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Ask HN: What sort of side-projects are useful for getting jobs?

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Re: Ask HN: What sort of side-projects are useful for getting jobs?

#61

Post by huehehue »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #10

Here's a piece of advice from actual experience (from both sides): Invest your time studying for interviews than wasting time building side projects if you're doing this purely for getting a job, period. In my experience, companies don't care about your little side project when hiring--that is, unless your "little side project" had some huge impact or is something they have been aware of--the best you could get is "h…

It really, really, really depends on where you're interviewing though.

Remember Google infamously rejecting Max Howell, the original Homebrew author? I know there has to be more to the story, but he's become the poster child for talented programmers getting rejected because they can't play the interview game. My point is, though, that his side project absolutely had a huge impact and it still wasn't enough.

90% of my interviews have been a take-home project followed by a chat going through my history and experience; in fact, my small side projects and hackathon projects tend to impress interviewers more than my on-the-spot abilities or my work history. Interestingly, I worked for a Fortune 500 bank and, while it was the least-challenging job I've had, the interview process was by far the hardest and had a few questions straight out of CCTI.

Research a few companies. Their Glassdoor pages usually indicate what kind of interview process they have. Then prepare accordingly.

Re: Ask HN: What sort of side-projects are useful for getting jobs?

#62

Post by Arizhel »

nrjdhsbsid wrote: post #16
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #10

Here's a piece of advice from actual experience (from both sides): Invest your time studying for interviews than wasting time building side projects if you're doing this purely for getting a job, period. In my experience, companies don't care about your little side project when hiring--that is, unless your "little side project" had some huge impact or is something they have been aware of--the best you could get is "h…

This 100%. When I'm involved in the interview process I make a point to check out all candidates side projects but over 90% of people don't care. In getting my last job I thought I would have a slam dunk because I have a bunch of cool stuff I work on but nobody cared at all. I failed multiple on site interviews until I gave in and read a couple CSCI 101 books cover to cover. I had too much specialized knowledge and n…

Do you have any recommendations for the best CSCI 101 books to read?

Re: Ask HN: What sort of side-projects are useful for getting jobs?

#63

Post by jamesmp98 »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #53
newbear wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you get a job?

Lol. There is definitively a barrier of entry in software and it helps if you do a bunch of things that are discussed here in this thread. On the other hand, if you just need a job as a programmer and have skills like OP seems to have, and apply for junior positions, possibly through a contractor, then you will get a job. This is for anyone who reads these threads and wonders "am I good enough?" "can I be a programme…

One of my problems is finding junior jobs. It seems whenever I go searching I see only mid-senior level jobs

Re: Ask HN: What sort of side-projects are useful for getting jobs?

#64

Post by EJTH »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #10

Here's a piece of advice from actual experience (from both sides): Invest your time studying for interviews than wasting time building side projects if you're doing this purely for getting a job, period. In my experience, companies don't care about your little side project when hiring--that is, unless your "little side project" had some huge impact or is something they have been aware of--the best you could get is "h…

I kind of agree with you for people who already have verifiable experience that sideprojects are not important. For people without anything on their CV however I think it can be a good idea.

I have been on both sides as well, many times and to be honest, if someone was a graduate and they didn't have some kind of side project, we just scrapped them.

Re: Ask HN: What sort of side-projects are useful for getting jobs?

#65

Post by bsvalley »

curiousDog wrote: post #58
bsvalley wrote: post #21

From my own experience dealing with all kinds of companies. If you aim for C-level companies (IBM, Banks, Oracle, Walmart, etc.) then you don't need to spend time building side projects. They simply don't care. For B-level companies like Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox and everything in between low and high skilled engineers, it's crucial to have a product of your own out there. They hire mostly young engineers with no profess…

Umm, Airbnb interviews are much harder than FB and Google.

