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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

#211

Post by heleninboodler »

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 your attitude is right, and you just have to ignore the "what?!?! no side projects!?!?" people. I've known plenty of extremely competent engineers who either don't do side projects or simply don't want to invite their coworkers into talking about their personal lives. I do a ton of small side projects and I haven't been asked about any of them in interviews, nor have I advertised my github on my resume or anything like that.

Out of all 9 members of my current team, the only ones I can remember ever talking about any side projects are the dev manager, who is obviously addicted to setting up tech stacks like he did when he was a developer (we recently compared notes about our experience using prometheus and grafana on home servers, for example), and one guy whose side project is a heavy metal band. Everyone else? Nothing I've been told about. Maybe they occupy their time with being a parent, or SCCA racing, or mountain climbing, or building dollhouses; I don't know and it's not really my business.

I think there's a lot of value in being able to confidently say "yeah, I've got different hobbies ."

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

#212

Post by eli_gottlieb »

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…

>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.

Yeah, they are. They're also how most people find jobs before we reach the career stage of being able to call a friend who knows a guy who works at a place.

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

#213

Post by person_of_color »

artembugara wrote: post #34

I began my side-project [1] one year ago. I quit my very well-paid job 6 months ago to make my side-project my full-time job. It is going quite well (I am nowhere near making the same money). Just 2 of us at the moment. I've learnt so much over this period. Like what you would get over 10 years in a big tech company while jumping over all the hierarchy. Moreover, my very first side project turned me from a guy who kn…

How did you learn about cloud?

That's what I'm missing ATM.

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

#214

Post by lhorie »

Eh. I'd tell my younger self the exact opposite. My side project is what eventually led me to a 2x increase in income. In fact, it was only after I started to spend time on a open source project that I started getting recruiters to initiate contact with me.

Heck, my entire career was born out of immersing myself in an area of interest in my free time, outside of my original field of study.

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

#215

Post by achillesheels »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #176
achillesheels wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

No offense taken! I have narcolepsy, which means attending a 9-5 job is difficult. I woke up at 2pm today, for example. It’s an advantage to conceal that fact, and the one company I did disclose it to, fired me about a month later. For completely unrelated reasons that totally didn’t violate any disabilities laws, of course /s. It was also partly my own fault, but in hindsight I wasn’t able to recover until I even un…

I’m sorry to hear that. This speaks to the generally lower moral behavior of our society today. It develops gross incompetency in ability to deal with unique human physiologies.

Ideally people are able to work with each other’s upmost abilities rather than view people as a threat to their own job security and career progression. :(

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

#216

Post by shard »

robocat wrote: post #102
tolbish wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is directly proportional to the size of the company.

Inversely proportional not directly proportional? Nitpick, I know what you mean, but... https://byjus.com/maths/inversely-proportional

The bigger the company the more its employees are hired through the standard recruitment process -- is that not directly proportional?

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

#217

Post by heleninboodler »

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…

The laser stuff is cool. If you don't mind me asking, how did it make you wealthy? Do you sell it as a service for events? Or maybe sold/licensed the tech to someone? Or maybe it just got you a really great job?

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

#218

Post by [deleted] »

krisroadruck wrote: post #174
dnautics wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've only been hired by impressed CEOs (small startup CEOs), and have to date never gotten a job offer in software through the standard recruitment process (n=5 offers out of ~100 applications moved to interview, not counting applications seen but not considered via services like triplebyte). Well that's not entirely true, I did finally get an offer last week but it was downgraded from the advertised offer to "let's…

^ Same. The last time I was out of work my wife was asking why I wasn't pounding the pavement sending out tons of cover letters and resumes and the like. I told her that in the 21 years I've been working, I've not gotten a single job via that route. It's always been networking. At some point about 10-15 years ago I just stopped even bothering with a resume at all. If I can't get in front of a decision maker, I don't…

[deleted]

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

#220

Post by armatav »

brookside wrote: post #191
evo_9 wrote: post #138

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,…

Likely unintentional, but your language around hiring is quite gendered. Guys / dudes ?

Not relevant to his point.
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