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Ask HN: Landing a programming job by virtue of a side project only?

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Re: Ask HN: Landing a programming job by virtue of a side project only?

#21

Post by jaabe »

randomvectors wrote: post #17
jaabe wrote: post #8

I’ve never hired someone who was self-taught, not because self-taught people can’t be equal or better, but because you’re trying to buy security and stability. The most expensive mistake you can make as a manager is hiring the wrong person, and self-educated people just aren’t worth the risk when you have a dozen other candidates who are great. I’m Danish though and things are a little different here because educatio…

1. As a hiring manager you should be better at differentiating between people and treat a degree as just one data point that you take into account, and not as a filter that gives no false positives. 2. You're pointing out that self-educated people aren't worth the risk and then you go on to advise him that he should self-educate. 3. A point that I think you're kind of making and that I agree with, is that a degree is…

You can certainly have a degree in CS and suck, but the odds of that happening are much lower than with people who don’t have a CS degree. Why should I waste the resources if I have enough decent candidates?

The rockstar developer is kind of a myth. If you compile 100 applicants into the 5-8 best ones, then the truth is that you could probably hire any of them and get good results.

That doesn’t mean self-educated people should give up. Especially because very few countries have as easy access to education as we do.

Re: Ask HN: Landing a programming job by virtue of a side project only?

#22

Post by randomvectors »

jaabe wrote: post #21
randomvectors wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. As a hiring manager you should be better at differentiating between people and treat a degree as just one data point that you take into account, and not as a filter that gives no false positives. 2. You're pointing out that self-educated people aren't worth the risk and then you go on to advise him that he should self-educate. 3. A point that I think you're kind of making and that I agree with, is that a degree is…

You can certainly have a degree in CS and suck, but the odds of that happening are much lower than with people who don’t have a CS degree. Why should I waste the resources if I have enough decent candidates? The rockstar developer is kind of a myth. If you compile 100 applicants into the 5-8 best ones, then the truth is that you could probably hire any of them and get good results. That doesn’t mean self-educated peo…

You're ignoring what I wrote above and you're arguing with a point that I'm not making.

Re: Ask HN: Landing a programming job by virtue of a side project only?

#23

Post by segmondy »

I have hired people due to their side projects and they turned out to be solid. But most people don't. It requires looking at your code, vetting & talking about it.

My concerns are do you know how to work with a team? How about communication? Do you know how to partake in all the other activities outside of coding? Testing? Documentation? System Design? Do you know how to program in the large?

Most people out there can brute force their way to a working project and even make tens of thousands of dollars but that doesn't mean they are a great developer.

Re: Ask HN: Landing a programming job by virtue of a side project only?

#24

Post by codingdave »

Honestly, having a $500 MRR side projects tells me nothing about your coding skills, and would not inspire me to interview you for a coding job.

What it would inspire me to interview you for is an junior PO role. You found a problem, built a solution, got a few customers, and have kept them happy. The skills to do that are not related to the coding -- they are product design/ownership skills.

Re: Ask HN: Landing a programming job by virtue of a side project only?

#25

Post by mattmanser »

jaabe wrote: post #21
randomvectors wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. As a hiring manager you should be better at differentiating between people and treat a degree as just one data point that you take into account, and not as a filter that gives no false positives. 2. You're pointing out that self-educated people aren't worth the risk and then you go on to advise him that he should self-educate. 3. A point that I think you're kind of making and that I agree with, is that a degree is…

You can certainly have a degree in CS and suck, but the odds of that happening are much lower than with people who don’t have a CS degree. Why should I waste the resources if I have enough decent candidates? The rockstar developer is kind of a myth. If you compile 100 applicants into the 5-8 best ones, then the truth is that you could probably hire any of them and get good results. That doesn’t mean self-educated peo…

Haha, the opposite of what you're arguing is true.

Anyone can get a CS degree without knowing how to program, you can make up the credits with all the irrelevant, purely academic, formal CS stuff.

But no-one can be a self-taught programmer, actually create a whole app, and lack the fundamental ability of being able to write a basic program.

Re: Ask HN: Landing a programming job by virtue of a side project only?