From what I remember so far at Airbnb it used to be tough when they were small. I don't know today if they still attract a lot of rock stars. But still, all I had to do was to write up a mini-web app and connect to their API in order to pull out some data, in about 2 hours. Then after this interview they had an onsite with classic CS and culture fit. They were very tough on culture fit and you had to meet with the 3 founders. I don't know today if it's still the case.

At FB and Google it's all about mathematics, advanced CS, etc. So... They're looking for generalists and it's harder to find because in real life you don't really use this stuff anymore.

Re: Ask HN: What sort of side-projects are useful for getting jobs?

#66

Post by ryandrake »

nickjj wrote: post #40

It depends on what your definition of "getting jobs" is. I haven't looked for a job for years but I get freelance / consulting gig opportunities presented to me on a pretty regular basis. Most of those opportunities come from a combination of side projects, open source contributions, having a blog and teaching online courses. Now, I'm not sure if that's what you meant but in the above life style you don't need a resu…

Congratulations, you're in a nice spot but your situation is extremely unusual. Most people do not have jobs just being offered to them out of the blue, so not sure if the advice is really that usable.

Re: Ask HN: What sort of side-projects are useful for getting jobs?

#67

Post by enraged_camel »

zad1 wrote: post #5

I'm a junior web developer (1.5 years of experience) and I don't have a degree in the field, so references are all I have to proof my worthiness. And similarly I have a lot of small (mostly useless too) projects that nobody uses. But I still put them online. I have my own domain for development purposes only and whenever I finish a project to a satisfiable degree I put it on some subdomain amd add it to my list of re…

>>Even projects from hackathons. [Here's](http://helpmehelp.herokuapp.com/) a perfect example. The code is opensource (terrible though :D). The project is old, irrelevent and unused.

It also doesn't seem to do anything. I kinda expected that though when you said hackathon. :)

Re: Ask HN: What sort of side-projects are useful for getting jobs?

#68

Post by pmiller2 »

stonemetal wrote: post #51
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #10

Here's a piece of advice from actual experience (from both sides): Invest your time studying for interviews than wasting time building side projects if you're doing this purely for getting a job, period. In my experience, companies don't care about your little side project when hiring--that is, unless your "little side project" had some huge impact or is something they have been aware of--the best you could get is "h…

This reflects my experience 90%. One time I contacted a company in a whose hiring thread here on HN. They asked if I had code on github they could look at. When my response was no, they broke it off.

That's a little extreme, and it's their loss, IMO. Many good programmers have nothing public on GitHub because they only program for their job. I guess they don't want those people.

Re: Ask HN: What sort of side-projects are useful for getting jobs?

#69

Post by pmiller2 »

pjc50 wrote: post #25
jamesmp98 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what do you do if you lack a degree and professional experience?

You need to get one of those two. Which means getting the experience somehow . Unpaid work is one (expensive) way of doing it, but so is getting into a related position and working your way across. QA is potentially a good path for this: hired to do simple things without the degree requirement, move into test automation, move across into development. Then you have it on your CV.

It's actually pretty tough to go from QA to dev.

Re: Ask HN: What sort of side-projects are useful for getting jobs?

#70

Post by logicallee »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #59
nrjdhsbsid wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 100%. When I'm involved in the interview process I make a point to check out all candidates side projects but over 90% of people don't care. In getting my last job I thought I would have a slam dunk because I have a bunch of cool stuff I work on but nobody cared at all. I failed multiple on site interviews until I gave in and read a couple CSCI 101 books cover to cover. I had too much specialized knowledge and n…

> stupid toy problems in minutes. What sort of toy problems are you talking about?

I'm going to be snarky but I'll say it anyway: you know, stupid stuff like balanced binary trees and shit like that, when nothing's going to fall apart if the user's browser shows a spinning wait animation for 7 seconds (45 seconds at peak times but that happens for just a few hours per week at most) while you iterate through the data sequentially. honestly, who ever needed an algorithm or data structure. /s

(I'm sorry. I thought about using less snark but I can't.)

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