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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

#161

Post by mattkevan »

Every change in my career began as a side project or idle curiosity, from design to development, to product to UX, to whatever's next.

Basically, what I'm doing now, when I should be doing what I'm paid to be doing is what I'll be paid to do in a few years' time.

Experimentation and side projects are vital to stretch creativity and learn new things. Not all of my side projects have been successful, but they've all played a vital role in my career development, more by happy accident than design. It's all about following interests to see where they lead.

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

#162

Post by spiffytech »

ck425 wrote: post #156
spiffytech wrote: post #146

Every time this topic comes up on HN I feel like the only person who does side projects because I enjoy them as a hobby. Learning for the job is distantly secondary, and getting my next job is tertiary. They're perks to something I'm doing anyway, not justifications for doing it. Yeah, I program at work, but the tasks I get at a software job don't scratch the itch that got me into tech in the first place. Just like h…

> I'm just boggled at how many people appear to find it unimaginable and unrelatable that a technologist likes technology enough to mess with it for fun, even after work. It's not that I can't understand it. I don't have that urge personally but I can see where it comes from and if that makes you happy go for it! The reason I personally get so defensive and anti side project is because as someone who's very defensive…

I think side projects can open career doors that you wouldn't otherwise have, and not doing side projects can close some doors. There is a probabilistic value of pursuing those doors and a cost to the time spent doing so, and it's fine to decide it is or isn't worth it. I'd happily do side projects even if there was zero chance they'd help my career.

Two of the best engineers I've ever worked with did basically nothing on the side that resembled a technical side project. The worst engineer I ever worked with also did no side projects. And I knew brilliant engineers who were big into things like the Hacker Cup or aerial robotics, just for fun. It's tempting to think that if we ourselves are competent, people who act similarly must also be competent. But the longer my career goes on, the less weight I place on seeing someone does or does not do side projects.

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

#163

Post by secondcoming »

spiffytech wrote: post #146

Every time this topic comes up on HN I feel like the only person who does side projects because I enjoy them as a hobby. Learning for the job is distantly secondary, and getting my next job is tertiary. They're perks to something I'm doing anyway, not justifications for doing it. Yeah, I program at work, but the tasks I get at a software job don't scratch the itch that got me into tech in the first place. Just like h…

I used be like that when I was younger. Hell, I taught myself to program doing this exact thing. But nowadays, I really don't want to spend weekends looking at a monitor all day. Before you know it, you've spent 8 or 10 or whatever hours tinkering away.

There's a point where it's not healthy. It'll catch up with you and there's a danger you'll find yourself not having the enthusiasm to do your hobby projects and also your real job.

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

#164

Post by dvt »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #153
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…

impressing recruiters is downright stupid. Let's be frank: recruiters are bottom-of-the-totem-pole, lowest-common-denominator, bottom-feeders. My friend, this isn't personal, but a fact: you're privileged. I sense you've never been in a position where you have $3,000 in the bank, your wife is depending on you to get through college, and you have to get a job or you lose your apartment. Out here dropping stories about…

> My friend, this isn't personal, but a fact: you're privileged.

Oh man, only if you truly knew how off-base this is :) My parents moved to the US with $2000, two kids (I was 11), and two carry-ons. But I'm not here to compete in the Victim Olympics.

> Most people don't know any CEOs, PMs, or hiring managers.

Good thing attending a hackathon is free. Good thing you can interact with literal SV royalty here on HN for free. Good thing you can contribute to famous OSS projects with minimal investment...

> In the situation I described above, where you absolutely need that job, all the people you mention have a good chance of forgetting about you due to day-to-day politics. Guess who won't? That recruiter. Because they get a cut of your salary.

Yeah, I disagree with this. I've been "forgotten about" and "ghosted" by more recruiters than I can remember. Not to mention that half the time my area of expertise wasn't even lined up with what they were looking for, and as soon as they hear about a potential pivot (front end to back end, engineering to product management, etc.) they jump ship. But people I've impressed (old bosses, old PMs, people I met through hackathons, obviously old founding partners) are always willing to come up to bat.

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

#165

Post by dheera »

taylodl wrote: post #131
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 meeti…

I disagree here.

In the business world, delivered functionality matters.

I think building something for the community that the community actually uses teaches you a lot about product management and building reliable systems and designing products people want. You learn a whole lot about the reality of the industry by doing something purposeful.

There's a big difference, for example, in machine learning engineers who can train a model in a Jupyter notebook and an engineer who can both train and actually deploy a model like that on a self-driving car. Companies often very much appreciate having dipped into the practical aspect of things, where things like optimization, uptime, and consistency matter.

Also, building things that give you a feeling of success make you more driven and motivated to learn and improve. Sometimes having a thousand users is that feeling of success that is the driving force for more learning.

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

#166

Post by achillesheels »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #153
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…

impressing recruiters is downright stupid. Let's be frank: recruiters are bottom-of-the-totem-pole, lowest-common-denominator, bottom-feeders. My friend, this isn't personal, but a fact: you're privileged. I sense you've never been in a position where you have $3,000 in the bank, your wife is depending on you to get through college, and you have to get a job or you lose your apartment. Out here dropping stories about…

Don’t take offense, sir, but how did you wind up in your unfortunate position?

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Your implication is precisely that recruiters are useful as a last resort. Wisdom beseeches to avoid decisions where that becomes necessary. Where, clearly, the recruiter is just using you and you are using them as a stop-gap measure.

Yet wisdom is considered privilege now?

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

#168

Post by jonathankoren »

cpursley wrote: post #133
jonathankoren wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s what the coding screen is for.

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

#169

Post by jonathankoren »

dvt wrote: post #62
jonathankoren wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Going to throw a bit of shade here, but there's a lot of irony in thinking that "hiking" is some exciting hobby while denigrating people building stuff in their spare time.

All hobbies are irrelevant.

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

#170

Post by michaelt »

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?

I suspect, much like women on dating websites, people receive many more low-effort messages from recruiters, because the subset of recruiters sending out low-effort messages send out far more of them.
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