Author here: had some positive feedback on the last one so wanted to keep sharing my experience of breaking into tech without a degree or related experience. As always reach out if you have any questions about switching into tech, happy to help.
Good for you dude, keep sharing - Hacker News content feels like it is predominantly from top-tier CS-degree'd wunderkinds, and for anyone just getting into the industry it feels like an awfully high bar to reach.
Your stories show a less traditional but just as valid approach, and I think it's an important thing to show people that you can get into tech and still make a decent living even if you're not one of the stereotypical HN FAANG crowd. The whole world isn't Silicon Valley, in spite of what you often see here.
I enjoyed reading your experience. I have a more traditional college degree -> interview -> job1 -> interview -> job2 -> interview -> job3 -> interview -> job4 experience.
Almost all my changes were because either because of change in management or job getting boring. But networking and knowing people played a huge part in ever move.
A huge break for the company owner! You were clearly able to ship things, and he was able to just hire you, instead of having to go through a long and painful process with the recruiters.
> Still didn’t really know what I was doing though.
I'm pretty sure no one knows what they're doing...
It does, but not as radically or frequently as software. The tools stay (mostly) the same. A reasonably experienced barber should be able to learn this year's haircut fashion after a couple customers.
He said barber, not hairdresser. Men’s hairstyles really don’t change that fast and the degree of technical sophistication involved doesn’t change radically over a career. You can get better at being a barber but there’s always going to be demand for a short back and sides or a buzz cut.
You don't? Black women are constantly complaining about how their hair takes specialty tools and special knowledge only possessed by barbers who specifically learn to care for black hair.
While perhaps technically correct (the best kind) this misses the colloquialism.
Someone who goes out into the world, improves themselves, and tries to show that to other people will have more opportunities to be lucky than someone who does none of these things. Obviously both people can strike out, but the person who never tries is way less likely to succeed.
>Many people stick with their jobs a long time, switch roles via networking, and barely put in any work off hours. That’s well and good and I try to do it as much as possible, but the fact remains you will not progress as quickly as your peers who are Not Doing That, and you run the risk of having your skills stagnate and becoming unemployable-ish.
This is the painful reality that anyone self-taught who wants to break into this industry will have to face. I spent my entire 20s grinding endlessly. Constantly learning, constantly coding, working 18 hour days nonstop. I studied CS theory, engineering principles, frameworks, OS internals, etc., etc., etc. to the absolute exclusion of anything else in life. Now at 32, I see my peers all married with families and personal lives. A life that I do not, and probably will not, ever have at this point because of the sacrifices I made back then. But I am also lightyears ahead of them technically. At my current job I've been promoted 3 levels past the midlevels I started with 4 years ago.
Life is full of decisions, and unfortunately attaining excellence requires commitment, dedication, and focus. You can do alright otherwise, but if you really want this and have the aptitude to reach the top, it will consume you.
Meh, it depends, but you're generally right. If you waste your 20s on inane technical achievement and ladder climbing, then you haven't spent time figuring out how to form healthy personal connections, or on the extreme end, you might be a total asshole and nobody's told you because they couldn't care less to burden themselves with someone who only cares about their job. If I didn't have a few different relationship experiences, I wouldn't be in a healthy one now. If you get it right the first time, you're very lucky. So you better start now, otherwise the prospect of starting a family might literally be out of reach within 5 to 10 years, though the marriage thing, if you want that, is always possible.
At the moment, I'm a bit younger than 32, but I almost consider relentless tech grinding to represent a silly sort of immaturity, or at least a bit confusing. As in "You seriously haven't found something else to do with the little spare time you have?", not that I'd say that.
Your decision wasn't the worst thing assuming you actually enjoy what you do. In contrast, one of the most tragic mistakes anyone can make is working that hard for technical excellence, having the talent, but then realising after many years that they actually dislike or even hate the work.
For the reasons above, I think it's crucial that people take extended breaks every few years to really think about whether they enjoy what they're doing, or if they're just doing it because they have the ability and otherwise kind of fell into a certain path.
Good insight thank you. I fell into a profession that I could do. I still don't know if I like it but I made it my own and there are certain aspects I like.
Reading this was like holding up a mirror. I’m also 32 and recently realized i need to learn how to spend a healthy amount of time away from a screen.
Getting stuck in “career” mode consumed the majority of the last decade. Self taught is not an easy path, but my life is much better than it would have been had i continued what i was doing before getting into tech.
Now i just want to play an instrument and sit outside. :)
I don't see what's wrong with doing this as long as it's what you're into. Not everyone needs or wants to get married and have kids in their 30s. Coding can be more fun than talking to people.
That said, it's simply not true that getting to a senior staff-level, or even director-level, position in tech requires busting your ass with 996 and no personal life. It might take a few extra years, or switching jobs a few times, but the higher end of the ladder is one with extremely diminishing returns on your personal time input. In certain positions your value is your ability to pattern match with previous experience, and such experience won't come to you any faster when you sit at the computer for a few more hours.
And if you go past that, into the c-suite, it's full of people who have a lengthy resume/connections and leave work at 4pm to go pick up their kids.
