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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

#201

Post by TeMPOraL »

gredelston wrote: post #47
maverickJ wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you go about choosing that one project?

This is the paradox of choice. In most cases, it doesn't pay to spend your time hemming and hawing about find the perfect project. It helps to just pick one, even if it's the stupidest idea of the lot. The alternative is to wind up as Burdian's Ass, who is equally hungry and thirsty, can't decide whether to eat hay or drink water, and so dies of hunger and thirst.

Yup. If you're really undecided, pick one at random, because at this point the marginal cost of thinking outweighs the marginal cost of being wrong.

And if you choose wrong, you'll find out soon enough. Personally, I had a lot of projects I couldn't stop thinking about, but when I finally started working on them, I quickly realized it's a bad idea. The usual reasons were: a) I already found it done by someone else in a form that satisfies my needs, b) it became obvious that either the process or the outcome won't be as satisfying as I thought it would be, or c) after scoping it out, I realized I'm not in a position to invest the required amount of time and effort.

Abandoning a side project early is not a bad deal. Your research and thoughts put into it stay with you forever, and it often happens that you'll get secondary value from them on some other endeavor.

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

#203

Post by werber »

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 have had great recruiters help me throughout my career. I didn't go into those relationships thinking of my career prospects but just letting someone buy me a drink or a meal and to chat and get to know them. Obviously they're trying to make money off your skills, but, a lot of them are really cool people just trying to get by and will look out for you if you let your guard down. Interviews are interviews, but meeting a recruiter is a first date

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

#204

Post by michannne »

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…

IME, once you get your foot in the door (in any career, not just software), side projects, hobbies and such become irrelevant to securing a job compared to real world experience. All that really matters in the initial stages of career progression is to prove to potential employers that you can do whatever work they may ask you to do. I think some employers do like to see initiative, but that can be conveyed during an interview, you don't necessarily need a starred out Git repo to demonstrate you are passionate about software, and of course, a Git project is not enough to show employers you are passionate about software.

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

#205

Post by [deleted] »

jyu wrote: post #59

This is decent career advice, but it doesn't address the root of why. If you want FIRE, the best way is to optimize your career. How do you do that? It starts early before your first job, as you try out different school subjects, books, friends, hobbies. As you look out to the future, what do you see on the horizon? Thinking about the time I entered school, programmers were near the bottom of the totem pole. Mathemat…

[deleted]

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

#206

Post by paffduddy »

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.

The advice from the blog post is awful as general advice. Posting anon here for obvious reasons, but there are different types of jobs. Some jobs reward you with equity, some reward you with promotions, and some are dead end jobs. Even many senior positions are dead end jobs.

I work at an A-round startup. Tons of people in FP&A, sales, accounting, and HR get promoted every six months. Engineers rarely get promoted. No refreshers. No raises.

Guess what? Engineers are now clocking out at 4pm, they are working on side projects, and it is the most rational thing to do.

On the flip side, I've worked at places where engineers are rewarded regularly for outstanding work. It makes sense to focus on your job.

On size advice does not fit all.

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

#207

Post by b0rsuk »

I think side projects are for fun and potentially for impressing technical reviewers in stage 3. Soft skills are for impressing recruiters.

During the recruiter phase, they're not going to understand the projects anyway. The only value they have at this point is they boost your confidence and let you move on to next questions. Just list them briefly if asked what you've been doing recently. Most recruiters can't recognize a good programmer, so they approximate it by judging your confidence.

The weapon of choice against recruiters is being prepared for the questions they ask. You pull out a lot of paper, write the questions down, and write answers. Ron Fry's 101 questions book describes them in detail. What the recruiter wants to hear, what she doesn't want to hear. All recruiters have the same set of questions, and although it changes every couple of years it's a solved problem. Yes, I know telling a recruiter what she wants to hear is manipulative :-(.

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

#208

Post by Nevaeh »

echelon wrote: post #188

Boo! This is awful advice. I'm constantly commended on my side projects, and I excel at them because I enjoy them: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x034jVB1avs - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XTi-jf-ans - https://vo.codes - https://trumped.com The laser stuff made me wealthy, and that wasn't even my intention. People at the time told me it was a huge distraction from my academic career and a waste of time. My cur…

Vocodes is super cool and fun to play with, well done. I wonder if it's possible to turn it into a text-to-speech donations service for Twitch streamers? The current TTS voices are rather monotone. Some donators test how their text donations would sound like on this website: https://textreader.pro

P/S: Small typo on the first sentence on the about page.

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

#209

Post by winrid »

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…

Impressing recruiters is easy. Doing that doesn't make you privileged.

I drove from PA to CA when I was 18, working along the way on my own business, and got a job in SV on my third interview as a "software engineer" making 65k. Bottom of the barrel coding job.

I'm somehow privileged now? Because I worked literally every day from the time I was 17 in high school until I got a full time job. Right.

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

#210

Post by godshatter »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #186
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…

Exactly this. I do my side projects for personal development and enjoyment. It's my opportunity to grow in whatever direction I like, and I'm not going to let my job dictate what kind of side projects I'm taking on. If that results in skills useful at work, or for finding work, that's a nice but entirely secondary benefit. The more important benefit is burnout prevention - because I too "don't get paid to do the inte…

I'm the same. I've been working for my current employer for over 30 years. I'm not doing side projects to impress recruiters. It's an extenuation of the love of programming I picked up when I was first exposed to a Tandy Level I at my local junior high school.

I enjoy going hiking or going swimming in a lake or river or going to movies with friends when that was still a thing, but it's mostly experiencing, whereas programming side projects is creating. I much prefer creating over experiencing.

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