To the last point, it's important not to find yourself in the IT-as-a-cost-center trap if you're being asked to spend 90% of your time working on {IT tickets, business analysis, customizing-Salesforce, creating-old-school-java-beans-all-day} work, so much so that you can't write about software engineering with features you're proud to have worked on, in the bullets on your resume.
On the hiring side, I've found quite a bit of anecdotal success finding really talented junior engineers who have fallen into this trap, where a close read of the resume and cover letters shows a passion that's not covered by the actual keywords on the resume. I'll often stretch our requirements to give interviews to people I have a good gut feeling about - "diamonds in the rough" so to speak. But it takes a lot of time and focus to not simply screen out a resume based on these negative keywords - and given that recruiting teams at a lot of companies have been reduced as well, many won't have the time to do this well, if they ever did to begin with.
As a candidate you can absolutely mitigate this with open-source contributions, if you have time. But it can be hard to find that focus, time, and mentorship/community, especially if the day-job environment is toxic.
On the hiring side, I've found quite a bit of anecdotal success finding really talented junior engineers who have fallen into this trap, where a close read of the resume and cover letters shows a passion that's not covered by the actual keywords on the resume. I'll often stretch our requirements to give interviews to people I have a good gut feeling about - "diamonds in the rough" so to speak. But it takes a lot of time and focus to not simply screen out a resume based on these negative keywords - and given that recruiting teams at a lot of companies have been reduced as well, many won't have the time to do this well, if they ever did to begin with.
As a candidate you can absolutely mitigate this with open-source contributions, if you have time. But it can be hard to find that focus, time, and mentorship/community, especially if the day-job environment is toxic.