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.
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.
I don’t think the article ever suggests that you shouldn’t work on side projects if it’s something you enjoy as a creative outlet. It’s saying that you shouldn’t work on side projects as a way to advance your career.
and also using new tech in a work project is often a terrible idea unless you or someone else on the team has intimate experience with it. it's either going to be betamax or legacy spaghetti 9/10 times.
> Many jobs don't allow for much exploration and you don't have leverage to call shots. It's usually uphil battle to even introduce any significant change. Also side projects shouldn't be just for goal of finding new jobs anyway. It should be for passion for creating things, realizing ideas.
You're right, but your point also indicates why business value side projects less than career projects. The skills and experience to complete the project don't overlap much between the two types of projects. The success criteria is usually quite different as well.
> its better to use new tech in real job instead of side projects.
Lol this is why so many tech stacks at work go to shit. Someone wanting to add another bullet point to the resume and instead of doing it at home, they force a new tool/language at work (when possible).
I turned a side project into a company, and recruiters contacted me non-stop during the entire journey. But maybe it is because I already had experience at Microsoft and Amazon.
I think there is a huge difference between what the author mentions as "shallow" side projects (where you are just trying to mess around with some new tech), and side projects where the aim is to develop a legit product. I imagine the latter, when seen all the way through, is much more attractive to recruiters. Although, I don't have any solid anecdotal experience with recruiting to validate that claim.
I just think it's important to not classify all projects outside of your job as "shallow" side projects, and then completely discard them career wise like the article seems to be doing.
Doesn't matter, just choose one that shows potential and do it. The only thing that matters is that you have an end-product in mind that will provide more value to the users than existing alternatives AND that you actually implement it AND the user finds your product.
That one is actually pretty simple: pick the one that you have the most to learn from, because that's the whole point of doing a side project if you are trying to leverage it as something that would help your knowledge/career development (as opposed to doing a side project for some supplementary income, for example).
And yes, I am aware that there are many unknowns, and when you are trying to pick a project with the goal to learn the most, sometimes the projects where you think you already know 90% of the solution end up being the ones where you know the least and have more for you to learn than projects that had initially more unknowns. But without the ability to know the future, picking the one that has the most "stuff to learn" (according to your first assessment) at the initial discovery phase is imo the most optimal strategy. It is fine if you discover later that the other project had a bit more to learn than the one you picked, because the goal is to learn a lot averaged down over a long period of time.
Which one do you think about when you're in the shower?
Usually there's one project that you just can't get out of your head. If you don't know which it is, try to take a break from all of them, and you'll quickly learn which one maters.
I would choose the one you can't stop thinking about. Or the one that many of the other side projects eventually lead to. If you feel similarly about all 100 side projects, probably none of them are worth doubling down on.
I can't stop thinking about creating my own operating system from scratch --similar to what Andreas Kling is doing with Sereneity OS-- but arriving at a usable state would probably take me 15 years, since I'm not even 10% as knowledgeable as Andreas.
I often think I should forget about this project altogether and focus on a viable one.
This is the paradox of choice. In most cases, it doesn't pay to spend your time hemming and hawing about find the perfect project. It helps to just pick one, even if it's the stupidest idea of the lot.
The alternative is to wind up as Burdian's Ass, who is equally hungry and thirsty, can't decide whether to eat hay or drink water, and so dies of hunger and thirst.
Yup. If you're really undecided, pick one at random, because at this point the marginal cost of thinking outweighs the marginal cost of being wrong.
And if you choose wrong, you'll find out soon enough. Personally, I had a lot of projects I couldn't stop thinking about, but when I finally started working on them, I quickly realized it's a bad idea. The usual reasons were: a) I already found it done by someone else in a form that satisfies my needs, b) it became obvious that either the process or the outcome won't be as satisfying as I thought it would be, or c) after scoping it out, I realized I'm not in a position to invest the required amount of time and effort.
Abandoning a side project early is not a bad deal. Your research and thoughts put into it stay with you forever, and it often happens that you'll get secondary value from them on some other endeavor.
100 side projects isn't "100 ideas worthy of implementation".
100 side projects is the chance at one idea worthy of implementation. If you have even one good idea, all of your bad ideas weren't only worth it, but amount to how you got there.
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.
It doesn’t work if you sit down and try to think of something. Inspiration comes spontaneously, you always have to be ready to note any ideas you get. You’ll accumulate ideas over time.
Hmm. What has worked for me is to solve problems I encounter. For instance, I was at a friend's house a couple of months ago and some walkers in the neighborhood shouted that a pipe was burst, and we should report it to the utility company. We called the utility company, and it was difficult to tell them the location of the burst pipe. From there an idea was born, what if we had an app that can report the gps location to the utility company.
The hard part for me is to find the time to implement an idea. An idea for me just naturally flows from a problem.
I personally get 1-2 ideas worth of implementation each day. I always get the idea while doing something and thinking "hey, it would be cool if...". Latest idea I had was when I was playing piano, then played in VR and realized it would be really cool to create a VR trainer/game/vizualizer for the piano to fully immers yourself in the music that you play. So, not only you can be told what to play but you could also shape the entire world/environment around you by what you play. So something like Tetris Effect VR but with you playing the piano instead of Tetris.
Whenever I get an idea, I quickly note the main pointes in a note-taking app and usually never return to it, as the secret of creating actual useful products is to spend the time to create them well. Ideas are worthless if they are not well implemented.
Thursday: I should build an API package for OpenWRT that will track bandwidth usage per device over a calendar period, e.g. past 30 days. wrtbwmon is all very nice, but it simultaneously tries to do too much (offer a UI) and not enough (track data usage for all time). Let me just write that down in my notebook.
Friday: I can build a nice and simple API for OpenWRT that is API focused and provides easier access to the common functions that people want from OpenWRT, this would help mobile app developers create apps that talk to OpenWRT in a simple way. Let me just write that down in my notebook.
Saturday: Let me just sketch out this new design for a workshop cabinet that will let me combine my tablesaw, bandsaw, chop saw and tool storage in a single location.
Sunday: I want my security camera to combine all the detected motion in to a single multilayer video that lets me scrub through events like layers playing simultaneously rather than scrub through time. Let me just write that down.
Monday: OpenWRT should have a "state" that is queryable via a curl request that determines if OpenWRT still needs to be configured. I can build that as a simple API and package it. Let me just write that down in my notebook.
Generally I find that trying to solve problems begets more problems (i.e. side projects beget side projects). Choose a tech stack and start building a Reddit clone, and you'll quickly hit roadblocks and get ideas.
Started a new side-project on the weekend (after a long long hiatus of just focusing on day job). Phase 1 was simply getting the stack up and running (PostgreSQL-backed, Python gRPC service taking gRPC-web through Envoy to a React front-end). Took some fighting through the setup to get a full-stack existence proof, ideas that arose during the working session:
side-project TODO #1 - Write a blog post about getting this all setup using current versions and push a public github repo with the setup to help other out.
side-project idea #2 - Build a micro-PaaS where a customer can define a gRPC interface, Python module implementing that, and with a single command, push this to a live serving endpoint.
side-project idea #3 - I need a state machine as part of my application logic, TODO: write a Python non-ephemeral state machine library that, with a simple Python internal DSL, backs state machine persistence onto a PostgreSQL table, handle automatic schema updates as the state machine is changed / versioned.
Literally not enough time to do any of these things though :)
Well, OP was the one who suggested to build a Reddit clone, my side project is something else :)
re: gRPC, largely pragmatic because of familiarity with protos and RPC interfaces defined in terms of protos. I wanted a typed API definition that generates first-class implementations in Typescript and Python.
Haven't had much success in the past re: using other formal mechanisms of defining API interfaces, and I'm no longer up-to-date with what's recommended in this space (any suggestions).
Alternative was GraphQL (since using React) but that's a learning curve and dealing with protos in Typescript and Python is a known-known for me.
What's the typical advice here? Something about writing down 100 ideas, diving into detail on your favorite 20, actually build a working prototype for 10 of them, and 2 or 3 will stand out, so pick one of those?
I read that somewhere, possibly here. Maybe someone can link the source, if they have it.
The advice from the blog post is awful as general advice. Posting anon here for obvious reasons, but there are different types of jobs. Some jobs reward you with equity, some reward you with promotions, and some are dead end jobs. Even many senior positions are dead end jobs.
I work at an A-round startup. Tons of people in FP&A, sales, accounting, and HR get promoted every six months. Engineers rarely get promoted. No refreshers. No raises.
Guess what? Engineers are now clocking out at 4pm, they are working on side projects, and it is the most rational thing to do.
On the flip side, I've worked at places where engineers are rewarded regularly for outstanding work. It makes sense to focus on your job.
If you think in terms of probability, there is no conflict. And that is also why "never do this if you want to get that" is often a necessary, but tautologically inaccurate, simplification.
> 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.
If you can speak to the processes involved and have demonstrable knowledge about how to implement things learned from side-projects, what's the difference between having done it at work versus personal time? None in my opinion.
> If you can speak to the processes involved and have demonstrable knowledge about how to implement things learned from side-projects
As I mentioned in my comment, no difference if the person is starting out or if the project gets traction.
But for experienced positions like the post author was talking about. You don't get additional signals on the developer, like did the product scale well, how was the uptime, the performance optimisations he needed to do, evolving the product with customer feedback etc. Also, bigcos love to ask around conflicts within a team, working with other teams because it matters a lot to them.
As an engineer I can admire the dexterity of a solution even if unproven but how do I verify it in an interview span. Easier to do this if I can attach it with a company name or some numbers.
I hate this and I spent early part of my career trying to come up with methods that can make hiring easier and reduce biases like company name but I realised how difficult the process is with different stakeholders, each having his own criteria and biases.
The counterpoint to this is the amount of resumes I've had to read and subsequent interviews I've had to sit on from "seniors" or "principals" that they themselves haven't gone fully into the weeds on whatever technology they've been practicing for 10+ years. The amount is staggering.
You know my hypothesis why, because they don't have side projects. They have silo'd themselves into whatever niche project or have been on maintenance mode on a piece of software for years and never evolve. Sometimes it's not their fault, their company has pigeon-holed them into whatever software and they can't escape for whatever reason.
They should have side projects (if they care to keep learning) or lest be left behind those in more dynamic companies or those that have side projects to evolve.
>The counterpoint to this is the amount of resumes I've had to read and subsequent interviews I've had to sit on from "seniors" or "principals" that they themselves haven't gone fully into the weeds on whatever technology they've been practicing for 10+ years. The amount is staggering.
You know this is a risk. If you went deep on something like Silverlight, you'd have just thrown away all that time. And then people will casually dismiss your 10 years away as not being relevant. And now you get to pick a new technology to maybe invest the next 10 years on, risking the same thing happening again. If a product dies, you go back to square one as a junior again on some new technology.
Picking a long-lasting technology is hard. You're predicting the future.
I'm really tired of people who think they have this industry figured out like it's easy to predict what will be around in 10 years so you can make safe choices about what to invest time into.
There's an argument for valuing ten years of Silverlight experience -- especially if it includes some gnarly projects where the framework isn't really holding your hand that much -- over ten years of flitting between web frameworks but never really getting much beyond implementing the stuff that shows up in the tutorial.
I think "going into the weeds" (and not being afraid to do so again, in another context) has some value independently of any specific patterns or tricks that apply to a particular technology.
> They have silo'd themselves into whatever niche project or have been on maintenance mode on a piece of software for years and never evolve. Sometimes it's not their fault, their company has pigeon-holed them into whatever software and they can't escape for whatever reason.
I think your hypothesis is correct. In my experience, most of the devs I've seen in that position do it to themselves. They get comfortable in their part of the codebase and rarely venture outside. Instead of helping other devs ramp up in their codebase, they just close all the tickets out themselves since that's easier than actually getting someone up to speed. I've gotten close to that situation, but realized what was happening and worked with my manager to take on different projects. It definitely creeps up on you.
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.
Doesn't it also mean the opposite? This person was at a better company now this person wants to work here. Why? What went wrong? Did big company make a mistake hiring. Vs this person seems to be on the rise. Each company is a bigger and each position is more senior.
I suspect "clear a certain kind of bar" is the biggest part of this.
