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

Post by bdavisx » Mon, Jan 23, 2017, 9:41 PM UTC

Robin_Message wrote: post #99

namelezz wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remember Google infamously rejecting Max Howell, the original Homebrew author If Donald Knuth interviewed with Google, he would fail too because he would need 24 hours to solve a hard level leetcode question[1]. Unfortunately, Google loves throwing those kind of questions at interviewees and expect them to come up with solutions within 1 hour interview, lol. [1] - http://keithschwarz.com/interesting/code/?dir=find-…

I thought the trick with this one was to sum all the entries and subtract the sum of 0 to N-2. The remainder is the duplicate entry. It's just a trick though; I don't think skill in coming up with these is particularly well-correlated with being a good programmer, and for that reason Google claims not to do teasers like this any more.

Post by Apocryphon » Mon, Jan 23, 2017, 10:55 PM UTC

curiousDog wrote: post #60

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…

Solve the book Elements of Programming Interviews and you'll get a job at any of the Big 5.

Post by vram22 » Mon, Jan 23, 2017, 11:13 PM UTC

bourbondd wrote: post #42

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…

Post by cocktailpeanuts » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 12:03 AM UTC

nrjdhsbsid wrote: post #127

user5994461 wrote: post #123

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…

Post by nrjdhsbsid » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 1:20 AM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #136

nrjdhsbsid wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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