Which personal projects got you hired? Which personal projects were so good you hired someone else?
Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?
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Re: Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?
#2[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?
#3None, ever. I can’t recall anyone paying attention to my personal projects in a hiring situation. And when hiring people I pay almost no attention to personal projects unless I’m hiring a green junior.
Companies hire people who can add business value and work as a team member and part of the larger organization. Personal projects don’t communicate that.
Re: Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?
#4Hired as an intern... but a basic client/server/db app I made to track WOW DKP for my guild :) Tough to claim for sure it got me hired but I brought it up and talked about it.
Re: Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?
#5My blog. Specifically, I was blogging solutions to the first N Euler problems.
Re: Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?
#6Personal work helped get me hired to my first job out of college.
In my latter years at college, I spent Summer & my spare time contributing to the Bugzilla project. My work on that project, and my involvement in the project's IRC, caught the attention of someone who worked at the company which eventually hired me. They were looking for someone to take over admin of their Bugzilla instance (a very large, customized, private installation). The work I did was enough for them to hire and relocate me from Ohio to California.
Re: Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?
#7Got my first job in IT support because I had an old computer at home I had set up as a router running pfSense. Was able to show my interest in computers and had a great conversation with the interviewer.
Got my first job in programming because I had written a website to manage support tickets on an IT support team.
Re: Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?
#8https://github.com/vgel/treebender , for my first job, building a meeting transcript analytics app.
Re: Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?
#9Back when Facebook launched their original API, I built a few games and apps on the platform, earning a few thousand on ads (the mid 2000s were a wild time).
This got me hired as a "Social Media Expert" at a Fortune 100 company in the marketing department, before even graduating college - a position that didn't exist and I didn't apply for, they were just terrified about Facebook and what it meant. Eventually I shifted to their "innovation department" creating many internal social networks, back when that was a thing.