Imagine you're a recruiter at Facebook. You reach out to thousands of candidates, convince hundreds to come in for interviews, and almost all of them fail because the interviews are hard and test skills that need to be specifically trained. If you convince a Googler to come in for an interview, they probably have a nearly 50% chance of passing since they've already done it at least once.
The recruiters are not exactly incentivized to bring in people who will be great hires. They are incentivized to bring in people who can pass the interview.
My favorite econ professor at my (private) university often pointed out that our eventual diploma was far more about signaling qualifications rather than education; that you won't necessarily get a better education than at the state school down the road, but it proves you can play the game; get the good grades in secondary school, do the things you need to do to get into the university, get the grades, do the work. It's far less about what you actually learn or the 'quality' of the education, whatever that means.
Yeah side projects shouldn't be a thing that you do to find a job unless that's all the experience you have. For example, if you're a junior new developer. Side projects are valuable though in that they keep you happy. You are in complete control and you arent tied down by deadlines or random whims of a senior manager five lev ls above you.
As a person trying to break into the software world to get a software developer job, I feel like side projects are the only thing I can show.
One day you read that recruiters only look for people that do opensource every single minute of their free time, the next day that you better hide your side projects. Shrug.
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.
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.
It depends. On company culture, your manager, and your role, among other things.
If you're doing a huge career change, side projects may be your only way. But most companies (in my experience at least) recognize the value in having their application developers understand some Ops work, and vise versa.
Many (most?) companies won't entirely "firewall" you from other groups. Even if you're throwing an application over the wall to ops, there's usually opportunities to learn from them, help out on specific tasks, etc.
That said, learning at work is probably _better_, but I do think side projects with a specific goal (e.g. to learn a technology) are a valuable supplement.
Yep. I didn't learn C# or Objective-C or Swift or Python at whatever job I had at the time, I learned them on my own, and then made a side-project with them, and was able to show that to future jobs and get hired that way.
One job I got because my side project was a finalist in a contest and was shown off at a convention my employer attended, and they called me as a result and brought me in for an interview.
Another job interview, I kind of stumbled on their programming test, but I was able to show something I made on the side, and that convinced them I knew enough to give me a week and bring me back in, and I refreshed my knowledge during that week, and I aced the test the second time and got the job.
My current job is at least in part thanks to those side projects I worked on in the past. And my side projects I'm working on now are giving me skills that I am not gaining at my current job, and will hopefully help align me with my next shift in my career (and if not, at least I'll make a few bucks and some people will enjoy the product).
I think we need to differentiate between a "learning project" and a "side project." Those are two very different things, at least to me.
A learning project is a project you're doing with the express intent of learning a new technology. The focus is on the learning, not the delivered functionality.
A side project is a project you're doing for the community. It's a labor of love. The focus is on functionality and meeting the needs of your users, not learning technology. You may even be able to grow it into an actual business.
From a career perspective you want to focus on learning projects. As you've mentioned learning projects are very important for your continued learning. Side projects on the other hand have the risk of distracting you from your work and my advice would be to avoid them unless you're scratching your own itch or maybe even want to explore starting a side business.
Bottom line - be clear with yourself on what you're doing and why you're doing it.
In the business world, delivered functionality matters.
I think building something for the community that the community actually uses teaches you a lot about product management and building reliable systems and designing products people want. You learn a whole lot about the reality of the industry by doing something purposeful.
There's a big difference, for example, in machine learning engineers who can train a model in a Jupyter notebook and an engineer who can both train and actually deploy a model like that on a self-driving car. Companies often very much appreciate having dipped into the practical aspect of things, where things like optimization, uptime, and consistency matter.
Also, building things that give you a feeling of success make you more driven and motivated to learn and improve. Sometimes having a thousand users is that feeling of success that is the driving force for more learning.
- cv-enhancing project (focus on optics, what the original article was mostly about and against)
In my experience, side projects are by far the most fun. All of the learning projects I've done in the past had some goal to achieve, something I could show someone and feel proud. I find it difficult to learn just for the sake of learning. Perhaps this is why I struggled with schooling.
A good interviewer easily figures out which type some side project is that a candidate lists on their resume. Just ask an appropriate probing question and you realize if they did this to learn something or to solve a problem they had or just to have something with javascript on their resume. It's almost counterproductive, if that's supposed to provide the basis for a "fluent in javascript" claim.
Similar experience here. I can attribute all my jobs to side projects - it always so happened that the technology I got employed for was something I tried to write a game in few months to years ago.
Yeah I never went to college/uni and got my first job in IT due to doing web/graphic design projects on the side of my non-IT job.
Then after getting sick of front-end/design I started coding back-end side projects and taught myself enough to ultimately get hired doing CMS development. Then same again to get into Sysadmin, after running game/file servers as side projects. Etc etc...
Five distinct career changes/upgrades over ~20 years inside IT, all thanks to building stuff I wanted to build for fun and that impressing the right people to get me hired. The only IT job I've ever gotten through working my way up in a company was the last one, into Project Management, and that was only due to the breadth of skills I taught myself throughout the years... on all those side projects.
If I didn't do side projects, and didn't always strive for more, I'd still be running/packing cables for concerts and working 20 hour shifts for barely enough money to survive.
The most transformative change in my career was turning my side project into a profitable company, which I now work on full-time. This was a huge step change in terms of my personal happiness and wealth. So, I generally disagree with the advice of forgetting side projects.
Focus on building your reputation and technical network. Your network will be the source of the best employment opportunities. Recruiters have presented me with some of my worst career opportunities. Former co-workers, technical collaborators and those who have been exposed to my previous work gave me the best opportunites.
Sure, if you do a good job with your employer, you will build reputation. But so do side projects, speaking at developer conferences and going to meetups. Build your network!
99% of the good jobs are filled through internal references. All the shit jobs nobody wants to do are filled through recruiters and cold appliers. Learned this one the hard way, lol.
Interesting article. The author has made an interesting conclusion and provided interesting premises to support it.
In my opinion, it depends on what your career goal is and what you want out of life.
If you are in a position where you use a technology you don't like or work on projects you don't enjoy, a side project on the weekends can be a way of addressing the gap. Not everyone has the chance of joining a great company.
It also depends on what country or continent you reside in. It appears that in American culture, side projects are actively encouraged; A couple of silicon valley companies have come out of side projects.
A different argument can also be made that doing multiple side projects would not make you a better programmer. Our culture tends to focus on quantitative factors for improving skills rather than qualitative factors. What if rather than doing side projects, one changes ones attitude in their current job?
An excellent article on qualitative factors on excellence can be found in https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/what-is-excellence
> Continue to do as many side projects as ever, code on nights and weekends if you want too, but don’t think about how they could be useful to you to get a new job.
My experience has been different than the author. I suffer from pretty bad anxiety, which doesn't exactly come in handy during interviews and coding challenges. Side projects have been a good way to talk deeply and technically during interviews about concrete problems that I've worked on because I can't show a potential employer code I wrote for someone else's company.
That said, I think there's limited value in showing an employer the product of some tutorial, but side projects that came from my brain alone never hurt in an interview context, and almost always helped.
If one is not currently at a company with a "brand name", how else are they supposed to get noticed amongst a pile of other "brand name" applicants?
Is the same true for educational backgrounds? If you don't have an Ivy League degree, what methods can you use to put yourself in the running vs those that do? Side projects seems like a good option in both cases to appear competitive.
I work on side projects on hope that I can one day make enough money from one of it and have financial freedom to do anything I want anytime. Hopefully soon and not when I am 60.
If I die tomorrow and all I did was focus on my career that would be so sad.
I can understand not letting your side project get in the way of your job. If you have a slow day at the office, it's not the time to be working on your side project - although many people do.
However, if it weren't for side projects, I would never have learned Linux, virtualization, handfuls of programming languages, or so many other things I ended up bringing into my 8-5 job.
If you use work materials to work on your side project, your employer can make a claim to it. This is why you should always have a separate personal computer for personal stuff, and a work machine you use for only for work stuff.
Well if your side project became a $1b company, you would have a very different story. A better advice: focus with no apologies on what really interest you.
> 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 exciting prospect), at least try to impress CEOs or product managers, or -- my goodness -- at least hiring managers. I heard a fun anecdote of Evan Spiegel attending an LA hackathon maybe 6 or 7 years ago. Some nerdy engineer showed him that he figured out how to get around Snapchat's spam filter. Spiegel offered him a job on the spot. Could a recruiter ever do that? Hell to the no.
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)
This might be the case, but recruiters and sourcers can and do sometimes reach out with the first message on behalf of the hiring manager. It looks the same to the candidate.
Not necessarily. Elon Musk stopped personally interviewing every vetted candidate about a week before I interviewed at SpaceX. I had to write him a short essay instead. When I started, there were about 1000 employees. Also, if you do get hired and work on something important, it's pretty likely you'll meet the CEO at some point, even in a company with many tens of thousands of people.
Ehm. Not sure which industry you are in, maybe banking? As a software engineer, when I do interviews and a guy walks in in a suit, that's nowadays a counterindicator. It has turned out to negatively correlate with interview performance. In my experience, dressed-up people in interviews tend to be just very inexperienced at best (somebody at their universities interview training course put "dress i a suit on some slide" an they didn't question that) or downright incompetent at worst (they are unable to understand nuanced context, draw conclusions and use them to make an improvement going forward).
Indeed, I always recommend finding someone you know who works at the company and getting an in from the inside. Even if they just throw you to the recruiters, you'll be at the top of the pile and that's often the hardest part.
This is also true, fwiw, of how I recommend switching teams within a company. Go sit with them, see what they're up to, establish a mutual fit, then ask their manager to sort out the transfer with your manager.
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
I've only been hired by impressed CEOs (small startup CEOs), and have to date never gotten a job offer in software through the standard recruitment process (n=5 offers out of ~100 applications moved to interview, not counting applications seen but not considered via services like triplebyte).
Well that's not entirely true, I did finally get an offer last week but it was downgraded from the advertised offer to "let's try out 3 months contract first".
^ Same. The last time I was out of work my wife was asking why I wasn't pounding the pavement sending out tons of cover letters and resumes and the like. I told her that in the 21 years I've been working, I've not gotten a single job via that route. It's always been networking. At some point about 10-15 years ago I just stopped even bothering with a resume at all. If I can't get in front of a decision maker, I don't consider it a viable opportunity. In contrast, About 75% of the time I've been able to speak directly to a department head, manager, or C-suite executive I've been hired on the back of a 30-45 minute conversation. I'll take a 3 out of 4 hit rate on a pair of conversations over sending out dozens of customized cover letters and resumes any day of the week.
What kind of companies are they? Small companies with less than 100 people?
I've never seen any medium-large company where any single person was able to take a decision. Large companies cut all hiring power from their middle managers, forcing to interview with a whole panel, this prevents manager from favoring friends and building a fiefdom.
Indeed, small companies. I don't have the right pedigree to make it through hiring hurdles at big companies. Despite industry name recognition and 11 years of experience I get filtered out because I never went to college. HR / People Ops / Recruiters tend to not know enough about the technical roles they are hiring for to gauge skill, so they go the lazy route and use college degrees or BigCo work history as a proxy. If you don't have a degree you can't get BigCo, so you fail on both fronts. Department heads and small company founders can tell if you know your stuff or not with a simple conversation. So that's what I've optimized for when looking for work. Routes to those people and around normal hiring filters.
You did not answer the question which was not if there ever was any case at all, but how many. An individual example is useless when the question is about if something works at (even minor) scale.
nobody is claiming that my experience is extrapolatable ad infinitum. However, if it was such a rare thing, what are the odds that someone like me would exist?
> An individual example is useless when the question is about if something works at (even minor) scale
That is incorrect. The plural of anecdote is data.
It's the rare thing. I bet that if you go to any big tech companies, you will find that pretty much none of the engineers got hired by impressing a CEO
Not all CEOs are CEOs of big companies. I went to a middle class high school in the US and no less than 5 of the students in my class of 70 are or have been CEOs.
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 spend your free time coding, instead of hiking, or some other hobby.
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.
Except that some side projects have value. The fact that you do the show useful traits- not all that you should consider hiring and not sufficient but useful. Not agreeing they have more value than hiking is wrong. I know several side projects which did have value and shown at least that their holders were interesting to hear.
