Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

That may be, but on the topic of emigration from the EU to US, I was talking about the general population and what reasons they may have to move there since the initial question was about Germans wanting to move to the US, not about German devs exclusively wanting to move to the US, so please not move the goalposts to just to the SW dev bubble.

Yes, I'm aware many SW devs in Europe can build comfy lives, especially in low-Col eastern Europe with western wages, but again, that's a bubble of a small subset of the country's total workforce. The vast majority of Poles not working in tech don't earn that well at all (average salary in Poland is 20,265 EUR/year, and if you exclude well paid SW devs it's probably much lower) so pretty sure they might be more inclined to move to the US is given the chance at a 5x or so pay bump.

>I can't imagine a person who makes minimal and moves to US in hopes of making more.

The alternative to well paid SW dev careers in Europe is not minimal wage person living paycheck to paycheck. There are other jobs in between that pay mediocre or sub-mediocre in most EU countries but pay stellar in the US. For example my office mate's brother moved to the US(North Carolina) to work in banking just like he did in Austria but according to him he "gets paid bank just to move money from one account to another and has less stres than at his job in Europe".

Same for other average jobs as well, that while not living paycheck to paycheck in Europe, don't allow you to build any wealth either, but in the US can get paid significantly more even adjusted to CoL(North Carolina is not Poland cheap but it's not SV expensive either).

After a few unsuccessful interviews, I was going to revisit what would be best for demonstration.

However, another interview came along and decided to try one last time with my existing software and hobby demos.

One demo was a C++ engine/game I wrote in my spare time. It was first person and dynamic lights (it was a thing back then). I was showing the editor side, which had 4 windows... front, side, top, and 3d.

  It was fortunate because they had a C++ project, and nobody really wanted to touch it. So I gained bonus points to getting for being open to it.

Surprisingly, of what I presented, he was really interested in the html+js demos, as they are doing a lot of web applications and want to push one of their existing products with more functionality.. animation, drag+drop, images, automation, etc.

Its funny. I felt like I had nothing to really show that would land me a job. On this ocassion, I managed to show things that just happens to link with real projects (in one way or another) they are doing. They pretty much offered me a 2 day trial (on a thurs and fri) to see how I would get on. The good news I passed without issue. They gave me a web project, heavy in javascript -- and to 1) avoid full post back (refresh) and 2) to support drag+drop.

I knew a little PHP at the time (more into C\C++) but they were using VB.NET - so managed to learn a lot in those 2 days, and meet their expectations.

I was officially a Junior Developer on Monday... and they decided to remove "junior" from my job title a few months later.

Well Amazon is a well known shit show (been there done that)

It was a fairly decent job, I helped the company scale from 5m to 15m communities and gave my software and infra skills a huge boost. I think without this experience, I wouldn't have the confidence to start working on software by myself as I do now.