Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects • Hacker News Board

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#41

Post by Iftheshoefits » Sat, Mar 28, 2015, 10:48 PM UTC

woah wrote: post #29

clyfe wrote: post #26

Work for free and don't get paid, because, hey! You'll get tons of experience and build your portfolio. Now on a crowd-source scale! Sucker!

I'm guessing you are someone who does not enjoy programming? Did your parents pressure you to take it up to have a well paying job?

There is not one single other engineering profession I'm aware of that thinks a "portfolio" consisting of past employment is insufficient, or that has academic trivia questions figure as largely in their interview process.

To me a request for portfolio contents beyond the contents of a resume is an indicator that the would-be employer is interested in people who are easily exploited or cajoled into working lots of unpaid overtime, or else that they don't actually trust the candidate's resume; both of these are negative indicators. A heavy focus on DS/algorithms for engineering positions is an indicator that the employer either doesn't understand the difference between academics/theory and engineering or, worse, thinks the latter is trivial, irrelevant, or otherwise beneath CS; both also negative indicators.

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#42

Post by code_reuse » Sat, Mar 28, 2015, 10:51 PM UTC

emerongi wrote: post #4

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #2

I find the focus on building portfolios frustrating. Mostly what I've seen it accomplish is people writing dumb scripts that don't do anything particularly useful or basic web apps that would never be useful for anything beyond the toy case the author came up with. That's not to knock building small programs like these to develop skills or become familiar with a new library, but it's hardly an adequate way of showing…

Have you written something like that? I think programmers should have a right to a personal life as well. My mother has never had to "build a portfolio" outside of her job ever. Whatever she had accomplished in her professional career shows how skilful she is. Yet you're probably lazy if you don't go home and start churning out code, am I right?

The way I think about it is.. post graduate work. In most of the natural sciences if you expect to be able to secure a decent job in the private sector after you complete school you need to do interesting post graduate work that is in alignment with the corporate sphere.

The big change we're seeing in the IT job market is that now these same sorts of expectations which are standard in more mature job markets are now often times being applied to IT knowledge workers. The new trend is that it's reasonable to expect for employees to have completed significant projects which demonstrate their knowledge and competency in a non-trivial way, which is akin to a doctrinal thesis or post graduate work.

In my opinion what this means in practical terms is that after you finish your 4 year degree, or acquire the equivalent CS knowledge on your own, it behooves you to plan for yourself a period of time, perhaps 6 months or a year to work on actually creating something which demonstrates the knowledge that you have acquired. You will own the IP for this "field work", so you can use it to qualify yourself to future employers.

What I suspect is that in the future this field work will be more important than the actual 4 year degree if it's not already. Personally I have no experience with hiring, but since it's part of my planning I think about it frequently. I suspect that already it's the case that startup hiring teams get more out of examining a well built implementation of a non-trivial concept than they do out of examining a college diploma.

TLDR: It's unreasonable to consider yourself to be a qualified anthropologist or an archeologist without having first done field work and documented in a thesis paper. This is coming to IT.

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#43

Post by zaryaf » Sat, Mar 28, 2015, 11:00 PM UTC

G650 wrote: post #15

Very similar to https://code4startup.com/ but for a slightly different purpose.

Hi this is Zarya, one of the co-founder of Zyring. I have actually used Code4startup and we are much different. Code4Startup helps you clone websites for the purpose of literally getting a website up for your startup. At Zyring, our goal is to get people to build applications from scratch so they can add it to their portfolio and get a job. That's why we put so emphasis on code reviews and feedback.

If you have used code4startup, I would love to talk to you about your goals and if there is anyway we can help you. My email is zaryafaraj@zyring.com. Thanks!

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#44

Post by zaryaf » Sat, Mar 28, 2015, 11:10 PM UTC

kowdermeister wrote: post #39

zooso wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats a harsh way to put it but somehow true. Its less about imagination and more about ability. The people who need this site the most are people who are new to programming or don't have any university background (online courses, self taught). Unlike you these people DO struggle starting their own project and they DO need some help setting up their node.js environment. The problem is that many of us who learned prog…

It feels that you want to solve multiple problems at once, not impossible, but more complicated. There is a great leap between installing git and node.js and writing a working, publishable project. I wish it was that easy. The site also didn't explain the process of creating a project from start to finish. It would be nice to see the time requirement for completing one. Is it 1 day or 1 month? I definitely agree that…

Thanks for your feedback! We will definitely make it our goal to provide a better explanation of how a project will be built start to finish, and how long it will take to build it, from the onset.