I work at a company as a consultant. Devs here have been doing the same thing for 10 years. Webforms. Guess what? None of their hobbies include coding. Stuff like git is like fire to these cavemen.
My first question is what does migrating to a new system get you that the current system doesn’t? Is the new system even compatible with existing system? I ask, because you sound like you want to rewrite a stable system. Stop whining and make a business case.
The idea that you need hobbies that match your work is as dumb as expecting a funeral director to embalm cats on the weekend.
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.
> 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 use it and trust us because they considered that a very important signal. The decision is not upto just developers.
> I heard a fun anecdote of Evan Spiegel attending an LA hackathon maybe 6 or 7 years ago. Some nerdy engineer showed him that he figured out how to get around Snapchat's spam filter. Spiegel offered him a job on the spot.
I am sure we will all have our anecdotal examples like this and I am not against side projects. I agree with the post author that side projects are great, but don't expect them to count towards your next job. If they do, then great.
Yeah I would split the issue raised in this post along two axes. The first is junior vs senior positions. For a junior position a half-baked github project or a little meetup presentation does wonders for you. At the senior level unless you did something incredible or highly relevant in your side-projects no one cares, it can even be a negative.
The other is how are you getting the job. Are you sending in your resume through a jobs site or are you calling your old friend the startup CTO to see if you can help out? Side-projects, failed startups, and networking will make the latter strategy easier for you but won't help much with the former.
Looking for a senior role through an impersonal application process depends very heavily on your primary, full-time employment track record. Otherwise I think there is still real value in developing along other lines.
That is very interesting, and would account for what I considered a mysterious experience of having a very hard time finding work this past year (while that had not remotely been an issue for me in the past).
I've been doing freelance for a few years now, but when I was hired at two startups prior to that, in each case it was clear that my side projects were the driving factor. (The first time, it was an offer directly in response to a ShowHN I'd posted; the second is harder to explain since it comes down to a series of calls/emails with the guy who hired me, and the fact that my unimpressive formal schooling was in stark contrast to everyone I worked with.)
In any case, during that time I'd turned down many inquiries sent to me by people potentially interested in hiring me, and the only places I applied to I was hired at.
More recently when I've tried applying for positions it's like my portfolio is irrelevant. Where previously those projects were met even with astonishment at times, and frequently with what seemed like genuine curiosity, now it seems like people are more interested in 'gaps in my resume' (where I was in fact working on more research or entrepreneurial software projects).
What's strange to me is that I wasn't particularly young during the first phase I spoke of: I posted the ShowHN that landed me my first real startup position when I was 27 (I'm 34 now)—so it's not like people's reactions to my projects were about it being impressive 'for my age' or something.
It seems like more and more the work I've done on my own on is irrelevant or even seen as a negative, while more traditional resume items take the forefront.
Obviously you know a great deal about your own situation than any internet commenter but perhaps you’re taking the wrong lesson from this?
Reading your story I would not be surprised if the problem was that the side projects strategy has topped out for the current level of impressiveness and publicity. I bet increasing either would improve results. If you look at Greg Kogan’s website[1] since he’s a consultant too there’s nothing about any impressive educational background. It’s all research and case studies. Blowing your own trumpet more, whether by speaking at meetups and conferences or creating digital artifacts that anyone can find on your website and then telling ten people who might be interested and might share might help. Both of these help more as they are performed more consistently, obviously.
Something I had some success with was grouping things together on the resume. Having lived through it it can feel like different chapters but often that isn't legible to others. So you had a lot of success freelancing for a year and then spent 3 years on product research and development that went nowhere or looks doomed in hindsight. Why did you give up a good business to dither around?
Really what happened was you spent 4 years on an entrepreneurial journey that involved products, services, and R&D. That the services side provided the revenue to support the other segments is exactly how that business is supposed to work. It's how IBM works.
The first rounds you were going for new graduate positions, they were looking at your side projects because juniors don't have anything to show, and they saw something in yourself, a cheap youngster willing to work hard probably like they were at your age. (You're right that 27s was not fresh out of university but it was 20s nonetheless and you were treated as a junior / new graduate)
The later rounds you are going for experienced positions, they have much higher expectations. They want to see successful experiences at previous companies, building things (preferably the same thing they are doing), working with coworkers, delivering in a more-or-less corporate environment. It's completely different expectations. A side project is out of touch at best.
Never worked in SV, but I have found 0/5 jobs via my network, which is pitifully small (because I spent the bulk of my career in the defense industry).
> No matter how we feel, the process still goes through recruiters.
That's right and they simply look for keywords on my various online profiles and send me the standard "I'm really impressed by your experience, I think you'll be a great fit" message, even though 50% of the time I'm clearly not a great fit. Why do they get this wrong? Because they are "are bottom-of-the-totem pole, lowest-common-denominator bottom-feeders" to quote the parent post...
Is that a matter of competence, or a deliberate tradeoff regarding false positives and false negatives? Or are they just motivated to show high numbers?
Almost universally these types of behaviors emerge from self-interest. So it's pretty safe to assume that whatever approach recruiters tend to follow, they do so because it is the optimum for them. That means either that the incentives are a problem, or that the seemingly foolish recruiting techniques you've been exposed to are more effective than you might realize, not being a recruiter yourself. Probably a mix.
The problem is that sometimes what is "optimal to the recruiter" is not optimal for the applicant nor optimal to society. This is why applicants get frustrated or angry.
I heard a recruiter once (socially) tell me that they ignore all resumes with foreign names for sales positions because on average their yield on such calls is too low to bother.
Fair -- absolutely not.
Optimal to recruiter -- probably.
Good for the organization - no.
Good for society - no.
I'd love if there was something company owners and operators did to prevent things like this which are local maximums but globally inefficient (as well as unethical and unfair)
Your last para is my exact point. The recruiters are acting in self interest. Expecting that they do otherwise is a doomed hope. It is up to owners, and transitively up to society at large, to make and if need be enforce policies that encourage the desired behavior.
> I'd love if there was something company owners and operators did to prevent things like this which are local maximums but globally inefficient (as well as unethical and unfair)
Well, continuing your line of thinking: what's the incentive structure for company owners/stakeholders? And how does it stimulate them to seek global efficiency?
In vernacular, "theory" is completely different from the scientific jargon meaning of a "theory", which leads to people saying "Evolution is just a theory".
Similarly, the economic jargon term "efficiency" is not at all the same as the commonplace definition you used. The economic definition barely covers anything beyond profit maximisation and cost minimisation and is precisely the reason we see so many externalised costs. Companies are "efficient" only in monetary terms, but that doesn't preclude waste, missed opportunities, myopia and environmental or societal fallout.
tbh I suspect it's at a fairly reasonable effort/reward point for them. There's so little you can factually learn from a short glance that confidence will always be low, and there are so many applicants (because applying is super low cost) that spending sufficient time to get a clearer answer is not worthwhile.
There probably are some high-quality-only recruiter groups out there, but they're not what most companies use. Which is probably why referrals are so valued in many places.
I suspect, much like women on dating websites, people receive many more low-effort messages from recruiters, because the subset of recruiters sending out low-effort messages send out far more of them.
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.
If you can't impress a recruiter, you are going to struggle to get a job at most companies. That's the starting point. It's great to think about what to do beyond then... but if you can't get past the starting point you're going to fail.
I feel like this is one of those moments that shouts “Hacker News is not typical”. A lot of people are employed through recruiters, including for Facebook, Google and the rest! Aiming to impress the CEO is all very well, but it’s not common.
This comment should really be more towards the top of the chain so more people are aware that the grandparent comment is one of those "HN is atypical" moments. Many HN users like the grandparent are very disconnected from the reality that exists for everyone else, where plenty of people have to swim and trudge through the hellscape of recruiters who don't know or care that LINQ is a feature in C# and not a separate language but who will ultimately decide whether or not you're qualified. They have to be appeased like everyone else if the applicant doesn't have the luxury of an extended network of people they can casually ping and go "hey pal i'm back on the market hook me up :)"
Being in tech, I am friends/acquaintances with several people that work for both Google and Facebook. I also interviewed with both. In both cases, it was because an in house recruiter reached out to me on linkedin, not because I had some inside connection.
At the start up I interned at during the beginning of my career, I got the interview and the job because I knew one of the developers. Every other job has been bog standard: apply , talk to recruiter, do phone screen, do onsite.
My sister is a recruiter. I’ll be sure to tell her that you think she’s a bottom-of-the-totem-pole, lowest-common-denominator bottom-feeder. That’ll brighten up her day. And when she doesn’t take it to heart, I’ll be sure to add a ‘Let’s be frank...’.
Two things. First the "I know / am related to / am married to group" so you can't have a negative opinion about group thing is super cringe. I'm also pretty sure it's one of the logical fallacies. To put into perspective here is a rather extreme example: "My cousins an axe murderer, I'll be sure to tell him you think axe murders are bad, that'll brighten up his day". See how me saying I'm related to an axe murder doesn't actually change your opinion on axe murderers at all?
Secondly, Bottom of the Totem Pole is actually the revered position[1]. Bit of an amusing cultural knowledge oversight on the OPs side ;-)
> Secondly, Bottom of the Totem Pole is actually the revered position[1]. Bit of an amusing cultural knowledge oversight on the OPs side ;-)
Hah, this is super interesting. I'm almost certain that I heard or read the "bottom-of-the-totem-pole" saying before, but you're totally right that I may have reversed it!
OP disparages people in my sister's line of work as "bottom-feeders", which is just a more euphemistic, if not cowardly, way of saying 'parasite', or 'scum'. My point is to draw attention to the decent people who work as recruiters (I'm implicitly holding my sister here as the archetype of a good person) and expose the original insult as unwarranted. An axe murderer is clearly someone who is indefensible, so could never be invoked as a positive example in argument with a statement like "Axe-murders are the worst people ever!"
Also, an 'axe murderer' is a caricature of a real murderer, used in comedy, horror films etc..., and not a honest counterexample to my sister.
But I digress..., thanks for the note on Totem Poles, I was unaware!
I mean, the REAL truth is that I don't do side projects to impress recruiters... I do them because of my intellectual curiosity. That said, they HAVE helped me make a pretty successful career shift.
This. Imagine the mental toll of working a full time job but then doing "side projects" you don't love doing, to further your career? I can't even imagine how soul crushing that must be.
Oh come on. Even as engineers, it's important not to have delusions of grandeur: we're replaceable cogs in an infinite machine. Unless you're engineer #2 or work as a VP or a part of the C-suite, you truly don't really matter to the company. Thinking otherwise will only lead to heartbreak.
Yes. But the supply of the cogs is limited, and to replace one you need to stop the machine. Even after the replacement you are not sure you put the right cog in.
Cogs being replaceable does not mean that replacing them is costless.
I ran that hackathon. Can confirm it happened in 2015. LA Hacks at UCLA, Evan was the keynote speaker and stayed around to talk to hackers and builders after his speech. Snapchat, as a company, was at its hottest peak in 2015. Very cool event.
impressing recruiters is downright stupid. Let's be frank: recruiters are bottom-of-the-totem-pole, lowest-common-denominator, bottom-feeders.
My friend, this isn't personal, but a fact: you're privileged.
I sense you've never been in a position where you have $3,000 in the bank, your wife is depending on you to get through college, and you have to get a job or you lose your apartment.
Out here dropping stories about Evan Spiegel; gimme a break. Most people don't know any CEOs, PMs, or hiring managers.
The funny part is, I agree with your premise. You are indeed presenting the best way of opening doors. It's worked for me, and has opened many doors.
But only when I was in a better position. Till then, it was one of the worst things I could have done. Focusing on playing the hiring game would have put me in a much stronger position.
The comment you made is slightly out of touch. There's nothing wrong with that, but I think you'll maybe look back on it in 10 years or so with a wince.
In the situation I described above, where you absolutely need that job, all the people you mention have a good chance of forgetting about you due to day-to-day politics. Guess who won't? That recruiter. Because they get a cut of your salary.
> My friend, this isn't personal, but a fact: you're privileged.
Oh man, only if you truly knew how off-base this is :) My parents moved to the US with $2000, two kids (I was 11), and two carry-ons. But I'm not here to compete in the Victim Olympics.
