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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

#71

Post by lsiunsuex »

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.

Agree with this. At least 2 jobs (I've lost count) I got based on side work I did. Full time employment history helped, but it was the side projects that showed a certain skillset that they wanted.

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

#72

Post by rconti »

actuator wrote: post #8

> First, most recruiters don’t care about your personal projects or how many meetups you went during the year. What matters the most is your current company - and by that I mean the name of your current company. He is so much right here. Recruiters don't have the time to go through and understand your side projects, for that matter even engineers don't. Most interviews are 45-60 mins, you need to scope your interview…

I never understood why people cared so much about company "name" until a handful of years ago. It's not about "status" in terms of what kind of fancy clothes you wear, but it absolutely signals an ability to clear a certain kind of bar, produce a certain kind of work, and experience things on a scale that you wouldn't at a smaller shop.

It doesn't mean one path is right or wrong for a job (I know many people who switch back and forth between bigcorp and startups), but if you only see BigCorp experience as status seeking/soul sucking experience, you're missing a huge part of the picture.

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

#73

Post by arcticbull »

jonathankoren wrote: post #48
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…

As a hiring manager, I never cared about side projects, or Stack Overflow or Kaggle scores. The most a side project github link would tell me if it was big or not. That’s it. I’m not going to go through and read a bunch of random code by myself, when I can just ask a couple of questions, and get the same information quicker. They are just too many resumes to read. Seriously, all side projects tell me is that you spen…

Not directly, for sure, but every decent company's screening process includes a segment roughly expressed as "tell me about something you built -- what technical challenges did you face, how did you overcome them." Sometimes, your side project is a more compelling answer than your day job. I've got some really compelling side projects haha.

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

#74

Post by 10-1-100 »

My side project over the last few years was more or less the deciding factor in me getting hired at my current employer and my previous one.

Being able to demonstrate turning an idea into reality and talk about technical (and design) problems I encountered and how I solved them seemed to be much more interesting to interviewers than most of what I had done at my previous day jobs.

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

#75

Post by munchbunny »

vbezhenar wrote: post #51
binarymax wrote: post #6

Advice to my young self: put MORE effort into one of your 100 side projects, and stop messing around with other stuff.

Where did you get 100 ideas worthy of implementation? My imagination is so terrible, I can only imagine stupid ideas like Reddit clones.

It doesn't take imagination. Rather than trying to imagine the issues, try to develop an eye to see the problems that are already in front of you. And don't start with grand ambitions. Start with the problem in front of you.

One way is to have hobbies, side hustles, volunteer work, whatever. As long as you're doing something that requires solving problems that are different from your day to day programming job, you will find a constant stream of problems that maybe you can improve with a bit of code.

Some of my side projects are directly related to my work, but most of them aren't. I'm working on something right now because someone in my life needed advice on digital security, and it turned out to be not an easy problem to address.

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

#76

Post by hobs »

dvt wrote: post #62
jonathankoren wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a hiring manager, I never cared about side projects, or Stack Overflow or Kaggle scores. The most a side project github link would tell me if it was big or not. That’s it. I’m not going to go through and read a bunch of random code by myself, when I can just ask a couple of questions, and get the same information quicker. They are just too many resumes to read. Seriously, all side projects tell me is that you spen…

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.

It's not saying its exciting, its that its equally boring.

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

#77

Post by triyambakam »

dvt wrote: post #62
jonathankoren wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a hiring manager, I never cared about side projects, or Stack Overflow or Kaggle scores. The most a side project github link would tell me if it was big or not. That’s it. I’m not going to go through and read a bunch of random code by myself, when I can just ask a couple of questions, and get the same information quicker. They are just too many resumes to read. Seriously, all side projects tell me is that you spen…

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 the parent poster is giving any judgement to how people spend their time, only qualifying how.

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

#78

Post by waprin »

It's a little ironic that this is on "hacker" news since I think that the original "hacker" ethos wasn't that you built things just to impress recruiters.

If your goal is career advancement, then it is fair to acknowledge that some projects won't be useful for that. But there's plenty of other reasons that people work on side projects besides just career advancement. "Just for fun" might be the most famous reason, that is I believe how the Linux kernel started.

While maybe big companies won't value side projects directly too heavily, there's still a good chance that if you learn new things and try to build interesting stuff, that it might open new doors in all sorts of unexpected ways. But there's no guarantee.

I also think that full time coding jobs can be a lot of work, and people shouldn't feel too pressured if they don't want to have side projects, because they have other things like a busy family life or non-technical hobbies. But for many people, programming can still be fun and interesting, especially outside of the usual corporate routine, and that's all the motivation they need to pick up a side project. That to me is really what a "hacker" is, not a leetcode grinder climbing the ranks at FAANG.

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

#79

Post by jackdh »

jyu wrote: post #59

This is decent career advice, but it doesn't address the root of why. 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. Mathemat…

For people unaware, FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early).

There is some interesting stories of how people achieved it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/top/?sort=top&t=year

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

#80

Post by actuator »

dvt wrote: post #62
jonathankoren wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a hiring manager, I never cared about side projects, or Stack Overflow or Kaggle scores. The most a side project github link would tell me if it was big or not. That’s it. I’m not going to go through and read a bunch of random code by myself, when I can just ask a couple of questions, and get the same information quicker. They are just too many resumes to read. Seriously, all side projects tell me is that you spen…

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.
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