About the target audience. We actually built Zyring for people like me. I was a PM at Microsoft who wanted to transition to a developer role. I learned programming through self-learning (didn't follow traditional CS path) but always found myself building things that were either insignificant or I was handheld through the entire process so I couldn't recreate my work. As I talked to more people, I realized that there are a lot more people like me. I completely agree with you that we need to find that "sweet spot" where the user (like your gf) can build a project on her own but still get the right guidance so she doesn't get overwhelmed and lost.

I would really love to talk with you and/or your girlfriend to get your feedback on how we can help and improve Zyring. My email is zaryafaraj@zyring.com. Thanks!

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#45

Post by lawry » Sat, Mar 28, 2015, 11:18 PM UTC

memonkey wrote: post #30

zooso wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Co-founder here. I am completely agreeing with you and I am one of the people who hates the culture you mentioned. We created this website for people who are new to programming or people changing careers. People who have not taken a university path (taken online courses, self taught) but find it difficult to get a job because they don't have anything on their resume. They find it intimidating to contribute to open so…

I am one of those self-taught no degree developers currently building my own portfolio. It definitely is intimidating to contribute to open source projects not to mention learning the projects/technology to be able to contribute. But as for my own projects, it's increasingly discouraging to find out my ideas have been done inside and out. I think the only thing keeping people like me going is the passion of figuring…

> But as for my own projects, it's increasingly discouraging to find out my ideas have been done inside and out.

Sure, but if you are solving a problem you come across, and the current solutions cannot solve it, there is no reason to not build it yourself!

There are different ways to solve a problem, and chances are your solution may be very useful to other people as well.

And lastly, I'd say don't focus too much on data structures and algorithms until you actually need to think about them. "premature optimization is the root of all evil" (or something like that, at least what I take from it is don't do it until you have to. But that's just my take on it.

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#46

Post by zaryaf » Sat, Mar 28, 2015, 11:27 PM UTC

code_reuse wrote: post #42

emerongi wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you written something like that? I think programmers should have a right to a personal life as well. My mother has never had to "build a portfolio" outside of her job ever. Whatever she had accomplished in her professional career shows how skilful she is. Yet you're probably lazy if you don't go home and start churning out code, am I right?

The way I think about it is.. post graduate work. In most of the natural sciences if you expect to be able to secure a decent job in the private sector after you complete school you need to do interesting post graduate work that is in alignment with the corporate sphere. The big change we're seeing in the IT job market is that now these same sorts of expectations which are standard in more mature job markets are now…

you nailed it on the head. A large and growing number of people are going the tech path without going getting the traditional CS degree. CS students at least have internships and labs to build functional experience but this new market of developers don't have similar options.

You are setting the right expectation with 6 months of building stuff. It is surprising how many people graduate from codeacamedy thinking that coding is fun and easy when in reality, the path to becoming a developer (let alone a great one) is frustrating and painful at times. Our goal is to give all of these new developers the chance to built significant pieces of work and get the proper guidance when they need it with code reviews. No handholding (learning websites) or intimidation (open source) - just a safe environment to build and break things, while getting the feedback and portfolio to jumpstart a developer career.

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#47

Post by zaryaf » Sat, Mar 28, 2015, 11:42 PM UTC

memonkey wrote: post #30

zooso wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Co-founder here. I am completely agreeing with you and I am one of the people who hates the culture you mentioned. We created this website for people who are new to programming or people changing careers. People who have not taken a university path (taken online courses, self taught) but find it difficult to get a job because they don't have anything on their resume. They find it intimidating to contribute to open so…

I am one of those self-taught no degree developers currently building my own portfolio. It definitely is intimidating to contribute to open source projects not to mention learning the projects/technology to be able to contribute. But as for my own projects, it's increasingly discouraging to find out my ideas have been done inside and out. I think the only thing keeping people like me going is the passion of figuring…

I was exactly in your shoes a year ago. I am a self-taught developer and I completely empathize with the pain and intimidation of open source, and the frustration of defining and breaking down a personal project.