> Most people don't know any CEOs, PMs, or hiring managers.
Good thing attending a hackathon is free. Good thing you can interact with literal SV royalty here on HN for free. Good thing you can contribute to famous OSS projects with minimal investment...
> In the situation I described above, where you absolutely need that job, all the people you mention have a good chance of forgetting about you due to day-to-day politics. Guess who won't? That recruiter. Because they get a cut of your salary.
Yeah, I disagree with this. I've been "forgotten about" and "ghosted" by more recruiters than I can remember. Not to mention that half the time my area of expertise wasn't even lined up with what they were looking for, and as soon as they hear about a potential pivot (front end to back end, engineering to product management, etc.) they jump ship. But people I've impressed (old bosses, old PMs, people I met through hackathons, obviously old founding partners) are always willing to come up to bat.
My parents also say this, except they say $40. But US immigration policies generally require immigrants to have some way of supporting themselves. While my parents didn't have much cash, they did have college educations and my father had been accepted to a PhD program — which is privilege.
I'm not trying to assume your parents' particular situations — just that there are things we unconsciously take for granted.
It's an aspect of someone's life that may mean better odds of making more money or pursuing some intellectual path. Your parents' degree does not prevent them from being shitty parents.
Not OP, but my parents came with little too. It depends on the situations. "Choosing" to come to the US for shits and giggles, you are absolutely correct on meeting substantial requirements.
Refugees/Asylum-Seekers don't follow the same requirements. It's super hard to nail down as there are different types and most (that I've been aware of) are case-by-case situations. You have war, religious, political, stateless, there's many types and yea... I wouldn't discount what your parents told you. There might be more to the story they don't want to share.
I am inclined to agree with the top comment, partly from my own experience. In college, I was a sub-3 GPA student with not-so-great internship experience, although I did cofound a startup. Yet I was able to reach out to some of the "privileged" you mention at the top of the totem pole - firm partners, founders, etc. Heck, I literally connected with MBB partners simply by shooting an email to them to meet and chatting with them. I don't even know what one guy even saw in me, but he even persuaded me to apply and referred me for an interview (which I was able to crack thankfully), which is a big deal considering they have to give clear reasons as to why they are referring you. And this was not in a backwater with a few guys but a major global financial center. I got my first good internship and subsequently my first job in private equity because I was an idiot who decided it would be a good idea to wait outside an office building an entire day so that I could show an MD the financial models I had built (after shooting an email obviously). And this was in white shoe finance, so I'm sure the barriers are much lower in tech.
Edit:- Apologies if I sound like I'm using a lot of anecdotal evidence/ grand-standing, but I had to disagree with that comment, and the best evidence I had was my own, although there are a lot of similar stories in the Street.
Edit 2:- I should add this too, since it is highly relevant to the linked topic. The people who referred/hired me later mentioned that a key reason for them taking me on was my startup experience, which was what the original link's author would call a "side project".
Yet I was able to reach out to some of the "privileged" you mention at the top of the totem pole - firm partners, founders, etc. Heck, I literally connected with MBB partners simply by shooting an email to them to meet and chatting with them.
To be clear, I would always 100% recommend trying your approach. It's how I even got my start, back when I was 17. It really does work.
But it's also more effective when you're a young, wide-eyed student. People see in you what they saw in themselves: a young person, eager to learn and to do a good job.
The older you get, the more strings that attach. And you lose the charm of being a young ambitious person. People have more history by which to judge you. No one expects a sub-3 GPA student not to have resume gaps, or a degree, or leadership experience, or any of the expectations that come with age. It's just a fact of life. Even if it's technically ageist, I'd rather play the game and win, not argue the game isn't fair or that it should change.
The moment I read bottom-feeder, "bottom-of-the-totem-pole, recruiter," etc, my recruiter buddy from St Louis immediately popped to mind. We weren't friends outside of work, but he placed me at two big financial companies over the course of two or so years. When I was fired from the first one solely due to showing up late (because undiagnosed narcolepsy), I was worried the recruiter's firm wouldn't want to do business with me anymore.
I shouldn't have been worried at all; they care about their cut, and I cared about not running out of money.
But I probably would have worried a lot more if I had secretly thought of him as some bottom-feeder loser, rather than a key who could open a door that was mutually beneficial. Because (a) business partners can sense when you think poorly of them, unless you're really, really good at hiding it, and (b) it would blind me to the fact that I needed him.
He was a cool guy on a personal level too. Had a house, dog, family, took me out to lunch a couple times, etc. He was doing better than I was at that point, for sure, even if I was in a stronger position long-term.
I guess the takeaway is, do the cold-email thing if you can (twitter DM works shockingly well for this); if not, try to find someone you know who might be looking; then recruiters as a fallback plan. But boy oh boy, if those "bottom-feeder recruiters" weren't there for me, I would have been screwed. :)
The privilege is simply thinking that you're better than the recruiter doing his job, or the woman at the store bagging groceries, or anyone else. A little twist of fate, being born to slightly different parents, not having the right mentor in your life, not having access to a computer when you were young... any of these things could easily have put you in their shoes, almost regardless of inherent ability. So it was just super shocking, I suppose, to hear such "honesty" about my cool recruiter buddy with a dog.
I think it goes without saying that your personal connection with the recruiter encouraged him to work extra hard to get hired. Some recruiters are really good - though I haven't used them myself, I know a number of folks who used them to their advantage. Of course, it's all about how much the recruiter likes you too - if they are indifferent to you, they will not put in that extra mile.
I don't think recruiters ended up recruiters due to familial circumstances though - many of them I know worked in the same fields they help recruit to, and largely pulled out due to burnout or some other unintentional consequences.
Also it is to be noted that recruiters are usually the only way forward once you reach a level of seniority - you won't be able to cold-email after a while.
My comment was largely targeted at the above comment which said that it's only possible through being part of the privileged.
It has. The well-meaning use of the word is trying to convey a sentiment that your views may not work for people who are less well-off or in various dire circumstances. Which is a good point to make, in context.
However, in the common use on the Internet, this word very often just stands for "you're better off than ${some group}, so your opinion is invalid and you should repent" dismissal/personal attack combo. Which makes knee-jerk reactions to its use, if not justified, then at least not unexpected.
Attending a hackathon is free but being able to do something that impresses a high level member of a company and get offered a job is a bit unreliable, no?
it's survivor-ship bias at its most obvious. Most people are not getting jobs by doing something extraordinary at a public event and getting offered it right on the spot.
Yes, thanks for naming it. Most of the stories above this comment all have it to varying degrees. It’s funny to me how they all write that they do not want to put forth an entry for the ‘Victim Olympics’, yet they all do share their story anyway...
The fact that this term is even used by these folks (and this is the first time I’ve seen it), to me shows that there is an (possibly unconscious) underlying contempt, as well as a lack of Class consciousness. Which is quite scary for the power dynamics present in Silicon Valley and the still-early-days -digital realm, what with the dogmatic idea of ‘Intellectual Property‘, etc.
Instead of ‘Victim Olympics‘ we would all benefit from talking about ‘Magical Voluntarism’, as well as to take part in further critiquing the underlying systems.
You really think your experience works at scale? You're the product of hard work, smart decisions, awesome parents and something often forgotten - luck.
If you think for a minute your experiences can be translated and reproduced by the masses, you're kidding yourself.
It doesn't work. Too many variables in life to capture all of them.
I'm imagining 20 years from now someone making IntervieweeBot, who will pass all the tests and STILL not get the job because the interviewer didn't like that indignant look in the robot's eye. Or MLHire, a machine-learning algorithm that reliably fails to predict what the employee will want to be doing at the end of their contract. It will make millions in a Series A, become hugely popular, then promptly forgotten after [Elon Musk-like in 20 years] fails to deliver.
EDIT: 80% chance of male pronoun considering the industry, but wasn't sure.
Same story here (parents came to the US with 3 kids (I was 9)) and struggled to support us (initially by being dishwashers at the local buffet).
I got a good college education and have a cushy software gig. Now I sit on my butt all day drinking LaCroix watching the checks come in. I sure as hell consider myself privileged.
Just because you started out lacking privilege, doesn't mean that you don't have it now.
But at what point does hard work and perseverance get any credit? You're not doing anyone any favors by lumping them into "privileged" vs "disadvantaged" binary groups, you're promoting victimhood mindset while virtue signaling your politics.
Part of the problem is, a lot of the best people in this field don't even realize how fuckin hard they had to work to get to the point they're at, because they didn't think of it as work a lot of the time. It seems easy until you have to show someone who isn't literally obsessed with it how to do it, at which point you start to realize how much experience and reading and studying and experimentation you're drawing from that you can't really skip over without missing important stuff.
There is a huge element of luck or privilege in having the intellectual space to be obsessed with code/math/business/design/etc at all, which factors in heavily as a filter, but yes, you need to do hella work as well. Being naturally smart is super helpful, too, and can cut the amount of work by a large factor, but by itself it's not enough.
When I first started in dev in my early 20s, I got super lucky to have a landlady who was also a VP of Tech for an insurance company. I got to know her decently. When I was emailed by my first recruiter (it was just a blanket message, but I took it seriously since I was young and dumb), I asked her for some advice since she was already in tech for longer than I was alive at the time. I asked what exactly the recruiter's goal and point was to all of this and how to best utilize the opportunity.
"A recruiter is your pimp and you're a prostitute. Work with them so they get you better dates." Was all she really told me on the matter.
From there, I reached out to recruiters and worked with them. I ended up choosing to just take contract jobs for the 1099 pay and flexibility. Plus, the guy I ended up working with was able to pimp me out more often and made more money. I got more and better work. Plus, they're stellar on re-writing your resume for you.
7+ years after leaving that, I still have a few emailing me with jobs. No one forgot me because I didn't let them. Recruiters are only shitty bottom feeders to folks with shitty, privileged attitudes. They like working with partners, not self-centered assholes.
Also, I call bullshit on your pivoting/jump ship comment. They jump ON folks that they can pad their resume and pimp them out for more money. The more roles you "could" fill, they can translate to a vertical and horizontal experience spectrum that crushes the competition, which they then sell you for double even though you're still only doing one job. They're the salesmen. Let them sell you.
That and my parents came with $15 bucks and a kid to the USA with the state funded sponsor disappeared with their grant the day before they landed. But hey, just like you, I didn't mention that to podium in the Victim Olympics. One thing I learned about all of us first-gens, we're all equally angry cunts.
LinkedIn exists for exactly this reason: as a directory of hiring managers you can connect with.
Cold-emailing / cold-calling people for finding roles is a good way to accomplish this, if you craft your pitch right and do your research well on how you can deliver value.
That's basically what branding is about, isn't it? Identifying where and how you can make a difference better than other people, making that your elevator pitch, and broadcasting that to people who need that difference in their lives.
I'm not impressed by the other comments arguing reaching people in positions of impact is next to impossible, at least in tech. There are two high-schoolers right now in the latest batch of YCombinator who literally cold-called Sam Altman for funding, and got it (see https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/08/11/2-t...).
This isn't even that crazy a way to connect with people. I once knew a recruiter who was fanatically inventive about connecting with people - he once got a cybersecurity consultant who was perfectly happy with his existing job to switch roles by (1) using the Wayback machine to find copies of the engineer's (taken-down) personal website, where he had his Foursquare link, (2) using the Foursquare API to figure out he enjoyed playing chess at his local club and would frequent a bar, (3) showing up at said bar, striking up a conversation about chess with him, getting him to talk about his job, casually slipping in that he's a recruiter for company X looking for someone exactly like him, and leaving a business card behind.
This is not an endorsement of that guy's method - just a reminder that there are crazier things in life to do than picking up the phone and trying your luck.
Don’t take offense, sir, but how did you wind up in your unfortunate position?
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Your implication is precisely that recruiters are useful as a last resort. Wisdom beseeches to avoid decisions where that becomes necessary. Where, clearly, the recruiter is just using you and you are using them as a stop-gap measure.
No offense taken! I have narcolepsy, which means attending a 9-5 job is difficult. I woke up at 2pm today, for example.
It’s an advantage to conceal that fact, and the one company I did disclose it to, fired me about a month later. For completely unrelated reasons that totally didn’t violate any disabilities laws, of course /s.
