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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

#81

Post by polote »

vbezhenar wrote: post #44
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…

How many people are hired through standard recruitment process and how many people are hired by impressed CEO?

How many developers tried to impress a CEO and how many went through the recruitment process? There are actually plenty of examples of people having landed a job thanks to a very good cover letter or something similar

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

#82

Post by jennyyang »

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.

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

#83

Post by DataSciGuy_401 »

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…

This is a great observation that is relevant for everyone who will serendipitously bump into the CEO of the company that makes the product on top of which their side project is built. Everyone else needs to be screened by a recruiter, though.

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

#84

Post by chrisseaton »

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…

> Why are you trying to impress recruiters?

I don't know whether this is a flippant answer... but to get a job so they can eat.

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

#85

Post by vkammerer »

It may be useful to remember that the author lives in France and has spent his whole professional life in France.

As a French having worked in Germany, Canada and New Zealand, I can say that the recruitment process is very different in other countries, where side projects and open source contributions are really valued.

In my opinion, his article should mention the geographical setting of his experience, and his advice should only apply to people living in France (and writing the article in French may have been more appropriate too)

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

#86

Post by curiousllama »

actuator wrote: post #70
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…

> 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. No matter how we feel, the process still goes through recruiters. In a company I used to work for, we built a way where we removed the company and uni name to remove biases from recruiters. Most recruiters flat out refused to…

> the process still goes through recruiters

Does it? Idk, maybe it’s because I’m not a SV SWE, but I’ve found all my jobs through my network.

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

#88

Post by aj7 »

You weren’t wrong. You gave up too early, accepting the salaryman fantasy of steady growth if you just “work hard.” If this works past 50, you are 80th percentile. Past 55? 98th percentile. How will you feel when you begin to be handed boring, or fix-it projects? When your salary doesn’t keep up with 29-year-old versions of yourself? Layoffs? Perfectly acceptable or ignorable at 20-38. Lethal >48.

You need to own the economic value of your output as early as possible. Read that sentence again. Side projects are about 10% effective here, if you get my drift.

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

#89

Post by keithnz »

heh, this seems common with devs who get to around the 10 year mark, they try and distil wisdom from their experience, but all too often it is quite rigid advice...I did it too, I would have plenty of advice for my "younger" self when I hit the 10 year mark. I'm at 40 years coding now, and I'd be hard pressed to make any definitive advice or claims about anything. Maybe my advice now would be don't buy into any strong claims about anything, instead, try and understand what underlying forces are shaping advice / claims

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

#90

Post by s1dewaysjects »

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 share your experience and I disagree strongly with this piece.

If I had joined a good company and focused on that, I would still be comfortably building web services for them like I learned to in school, and I would probably continue doing that indefinitely.

That's fine, it's a nice salary, but it was also boring and soul-crushing. When I started to see the damage wrought by mass-scale social media, my side projects made it easy for me to transition into a much more interesting but specialized field that I saw more of a future in, and that has worked out great.

The author's main complaints seem to involve recruiters and the poor value proposition of shallow projects. But if you have deep projects and poke your nose around the industries that you're interested in, you won't have to deal with recruiters, and you'll often be able to avoid the technical side of interviews entirely. Talent is very scarce.

Although, I write this from a USA perspective and I notice this is a .fr domain; the labor markets and hiring practices might be very different.

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