51–60 of 396 posts
Advice to my young self: put MORE effort into one of your 100 side projects, and stop messing around with other stuff.
The fact is, (even different parts of) organizations vary widely in their hiring practices. Some care and some don't. I've hired people almost solely on their side-project (nearly a proto-startup), and I've hired folks without them.
If you interviewed Mssrs. Bellard or Hunt (and you didn't know of them beforehand) and they talked about their side projects QEMU or haveibeenpwned.com (respectively), you should probably rate them highly, maybe even hire them on the spot.
You should aim to work for groups that value such projects.
> 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…
How many people are hired through standard recruitment process and how many people are hired by impressed CEO?
> 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…
How many people are hired through standard recruitment process and how many people are hired by impressed CEO?
Which is fine if that's what you're looking for, but not so great if you consider yourself an entrepreneur.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At any company of any decent size, your resume isn't going to get to the hiring manager if it doesn't get through the recruiter. The CEO of any large tech company is never going to meet you, much less see your resume.
I know quite a few hiring managers who will search Linkedin directly, and reach out to candidates themselves. This, for example, was how I was hired into my current employer (which is a company with over a thousand people)
Side projects open the creative pipeline. Your job, all too often, closes it.
Also, who cares about recruiters? This is your life—you should find a bigger pool of people to impress and delight.
If you want FIRE, the best way is to optimize your career. How do you do that? It starts early before your first job, as you try out different school subjects, books, friends, hobbies. As you look out to the future, what do you see on the horizon?
Thinking about the time I entered school, programmers were near the bottom of the totem pole. Mathematicians were trapped in academic ivory towers. Data was barely used as the alpha bros of finance dominated the talks of high compensation. The most sought after jobs did not even exist then. Youtuber, data science, deep learning, cloud computing, analytics, ecommerce, cryptocurrency, even professional video gamer were not real careers.
Increasing revenues solve all problems. Jump on the waves of industries that are booming and will continue to boom.
The world and culture is constantly changing as we march towards the future. Put yourself in a position to succeed by learning the fundamentals needed to pass interviews and recognize when something seems obvious to you but not to everyone else yet.
> ” As we all know, the interview process is broken.”
I don’t know how the author conciliate these two opinions.
Other than that, I agree that being hired by a FAANG company is better for your career than any number of side-projects. The problem is that I don’t think I will ever be hired by a FAANG company (as many many many others). It is not about not wanting to focus on leetcode and Cracking the Coding Interview (and I don’t), but my resume would be rejected for sure much before that stage (as a self-taught developer with 41 years old and a degree in Eocnomics from an university in Brazil).