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Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?

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Re: Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?

#11

Post by amatecha »

My personal website helped me get hired for a web dev job in the early 2000's. The quality of the site's code/structure, and its reasonably slick design "for a programmer" were both factors commended by the interviewer. Unfortunately there isn't a proper snapshot on archive.org. I think I built the site with Dreamweaver. Good times :)

Re: Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?

#12

Post by amatecha »

gregjor wrote: post #3

None, ever. I can’t recall anyone paying attention to my personal projects in a hiring situation. And when hiring people I pay almost no attention to personal projects unless I’m hiring a green junior. Companies hire people who can add business value and work as a team member and part of the larger organization. Personal projects don’t communicate that.

Uh, I absolutely look at interviewee's personal projects, especially if they are using technology directly related to what I'm looking for. Also especially when they are literally a creator/maintainer of one of the open source libraries my team is using. You can very often hear interesting stories of how the person solved unique, challenging problems. To ignore the products of an interviewee's personally-driven efforts seems like a serious mistake, in my opinion.

Re: Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?

#17

Post by rullelito »

I did programming contest problems, and also Google Code Jam a few years in a row, which got Google to reach out, which ended up with me getting hired. They probably didn't reach out due to my fantastic performance as I felt quite mediocre, but it got me hired.

Not quite a personal project, I know..

Re: Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?

#19

Post by rantallion »

amatecha wrote: post #12
gregjor wrote: post #3

None, ever. I can’t recall anyone paying attention to my personal projects in a hiring situation. And when hiring people I pay almost no attention to personal projects unless I’m hiring a green junior. Companies hire people who can add business value and work as a team member and part of the larger organization. Personal projects don’t communicate that.

Uh, I absolutely look at interviewee's personal projects, especially if they are using technology directly related to what I'm looking for. Also especially when they are literally a creator/maintainer of one of the open source libraries my team is using. You can very often hear interesting stories of how the person solved unique, challenging problems. To ignore the products of an interviewee's personally-driven effor…

Checking out their projects (if they have any and volunteer them) is fine. Just as long as we don't expect them to have said projects.

I can see the argument for a candidate seeking their first job in IT needing to distinguish themselves from the rest of the crowd and how a couple of well-executed projects can help with that. However, it's unfair to expect that any candidate must have projects, especially if they're already in employment elsewhere - few of us have the time or the energy to put into projects of passion after we've done our 40 hours and taken care of other priorities.

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