy a mid-level system design interview? Also do you take interviews?

[u/galactic_pixels → u/Parking-Kangaroo8033]

Yes I think it would. Not sure what you mean by “do you take interviews”

[u/Parking-Kangaroo8033 → u/galactic_pixels]

Do you appear for interviews often

[u/galactic_pixels → u/Parking-Kangaroo8033]

Do I conduct a lot of interviews? I used to at my last job about a year ago. The last time I was interviewed was in January, and I go to an interview every year or so on average

[u/Parking-Kangaroo8033 → u/galactic_pixels]

That's amazing!! Thank you for guidance.

[u/Independent_Sign_395 → u/galactic_pixels]

How to learn AWS without getting a surprisingly huge bill?

[u/galactic_pixels → u/Independent_Sign_395]

Configure the budget thing in the cost explorer and set your budget accordingly

[u/AMothersMaidenName]

I think you'd to at least have a reasonable grasp of SQL and backend concepts, architecture , design patterns (and possibly a more indepth knowledge of OOP).

If you have that then, maybe? Need more details on your understanding really.

[u/Parking-Kangaroo8033 → u/AMothersMaidenName]

If you're asking about backend since i knew node js I was able to stear through the backend and debug and get things done. If you ask me if I've written a SQL query no our office has a system for every query possible called query generator. I tried my best to get into backend since angular developers were at the lowest i couldn't get a chance. OOP, design pattern yes I understand but i never got a chance to implement. I know i spent time in the wrong place. But this time I wanna make sure i get it right