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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

#4

Post by sytelus »

TLDR; Recruiters don't care about side projects. Side projects are often shallow and its better to use new tech in real job instead of side projects.

I feel most of us would disagree with that. All new jobs in my career were result of learning something new on side projects. Recruiters show that as passion for learning. Many jobs don't allow for much exploration and you don't have leverage to call shots. It's usually uphill battle to even introduce any significant changes in large stable products. Also, side projects shouldn't be just for goal of finding new jobs and making recruiters happy anyway. It should be for passion for creating things, realizing ideas.

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

#8

Post by actuator »

> 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 such that the process remains same for all candidates. If someone is just beginning out then side projects matter a lot but for hiring experienced people, most won't care about side projects unless they got significant traction.

Also, it is incredibly hard to judge side projects. Sure, I can go through your Github repo if it is open source, open 2-3 files to see code structure, see the automation suite you have setup but unless the project was complex there is not much to talk about. For experienced folks, there are other metrics you need to gauge them on which are absent in hobby projects.

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

#9

Post by djstein »

adflux wrote: post #3

"The satisfaction of seeing your career flourishing without you having to do anything will give you a valuable peace of mind." Without you having to do anything?

I believe they mean, you have to work either way and most people do as good a job as they can. You can either do this for a no name company or at FAANG. At FAANG, you’ll probably do the same work, maybe a little harder in crunch time, but you’ll find yourself in a far better situation five years down the line for virtually the same effort.
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