#26

Post by mattmanser »

jaabe wrote: post #20
thetrost wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, nobody gets fired for buying IBM. I don't know how the market for good developers is in Denmark, but I think restricting your potential employees to just formally trained limits your potential as team/company. edit: Plus, I know quite a lot of formally trained developers who at some point just stopped learning. To me that is much more dangerous than not having a formal education in the first place.

I’ve hired a lot of people, I do a lot of networking and I work as an examiner for CS students, I’ve never seen someone who was self-educated remotely compare to someone with a degree. It just doesn’t happen in a country where anyone who wants to put in the work can get a degree. Which was kind of my point. The people who failed to get a degree are typically the people who won’t become great when they are self-taught…

You've already said you never hire self-taught programmers so how would you know?

We have a lot of self-taught programmers in my generation in the UK (I think mainly because of the BBC micro programme for schools a few decades ago). I've seen awful CS educated programmers and I've seen awful self-taught ones.

The two best programmers I know, one was self-taught and one was not.

The worst programmer I've ever known was formally educated, could quote you reams of technical specs, advanced CS, and managed to write 20 lines of not working code in 3 months.

Re: Ask HN: Landing a programming job by virtue of a side project only?

#28

Post by dragonwriter »

codingdave wrote: post #24

Honestly, having a $500 MRR side projects tells me nothing about your coding skills, and would not inspire me to interview you for a coding job. What it would inspire me to interview you for is an junior PO role. You found a problem, built a solution, got a few customers, and have kept them happy. The skills to do that are not related to the coding -- they are product design/ownership skills.

> You found a problem, built a solution, got a few customers, and have kept them happy. The skills to do that are not related to the coding

If it's a software solution, the idea that the skills for the “built a solution” part of that are not related to coding seems to be generally untrue. Yes, a solo project of the type involved more than coding skills, but product owner skills without tech skills don't call forth software from the depths of the abyss, though they can produce a nice idea of what a software solution would look like if someone was available to build it.

Re: Ask HN: Landing a programming job by virtue of a side project only?

#29

Post by taway555 »

i was able to do this. i had one side project/app published in the app store and one freelance contract. those alone got my foot in the door for technical interviews... from there, there is no free lunch, however: study nonstop to pass technical white boarding and screens. you have to run through the gauntlet of technical interviews to get hired.

do you have any formal education? bachelors in anything?

Re: Ask HN: Landing a programming job by virtue of a side project only?

#30

Post by sethammons »

drenvuk wrote: post #15
smt88 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would whiteboard you > you're good on from a project pov and an algorithms pov As someone who also hires software people, I would urge you to review the evidence on whiteboarding. It's difficult to discard your own anecdotal evidence, but hiring has no control group -- you have no idea how many great people you're missing as a result of whiteboarding. The reasons against whiteboarding have been discussed here man…

My whiteboarding consists of a mix of three things: 1. Invert a binary tree (tree based and simplistic) 2. Open a file, parse it in a simple way and then write to a new file. (file systems, strings) 3. Design a barebones twitter/reddit, etc. (architecture) No dynamic programming, no esoteric stuff. Just can they understand tree structures, do they have a grasp on file systems, and do they have a modicum of design sen…

1: have you _ever_ had to invert a binary tree outside your interview? And if you have, not that many others have.

2: surprisingly, not all programming jobs require opening a file (I used to run a question that required opening and writing a new file and got rid of it).

3: I love whiteboards for design questions.

My suggestion for a technical interview (coding portion): take a real life problem you solved in the last year or so. Distill it down into something you could do in 15 minutes. Give the candidate 45 minutes to do it on a computer (preferably their own). For other important things you need them to know before they start (like if trees and file systems are important), just talk about them and ask questions. You can drill down as far as needed there and learn more than if they know the file api in the given language. I recently hired a guy who was green, and did not know how to open and read a file or do unit tests (really green). But given a laptop and a few minutes to read docs, he knocked it out. He has been a fantastic hire working on high scale, high available systems. I don't think he would have done well if the questions were on a whiteboard. Just my $0.02.

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