The answer to your question, the idea spot is somewhere in between. Yes, you need to know data structures/algo because there is only so far you can go if that's all you know. I am a very strong believer in "learn as you go" and "pull information as needed". Many people start out learning the fundamentals but forget what they learned because they didn't put it into practice. So my recommendation would be to keep building things and your portfolio, while challenging yourself to also learn the fundamentals as needed for your project.

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#48

Post by code_reuse » Sat, Mar 28, 2015, 11:49 PM UTC

zooso wrote: post #3

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #2

I find the focus on building portfolios frustrating. Mostly what I've seen it accomplish is people writing dumb scripts that don't do anything particularly useful or basic web apps that would never be useful for anything beyond the toy case the author came up with. That's not to knock building small programs like these to develop skills or become familiar with a new library, but it's hardly an adequate way of showing…

Can you give an example of something that you find large and interesting ? Did you have a chance to take a look at the actual projects ? The projects are modeled after things that are already on production (Zillow, Medium, Flipboard). They are meant to get you started on those things.

an example would be a data-mining project where the goal is to uncover interesting subsets of data within larger public datasets which may have business value while also attempting to answer larger statistical questions about the domain. This should require the use of multiple APIs and potentially even require the candidate to write an web crawler (always make sure the assignment is legal).

The candidate would choose a data-store for the problem domain, write a multi-threaded web crawler to ingest the data, implement some stream-processing components (parsers, filters, etc), and create a simple HTML5 chart view of the (real-time) statistics around the data.

The tools he chooses would clue us in to his/her overall knowledge of distributed systems, graph theory, data-science, networking, real-time systems theory, etc The requirement to create a small statistics visualization web app to display the data will encourage the candidate to demonstrate a requisite knowledge of web standards XHMTL/CSS/Javascript.

The overall terseness, neatness, and quality of the code is what matters rather than the "coolness" of the tools. Many candidates will lose focus on the actual data-analysis problem itself as they get bogged down in the details around building a platform to solve it. The ability to remain focused on the actual problem while writing terse production quality code is what you're looking for in the interview, and the candidate should be informed of that ahead of time.

p.s. the above problem is not meant to serve as a 'bar to reach' in terms of whether or not to hire someone, but rather it's a problem designed to measure a candidate's overall "full stackness" by forcing him/her to struggle towards solving a honest to goodness "full-stack" problem

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#49

Post by zaryaf » Sat, Mar 28, 2015, 11:50 PM UTC

Iftheshoefits wrote: post #41

woah wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing you are someone who does not enjoy programming? Did your parents pressure you to take it up to have a well paying job?

There is not one single other engineering profession I'm aware of that thinks a "portfolio" consisting of past employment is insufficient, or that has academic trivia questions figure as largely in their interview process. To me a request for portfolio contents beyond the contents of a resume is an indicator that the would-be employer is interested in people who are easily exploited or cajoled into working lots of un…

what you are saying is relatively true for developers with some experience, especially engineers. This is not true for people coming out of online learning programs who know the basics of coding but haven't built anything significant. For these people, the resume is empty so building a portfolio of significant projects is a way to become a developer. It is as much self-serving as it is serving the needs of employers.

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#50

Post by Iftheshoefits » Sun, Mar 29, 2015, 3:38 PM UTC

zaryaf wrote: post #49

Iftheshoefits wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is not one single other engineering profession I'm aware of that thinks a "portfolio" consisting of past employment is insufficient, or that has academic trivia questions figure as largely in their interview process. To me a request for portfolio contents beyond the contents of a resume is an indicator that the would-be employer is interested in people who are easily exploited or cajoled into working lots of un…

what you are saying is relatively true for developers with some experience, especially engineers. This is not true for people coming out of online learning programs who know the basics of coding but haven't built anything significant. For these people, the resume is empty so building a portfolio of significant projects is a way to become a developer. It is as much self-serving as it is serving the needs of employers.

That's true, and it is a case that seems to be unique to the software field as far as engineering is concerned. I'm also unaware of any other engineering profession in which such shallow education and experience would be considered acceptable in any case. Usually a four-year degree from an accredited engineering school is a minimum requirement for even entry-level work. In these cases references and some casual "technical" discussions (but nothing like the pedantic Algo/DS grilling in a software interview) in the interviews will determine suitability, and the individual will effectively be considered a trainee for a time. That is also absent in the software industry, generally.