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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

#131

Post by taylodl »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #13

The only reason I have my job that I do now is because of side projects. How else are you suppose to learn different parts of the stack when you're (usually) only hired to work in one part? How are you suppose to learn DevOps/CloudOps unless you're on an Ops team? Many (most?) companies don't delegate full stack responsibilities to individual teams.

I think we need to differentiate between a "learning project" and a "side project." Those are two very different things, at least to me.

A learning project is a project you're doing with the express intent of learning a new technology. The focus is on the learning, not the delivered functionality.

A side project is a project you're doing for the community. It's a labor of love. The focus is on functionality and meeting the needs of your users, not learning technology. You may even be able to grow it into an actual business.

From a career perspective you want to focus on learning projects. As you've mentioned learning projects are very important for your continued learning. Side projects on the other hand have the risk of distracting you from your work and my advice would be to avoid them unless you're scratching your own itch or maybe even want to explore starting a side business.

Bottom line - be clear with yourself on what you're doing and why you're doing it.

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

#133

Post by cpursley »

jonathankoren wrote: post #48
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…

As a hiring manager, I never cared about side projects, or Stack Overflow or Kaggle scores. The most a side project github link would tell me if it was big or not. That’s it. I’m not going to go through and read a bunch of random code by myself, when I can just ask a couple of questions, and get the same information quicker. They are just too many resumes to read. Seriously, all side projects tell me is that you spen…

What prevents someone from just BSin'g you in response to your questions? Code doesn't lie.

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

#134

Post by fizx »

I split time between a successful side project and early Twitter, both at around 30 hours a week, with spikes up to 50hrs.

While they both netted positive outcomes for me, if I had gone all-in on either one, I think I would have had an order-of-magnitude better outcome. Splitting my attention cost me serious advancement & money at both.

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

#135

Post by Groxx »

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?

tbh I suspect it's at a fairly reasonable effort/reward point for them. There's so little you can factually learn from a short glance that confidence will always be low, and there are so many applicants (because applying is super low cost) that spending sufficient time to get a clearer answer is not worthwhile.

There probably are some high-quality-only recruiter groups out there, but they're not what most companies use. Which is probably why referrals are so valued in many places.

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

#136

Post by justinlloyd »

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.

Thursday: I should build an API package for OpenWRT that will track bandwidth usage per device over a calendar period, e.g. past 30 days. wrtbwmon is all very nice, but it simultaneously tries to do too much (offer a UI) and not enough (track data usage for all time). Let me just write that down in my notebook.

Friday: I can build a nice and simple API for OpenWRT that is API focused and provides easier access to the common functions that people want from OpenWRT, this would help mobile app developers create apps that talk to OpenWRT in a simple way. Let me just write that down in my notebook.

Saturday: Let me just sketch out this new design for a workshop cabinet that will let me combine my tablesaw, bandsaw, chop saw and tool storage in a single location.

Sunday: I want my security camera to combine all the detected motion in to a single multilayer video that lets me scrub through events like layers playing simultaneously rather than scrub through time. Let me just write that down.

Monday: OpenWRT should have a "state" that is queryable via a curl request that determines if OpenWRT still needs to be configured. I can build that as a simple API and package it. Let me just write that down in my notebook.

The ideas aren't the problem.

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

#137

Post by WikipediasBad »

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 ran that hackathon. Can confirm it happened in 2015. LA Hacks at UCLA, Evan was the keynote speaker and stayed around to talk to hackers and builders after his speech. Snapchat, as a company, was at its hottest peak in 2015. Very cool event.

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

#138

Post by evo_9 »

Honestly when I interview someone and they have no side-projects, or any interest in that sort-of-thing, it's a huge warning sign they're not likely to succeed and/or stick around long.

I mean I don't expect people eat/sleep/breath code but I also don't want to hire folks that just got into CompSci/Coding cause it was a 'good/safe' career choice. In my experience the guys that are self learners, doing side projects, playing with the latest 'for fun' are the dudes that really get stuff done.

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

#139

Post by yelloweyes »

diskzero wrote: post #15

Focus on building your reputation and technical network. Your network will be the source of the best employment opportunities. Recruiters have presented me with some of my worst career opportunities. Former co-workers, technical collaborators and those who have been exposed to my previous work gave me the best opportunites. Sure, if you do a good job with your employer, you will build reputation. But so do side proje…

This. So much this. Dear lord, so much this.

99% of the good jobs are filled through internal references. All the shit jobs nobody wants to do are filled through recruiters and cold appliers. Learned this one the hard way, lol.

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

#140

Post by robocat »

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…

> Past 55? 98th percentile

Reference? Are you implying that developers over 55 are unemployed against their choice?

I suspect sampling bias: Any half competent 55 year old has lived through some golden opportunities to make bank, or decide on a career change by choice. Also the intake cohorts results in not many over 55 as a % of total. My experience in New Zealand is that older devs are doing fine as a cohort, although I also can see poor performers who stuck with old tech who may have bitter anecdotes.

> You need to own the economic value of your output as early as possible

I disagree. I have plenty of 50+ acquaintances doing very nicely on their boring salary without the stress or risk of trying to get a slice of equity. Plenty of people do not have the traits required, or their personal circumstances are not flexible enough to allow for risk, or they just want a 9 to 5 and a comfortable retirement (which they will get, and their rockstar friend might not).

Edit: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. The outcomes for the first cohort of developers is very unlikely to be anything like the latest cohort who you are advising - “as early as possible” doesn’t apply to 55+ year old developers?! We haven’t had 30 years of hindsight bias to know what the successful path for a current 20 year old will be.

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