It was also partly my own fault, but in hindsight I wasn’t able to recover until I even understood what was happening. I wrote a bit about it several years ago, shortly after being diagnosed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10984478
So my career progression has been more of a stochastic random walk. And I’m fine with that. :) Ended up being able to contribute one or two things to the ML scene, which is all I really wanted anyway. Just a scientist at heart, I suppose.
There’s nothing wrong with being used, and using someone, by the way, if it’s mutually beneficial. Aligned incentives are how society comes together.
I’m sorry to hear that. This speaks to the generally lower moral behavior of our society today. It develops gross incompetency in ability to deal with unique human physiologies.
Ideally people are able to work with each other’s upmost abilities rather than view people as a threat to their own job security and career progression. :(
Sir, I recommend you look into the history of Charles Steinmetz, for instance. And your generalization of minorities effectively evacuates its meaning - technically we are all minorities by your reasoning; or rather your lack of it.
>I sense you've never been in a position where you have $3,000 in the bank, your wife is depending on you to get through college, and you have to get a job or you lose your apartment.
When I was at my lowest point I was delivering sushi rather than waiting for a job that would look good on a resume. Most of the people in desperate situations like that aren't (don't have time to be) padding their resume with side-projects, and therefore aren't the topic of the original argument.
Perhaps. But one rich person once gave me a tip: don’t show weakness.
It bugged me at the time, but I’ve come to accept he was probably correct. It’s not a good idea to bring attention to matters that might work against you. Focus on selling yourself, and treat your business associates as customers (in the sense that you work hard to please them, in exchange for getting what you want). http://www.paulgraham.com/judgement.html
It’s important to know how people in better situations open doors. Because you can play that same game, with crafty use of time and words. And you might have more time than it seems, even in the position you mentioned (though I would not ever say it’s a guarantee): between Uber shifts, I’d park in a random store parking lots and build things, partly to keep sharp, but partly to get a job at a certain place, since the work was related. I didn’t get that job, but I gained so much knowledge that turned out to be much less obscure than it seemed; I still use it to this day.
You’re right in general though. People on a strong upwards trajectory have different concerns.
Funny enough, most competent hiring managers I’ve had the chance to speak to on the matter, agreed that if you’ve worked in the service sector, especially by necessity, you end up a much better hire _because_ you are usually more humble and happy with what you’ve got.
Sanitary worker turned software engineer is a very powerful story that can help you get a job, since if you’ve shoveled shit, fixing a nasty bug or doing a menial task wouldn’t be beneath you, and you’d make sure you do a good job. Managers seem to like that.
Impressing recruiters is easy. Doing that doesn't make you privileged.
I drove from PA to CA when I was 18, working along the way on my own business, and got a job in SV on my third interview as a "software engineer" making 65k. Bottom of the barrel coding job.
I'm somehow privileged now? Because I worked literally every day from the time I was 17 in high school until I got a full time job. Right.
If you earned it, then it isn't privilege, by defintion. Unless you consider being born a hard worker as being privileged, in which case the word is meaningless.
It's certainly different from what seems like the standard usage in the past few years, but I woudn't say it's a misuse. Here's is google's dictionary definition
"a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group."
In this case, the "advatange" would be 'able to find job without going through recruiter' and the 'particular person or group' would be 'the group of people who (through their hard work or otherwise) are sufficiently talented/and or secure enough in their career'
Anyway it's sad this this word has such a negative smell attached to it now, thanks to people using it to shame people on the opposing side of internet arguments.
My entire direct family is on welfare and was half my life. My parents spent a significant amount of time in mental hospitals while I lived with various aunts and grandparents (sometimes trailers, sometimes in a farm house. I liked the farm house though).
We actually ended up loosing the farm house to the bank. I say farm house because that's an easy way to describe it, but it was really just a house on the edge of another farm in the middle of nowhere. Lots of peace and quiet. :)
It doesn't matter if someone is privileged or not, recruiters _are_ bottom feeders. Its a shit job that nobody wants and anyone with a modicum of ability seems to get out of asap in my experience. They don't seem to know who their client is, what technology is or who you need to be but they can just about play snap (although they may struggle with java and javascript) and get someone to a job interview.
The whole point is that impressing these people is _pointless_ because they'd be impressed by a snow globe and mostly know nothing about tech. They're just a roadblock between you and the other technical people that you have to go round.
> It doesn't matter if someone is privileged or not, recruiters _are_ bottom feeders. Its a shit job that nobody wants and anyone with a modicum of ability seems to get out of asap in my experience.
It's totally a shit job in a ton of ways but the best recruiters absolutely make a killing. It's a sales job though so what makes a recruiter good from an engineers prospective is orthogonal to what actually makes them good.
I've met a lot of recruiters and I really think most of them don't have technical chops to be worthy of trying to impress. Its way more critical to worry about what your colleagues think of you. Focus on impressing them. Because three, five, ten years out when you have all spidered out to other companies it is these people who will get you your next great job.
I have a few friends, really smart ones, that would do anything to have recruiters "annoying" them. And all of this just because they made an unfortunate choice somewhere in their past: they didn't choose STEM.
Everytime I ear people here bashing recruiters I feel the urge to shout: It's not about you it's STEM. Enjoy your prized ticket but be humble.
For every decent recruiter I've ever dealt with I got a thousand low effort spams from India or Pakistan from guys all named John trying to get me to take some crappy call center or tech support position 2 moves back.
It might actually be 10000 to 1. I HAVE worked with tech recruiters (I can think of a specific local company) that were good, but it's incredibly rare outside maybe a major metro.
Recruiters are playing a numbers game. They aren't going to be evaluating your side project, they don't care about you as a person. They are there to do a job - find candidates. Yes you should try and be impressive enough they are interested, but if you're doing things primarily to impress recruiters that is probably going to work out poorly, as they don't make the final decision. And that is true regardless of how privleged you are.
> Most people don't know any CEOs, PMs, or hiring managers.
You don't need to know them personally. Most companies (small companies at least) post job advertisements on their website and you can apply via email or a simple application form that goes directly to the hiring manager.
I managed to get my first dev job with zero professional experience (and I mean zero, I'd literally never worked any job before), zero "networking" activity, and only high school qualifications using this method, and it's only gotten easier since then.
2012. I had been coding for ~5 years at that point, so I had a fair bit of coding experience. Just none of it was professional experience. I made a CV that went over my actual coding experience and skills in details, then I applied to small companies (<40 people). Many of those don't have much in the way of HR and have hiring managers dealing with CVs directly.
I have had great recruiters help me throughout my career. I didn't go into those relationships thinking of my career prospects but just letting someone buy me a drink or a meal and to chat and get to know them. Obviously they're trying to make money off your skills, but, a lot of them are really cool people just trying to get by and will look out for you if you let your guard down. Interviews are interviews, but meeting a recruiter is a first date
>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.
Yeah, they are. They're also how most people find jobs before we reach the career stage of being able to call a friend who knows a guy who works at a place.
Not only this, but the premise that working on your job will impress recruiters is just wrong.
There's a pretty simple flow chart for getting hired at a bay area company:
1. Go to MIT, Stanford, Cal, an Ivy, or CalTech and make sure you have linked in.
2. If 1 isn't possible then make a friend who works where you want to work and get a referral.
3. Cram leetcode
That's basically it.
Don't give up doing side projects and things you actually enjoy because that's how you learn.
I think you're also overly harsh on recruiters (they're not 'bottom-feeders'), they're friendly and can help you out - but they're just looking in a very narrow subset. Basically the graduates from those schools and people already employed at FAANGs.
Working at a good company can also help out. MS/Facebook/Amazon/Google all have reputations for a decent hiring bar and need to recruit a lot of engineers. There are other companies that have decent reputations and are less selective about interviewing.
Honestly, if you have a FAANG on your CV you're pretty much set, especially outside of SF (e.g. every other tech hub in Europe). Senior developer / CTO will be the kind of job offers you'll get, and recruiters will be all over you.
There's a massive gap between terrible spammy recruiters and impressing a hot startup's CEO directly.
Also the higher your position the less side projects matter because it's your main job responsibilities and performance that's in focus, not what you do on your own time.
The author is a native French speaker. Based on context, I'm pretty sure he's using the word recruiter to mean a company that's recruiting and not the HR individual that funnels resumes to hiring managers.
The issue is how else are you gonna get the attention of those people without going through a recruiter? Some, like you said, maybe able to do it. Some might have referrals.
But for a lot of people, recruiters reaching out or applying through a portal is the start of many new positions.
Assuming he's in France, by "recruiter" he means company recruiters / HR. Your CV and first phone interview always go to a recruiter at the company, that's the first person you have to talk to (and impress) to have a shot at any job.
American might understand recruiter as an external agency, there's no such thing in tech in France. There's no CEO/CTO either, they are sitting idle out of sight collecting money never interacting with the company or any employee.
"There's no CEO/CTO either, they are sitting idle out of sight collecting money never interacting with the company or any employee." -> Could you elaborate this, please?
In the US startup world, CEO/CTO are those who built the company from scratch up, growing the company and selecting the first hundred employees up to where it is today (billions of dollars with unicorns). It's a symbol, in many ways, more than can be described in a sentence.
In large US companies, they're more a public figure and who negotiate large contracts in person and send regular emails to employees telling them they are the greatest company and the greatest employees in the world.
In French companies. CEO/CTO are basically absent, they don't exist and don't send any communication. You can ask some French workers who are the executives of their company and they probably have no idea. The startup scene being pretty weak with no unicorn, there isn't any example you could quote either, there isn't a French Zuckerberg or Elon.
If you wonder who's there for real, there's a bunch of rich folks who sponsor one another to board and executive seats of the 100 largest companies and that's about it.
I began my side-project [1] one year ago. I quit my very well-paid job 6 months ago to make my side-project my full-time job.
It is going quite well (I am nowhere near making the same money). Just 2 of us at the moment. I've learnt so much over this period. Like what you would get over 10 years in a big tech company while jumping over all the hierarchy.
Moreover, my very first side project turned me from a guy who knows only Python into a guy who can set up entire architecture on the cloud. Later, I became somewhat a "rockstar"/jack-of-all-trades engineer.
But I agree, unless you do your side-project just to do something then it is your hobby.
My advice would be: someone has to pay for your side project's product/service. Because only then you can show that it generates real business value. This is the only thing which should matter to your future employer. You generate business value.
I stumbled across your project recently while helping a friend with scraping project. I think the pricing is reasonable but I found that the non-commercial limitations of the free plan make it difficult for smaller developers to try it out in their projects. Just my 2c.
I had a different experience, specifically it was my embedded software and hardware spare-time experience that gained me my most influential role to date (bridging iOS and embedded systems at a fast-growing start-up). It even helped me pass my technical screen as the CTO asked me to build a ring buffer. Little did he know I built one for an RS232 driver the week before.
I'm heading soon to do the same thing at another fast-growing startup.
I've actually talked about my side projects each time I've hopped jobs, and actually, when I took on advisory work. Niches are good!
I admire this approach and have many colleagues who operated this way. But for someone who didn’t get into a top school and had to start with “low prestige” jobs and work my way up focusing on side projects was essential to my career. By showing I could take risks and learn emerging technologies I was able to make myself attractive to startup and on the bleeding edge and just spent the last two years working in my dream field of AI/ML.
If you’re young and believe in yourself more than society’s ridged idea of credentialism has don’t be afraid to buck the trend. I failed out of a mid tier college. And while my 20s has my been a stressful hodgepodge of jobs I was under qualifying for. A public track record of my ability to create something with emerging technologies has always meant someone is willing and excited to work with me.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] threadWithout you having to do anything?
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.
You're right, but your point also indicates why business value side projects less than career projects. The skills and experience to complete the project don't overlap much between the two types of projects. The success criteria is usually quite different as well.
Lol this is why so many tech stacks at work go to shit. Someone wanting to add another bullet point to the resume and instead of doing it at home, they force a new tool/language at work (when possible).
I just think it's important to not classify all projects outside of your job as "shallow" side projects, and then completely discard them career wise like the article seems to be doing.