I see a bunch of other comments about being able to have a family from this age etc etc.
I agree with your comment really. It doesn't say anything about future potential or paths you could go down. Simply that to get where you have you had to act a certain way.
I know not your intents. If you like where you are, good job. If not, act different to get different.
> if you really want this and have the aptitude to reach the top, it will consume you.
That's with many things, not just with a tech career. Jordan Peterson* mentions this many times: there are people that just work for the sake of working and then become miserable.
* I do not endorse every opinion of him, but I find this opinion of his great food for thought. I especially have issues with his Christian and conservative side. He's one of the few people that can break my filter bubble while I can also listen with interest to what he has to say.
> Life is full of decisions, and unfortunately attaining excellence requires commitment, dedication, and focus. You can do alright otherwise, but if you really want this and have the aptitude to reach the top, it will consume you.
I think you've decided that you don't want a family/etc. any time soon. No problem with that. But the other side of life that isn't about work requires lots of commitment, dedication, and focus. It doesn't work well if you don't put in the time and the effort.
So, I'll add one word to your list of excellence-attaining requirements: balance. You'll need it if you ever want more than just work. And you also might realize that a singular focus on one thing is not worth as much as you thought. I don't think you made the better decision among the potential universe, you just made a different decision.
Curious to hear more from you about what you want beyond work.
I would ask the author to take another look at the meetups. Going to one, even consistently for a few months, will help in a variety of ways. 1) a lot of engineers are introverts, you have to keep showing your face if you want to be included. 2) while most of the time these meetups are “how I achieved X by using Y”, occasionally there’s some real meat to those presentations.
8 or so years ago I used to frequent a meetup only because it was hosted at our office. I figured a chance to hang with a few coworkers I liked and a free beer was worth it.
I ended up learning scala.
During those meetups we kept getting these really awesome presentations about concurrency and things. At the time a company who was just bought by a really known guy would present their solution to handling massive amounts of traffic. To us Java people we brushed it off as we’ve been handling volume for a while with Spring and stuff.
Anyway, what I’m saying is. Keep going to the meetups for the tech you are interested in learning. You WILL learn something. Then, when you ask questions (because you won’t be able to help yourself), you’ll end up networking. Strange I know.
To stay sharp employers want to see you keeping up with new trends, doing side projects, or improving in some way.
I don't think this is actually true. Employers don't give a crap about your side projects, what you do in your free time, or what you learn at the weekends. Many don't even want you to learn things in your job. The reason it's so widely believed in our industry is four-fold;
- people who are "Twitter famous" devs often work as developer advocates for businesses, and spend their work days building small projects to demonstrate things. Then they talk about them but never mention that they're work projects. Their audience thinks "I could never get to build that in office hours, must be a side project!" and extrapolate from there that getting to be a rich and famous dev advocate means working on weekends.
- devs involved in hiring say they want to look at Github repos. I've been hiring devs for the last 15 years and while I do look at repos if they're available I still interview loads of people who don't have them. In fact, to be honest, having public repos is more likely to push me to rule someone out rather than arrange a chat. Most people's public repos are examples of very bad quick hacks, starter projects with no additional work, or things so poorly documented I can't even tell what they are.
- we like making side projects and need an excuse to spend time on them. When your partner or kids or parents are nagging you to do something being able to stress that our career will wither away to nothing if we don't spend time on something on Sunday night is useful.
- it's a route out of a bad job. If you're working with tech you don't like, at an employer who refuses to give you a training budget, and you don't have any opportunity to learn things in work time, then side projects are an obvious alternative. A better alternative is to find a job where you can grow. An important thing to note about this is that there are a ton of skills that are really hard to learn at home on a weekend (running meetings, talking to clients, using focus groups, mentoring juniors, writing clear docs, etc). Being a dev is about much more than coding after all.
Heh your bit about Github resonates. I hire plenty of devs and the whole "make sure you have a GH body of work" has become such a meme that when people do include it on their CV, it's usually just a big list of forked repos with no contributions.
For me, Github/personal projects have not been a useful signal either way, but it is apparent in recentish years that the advice has been to have one regardless.
I havent done much hiring but when I did a github profile that wasnt just forked repos, programming exercises, classroom notes etc. it was always a strong and positive signal of ability.
It just happened rarely. 95% of github profiles held almost nothing of interest.
Impressive github + well known employers + gregarious/outgoing as a combination also always basically signaled that the candidate wasnt going to be within budget.
Good points, and interestingly as a candidate who is reasonably outgoing, does a bit of public speaking, and has a github profile with a few infrequently updated but well used side projects included on my resume, I aim for this to work as a reverse filter for companies who will pay me an above average salary, and it’s worked a treat so far. If an employer still wants to interview me after being referred from a DevOps talk or through friends after reading my resume or having coffee with me, I’m usually pretty confident they know what I’m going to be asking for.
You don’t really sound like a person who writes code for fun. Just because you don’t or cant do it doesn’t mean that others should follow.
side projects’ intended audience isn’t future employers. It can be anything the creator wants to hack on just because.
