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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

#351

Post by secondcoming »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #190
secondcoming wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wonder what will catch up with us exactly. A serious question - because I'm by no means young, and I'm still in the "forever tinkering" phase. I wish I could spend 8 or 10 hours on it on a regular basis - but the job that's funding my tinkering is also taking away the time for it.

Life, other priorities.

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

#352

Post by GuB-42 »

Important note: the author is French, working in France.

I am French myself and from what I've heard about how it happens in North America, the way recruiting works is a bit different.

The general idea is that French recruiters are more cautious, which is understandable since there are stronger employee protection laws and it is harder to let go of a problematic employee. For that reason, employees are also expected to stay longer.

It also looks like recruiting criteria are less technical. Your degree, years of experience, companies you worked for, certifications, etc... play a more important role than showing off your skills. Wages also tend to be defined more by your experience and position than how much money the company can expect to make out of your work.

So if you are not working in France, keep that in mind when reading such advise.

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

#353

Post by snak »

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…

Thanks for sharing that parable. It reminds me of the times I've discussed about Kubernetes with colleagues.

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

#354

Post by user5994461 »

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…

Oh major cultural misunderstanding here.

Assuming he's in France, by "recruiter" he means company recruiters / HR. Your CV and first phone interview always go to a recruiter at the company, that's the first person you have to talk to (and impress) to have a shot at any job.

American might understand recruiter as an external agency, there's no such thing in tech in France. There's no CEO/CTO either, they are sitting idle out of sight collecting money never interacting with the company or any employee.

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

#355

Post by user5994461 »

nicoburns wrote: post #348
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…

> Most people don't know any CEOs, PMs, or hiring managers. You don't need to know them personally. Most companies (small companies at least) post job advertisements on their website and you can apply via email or a simple application form that goes directly to the hiring manager. I managed to get my first dev job with zero professional experience (and I mean zero, I'd literally never worked any job before), zero "ne…

What year was it? I don't imagine a CV fresh out of high school passing a first HR filter in the current decade.

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

#356

Post by etripe »

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.

I think what they meant was not needing recruiters puts you in a relatively well-off and thus "privileged" position.

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

#357

Post by etripe »

TuringNYC wrote: post #198
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost universally these types of behaviors emerge from self-interest. So it's pretty safe to assume that whatever approach recruiters tend to follow, they do so because it is the optimum for them. That means either that the incentives are a problem, or that the seemingly foolish recruiting techniques you've been exposed to are more effective than you might realize, not being a recruiter yourself. Probably a mix.

The problem is that sometimes what is "optimal to the recruiter" is not optimal for the applicant nor optimal to society. This is why applicants get frustrated or angry. I heard a recruiter once (socially) tell me that they ignore all resumes with foreign names for sales positions because on average their yield on such calls is too low to bother. Fair -- absolutely not. Optimal to recruiter -- probably. Good for the…

> I'd love if there was something company owners and operators did to prevent things like this which are local maximums but globally inefficient (as well as unethical and unfair)

Well, continuing your line of thinking: what's the incentive structure for company owners/stakeholders? And how does it stimulate them to seek global efficiency?

In vernacular, "theory" is completely different from the scientific jargon meaning of a "theory", which leads to people saying "Evolution is just a theory".

Similarly, the economic jargon term "efficiency" is not at all the same as the commonplace definition you used. The economic definition barely covers anything beyond profit maximisation and cost minimisation and is precisely the reason we see so many externalised costs. Companies are "efficient" only in monetary terms, but that doesn't preclude waste, missed opportunities, myopia and environmental or societal fallout.

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

#358

Post by user5994461 »

westoncb wrote: post #221
jrumbut wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I would split the issue raised in this post along two axes. The first is junior vs senior positions. For a junior position a half-baked github project or a little meetup presentation does wonders for you. At the senior level unless you did something incredible or highly relevant in your side-projects no one cares, it can even be a negative. The other is how are you getting the job. Are you sending in your resume…

That is very interesting, and would account for what I considered a mysterious experience of having a very hard time finding work this past year (while that had not remotely been an issue for me in the past). I've been doing freelance for a few years now, but when I was hired at two startups prior to that, in each case it was clear that my side projects were the driving factor. (The first time, it was an offer direct…

The first rounds you were going for new graduate positions, they were looking at your side projects because juniors don't have anything to show, and they saw something in yourself, a cheap youngster willing to work hard probably like they were at your age. (You're right that 27s was not fresh out of university but it was 20s nonetheless and you were treated as a junior / new graduate)

The later rounds you are going for experienced positions, they have much higher expectations. They want to see successful experiences at previous companies, building things (preferably the same thing they are doing), working with coworkers, delivering in a more-or-less corporate environment. It's completely different expectations. A side project is out of touch at best.

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

#359

Post by user5994461 »

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…

What kind of companies are they? Small companies with less than 100 people?

I've never seen any medium-large company where any single person was able to take a decision. Large companies cut all hiring power from their middle managers, forcing to interview with a whole panel, this prevents manager from favoring friends and building a fiefdom.

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

#360

Post by cvhashim »

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…

> One thing I learned about all of us first-gens, we're all equally angry cunts.

Speak for yourself :)

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