That one is actually pretty simple: pick the one that you have the most to learn from, because that's the whole point of doing a side project if you are trying to leverage it as something that would help your knowledge/career development (as opposed to doing a side project for some supplementary income, for example).
And yes, I am aware that there are many unknowns, and when you are trying to pick a project with the goal to learn the most, sometimes the projects where you think you already know 90% of the solution end up being the ones where you know the least and have more for you to learn than projects that had initially more unknowns. But without the ability to know the future, picking the one that has the most "stuff to learn" (according to your first assessment) at the initial discovery phase is imo the most optimal strategy. It is fine if you discover later that the other project had a bit more to learn than the one you picked, because the goal is to learn a lot averaged down over a long period of time.
Usually there's one project that you just can't get out of your head. If you don't know which it is, try to take a break from all of them, and you'll quickly learn which one maters.
I often think I should forget about this project altogether and focus on a viable one.
The alternative is to wind up as Burdian's Ass, who is equally hungry and thirsty, can't decide whether to eat hay or drink water, and so dies of hunger and thirst.
And if you choose wrong, you'll find out soon enough. Personally, I had a lot of projects I couldn't stop thinking about, but when I finally started working on them, I quickly realized it's a bad idea. The usual reasons were: a) I already found it done by someone else in a form that satisfies my needs, b) it became obvious that either the process or the outcome won't be as satisfying as I thought it would be, or c) after scoping it out, I realized I'm not in a position to invest the required amount of time and effort.
Abandoning a side project early is not a bad deal. Your research and thoughts put into it stay with you forever, and it often happens that you'll get secondary value from them on some other endeavor.
100 side projects is the chance at one idea worthy of implementation. If you have even one good idea, all of your bad ideas weren't only worth it, but amount to how you got there.
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.
Somewhat relevant, PG has a post on startup ideas http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
The hard part for me is to find the time to implement an idea. An idea for me just naturally flows from a problem.
Whenever I get an idea, I quickly note the main pointes in a note-taking app and usually never return to it, as the secret of creating actual useful products is to spend the time to create them well. Ideas are worthless if they are not well implemented.
Friday: I can build a nice and simple API for OpenWRT that is API focused and provides easier access to the common functions that people want from OpenWRT, this would help mobile app developers create apps that talk to OpenWRT in a simple way. Let me just write that down in my notebook.
Saturday: Let me just sketch out this new design for a workshop cabinet that will let me combine my tablesaw, bandsaw, chop saw and tool storage in a single location.
Sunday: I want my security camera to combine all the detected motion in to a single multilayer video that lets me scrub through events like layers playing simultaneously rather than scrub through time. Let me just write that down.
Monday: OpenWRT should have a "state" that is queryable via a curl request that determines if OpenWRT still needs to be configured. I can build that as a simple API and package it. Let me just write that down in my notebook.
The ideas aren't the problem.
Started a new side-project on the weekend (after a long long hiatus of just focusing on day job). Phase 1 was simply getting the stack up and running (PostgreSQL-backed, Python gRPC service taking gRPC-web through Envoy to a React front-end). Took some fighting through the setup to get a full-stack existence proof, ideas that arose during the working session:
side-project TODO #1 - Write a blog post about getting this all setup using current versions and push a public github repo with the setup to help other out.
side-project idea #2 - Build a micro-PaaS where a customer can define a gRPC interface, Python module implementing that, and with a single command, push this to a live serving endpoint.
side-project idea #3 - I need a state machine as part of my application logic, TODO: write a Python non-ephemeral state machine library that, with a simple Python internal DSL, backs state machine persistence onto a PostgreSQL table, handle automatic schema updates as the state machine is changed / versioned.
Literally not enough time to do any of these things though :)
re: gRPC, largely pragmatic because of familiarity with protos and RPC interfaces defined in terms of protos. I wanted a typed API definition that generates first-class implementations in Typescript and Python.
Haven't had much success in the past re: using other formal mechanisms of defining API interfaces, and I'm no longer up-to-date with what's recommended in this space (any suggestions).
Alternative was GraphQL (since using React) but that's a learning curve and dealing with protos in Typescript and Python is a known-known for me.
I read that somewhere, possibly here. Maybe someone can link the source, if they have it.
I work at an A-round startup. Tons of people in FP&A, sales, accounting, and HR get promoted every six months. Engineers rarely get promoted. No refreshers. No raises.
Guess what? Engineers are now clocking out at 4pm, they are working on side projects, and it is the most rational thing to do.
On the flip side, I've worked at places where engineers are rewarded regularly for outstanding work. It makes sense to focus on your job.
On size advice does not fit all.
I got a job because of my side projects and would be unemployed if I didn't work on side projects.
Now, who's opinion is correct?
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.
As I mentioned in my comment, no difference if the person is starting out or if the project gets traction.
But for experienced positions like the post author was talking about. You don't get additional signals on the developer, like did the product scale well, how was the uptime, the performance optimisations he needed to do, evolving the product with customer feedback etc. Also, bigcos love to ask around conflicts within a team, working with other teams because it matters a lot to them.
As an engineer I can admire the dexterity of a solution even if unproven but how do I verify it in an interview span. Easier to do this if I can attach it with a company name or some numbers.
I hate this and I spent early part of my career trying to come up with methods that can make hiring easier and reduce biases like company name but I realised how difficult the process is with different stakeholders, each having his own criteria and biases.
You know my hypothesis why, because they don't have side projects. They have silo'd themselves into whatever niche project or have been on maintenance mode on a piece of software for years and never evolve. Sometimes it's not their fault, their company has pigeon-holed them into whatever software and they can't escape for whatever reason.
They should have side projects (if they care to keep learning) or lest be left behind those in more dynamic companies or those that have side projects to evolve.
You know this is a risk. If you went deep on something like Silverlight, you'd have just thrown away all that time. And then people will casually dismiss your 10 years away as not being relevant. And now you get to pick a new technology to maybe invest the next 10 years on, risking the same thing happening again. If a product dies, you go back to square one as a junior again on some new technology.
Picking a long-lasting technology is hard. You're predicting the future.
I'm really tired of people who think they have this industry figured out like it's easy to predict what will be around in 10 years so you can make safe choices about what to invest time into.
I think "going into the weeds" (and not being afraid to do so again, in another context) has some value independently of any specific patterns or tricks that apply to a particular technology.
I think your hypothesis is correct. In my experience, most of the devs I've seen in that position do it to themselves. They get comfortable in their part of the codebase and rarely venture outside. Instead of helping other devs ramp up in their codebase, they just close all the tickets out themselves since that's easier than actually getting someone up to speed. I've gotten close to that situation, but realized what was happening and worked with my manager to take on different projects. It definitely creeps up on you.
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.
Imagine you're a recruiter at Facebook. You reach out to thousands of candidates, convince hundreds to come in for interviews, and almost all of them fail because the interviews are hard and test skills that need to be specifically trained. If you convince a Googler to come in for an interview, they probably have a nearly 50% chance of passing since they've already done it at least once.
The recruiters are not exactly incentivized to bring in people who will be great hires. They are incentivized to bring in people who can pass the interview.
Instead, I have started shifting my focus to "side-gigs" rather, with the goal that they create future value for me in some sense.
As a person trying to break into the software world to get a software developer job, I feel like side projects are the only thing I can show.
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.
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.
If you're doing a huge career change, side projects may be your only way. But most companies (in my experience at least) recognize the value in having their application developers understand some Ops work, and vise versa.
Many (most?) companies won't entirely "firewall" you from other groups. Even if you're throwing an application over the wall to ops, there's usually opportunities to learn from them, help out on specific tasks, etc.
That said, learning at work is probably _better_, but I do think side projects with a specific goal (e.g. to learn a technology) are a valuable supplement.
One job I got because my side project was a finalist in a contest and was shown off at a convention my employer attended, and they called me as a result and brought me in for an interview.
Another job interview, I kind of stumbled on their programming test, but I was able to show something I made on the side, and that convinced them I knew enough to give me a week and bring me back in, and I refreshed my knowledge during that week, and I aced the test the second time and got the job.
My current job is at least in part thanks to those side projects I worked on in the past. And my side projects I'm working on now are giving me skills that I am not gaining at my current job, and will hopefully help align me with my next shift in my career (and if not, at least I'll make a few bucks and some people will enjoy the product).
A learning project is a project you're doing with the express intent of learning a new technology. The focus is on the learning, not the delivered functionality.
A side project is a project you're doing for the community. It's a labor of love. The focus is on functionality and meeting the needs of your users, not learning technology. You may even be able to grow it into an actual business.
From a career perspective you want to focus on learning projects. As you've mentioned learning projects are very important for your continued learning. Side projects on the other hand have the risk of distracting you from your work and my advice would be to avoid them unless you're scratching your own itch or maybe even want to explore starting a side business.
Bottom line - be clear with yourself on what you're doing and why you're doing it.
In the business world, delivered functionality matters.
I think building something for the community that the community actually uses teaches you a lot about product management and building reliable systems and designing products people want. You learn a whole lot about the reality of the industry by doing something purposeful.
There's a big difference, for example, in machine learning engineers who can train a model in a Jupyter notebook and an engineer who can both train and actually deploy a model like that on a self-driving car. Companies often very much appreciate having dipped into the practical aspect of things, where things like optimization, uptime, and consistency matter.
Also, building things that give you a feeling of success make you more driven and motivated to learn and improve. Sometimes having a thousand users is that feeling of success that is the driving force for more learning.
- learning project (focus on learning)
- side project (focus on functionality)
- cv-enhancing project (focus on optics, what the original article was mostly about and against)
In my experience, side projects are by far the most fun. All of the learning projects I've done in the past had some goal to achieve, something I could show someone and feel proud. I find it difficult to learn just for the sake of learning. Perhaps this is why I struggled with schooling.
Then after getting sick of front-end/design I started coding back-end side projects and taught myself enough to ultimately get hired doing CMS development. Then same again to get into Sysadmin, after running game/file servers as side projects. Etc etc...
Five distinct career changes/upgrades over ~20 years inside IT, all thanks to building stuff I wanted to build for fun and that impressing the right people to get me hired. The only IT job I've ever gotten through working my way up in a company was the last one, into Project Management, and that was only due to the breadth of skills I taught myself throughout the years... on all those side projects.
If I didn't do side projects, and didn't always strive for more, I'd still be running/packing cables for concerts and working 20 hour shifts for barely enough money to survive.
Sure, if you do a good job with your employer, you will build reputation. But so do side projects, speaking at developer conferences and going to meetups. Build your network!
99% of the good jobs are filled through internal references. All the shit jobs nobody wants to do are filled through recruiters and cold appliers. Learned this one the hard way, lol.
In my opinion, it depends on what your career goal is and what you want out of life.
If you are in a position where you use a technology you don't like or work on projects you don't enjoy, a side project on the weekends can be a way of addressing the gap. Not everyone has the chance of joining a great company.
It also depends on what country or continent you reside in. It appears that in American culture, side projects are actively encouraged; A couple of silicon valley companies have come out of side projects.
A different argument can also be made that doing multiple side projects would not make you a better programmer. Our culture tends to focus on quantitative factors for improving skills rather than qualitative factors. What if rather than doing side projects, one changes ones attitude in their current job? An excellent article on qualitative factors on excellence can be found in https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/what-is-excellence
My experience has been different than the author. I suffer from pretty bad anxiety, which doesn't exactly come in handy during interviews and coding challenges. Side projects have been a good way to talk deeply and technically during interviews about concrete problems that I've worked on because I can't show a potential employer code I wrote for someone else's company.
That said, I think there's limited value in showing an employer the product of some tutorial, but side projects that came from my brain alone never hurt in an interview context, and almost always helped.
Is the same true for educational backgrounds? If you don't have an Ivy League degree, what methods can you use to put yourself in the running vs those that do? Side projects seems like a good option in both cases to appear competitive.
If I die tomorrow and all I did was focus on my career that would be so sad.
However, if it weren't for side projects, I would never have learned Linux, virtualization, handfuls of programming languages, or so many other things I ended up bringing into my 8-5 job.
- They allow me to grow my skills and also test ideas in public.
- Every code pattern or library I use in my main job has been put to test on my side-projects.
If I had more hours per day, I would pour them all into my side-projects.
A side project is a great way to get better at things you already have interest in.
