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

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131–140 of 169 posts

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

#131

Interesting to see many comments here claiming that side projects don't matter when looking for a job. I've been actively applying for a full-time dev position for the past 3 months and the most common feedback I receive is "We need to see side projects, OSS contributions so we know how you code." I have about 4+ years in DevOps and in support. I consider myself a programming generalist, which I thought would be enou…

Fork a random GitHub and you'll be fine.

Then you can watch the GitHub stats and see that noone opened your link :D

If you're DevOps you should probably have an updated LinkedIn. Its getting crazy over there.

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

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting. What does "tough on culture fit" mean exactly?

There was an interview I did last fall where I was rejected because I had prepared material that was more useful for a team they weren't hiring for at that time. So it can mean many things, and it's really frustrating when they don't explain.

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

#133

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…

> Now, for A-level companies like Google, Apple, FB, etc. it's actually better to do what you do!

Bull-fucking-shit. Google and Facebook are the poster children for algorithm based interviews. They don't give 2 shits about what you have done because it wasn't done at Google, so it counts for nothing. Now go solve another pointless dynamic programming problem you waste of skin.

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

#134
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can do it right now.

OK, I'll bite. What's the secret? Because nobody yet has E-mailed me out of the blue with my next job offer.

You have no experience; no linkedin; or you're not in SF/SV/NY/London.

Link to your linkedin/resume please?

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

#135
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing as a finished project. Just one you no longer work on.

I think the parent really meant publishable where he said finished. Some kind of minimum viable product. That's what shows you can cut through the BS and wishlist and fun-to-code stuff in favor of the details and grind of getting something out the door and functioning to serve an audience.

`publish` vs `finish` I think is a good clarification of what I think the commenter meant.

Going further though, I do think I prefer `published` to `publishable`. Fighting through the last (sometimes most difficult steps) to get something in the public means a lot to me.

Additionally, it's also easier to demo something that's available on the public web.

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

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say that you dont remember the exact arguments for main and move on. It will be fine. And don't assimilate fizzbuzz with half hour problems. There are for sure some difficult half hour interviews questions; they are not comparable to trivial exercises like printing the numbers from 1 to 10. P.S. If you never use console, strings or regex. I really wonder what kind of applications you're writing.

Mostly web. You always use a logging lib so no console really ever. Strings are used all the time but not substring or splice, 90% of uses for those are anti patterns tbh. Regex really never. Unless you're munging data in Python it's usually a bad idea to use regex. Clean strings? Use a library. Parsing? Use a parser. Raw regex implies filtering stuff or banning certain characters in strings which breaks all kinds of…

I use regex all the time for refactoring stuff and transforming data. There is nothing else to achieve that. Also, for log/message filtering at times.

Well, I am obviously the guy who write the tools and the libraries, so you don't have to know these things yourself but I do :D

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

#137
post #18
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…

How did you get a job?

I was always pretty good at landing junior level jobs. To give you a rough idea, I've done 14 interviews in my life and only 2 of them did not offer me the position. I'm at my 3rd job right now (turned down all the others). Also for reference I quit first one before the company went broke (I literally took the first job offered to me at the time, before doing other interviews I was invited to), 2nd one was just a 5-month project and I'm somewhat happy with my current job.

My rate of getting interviews per email sent is much lower (maybe 40-50%).

1.) CV. My CV is cool. It's a password protected website (I also generate a link that logs you in to save time for employers). It's a minimalistic one-page website with lots of cool features. It sets cookie that says Hi, it outputs messages to console, has fun comments in JS files, puts message in header. It also has "print friendly" button that hides unnecessary stuff (links, stuff that doesn't print well). If you click it 100 times you get an XKCD comic (and some prompts at 10/50 click). Just all around fun site that is also a very basic showcase of my work.

Granted most of the people don't even see the console.log messages. But I guarantee you two things a) those who do notice these details will want you more than some random guy b) you want the job more than some random job someone might offer you.

2.) Interviews. I'm extremely honest. I have zero problems saying "I'm sorry I've never heard/used this before" (which happened more often than I'd like to admit). As it turns out, our field is pretty big and people really don't expect you to know everything as far as they can see you've grasped different concepts before without big issues. But you need to show you're happy to learn. Not just willing, but happy. Make them know you're always happy to get more stuff under your belt. Humble yourself and show them you want to be as good as them in this technology.

Hell, I've been accepted for a job as RoR engineer and I've written maybe 10 lines of Ruby in my life. I told them that in the interview. I'm experienced in Laravel though (PHP framework). So I drew parallels and showed them that I'm familiar with the concepts. 2 weeks later they called me that I got the job :) Had to turn it down though.

I will also always try to ask about their stack/technologies they're using. Now I've been on interviews where their decisions were "uninformed" to say the least. For example, the guy interviewing me was going on and on about how the performance really matters. And they were using PHP (relatively new project). In cases like this (if you want the job) it is EXTREMELY important not to come off as arrogant, but still show that you're well informed. So I asked them how they decided for PHP, wouldn't Java/C# be more suitable. And they said that they were thinking about it, but ultimately decided for PHP as their developers had more experience. And, in order to not come off as arrogant, you need to find a way to (at least partially) agree with them. I said something along the lines: "Yeah, I can understand that. Sometimes you've got good developers on your hands and you need to implement some stuff quickly (which will require performance). You don't want to replace you good programmers and you don't have time to learn a whole new language/concept.".

But most most importantly - show enthusiasm. This will get you far. Show that that you enjoy this stuff, tell them about that hackathon, make them laugh with that irrelevant side project of yours that outputs morse code with belly buttons - where you were learning some new technology (or just improving on old ones), tell them about those local meetups you attended.

For junior positions people will always take someone who is easy to work with, will happily accept help (this is often more important than next one) and offer it too when possible and genuinely enjoy learning new technologies over someone who might be better on paper, but just doesn't show the above characteristics.

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

#138
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but it's also quite hard to get hired as a dev without either qualifications or experience. If you've got the qualifications you can go in directly.

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

#139
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. :)

But it does! :p

It's a stupid app that helps you decide on who to vote (US elections) based on issues you type in. Try typing in "death penalty" or "crazy".

It then dynamically finds latest google searches and tweets about candidates. And charities that help the issue.

The app had to "solve a real problem" and use paypal. Not our favourite 2 things for a hackathon. This (useless and non-profitable) is more our style https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySU703VXSNY

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

#140

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…

Who is this advice for? UC Berkeley grads? If you don't have personal projects or previous professional experience to talk about the only thing you have to bring to an interview is a university degree. Are you proposing the OP just does nothing? How is OP supposed to land an interview in the first place?
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