Hey Ishika,

Good to hear that you are planning your career path in the second year of graduation which many students find difficult.

Regarding your question, I would like to mention it in 2 ways. First, You should understand the difference between SDE and Full stack developer. Second, Why full stack developer jobs will be saturated by the time you graduate.

Let me walk through detailed differences in 1:1. Kindly, book a call to have a discussion and I'll mentor you on what can be done.

Hi Ishika,

Great question!

SDE title is usually given to any software engineer starting their career. It does not include your speciality but just your level of experience. SDEs could be focusing completely on backend alone, frontend alone or become a full stack specialist (works on both frontend and backend parts of the application). For example, at Google, all college graduates have the title of L3 SDE, irrespective of which team or backend/frontend/full stack they work on.

In each of the backend and frontend domains, you have several areas e.g. Python/Django web developers vs Java/Spring web developers can both be backend developers. Same for frontend or full stack specialists.

Now coming to your question, about what areas to target. For college graduates, typically companies are not looking for specialists. They are more generally looking for people with good problem solving skills. All the big tech companies usually ask you only questions about Data Structures and Algorithms and some other general areas. However, for smaller companies, having some familiarity with different languages and frameworks might help.

Also, note that the more relevant frameworks and techonologies you have experience with, broader your opportunities are. Someone who knows web development in Python & Java and also knows React and CSS will have more roles that they will be eligible for - as they can apply to pure backend roles for Python/Django or pure frontend roles for React as well. However, college graduates are not typically specialists in anything, so all this just works as familiarity or for a handful of small companies.

The way to handle saturation in any domain is to really stand out from the crowd with your knowledge and experience.

In summary, my advice for fresh graduates is to not box themselves in a specialization, focus on DSA and interview specific areas more and then if you have time, use that to get more exposure e.g. learning various languages and frameworks.