A side business is a great way to discover new interests and challenges.
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 exciting prospect), at least try to impress CEOs or product managers, or -- my goodness -- at least hiring managers. I heard a fun anecdote of Evan Spiegel attending an LA hackathon maybe 6 or 7 years ago. Some nerdy engineer showed him that he figured out how to get around Snapchat's spam filter. Spiegel offered him a job on the spot. Could a recruiter ever do that? Hell to the no.
I guess maybe that’s counterproductive for a job as garbageman, but...
I do like that phrase a lot, though it does have its limits
This is also true, fwiw, of how I recommend switching teams within a company. Go sit with them, see what they're up to, establish a mutual fit, then ask their manager to sort out the transfer with your manager.
Well that's not entirely true, I did finally get an offer last week but it was downgraded from the advertised offer to "let's try out 3 months contract first".
I've never seen any medium-large company where any single person was able to take a decision. Large companies cut all hiring power from their middle managers, forcing to interview with a whole panel, this prevents manager from favoring friends and building a fiefdom.
> An individual example is useless when the question is about if something works at (even minor) scale
That is incorrect. The plural of anecdote is data.
Someone wins the lottery every week. What are the odds of winning the lottery? Is playing the lottery a good strategy to make money?
"Usain bolt won the olypmic gold medal many times (n=8).
If winning the gold medal was so rare, what are the odds that people like Usain Bolt exist?"
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 spend your free time coding, instead of hiking, or some other hobby.
The idea that you need hobbies that match your work is as dumb as expecting a funeral director to embalm cats on the weekend.
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 use it and trust us because they considered that a very important signal. The decision is not upto just developers.
> I heard a fun anecdote of Evan Spiegel attending an LA hackathon maybe 6 or 7 years ago. Some nerdy engineer showed him that he figured out how to get around Snapchat's spam filter. Spiegel offered him a job on the spot.
I am sure we will all have our anecdotal examples like this and I am not against side projects. I agree with the post author that side projects are great, but don't expect them to count towards your next job. If they do, then great.
Does it? Idk, maybe it’s because I’m not a SV SWE, but I’ve found all my jobs through my network.
The other is how are you getting the job. Are you sending in your resume through a jobs site or are you calling your old friend the startup CTO to see if you can help out? Side-projects, failed startups, and networking will make the latter strategy easier for you but won't help much with the former.
Looking for a senior role through an impersonal application process depends very heavily on your primary, full-time employment track record. Otherwise I think there is still real value in developing along other lines.
I've been doing freelance for a few years now, but when I was hired at two startups prior to that, in each case it was clear that my side projects were the driving factor. (The first time, it was an offer directly in response to a ShowHN I'd posted; the second is harder to explain since it comes down to a series of calls/emails with the guy who hired me, and the fact that my unimpressive formal schooling was in stark contrast to everyone I worked with.)
In any case, during that time I'd turned down many inquiries sent to me by people potentially interested in hiring me, and the only places I applied to I was hired at.
More recently when I've tried applying for positions it's like my portfolio is irrelevant. Where previously those projects were met even with astonishment at times, and frequently with what seemed like genuine curiosity, now it seems like people are more interested in 'gaps in my resume' (where I was in fact working on more research or entrepreneurial software projects).
What's strange to me is that I wasn't particularly young during the first phase I spoke of: I posted the ShowHN that landed me my first real startup position when I was 27 (I'm 34 now)—so it's not like people's reactions to my projects were about it being impressive 'for my age' or something.
It seems like more and more the work I've done on my own on is irrelevant or even seen as a negative, while more traditional resume items take the forefront.
Reading your story I would not be surprised if the problem was that the side projects strategy has topped out for the current level of impressiveness and publicity. I bet increasing either would improve results. If you look at Greg Kogan’s website[1] since he’s a consultant too there’s nothing about any impressive educational background. It’s all research and case studies. Blowing your own trumpet more, whether by speaking at meetups and conferences or creating digital artifacts that anyone can find on your website and then telling ten people who might be interested and might share might help. Both of these help more as they are performed more consistently, obviously.
[1] https://www.gkogan.co/
Really what happened was you spent 4 years on an entrepreneurial journey that involved products, services, and R&D. That the services side provided the revenue to support the other segments is exactly how that business is supposed to work. It's how IBM works.
The later rounds you are going for experienced positions, they have much higher expectations. They want to see successful experiences at previous companies, building things (preferably the same thing they are doing), working with coworkers, delivering in a more-or-less corporate environment. It's completely different expectations. A side project is out of touch at best.
1 was from a college recruiting visit.
1 was from a direct, blind application.
1 was from an in-house recruiter.
2 were from third-party recruiters.
That's right and they simply look for keywords on my various online profiles and send me the standard "I'm really impressed by your experience, I think you'll be a great fit" message, even though 50% of the time I'm clearly not a great fit. Why do they get this wrong? Because they are "are bottom-of-the-totem pole, lowest-common-denominator bottom-feeders" to quote the parent post...
PS - I wish it weren't so.
I heard a recruiter once (socially) tell me that they ignore all resumes with foreign names for sales positions because on average their yield on such calls is too low to bother.
Fair -- absolutely not.
Optimal to recruiter -- probably.
Good for the organization - no.
Good for society - no.
I'd love if there was something company owners and operators did to prevent things like this which are local maximums but globally inefficient (as well as unethical and unfair)
Well, continuing your line of thinking: what's the incentive structure for company owners/stakeholders? And how does it stimulate them to seek global efficiency?
In vernacular, "theory" is completely different from the scientific jargon meaning of a "theory", which leads to people saying "Evolution is just a theory".
Similarly, the economic jargon term "efficiency" is not at all the same as the commonplace definition you used. The economic definition barely covers anything beyond profit maximisation and cost minimisation and is precisely the reason we see so many externalised costs. Companies are "efficient" only in monetary terms, but that doesn't preclude waste, missed opportunities, myopia and environmental or societal fallout.
There probably are some high-quality-only recruiter groups out there, but they're not what most companies use. Which is probably why referrals are so valued in many places.
I don't know whether this is a flippant answer... but to get a job so they can eat.
At the start up I interned at during the beginning of my career, I got the interview and the job because I knew one of the developers. Every other job has been bog standard: apply , talk to recruiter, do phone screen, do onsite.
Secondly, Bottom of the Totem Pole is actually the revered position[1]. Bit of an amusing cultural knowledge oversight on the OPs side ;-)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totem_pole#Meaning_and_purpose
Hah, this is super interesting. I'm almost certain that I heard or read the "bottom-of-the-totem-pole" saying before, but you're totally right that I may have reversed it!
OP disparages people in my sister's line of work as "bottom-feeders", which is just a more euphemistic, if not cowardly, way of saying 'parasite', or 'scum'. My point is to draw attention to the decent people who work as recruiters (I'm implicitly holding my sister here as the archetype of a good person) and expose the original insult as unwarranted. An axe murderer is clearly someone who is indefensible, so could never be invoked as a positive example in argument with a statement like "Axe-murders are the worst people ever!"
Also, an 'axe murderer' is a caricature of a real murderer, used in comedy, horror films etc..., and not a honest counterexample to my sister.
But I digress..., thanks for the note on Totem Poles, I was unaware!
Recruiters are just people just doing their jobs. It's a shame that you've labelled a diverse group of people so heavy-handedly.
Outside whatever thin veil of prestige your job offers you, the larger world couldn't care less about what you do or what you make.
My friend, this isn't personal, but a fact: you're privileged.
I sense you've never been in a position where you have $3,000 in the bank, your wife is depending on you to get through college, and you have to get a job or you lose your apartment.
Out here dropping stories about Evan Spiegel; gimme a break. Most people don't know any CEOs, PMs, or hiring managers.
The funny part is, I agree with your premise. You are indeed presenting the best way of opening doors. It's worked for me, and has opened many doors.
But only when I was in a better position. Till then, it was one of the worst things I could have done. Focusing on playing the hiring game would have put me in a much stronger position.
The comment you made is slightly out of touch. There's nothing wrong with that, but I think you'll maybe look back on it in 10 years or so with a wince.
In the situation I described above, where you absolutely need that job, all the people you mention have a good chance of forgetting about you due to day-to-day politics. Guess who won't? That recruiter. Because they get a cut of your salary.
Oh man, only if you truly knew how off-base this is :) My parents moved to the US with $2000, two kids (I was 11), and two carry-ons. But I'm not here to compete in the Victim Olympics.
> Most people don't know any CEOs, PMs, or hiring managers.
Good thing attending a hackathon is free. Good thing you can interact with literal SV royalty here on HN for free. Good thing you can contribute to famous OSS projects with minimal investment...
> In the situation I described above, where you absolutely need that job, all the people you mention have a good chance of forgetting about you due to day-to-day politics. Guess who won't? That recruiter. Because they get a cut of your salary.
Yeah, I disagree with this. I've been "forgotten about" and "ghosted" by more recruiters than I can remember. Not to mention that half the time my area of expertise wasn't even lined up with what they were looking for, and as soon as they hear about a potential pivot (front end to back end, engineering to product management, etc.) they jump ship. But people I've impressed (old bosses, old PMs, people I met through hackathons, obviously old founding partners) are always willing to come up to bat.
My parents also say this, except they say $40. But US immigration policies generally require immigrants to have some way of supporting themselves. While my parents didn't have much cash, they did have college educations and my father had been accepted to a PhD program — which is privilege.
I'm not trying to assume your parents' particular situations — just that there are things we unconsciously take for granted.
Refugees/Asylum-Seekers don't follow the same requirements. It's super hard to nail down as there are different types and most (that I've been aware of) are case-by-case situations. You have war, religious, political, stateless, there's many types and yea... I wouldn't discount what your parents told you. There might be more to the story they don't want to share.
Edit:- Apologies if I sound like I'm using a lot of anecdotal evidence/ grand-standing, but I had to disagree with that comment, and the best evidence I had was my own, although there are a lot of similar stories in the Street.
Edit 2:- I should add this too, since it is highly relevant to the linked topic. The people who referred/hired me later mentioned that a key reason for them taking me on was my startup experience, which was what the original link's author would call a "side project".
To be clear, I would always 100% recommend trying your approach. It's how I even got my start, back when I was 17. It really does work.
But it's also more effective when you're a young, wide-eyed student. People see in you what they saw in themselves: a young person, eager to learn and to do a good job.
The older you get, the more strings that attach. And you lose the charm of being a young ambitious person. People have more history by which to judge you. No one expects a sub-3 GPA student not to have resume gaps, or a degree, or leadership experience, or any of the expectations that come with age. It's just a fact of life. Even if it's technically ageist, I'd rather play the game and win, not argue the game isn't fair or that it should change.
The moment I read bottom-feeder, "bottom-of-the-totem-pole, recruiter," etc, my recruiter buddy from St Louis immediately popped to mind. We weren't friends outside of work, but he placed me at two big financial companies over the course of two or so years. When I was fired from the first one solely due to showing up late (because undiagnosed narcolepsy), I was worried the recruiter's firm wouldn't want to do business with me anymore.
I shouldn't have been worried at all; they care about their cut, and I cared about not running out of money.
But I probably would have worried a lot more if I had secretly thought of him as some bottom-feeder loser, rather than a key who could open a door that was mutually beneficial. Because (a) business partners can sense when you think poorly of them, unless you're really, really good at hiding it, and (b) it would blind me to the fact that I needed him.
He was a cool guy on a personal level too. Had a house, dog, family, took me out to lunch a couple times, etc. He was doing better than I was at that point, for sure, even if I was in a stronger position long-term.
I guess the takeaway is, do the cold-email thing if you can (twitter DM works shockingly well for this); if not, try to find someone you know who might be looking; then recruiters as a fallback plan. But boy oh boy, if those "bottom-feeder recruiters" weren't there for me, I would have been screwed. :)
The privilege is simply thinking that you're better than the recruiter doing his job, or the woman at the store bagging groceries, or anyone else. A little twist of fate, being born to slightly different parents, not having the right mentor in your life, not having access to a computer when you were young... any of these things could easily have put you in their shoes, almost regardless of inherent ability. So it was just super shocking, I suppose, to hear such "honesty" about my cool recruiter buddy with a dog.
