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How to not waste time on a side project when trying to get a job

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Re: How to not waste time on a side project when trying to get a job

#31

Post by corporateslave3 »

dundercoder wrote: post #16
alexkavon wrote: post #6

I totally stop my side projects when job hunting. There really doesn't seem to be any practical time. Often I find that I need that time to study new concepts and play catch up improving my skills so I can be even more presentable to a company. I mean the tech industry, especially software engineering is rife with testing merge sorts, parsing csv files, and non-real world coding challenges when interviewing. Who has…

I had never even heard of HackerRank before applying at a few places. I was supposed to write a binary search tree algorithm without using anything except the language docs. I rarely write anything new without a quick search, it wastes valuable time reinventing the wheel.

I had this as well, an off by one error on a binary search resulted in a rejection...

Re: How to not waste time on a side project when trying to get a job

#32

Post by auvrw »

alexkavon wrote: post #6

I totally stop my side projects when job hunting. There really doesn't seem to be any practical time. Often I find that I need that time to study new concepts and play catch up improving my skills so I can be even more presentable to a company. I mean the tech industry, especially software engineering is rife with testing merge sorts, parsing csv files, and non-real world coding challenges when interviewing. Who has…

i did my last search in two milestones: build things, do interviews.

i did one "field of dreams" project using a stack that i was mostly familiar with already and several "effort" project to learn and demonstrate skills in a different language/stack (Clojure).

totally agree that once the interview screens started, that side-project time got scaled back to vanishing. however, i'm really thankful that i had enough time to do the side project milestone as well as the interview proper, because i wound up finding a role developing in Clojure. i don't think that would've been possible had i not invested the time in side projects before starting in on interviews.

Re: How to not waste time on a side project when trying to get a job

#33

Post by pipio21 »

jefe78 wrote: post #3

I don't understand the logic of this article. My side projects tend to be efforts in self employment, not 'click bait' for an employer. While not everyone has the same approach, this article seems to imply the only value of side projects is for future employers. I'd hate for people to get the wrong impression about the value of these projects.

Agreed.

Everything that I have, my companies, my capital, my house, comes from my side projects being transformed into self employment, recurring revenue or reputation for me or my team.

You have to consider that side projects will start small, like a plant, they are very easy to squash and destroy, but takes an enormous effort, and your rewards come later, when you have a tree.

Even a company like Apple could not make something like the App Store earn more than a couple millions the first year. Larry and Sergei tried to sell google for just a million dollars and could not.

A side project takes so much effort that I would have never ever considered making the effort just to show off to companies, then abandoning those(as you will be forced as you have a job that takes most of your efforts). Side project is like your children if you create them.

It is a big error to try to make companies value your projects. They will pay you 0$ if they can(even if they know it is a great project, more benefit for them).

There are much better ways to show off in front of companies if that is what you want.

Re: How to not waste time on a side project when trying to get a job

#34

Post by k__ »

ryandrake wrote: post #10
realPubkey wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thought the the same. For me it's not doing sideprojects to get a job but having a job to finance my sideprojects.

My guess is you're both gainfully employed :) Side projects are more and more being touted as a way to "stand out" from the enormous crowd of people trying to get tech jobs. A company choosing among 100 candidates, all things being equal, may bias towards the few with active interesting side projects. If you accept that, then starting some kind of side project would be worth it.

I had the impression it was the other way around. A crowd of companies all searching for tech people.

Re: How to not waste time on a side project when trying to get a job

#35

Post by ashark »

dundercoder wrote: post #16
alexkavon wrote: post #6

I totally stop my side projects when job hunting. There really doesn't seem to be any practical time. Often I find that I need that time to study new concepts and play catch up improving my skills so I can be even more presentable to a company. I mean the tech industry, especially software engineering is rife with testing merge sorts, parsing csv files, and non-real world coding challenges when interviewing. Who has…

I had never even heard of HackerRank before applying at a few places. I was supposed to write a binary search tree algorithm without using anything except the language docs. I rarely write anything new without a quick search, it wastes valuable time reinventing the wheel.

I find I often forget basic language syntax when I don't have adjoining lines to crib from, say, when white boarding. And that's with languages I'm actively working in—I'm hopeless in anything I haven't used in a couple months, even if I wrote in it daily for the five years before that. I'll flat out forget which language features it supports, or how to address them.

Re: How to not waste time on a side project when trying to get a job

#36

Post by newfoundglory »

k__ wrote: post #34
ryandrake wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is you're both gainfully employed :) Side projects are more and more being touted as a way to "stand out" from the enormous crowd of people trying to get tech jobs. A company choosing among 100 candidates, all things being equal, may bias towards the few with active interesting side projects. If you accept that, then starting some kind of side project would be worth it.

I had the impression it was the other way around. A crowd of companies all searching for tech people.

Yes, but they're all searching for "awesome" tech people, not just anyone.

Re: How to not waste time on a side project when trying to get a job

#37

Post by eggie5 »

here's my side project I just finished: http://www.eggie5.com/126-semantic-image-search-video

Semantic Image Search: takes high dimensional images vectors from a Deep Convolutional Neural Network and searches for similar images using Locality Sensitivity Hashing.

Search is O(1) + O(n/B) where the last term is a small fraction, B, of the complete search space n.

The goal was an E2E machine learning project: modeling, training, validation, deployment and serving. Using VGG-mased CNN w/ tensorflow, redis for database, Flask for web frontend , tensorflow serving and docker+kubernetes for orchestration.

It all works on my local machine but when I went to deploy it to my prod website the tensorflow serving part broke down and I haven't had time to fix it yet :(

It was just supposed to be a one weekend project after I got the inspiration from the AlexNet paper, but it took over a month. Most of the time was fighting k8s.

So another data science project doesn't make it to production...

Re: How to not waste time on a side project when trying to get a job

#38

Post by symlinkk »

Why do I have to build side projects and memorize algorithm trivia to prove to employers that I know enough to do a job? What's the value of my degree if it doesn't tell employers that I know what I'm talking about? Why are software engineers the only ones with this problem (can you imagine if doctors had to memorize random trivia to get a job)?

Re: How to not waste time on a side project when trying to get a job

#40

Post by dheera »

jefe78 wrote: post #3

I don't understand the logic of this article. My side projects tend to be efforts in self employment, not 'click bait' for an employer. While not everyone has the same approach, this article seems to imply the only value of side projects is for future employers. I'd hate for people to get the wrong impression about the value of these projects.

And many times, my side projects are my way of relaxing. Some people relax by partying, some relax by walking their dog, some relax by spending time with their kids. And my choice of relaxation time is often just building something interesting that has zero self-employment or market value, but is just funny or cool. It is refreshing to do something for pure happiness and fun, after dealing with the unhappy real world, is all about traction and money and not happiness.

I also have another set of side projects with specific intent to learn something new, which I consider an educational time investment in myself.

Neither is "click bait" for employers, and I consider neither to be a "waste of time".

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