CSE Graduate '23, a couple of months as an AI Intern. Then, 3 months of solar sales. I've an year gap of about the entire year from Nov excluding sales. Will this always haunt me, lost my interest there's nothing that excites like the olden days.
I don't want to be learning webdev, is there anything else you'd recommend? Any recommendations would be highly appreciated.
Gaps will never haunt you, you know the story, if a recruiter or interviewer is interested, just give them a back story, doesn't even need to be a blatant lie. I have gaps in my CV of up to three years, I just moved to a different industry, but I was always working as a freelance and was always upgrading my knowledge. Maybe the market was not right, maybe you had personal issues, who knows... I honestly don't think this matters, the only way to screw up the answer to the gap question is with something like "Yeah, I did a 3 stretch for drugs, but it's all good now".
About webdev... I don't know, I've been crunching code for a decade now and I'm still not tired, I have done other stuff like CMS implementation, native windows desktop apps, office plugins, APIs, console abstractions... whatever, I understand this is not necessarily something you might want to do, but tell you want, maybe you need a break from the industry anyway... When I had my 3 year gap I went to work for Immigration and then I came up with the idea for a system that I then developed and sold to them. Sometimes the gap is exactly what you need to come back with fresh ideas.
I have a ton of freelancing in my resume, which many people admitted look like gaps. Which is why I also have a heavy portfolio that matches up with the number of years.
I think if you just work on enough stuff, you can just slap "freelancer" over all those gaps. Freelancing maybe a gap too - there are many times when you're just doing sales or ops work and no coding.