I don't think recruiters ended up recruiters due to familial circumstances though - many of them I know worked in the same fields they help recruit to, and largely pulled out due to burnout or some other unintentional consequences.
Also it is to be noted that recruiters are usually the only way forward once you reach a level of seniority - you won't be able to cold-email after a while.
My comment was largely targeted at the above comment which said that it's only possible through being part of the privileged.
However, in the common use on the Internet, this word very often just stands for "you're better off than ${some group}, so your opinion is invalid and you should repent" dismissal/personal attack combo. Which makes knee-jerk reactions to its use, if not justified, then at least not unexpected.
it's survivor-ship bias at its most obvious. Most people are not getting jobs by doing something extraordinary at a public event and getting offered it right on the spot.
Yes, thanks for naming it. Most of the stories above this comment all have it to varying degrees. It’s funny to me how they all write that they do not want to put forth an entry for the ‘Victim Olympics’, yet they all do share their story anyway...
The fact that this term is even used by these folks (and this is the first time I’ve seen it), to me shows that there is an (possibly unconscious) underlying contempt, as well as a lack of Class consciousness. Which is quite scary for the power dynamics present in Silicon Valley and the still-early-days -digital realm, what with the dogmatic idea of ‘Intellectual Property‘, etc.
Instead of ‘Victim Olympics‘ we would all benefit from talking about ‘Magical Voluntarism’, as well as to take part in further critiquing the underlying systems.
If you think for a minute your experiences can be translated and reproduced by the masses, you're kidding yourself.
It doesn't work. Too many variables in life to capture all of them.
I'm imagining 20 years from now someone making IntervieweeBot, who will pass all the tests and STILL not get the job because the interviewer didn't like that indignant look in the robot's eye. Or MLHire, a machine-learning algorithm that reliably fails to predict what the employee will want to be doing at the end of their contract. It will make millions in a Series A, become hugely popular, then promptly forgotten after [Elon Musk-like in 20 years] fails to deliver.
EDIT: 80% chance of male pronoun considering the industry, but wasn't sure.
I got a good college education and have a cushy software gig. Now I sit on my butt all day drinking LaCroix watching the checks come in. I sure as hell consider myself privileged.
Just because you started out lacking privilege, doesn't mean that you don't have it now.
There is a huge element of luck or privilege in having the intellectual space to be obsessed with code/math/business/design/etc at all, which factors in heavily as a filter, but yes, you need to do hella work as well. Being naturally smart is super helpful, too, and can cut the amount of work by a large factor, but by itself it's not enough.
"A recruiter is your pimp and you're a prostitute. Work with them so they get you better dates." Was all she really told me on the matter.
From there, I reached out to recruiters and worked with them. I ended up choosing to just take contract jobs for the 1099 pay and flexibility. Plus, the guy I ended up working with was able to pimp me out more often and made more money. I got more and better work. Plus, they're stellar on re-writing your resume for you.
7+ years after leaving that, I still have a few emailing me with jobs. No one forgot me because I didn't let them. Recruiters are only shitty bottom feeders to folks with shitty, privileged attitudes. They like working with partners, not self-centered assholes.
Also, I call bullshit on your pivoting/jump ship comment. They jump ON folks that they can pad their resume and pimp them out for more money. The more roles you "could" fill, they can translate to a vertical and horizontal experience spectrum that crushes the competition, which they then sell you for double even though you're still only doing one job. They're the salesmen. Let them sell you.
That and my parents came with $15 bucks and a kid to the USA with the state funded sponsor disappeared with their grant the day before they landed. But hey, just like you, I didn't mention that to podium in the Victim Olympics. One thing I learned about all of us first-gens, we're all equally angry cunts.
Speak for yourself :)
LinkedIn exists for exactly this reason: as a directory of hiring managers you can connect with.
Cold-emailing / cold-calling people for finding roles is a good way to accomplish this, if you craft your pitch right and do your research well on how you can deliver value.
That's basically what branding is about, isn't it? Identifying where and how you can make a difference better than other people, making that your elevator pitch, and broadcasting that to people who need that difference in their lives.
I'm not impressed by the other comments arguing reaching people in positions of impact is next to impossible, at least in tech. There are two high-schoolers right now in the latest batch of YCombinator who literally cold-called Sam Altman for funding, and got it (see https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/08/11/2-t...).
This isn't even that crazy a way to connect with people. I once knew a recruiter who was fanatically inventive about connecting with people - he once got a cybersecurity consultant who was perfectly happy with his existing job to switch roles by (1) using the Wayback machine to find copies of the engineer's (taken-down) personal website, where he had his Foursquare link, (2) using the Foursquare API to figure out he enjoyed playing chess at his local club and would frequent a bar, (3) showing up at said bar, striking up a conversation about chess with him, getting him to talk about his job, casually slipping in that he's a recruiter for company X looking for someone exactly like him, and leaving a business card behind.
This is not an endorsement of that guy's method - just a reminder that there are crazier things in life to do than picking up the phone and trying your luck.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Your implication is precisely that recruiters are useful as a last resort. Wisdom beseeches to avoid decisions where that becomes necessary. Where, clearly, the recruiter is just using you and you are using them as a stop-gap measure.
Yet wisdom is considered privilege now?
It’s an advantage to conceal that fact, and the one company I did disclose it to, fired me about a month later. For completely unrelated reasons that totally didn’t violate any disabilities laws, of course /s.
It was also partly my own fault, but in hindsight I wasn’t able to recover until I even understood what was happening. I wrote a bit about it several years ago, shortly after being diagnosed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10984478
So my career progression has been more of a stochastic random walk. And I’m fine with that. :) Ended up being able to contribute one or two things to the ML scene, which is all I really wanted anyway. Just a scientist at heart, I suppose.
There’s nothing wrong with being used, and using someone, by the way, if it’s mutually beneficial. Aligned incentives are how society comes together.
Ideally people are able to work with each other’s upmost abilities rather than view people as a threat to their own job security and career progression. :(
Lol of course disadvantaged minorities were treated far better in the olden days. /s
When I was at my lowest point I was delivering sushi rather than waiting for a job that would look good on a resume. Most of the people in desperate situations like that aren't (don't have time to be) padding their resume with side-projects, and therefore aren't the topic of the original argument.
It bugged me at the time, but I’ve come to accept he was probably correct. It’s not a good idea to bring attention to matters that might work against you. Focus on selling yourself, and treat your business associates as customers (in the sense that you work hard to please them, in exchange for getting what you want). http://www.paulgraham.com/judgement.html
It’s important to know how people in better situations open doors. Because you can play that same game, with crafty use of time and words. And you might have more time than it seems, even in the position you mentioned (though I would not ever say it’s a guarantee): between Uber shifts, I’d park in a random store parking lots and build things, partly to keep sharp, but partly to get a job at a certain place, since the work was related. I didn’t get that job, but I gained so much knowledge that turned out to be much less obscure than it seemed; I still use it to this day.
You’re right in general though. People on a strong upwards trajectory have different concerns.
Sanitary worker turned software engineer is a very powerful story that can help you get a job, since if you’ve shoveled shit, fixing a nasty bug or doing a menial task wouldn’t be beneath you, and you’d make sure you do a good job. Managers seem to like that.
I drove from PA to CA when I was 18, working along the way on my own business, and got a job in SV on my third interview as a "software engineer" making 65k. Bottom of the barrel coding job.
I'm somehow privileged now? Because I worked literally every day from the time I was 17 in high school until I got a full time job. Right.
"a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group."
In this case, the "advatange" would be 'able to find job without going through recruiter' and the 'particular person or group' would be 'the group of people who (through their hard work or otherwise) are sufficiently talented/and or secure enough in their career'
Anyway it's sad this this word has such a negative smell attached to it now, thanks to people using it to shame people on the opposing side of internet arguments.
Yeah. Lots of privilege.
Anyway, no need to defend yourself against random internet people.
In the end it’s all down to hard work and a bit of luck (the people not doing the hard work part will never be in a position to make use of the luck).
We actually ended up loosing the farm house to the bank. I say farm house because that's an easy way to describe it, but it was really just a house on the edge of another farm in the middle of nowhere. Lots of peace and quiet. :)
Frankly, the recruiter route is simpler and has a higher success rate than what you did.
The whole point is that impressing these people is _pointless_ because they'd be impressed by a snow globe and mostly know nothing about tech. They're just a roadblock between you and the other technical people that you have to go round.
It's totally a shit job in a ton of ways but the best recruiters absolutely make a killing. It's a sales job though so what makes a recruiter good from an engineers prospective is orthogonal to what actually makes them good.
Everytime I ear people here bashing recruiters I feel the urge to shout: It's not about you it's STEM. Enjoy your prized ticket but be humble.
It might actually be 10000 to 1. I HAVE worked with tech recruiters (I can think of a specific local company) that were good, but it's incredibly rare outside maybe a major metro.
You don't need to know them personally. Most companies (small companies at least) post job advertisements on their website and you can apply via email or a simple application form that goes directly to the hiring manager.
I managed to get my first dev job with zero professional experience (and I mean zero, I'd literally never worked any job before), zero "networking" activity, and only high school qualifications using this method, and it's only gotten easier since then.
Yeah, they are. They're also how most people find jobs before we reach the career stage of being able to call a friend who knows a guy who works at a place.
There's a pretty simple flow chart for getting hired at a bay area company:
1. Go to MIT, Stanford, Cal, an Ivy, or CalTech and make sure you have linked in.
2. If 1 isn't possible then make a friend who works where you want to work and get a referral.
3. Cram leetcode
That's basically it.
Don't give up doing side projects and things you actually enjoy because that's how you learn.
I think you're also overly harsh on recruiters (they're not 'bottom-feeders'), they're friendly and can help you out - but they're just looking in a very narrow subset. Basically the graduates from those schools and people already employed at FAANGs.
Disclaimer: I don't have a FAANG on my CV.
Also the higher your position the less side projects matter because it's your main job responsibilities and performance that's in focus, not what you do on your own time.
This reads like an overly pumped up alpha macho business guru telling his disciples how to "crush it".
But for a lot of people, recruiters reaching out or applying through a portal is the start of many new positions.
Assuming he's in France, by "recruiter" he means company recruiters / HR. Your CV and first phone interview always go to a recruiter at the company, that's the first person you have to talk to (and impress) to have a shot at any job.
American might understand recruiter as an external agency, there's no such thing in tech in France. There's no CEO/CTO either, they are sitting idle out of sight collecting money never interacting with the company or any employee.
In large US companies, they're more a public figure and who negotiate large contracts in person and send regular emails to employees telling them they are the greatest company and the greatest employees in the world.
In French companies. CEO/CTO are basically absent, they don't exist and don't send any communication. You can ask some French workers who are the executives of their company and they probably have no idea. The startup scene being pretty weak with no unicorn, there isn't any example you could quote either, there isn't a French Zuckerberg or Elon.
If you wonder who's there for real, there's a bunch of rich folks who sponsor one another to board and executive seats of the 100 largest companies and that's about it.
I just want to say there is at least one unicorn in France, BlaBlaCar. Granted, it's not as big as FB. But unicorn nevertheless.
It is going quite well (I am nowhere near making the same money). Just 2 of us at the moment. I've learnt so much over this period. Like what you would get over 10 years in a big tech company while jumping over all the hierarchy.
Moreover, my very first side project turned me from a guy who knows only Python into a guy who can set up entire architecture on the cloud. Later, I became somewhat a "rockstar"/jack-of-all-trades engineer.
But I agree, unless you do your side-project just to do something then it is your hobby.
My advice would be: someone has to pay for your side project's product/service. Because only then you can show that it generates real business value. This is the only thing which should matter to your future employer. You generate business value.
[1] https://newscatcherapi.com/
That's what I'm missing ATM.
I'm heading soon to do the same thing at another fast-growing startup.
I've actually talked about my side projects each time I've hopped jobs, and actually, when I took on advisory work. Niches are good!
If you’re young and believe in yourself more than society’s ridged idea of credentialism has don’t be afraid to buck the trend. I failed out of a mid tier college. And while my 20s has my been a stressful hodgepodge of jobs I was under qualifying for. A public track record of my ability to create something with emerging technologies has always meant someone is willing and excited to work with me.