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Advice to my young self: forget side projects and focus on your job

manuel.darcemont.fr

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Re: Advice to my young self: forget side projects and focus on your job

#101

Post by maverickJ »

aj7 wrote: post #88

You weren’t wrong. You gave up too early, accepting the salaryman fantasy of steady growth if you just “work hard.” If this works past 50, you are 80th percentile. Past 55? 98th percentile. How will you feel when you begin to be handed boring, or fix-it projects? When your salary doesn’t keep up with 29-year-old versions of yourself? Layoffs? Perfectly acceptable or ignorable at 20-38. Lethal >48. You need to own the…

Interesting comment. How do you capture value if I may ask? This article https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/dont-hinge-your-care... Uses Nikola Tesla ad an expample of not depending on your technical skills alone

Re: Advice to my young self: forget side projects and focus on your job

#102

Post by robocat »

tolbish wrote: post #53
vbezhenar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people are hired through standard recruitment process and how many people are hired by impressed CEO?

That is directly proportional to the size of the company.

Inversely proportional not directly proportional? Nitpick, I know what you mean, but... https://byjus.com/maths/inversely-proportional

Re: Advice to my young self: forget side projects and focus on your job

#103

Post by umutisik »

A lot of people who do side projects do them for themselves rather than simply for improving career prospects. Many folks need a balance between being an independent creator, and being part of a bigger organization and side projects are a great way to get to that.

Re: Advice to my young self: forget side projects and focus on your job

#104

Post by read_if_gay_ »

vbezhenar wrote: post #51
binarymax wrote: post #6

Advice to my young self: put MORE effort into one of your 100 side projects, and stop messing around with other stuff.

Where did you get 100 ideas worthy of implementation? My imagination is so terrible, I can only imagine stupid ideas like Reddit clones.

It doesn’t work if you sit down and try to think of something. Inspiration comes spontaneously, you always have to be ready to note any ideas you get. You’ll accumulate ideas over time.

Somewhat relevant, PG has a post on startup ideas http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

Re: Advice to my young self: forget side projects and focus on your job

#105

Post by jimbob45 »

Here's a more reasonable take:

#1: No one will ever look at your side project. However, it can still be of use to your job hunt if you can talk about it. In fact, it's possible to get away with a empty project provided you can talk about what would have been in there in great detail (as if you'd actually done it).

#2: If you can't talk about your project in great detail, then it has as much worth as if you'd never actually completed the project.

Re: Advice to my young self: forget side projects and focus on your job

#106

Post by dnautics »

vbezhenar wrote: post #44
dvt wrote: post #28

> First, most recruiters don’t care about your personal projects or how many meetups you went during the... Why are you trying to impress recruiters? I mean, the entire point of the post is wrong, but impressing recruiters is downright stupid. Let's be frank: recruiters are bottom-of-the-totem-pole, lowest-common-denominator, bottom-feeders. If you aren't trying to do your own thing (which, let's face it, is the most…

How many people are hired through standard recruitment process and how many people are hired by impressed CEO?

I've only been hired by impressed CEOs (small startup CEOs), and have to date never gotten a job offer in software through the standard recruitment process (n=5 offers out of ~100 applications moved to interview, not counting applications seen but not considered via services like triplebyte).

Well that's not entirely true, I did finally get an offer last week but it was downgraded from the advertised offer to "let's try out 3 months contract first".

Re: Advice to my young self: forget side projects and focus on your job

#107

Post by untog »

dvt wrote: post #28

> First, most recruiters don’t care about your personal projects or how many meetups you went during the... Why are you trying to impress recruiters? I mean, the entire point of the post is wrong, but impressing recruiters is downright stupid. Let's be frank: recruiters are bottom-of-the-totem-pole, lowest-common-denominator, bottom-feeders. If you aren't trying to do your own thing (which, let's face it, is the most…

I feel like this is one of those moments that shouts “Hacker News is not typical”. A lot of people are employed through recruiters, including for Facebook, Google and the rest! Aiming to impress the CEO is all very well, but it’s not common.

Re: Advice to my young self: forget side projects and focus on your job

#108

Post by Milank »

This is just one of the many approaches to building a career.

As with many other things in life, there is now one-size-fits-all. For someone else, a complete opposite will work.

Stay informed, learn about different approaches, and simply choose what you think is best.

Re: Advice to my young self: forget side projects and focus on your job

#109

Post by pier25 »

Technical expertise and experience doesn't really tell the whole story. CV bling is mostly irrelevant to know if someone will perform well on a job. You can have the best engineer in the world coming from a top tech company and be a total asshole that will only cause problems and make the team underperform.

Re: Advice to my young self: forget side projects and focus on your job

#110

Post by XCSme »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #31
binarymax wrote: post #6

Advice to my young self: put MORE effort into one of your 100 side projects, and stop messing around with other stuff.

If only you knew which one!

Doesn't matter, just choose one that shows potential and do it. The only thing that matters is that you have an end-product in mind that will provide more value to the users than existing alternatives AND that you actually implement it AND the user finds your product.
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