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Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

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Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#511

Post by VirusNewbie »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #100
rikafurude21 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but this sounds like LARP, who the hell wouldnt jump on a job offer from apple? Even if it doesnt work out, having Apple on your resume wouldve been an insane career booster, telling people you got an offer from them but didnt take it sounds very unbelievable, atleast personally, I wouldnt have believed you

I am genuinely unsure if this is a parody comment. I am assuming that you are fairly green behind the ears? The thing about Big Tech companies is that they hire lots of developers. That’s in large part makes them Big Tech. “Having Apple on your CV” is not as prestigious as you’re making out. It doesn’t mean you have The Knowledge that makes you a ‘10x developer’ or whatever anywhere you work. In fact, it could mean t…

There are certainly non big tech jobs that pay well, give people tons of autonomy and have a great work environment, but do you really not understand why many people who write software would want to work at places where:

1. Their software gets used by millions of people 2. They are paid incredible amounts of money 3. They have wonderful working environments and perks 4. Are generally given more autonomy than non big tech companies?

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#512

Post by VirusNewbie »

patrickkidger wrote: post #148

I wrote a JAX-based neural network library (Equinox [1]) and numerical differential equation solving library (Diffrax [2]). At the time I was just exploring some new research ideas in numerics -- and frankly, procrastinating from writing up my PhD thesis! But then one of the teams at Google starting using them, so they offered me a job to keep developing them for their needs. Plus I'd get to work in biotech, which wa…

It is very cool to see that this sort of thing still happens. I love stories of people who wrote software to scratch an itch, for curiosity, and for the sake of just making something cool and useful and it turning out well for them.

I too did a fair bit of open source before ending up at G.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#513

Post by itsZero »

I wrote a program to fetch lyrics from some websites and then got approached by someone who has license to actually use the lyrics but they don’t have it in digital form so they asked to purchase my app.

Ended up working with them and later moved to a startup that also worked with them. For a college student, being able to work as one of the two engineers was great, system architecture, distributed queue, networking setup, everything is yours to do and learn. It was also a Mac OS X / Objective-C shop so learned a lot of obscure debugging techniques because there’s just not that many info available for OS X as servers. (We made web photo album editor and print it out for our users, OS X had the best PDF engine for free.)

Moved to the US from Taiwan later, the knowledge I’ve accumulated helped me passed my interview at Twitter and things went from there. I would never imagine a tiny app would lead me into a career!

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#514

Post by fataliss »

bsnnkv wrote: post #261

It's very heartening to see all of the stories here. I've put the last few years of my life into working on komorebi, a tiling window manager for Windows[1], https://notado.app , a content-first social bookmarking service, and https://kulli.sh , a "bring your own links" comment aggregator which shows you comments from hn, reddit, lobsters, lemmy etc. on an article all in one place. Unfortunately I was laid off after…

In my experience that's true mostly of large companies that have very standardized interview process. All the startups I worked at so far had some kind of coding question but it was not very leetcode-y and more conversational; Trying to get your thoughts about how you'd solve the problem and assess whether you had the right intuitions about software challenges. I'd encourage you to exercise your network and see if you can find a small to mid-size company that does something interesting to you. You'll likely have a much higher success rate!

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#515

Post by thighbaugh »

oaiey wrote: post #300
pokepim wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it common for Germans to dream about getting out of Germany and moving to US? Congratulations to you that you managed to do that, I am wondering how hard for German is to migrate to US to puruse better life here.

It is not common. Most Germans consider would never use the phrase "pursue a better life" when talking about the US. Quality of Life is in most European countries better including Germany. There are however some who want "freedom". Not that they lack freedom in Germany but the spiritual cowboy style, rocky mountain lifestyle freedom. Another reason for migration are obviously job offers in some industries.

As an American who values the quality of my life, there is little I wouldn't give for a working permit in any EU country, especially Germany. The grass is always greener I suppose, or maybe something of an ancestral longing (my paternal ancestor wasn't a willing emigrant, just a captured mercenary with no capo to negotiate with the British for the fare back to his Hessian homeland). Maybe a rarer inclination at present, but in another 50 years I doubt it still will be. It costs 40% less to live in Berlin (on average) than to live in my the fair Verona where I lay my scene, the San Francisco Bay Area, 40% less and a completely functional social safety net that doesn't let its old people starve to death on the streets! I am not sure what anyone means when they say freedom, its an amorphous concept but starving to death in the cold, that's a more visceral and topical thing I can see the hideous reality of by walking a block in any direction in SF. There but for God's grace go I.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#516

Post by gaws »

simonsarris wrote: post #203

When I was fresh out of college I semi-obsessively started answering StackOverflow questions about HTML Canvas, which was still new enough to not have a lot of coverage. At one point I answered over 10% of all canvas questions ever asked. I also blogged a few tutorials. This made Pearson email me for a book offer (HTML5 Unleashed, 2013, almost no one read it as I had no fame, but last amazon review: "Still relevant i…

> But I was too scared to leave New Hampshire, and perhaps too sentimental, or some more nameless term, so I didn't accept the offer.

What happened next?

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#517

Post by moooo99 »

Markstar wrote: post #508
pokepim wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it common for Germans to dream about getting out of Germany and moving to US? Congratulations to you that you managed to do that, I am wondering how hard for German is to migrate to US to puruse better life here.

My wife is a researcher in Germany and because of something called the "Wissenschaftszeitgesetz", she is looking for a job outside of Germany for her next research project. With having 2 kids, the US is definitely on our blacklist despite both of us having gone to school there, still keeping in touch with friends from that time and even professors actually offering her a position. We know many others who feel the sam…

> My wife is a researcher in Germany and because of something called the "Wissenschaftszeitgesetz"

For a country that prides itself in research and engineering culture, this piece of legislation really is an embarrasment

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#518

Post by lolive »

tuukkah wrote: post #401
lolive wrote: post #395

I worked for something like 15 years on a Semantic Web/Linked Data/Knowledge Graph client GUI. Funnily, the market never provided a convenient alternative. So when a big company decided that their data were becoming a massive mess, and it was time for a proper layering of data architecture, they chose my tool. Then me.

Congratulations! Which GUI and company, if I may ask? I've heard KG demand is on the rise, but one of the companies expects you to move to Sweden...

It is Datao.net I mostly use it at work over Ontop. The website is really old. But the code is updated regularly.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#519

Post by jsjsof »

bsnnkv wrote: post #261

It's very heartening to see all of the stories here. I've put the last few years of my life into working on komorebi, a tiling window manager for Windows[1], https://notado.app , a content-first social bookmarking service, and https://kulli.sh , a "bring your own links" comment aggregator which shows you comments from hn, reddit, lobsters, lemmy etc. on an article all in one place. Unfortunately I was laid off after…

I have a similar life story. This field is toxic and hates developers that build useful software. Look at Max Howell and so many others like him.

Reading through the thread it's all about vibe and liking people. Most of the success stories are products that went nowhere and nobody used. But they got paid and had fun.

Bullshit jobs for friendly people.

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