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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

#321

Post by swader999 »

Mandatum wrote: post #252
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…

You really think your experience works at scale? You're the product of hard work, smart decisions, awesome parents and something often forgotten - luck. If you think for a minute your experiences can be translated and reproduced by the masses, you're kidding yourself.

Luck is one of the factors very few give enough credit to imo.

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

#322

Post by swader999 »

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…

I've met a lot of recruiters and I really think most of them don't have technical chops to be worthy of trying to impress. Its way more critical to worry about what your colleagues think of you. Focus on impressing them. Because three, five, ten years out when you have all spidered out to other companies it is these people who will get you your next great job.

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

#323

Post by gosukiwi »

jennyyang wrote: post #82

The creator of homebrew flunked a Google interview because he couldn't invert a binary tree. Everyone at Google that he interviewed said they used homebrew and loved it, but ultimately it didn't matter. He couldn't invert a binary tree. So side projects or even real projects that are used by millions are literally meaningless. Study LeetCode instead to get a job and focus on your job at work.

I don't think Google is a good place to work at really... And when interviewing a web developer, I don't think caring if they can invert a binary tree is a good thing.

If you think things like LeetCode makes you a better programmer then you only show how inexperienced you are. You can know a lot about theory and algorithms and still write shitty, unmaintainable code.

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

#325

Post by brotchie »

angrais wrote: post #242
brotchie wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally I find that trying to solve problems begets more problems (i.e. side projects beget side projects). Choose a tech stack and start building a Reddit clone, and you'll quickly hit roadblocks and get ideas. Started a new side-project on the weekend (after a long long hiatus of just focusing on day job). Phase 1 was simply getting the stack up and running (PostgreSQL-backed, Python gRPC service taking gRPC-web…

Why'd you go for gRPC in particular for your Reddit clone?

Well, OP was the one who suggested to build a Reddit clone, my side project is something else :)

re: gRPC, largely pragmatic because of familiarity with protos and RPC interfaces defined in terms of protos. I wanted a typed API definition that generates first-class implementations in Typescript and Python.

Haven't had much success in the past re: using other formal mechanisms of defining API interfaces, and I'm no longer up-to-date with what's recommended in this space (any suggestions).

Alternative was GraphQL (since using React) but that's a learning curve and dealing with protos in Typescript and Python is a known-known for me.

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

#326

Post by BeetleB »

winrid wrote: post #209
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…

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.

> Because I worked literally every day from the time I was 17 in high school until I got a full time job.

Frankly, the recruiter route is simpler and has a higher success rate than what you did.

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

#327

Post by makapuf »

actuator wrote: post #80
dvt wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think he is denigrating it. He probably phrased it badly, but he meant you did side projects like a hobby just as well you might have done hiking in that time.

Except that some side projects have value. The fact that you do the show useful traits- not all that you should consider hiring and not sufficient but useful. Not agreeing they have more value than hiking is wrong. I know several side projects which did have value and shown at least that their holders were interesting to hear.

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

#328

Post by ObsoleteNerd »

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.

Yeah I never went to college/uni and got my first job in IT due to doing web/graphic design projects on the side of my non-IT job.

Then after getting sick of front-end/design I started coding back-end side projects and taught myself enough to ultimately get hired doing CMS development. Then same again to get into Sysadmin, after running game/file servers as side projects. Etc etc...

Five distinct career changes/upgrades over ~20 years inside IT, all thanks to building stuff I wanted to build for fun and that impressing the right people to get me hired. The only IT job I've ever gotten through working my way up in a company was the last one, into Project Management, and that was only due to the breadth of skills I taught myself throughout the years... on all those side projects.

If I didn't do side projects, and didn't always strive for more, I'd still be running/packing cables for concerts and working 20 hour shifts for barely enough money to survive.

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

#329

Post by arminiusreturns »

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…

Coming from the sysadmin side of things I have noticed this glaringly many times over my years on hn. So much miscommunication just because it's easy to assume other people are like you or like your company.

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

#330

Post by seer »

scythe wrote: post #177
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…

>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. When I was at my lowest point I was delivering sushi rather than waiting for a job that would look good on a resume. Most of the people in desperate situations like that aren't (don't have time to be) padding their resume with side-proj…

Funny enough, most competent hiring managers I’ve had the chance to speak to on the matter, agreed that if you’ve worked in the service sector, especially by necessity, you end up a much better hire _because_ you are usually more humble and happy with what you’ve got.

Sanitary worker turned software engineer is a very powerful story that can help you get a job, since if you’ve shoveled shit, fixing a nasty bug or doing a menial task wouldn’t be beneath you, and you’d make sure you do a good job. Managers seem to like that.

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