Advice to my young self: forget side projects and focus on your job • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by ufmace » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 8:16 PM UTC

Interesting post. I don't necessarily agree 100%, but I think it's a useful perspective in addition to the counter-idea that side projects and meetups will get you jobs.

It's not every company or set of interviewers, but there are lots of interviewers and recruiters who don't care at all about your side projects. I've done plenty of interviews, and don't really ask about them much, or really have time to check them out in any detail before the interview.

Lots of tech meetups are also jammed with aggressive recruiter-bros and newbies who need a paycheck and aren't all that interested in tech. Keep your expectations in check for finding good employers or employees at them.

For side projects, I wouldn't say not to do them. But don't do "hello world" level side projects in a trendy language in the expectation that anybody will care or it will get you a job. Do a side project to accomplish something that you are actually interested in. If you don't feel like it or don't have any interesting ideas, then by all means do something else instead. Half-hearted projects to fill a perceived recruiting checkbox definitely won't get you anything. Doing something interesting, or even doing something kind of boring in an interesting way, might help. Or doing something and taking it into Production enough to feel some of the pain points of maintenance, uptime, marketing, etc.

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

#122

Post by wolco2 » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 8:17 PM UTC

rconti wrote: post #72

actuator wrote: post #8

> First, most recruiters don’t care about your personal projects or how many meetups you went during the year. What matters the most is your current company - and by that I mean the name of your current company. He is so much right here. Recruiters don't have the time to go through and understand your side projects, for that matter even engineers don't. Most interviews are 45-60 mins, you need to scope your interview…

I never understood why people cared so much about company "name" until a handful of years ago. It's not about "status" in terms of what kind of fancy clothes you wear, but it absolutely signals an ability to clear a certain kind of bar, produce a certain kind of work, and experience things on a scale that you wouldn't at a smaller shop. It doesn't mean one path is right or wrong for a job (I know many people who swit…

Doesn't it also mean the opposite? This person was at a better company now this person wants to work here. Why? What went wrong? Did big company make a mistake hiring. Vs this person seems to be on the rise. Each company is a bigger and each position is more senior.

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

#123

Post by helaoban » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 8:17 PM UTC

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…

My sister is a recruiter. I’ll be sure to tell her that you think she’s a bottom-of-the-totem-pole, lowest-common-denominator bottom-feeder. That’ll brighten up her day. And when she doesn’t take it to heart, I’ll be sure to add a ‘Let’s be frank...’.

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

#124

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 8:18 PM UTC

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #119

shortlived wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No matter how we feel, the process still goes through recruiters. That's right and they simply look for keywords on my various online profiles and send me the standard "I'm really impressed by your experience, I think you'll be a great fit" message, even though 50% of the time I'm clearly not a great fit. Why do they get this wrong? Because they are "are bottom-of-the-totem pole, lowest-common-denominator bottom-fe…

Is that a matter of competence, or a deliberate tradeoff regarding false positives and false negatives? Or are they just motivated to show high numbers?

Almost universally these types of behaviors emerge from self-interest. So it's pretty safe to assume that whatever approach recruiters tend to follow, they do so because it is the optimum for them. That means either that the incentives are a problem, or that the seemingly foolish recruiting techniques you've been exposed to are more effective than you might realize, not being a recruiter yourself. Probably a mix.

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

#125

Post by jrumbut » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 8:18 PM UTC

curiousllama wrote: post #86

actuator wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. No matter how we feel, the process still goes through recruiters. In a company I used to work for, we built a way where we removed the company and uni name to remove biases from recruiters. Most recruiters flat out refused to…

> the process still goes through recruiters Does it? Idk, maybe it’s because I’m not a SV SWE, but I’ve found all my jobs through my network.

Yeah I would split the issue raised in this post along two axes. The first is junior vs senior positions. For a junior position a half-baked github project or a little meetup presentation does wonders for you. At the senior level unless you did something incredible or highly relevant in your side-projects no one cares, it can even be a negative.

The other is how are you getting the job. Are you sending in your resume through a jobs site or are you calling your old friend the startup CTO to see if you can help out? Side-projects, failed startups, and networking will make the latter strategy easier for you but won't help much with the former.

Looking for a senior role through an impersonal application process depends very heavily on your primary, full-time employment track record. Otherwise I think there is still real value in developing along other lines.

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

#126

Post by sdenton4 » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 8:20 PM UTC

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 mean, the REAL truth is that I don't do side projects to impress recruiters... I do them because of my intellectual curiosity. That said, they HAVE helped me make a pretty successful career shift.

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

#127

Post by elorant » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 8:20 PM UTC

My main job used to be a side project while my main job was working at some company. And I still have side projects because they keep my interest in programming alive even if they turn into total failures.

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

#128

Post by umaar » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 8:21 PM UTC

I've been putting more and more effort into my side projects recently (all on GitHub). It's kept me sharp, passionate, always gives me something to optionally think about (e.g. when exercising), provides conversation pieces (with the right crowd of course), has taught me a whole bunch of new techniques and has kept me relevant in this fast moving industry.

My side projects include:

- An Air Quality Monitoring Dashboard

- A leaderboard app built with redis

- A WebGL globe to show live wikipedia edits

- A web service to scrape any number of GitHub stars from any number of people

- A node.js app which extracts 1 second of footage from your media library, and combines it into a '1 second everyday'-style video

- An audio reactive image slideshow from instagram selfies

- A visualisation dashboard to show stats about your blood from some diabetes bluetooth thingymajig

- 3D renders of popular logos, like the GitHub logo

- An Alfred workflow app to trim X seconds from the currently playing video from VLC

- A script which downloads the top 250 websites to your drive, so you can then run other scripts upon them, as often as you want, without getting blocked

- An augmented reality music website (where you can use the webcam to control audio)

I'm really grateful I'm able to do such things and have no intention of stopping.

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

#129

Post by jsmith12673 » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 8:22 PM UTC

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…

> recruiters are bottom-of-the-totem-pole, lowest-common-denominator, bottom-feeders

Recruiters are just people just doing their jobs. It's a shame that you've labelled a diverse group of people so heavy-handedly.

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

#130

Post by vsareto » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 8:22 PM UTC

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #61

actuator wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can speak to the processes involved and have demonstrable knowledge about how to implement things learned from side-projects As I mentioned in my comment, no difference if the person is starting out or if the project gets traction. But for experienced positions like the post author was talking about. You don't get additional signals on the developer, like did the product scale well, how was the uptime, the p…

The counterpoint to this is the amount of resumes I've had to read and subsequent interviews I've had to sit on from "seniors" or "principals" that they themselves haven't gone fully into the weeds on whatever technology they've been practicing for 10+ years. The amount is staggering. You know my hypothesis why, because they don't have side projects. They have silo'd themselves into whatever niche project or have bee…

>The counterpoint to this is the amount of resumes I've had to read and subsequent interviews I've had to sit on from "seniors" or "principals" that they themselves haven't gone fully into the weeds on whatever technology they've been practicing for 10+ years. The amount is staggering.

You know this is a risk. If you went deep on something like Silverlight, you'd have just thrown away all that time. And then people will casually dismiss your 10 years away as not being relevant. And now you get to pick a new technology to maybe invest the next 10 years on, risking the same thing happening again. If a product dies, you go back to square one as a junior again on some new technology.

Picking a long-lasting technology is hard. You're predicting the future.

I'm really tired of people who think they have this industry figured out like it's easy to predict what will be around in 10 years so you can make safe choices about what to invest time into.