Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

Based on my experience, you have a few people that report to you from the different teams (reception, cleaning, maintenance, kitchen, sales etc.) - what you actually do depends a lot on the size of the hotel and on how large those teams are; in a small B&B you are probably doing some of those tasks yourself, but in a larger hotel there will be different teams and you are purely in a management position.

The amount and frequency of customer interaction also depends on the hotel size.

Whether it is more technical or social depends on the above. And it also depends on whether you consider management itself to be a technical or social skill.

Edit - regarding training: I have seen people in this field who had hospitality management degrees so I suppose that's the most common path.

Another project that I built was a component library using HTML and CSS, so I built this to learn HTML and CSS in a better way. Its repo also has 6 forks and 7 stars - https://github.com/hsnice16/PoshUI-Documentation

Also moved to the US at that time, searching for a job for months after that. Finally, one company was using the same tech stack got interested and we had a good talk about it during the interview, and they offered me the job.

I was close to give up my dream of working as a programmer until that point (you know, when you moved to a new country, with a family to support, you can’t just do interview forever, the most possible option for me at that time was to work at a restaurant or something like that).

At first I couldn't believe this would be a thing done by US companies (I thought maybe people in other parts of the world would have tried this, but no), but ultimately I had to face the unpalatable reality that indeed they were trying to unethically trick me into surrendering my IP by using grabby IP clauses.

When I pushed back and went through multiple rounds of contract clause negotiation, their grabby language only got more extreme in iteration (to a ridiculous degree), essentially a legal "fuck you" to standing up for myself and my rights.

Essentially a ploy to try to use an employment contract to own all my OSS work, and when I brought up ways to clarify and mutually protect IP on both sides from any such contamination, they resisted, and ultimately refused. SMH disgusting experience.

I think the most offensive thing about this was that they thought I was such a rube that I could be tricked by that, and also that it demonstrated they would try this with others. I hate the idea that little OSS developers out there were seen as inexperienced rubes to be taken advantage of. It's so hurtful. What about all the other folks out there who weren't canny enough to protect themselves, or even read through the contracts?

For reference this is not just "default clauses". I've signed many contracts that had zero grabby "own everything related" IP clauses at all, in multiple US jurisdictions. This is entirely an optional thing and does not need to be included, especially not in the circumstances I was in. The resistance in the face of subsequent negotiations, only strongly supports the idea that this is a deliberate ploy. Please respect that I'm not going to name and shame specifics tho right now, I think there's other more apt responses. Consider the experiences related here a warning enough to be careful with how you protect your IP in your own dealings, no matter who you deal with.

Sometimes the public face a company presents is so different to how they conduct themselves. Disgusting.

0: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox