Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

manuel.darcemont.fr

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 396 posts

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

#291

Post by pbalau »

NoOneNew wrote: post #261
dvt wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

When I first started in dev in my early 20s, I got super lucky to have a landlady who was also a VP of Tech for an insurance company. I got to know her decently. When I was emailed by my first recruiter (it was just a blanket message, but I took it seriously since I was young and dumb), I asked her for some advice since she was already in tech for longer than I was alive at the time. I asked what exactly the recruite…

There are bad pimps and there are good pimps (erm...?). But you should aim for a sugar daddy.

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

#292

Post by chris11 »

gonehome wrote: post #230
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…

Not only this, but the premise that working on your job will impress recruiters is just wrong. There's a pretty simple flow chart for getting hired at a bay area company: 1. Go to MIT, Stanford, Cal, an Ivy, or CalTech and make sure you have linked in. 2. If 1 isn't possible then make a friend who works where you want to work and get a referral. 3. Cram leetcode That's basically it. Don't give up doing side projects…

Working at a good company can also help out. MS/Facebook/Amazon/Google all have reputations for a decent hiring bar and need to recruit a lot of engineers. There are other companies that have decent reputations and are less selective about interviewing.

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

#293

Post by raindropm »

Here's my experience. Until you have the luxury to pursue any side project you want, I found that side project that scratch your itch on your main job work best. You have fun with problem solving at your own pace, and also make your work life continuously a little better(because you know where your itch at, and since no one cares, so you do it yourself)

At the end of the day, you ship something useful and practical and learn something new along the way. Ain't that count?

Unless your side project = side business, now that'll be another beast.

Even something you do out of love that doesn't involve money making, you still have to think about it, find time to do it and when you can't(mostly because your main job took all your time) you will feel guilty and depressed. And the cycle continue.... seriously, I think it's worse than having no side project.

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

#294

Post by boyobo »

dx87 wrote: post #246
alex_anglin wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you earned your privilege, how does that not make you privileged nonetheless?

If you earned it, then it isn't privilege, by defintion. Unless you consider being born a hard worker as being privileged, in which case the word is meaningless.

I think people are using the word in different ways. The person you are responding to is using it as a description of the current state.

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

#295

Post by boyobo »

dnautics wrote: post #277
nosianu wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You did not answer the question which was not if there ever was any case at all, but how many. An individual example is useless when the question is about if something works at (even minor) scale.

nobody is claiming that my experience is extrapolatable ad infinitum. However, if it was such a rare thing, what are the odds that someone like me would exist? > An individual example is useless when the question is about if something works at (even minor) scale That is incorrect. The plural of anecdote is data.

> However, if it was such a rare thing, what are the odds that someone like me would exist?

Someone wins the lottery every week. What are the odds of winning the lottery? Is playing the lottery a good strategy to make money?

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

#296

Post by mavster »

I wholeheartedly disagree with this entire statement.

If you want to grow as a programmer (in my case), then side projects are going to get you the skills to advance your career and get you a better job over "buddying up" with recruiters. Sure, you can be a 9-5 kinda person and then "switch off" when you get home, but you will be the one stuck wondering where it all went wrong and write a blog article complaining about it.

insert principal skinner out-of-touch meme here

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

#297

Post by raindropm »

01100011 wrote: post #229

So many times on HN I feel we disagree because we each touch different parts of the elephant( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant ). Systems programmers have different experiences than web developers who have different experiences from ML researchers. Things that benefit junior Ruby devs may make no sense for a middle aged, embedded dev working for the defense industry. There are people who benefi…

Right? Maybe the speck of hostility is as little as we interpret the word 'side projects' differently and forget about other context and variable, or simple fact that not everyone have a knack on side project...I found that if you're not side project guy, then you're not, and that's fine.

I mean, I believe many people don't have side project and still have perfectly happy life.

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

#298

Post by 627467 »

Reads like someone who's deeply frustrated with their career history...

"Forget side projects and focus on job" sounds as terrible as the opposite: "ignore your job and just send time on personal interests"

It is my experience that most recruiters are superficial to the point that unless they received instructions to literally hire someone with most meetup attandances, they will ignore any candidate that list those in resume.

But, there ARE recruiters who can see through a weak resume and help you make it more targeted, surface keywords that help you get interviews.

I see .fr in domain: is going through recruiters the main way to get hired in IT in france? Where I am the best way to get hired (beyond entry level) is through referrals and for those, I find that side projects and collaborations are much better at generating a future lead that just proving you were good at your job

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

#299

Post by jrott »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #227
sillysaurusx wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It doesn't matter if someone is privileged or not, recruiters _are_ bottom feeders. Its a shit job that nobody wants and anyone with a modicum of ability seems to get out of asap in my experience. They don't seem to know who their client is, what technology is or who you need to be but they can just about play snap (although they may struggle with java and javascript) and get someone to a job interview. The whole poi…

> It doesn't matter if someone is privileged or not, recruiters _are_ bottom feeders. Its a shit job that nobody wants and anyone with a modicum of ability seems to get out of asap in my experience.

It's totally a shit job in a ton of ways but the best recruiters absolutely make a killing. It's a sales job though so what makes a recruiter good from an engineers prospective is orthogonal to what actually makes them good.

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

#300

Post by sixdimensional »

_alex_ wrote: post #279
sixdimensional wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My only problem is I spend so much energy on work, I don't have it when I go home, no matter how excited or interested I am in the side projects. I realize that's also a personal problem - poor time/resource allocation - not allocating a proper amount of time/energy to work vs. personal projects. However, I can say, doing a full time, involved job and giving it all my attention tends to use up all the cycles. Is that…

I go through cycles. I'll have a long stretch where I come home and I'm just fried and can't do anything that takes critical thinking. And then I'll go through a period where either work is more boring or I've found something to do on the side that's so exciting to me that I have tons of energy and focus on side projects. One thing I've been doing for the last 2ish years is having side projects that are really far re…

Thank you for sharing your perspective! Good idea on doing something different from the daily job to generate the energy/drive. I should do that more often.
Post reply on HN