> Most people's public repos are examples of very bad quick hacks, starter projects with no additional work, or things so poorly documented I can't even tell what they are.
lol ok. Having worked at several corps generating hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, most of them have been powered by the gnarliest of hacks duck taped together and kept alive by armies of pitiable engineers with a pager. Your expectations are wildly out of touch with how most software companies operate.
I think you've interpreted the post incorrectly. It's not saying "don't do side projects for fun". It's saying "don't do side projects as a means to get hired" which I agree with.
You don’t really sound like a person who writes code for fun.
On the contrary, I write code in my spare time a lot. I have a ton of GH repos, CodeSandbox things, Codepens, etc. I tinker with things all the time. I'm just aware that others don't so I try not to let my own preferences bias how I hire people. Missing out on a great candidate because they're not like me would suck for my team. Plus, I'm also aware that people's 'free time code' often isn't representative of how they write code professionally. I wouldn't want to be judged on mine...
Your expectations are wildly out of touch with how most software companies operate.
I've run a software company. I've worked at a lot of them. I'm very aware of how much things are held together with duct tape and undocumented YAML files. I don't see how that would impact how I'd review someone's public GH commits though. The company they work for might be operating a codebase that's one commit away from catastrophe, but it might not. I don't get to see that code so I can't really use it as a reference.
How great would it be to get paid by your employer to tinker on something on the side :) Because, if that was the expectation, I would happily bill my employer for things I toy around with.
I think the usual way to do it is to pitch your manager on a new project for something that the company actually needs, but for which the fancy new tech you want to play with just happens to be the best tool.
Of course, this will also cause people on HN to shout at you for making things too complex, but you can't have everything.
I wrote a small tool based on a tool I have at work in Free Pascal for fun and mentioned it in our company chat room. One of my co-workers thought was scared and thought this was an indication that we were going to start using Pascal for everything. :D
Interesting. There were posts on HN here recently were tech recruiters said that they look at github more than at resumes (with lots of people commenting that their githubs look like what you described and aren't representative at all).
3 comments on HN can look like a crowd. It is still 3 people. Even a busy thread might be a few tens of people.
There are too many good people out there who don't have interesting public github repos. It isn't a decisive signal although it might help a resume stand out from the crowd.
Engineers who are involved in hiring people for their teams have wildly different goals to tech recruiters, and possibly a much better understanding of recruitment in a lot of cases. Tech recruiters (bad ones) don't care if someone's skills match a role. They're happy to waste everyone's time on the small probability that they'll get lucky and land a candidate. I'm not happy to do that.
The constraints are fewer on side projects, the motivations are not the same.
I am not certain that I'm amazing at my job, I'm definitely decent enough to be employed for 15~ years, but the gulf that exists between my GitHub repos and code I write for my employer is extreme enough that I'm relatively certain that if I was judged on my GitHub profile alone I would not get jobs; and if my proprietary code were open it would lead to jobs.. so *shrug*
Not doing side projects is not the same as stopping learning. OP addressed this in their last paragraph: if you're in a dead-end job that isn't teaching you anything, you'll learn faster by getting a new job where you can grow, rather than working overtime to teach yourself. You'll have more hours to learn in, other people to learn from, and real-world situations to adapt to. They also rightly point out that a good job teaches you valuable soft skills that you can't really get from side projects.
More generally, it would be helpful if you explained more why you disagree. This comment and the paragraph you reference are both devoid of any actual explanation for your opinion beyond "it worked for me", while the commenter you're replying to has clearly thought things through.
You interview two candidates, they both have exactly 1 year experience and no degree. They both have done satisfactory at their first role, but one has also stayed learning and has a few side projects to show for it. Which do you choose?
If all else is equal, I'd go for the one with the side projects. But all else is never equal, and you haven't listed all the possible differentiators:
* What if one spent a year doing the bare minimum at their job because their creative energies were wrapped up in their side projects, while the other took the lead on important tasks at work?
* What if one spent a long time working on side projects that use arcane technology, while the other worked at a job that uses the same tech stack I do?
* What if the one who worked on the side projects is distractible and never finishes anything while the one who didn't is focused and get stuff done?
* What if the one who works on side projects doesn't get along well with others, while the other one avoids side projects because they prefer to be on a team?
* What if one did side projects because their job bored them to tears, while the other was a key player on a small team and learned a ton from their job?
The point is, side projects are just one signal among many, and they're far from the most important signal. This is important to keep in mind when strategizing your career, because it means that there are other things that are valuable to focus on; it's not just side projects or bust.
The one who interviews better, and who sounds like they'd be a better fit for the team. If one of them has been learning the things the team uses then that will shine through on their technical interview and coding test. If they've been learning something that's not used then it won't make any difference and won't put them any further ahead than the candidate who spent their spare time doing other things.
Anecdotally, and this is just me rather than something that applies broadly in tech, but I don't want people on my team to work (or learn, or whatever) 16 hours a day. I want to work with people who are fun, interesting, and have interests outside of just working all the time. There's few things I find more tiresome on a Monday morning than when the PM asks "how was your weekend?" having someone on the team who never has anything to contribute. Those people are boring, and they make the rest of the team less willing to engage with one another.
Coding is a team sport. If you're doing your best work on your own at 2am learning something new then you will not do well in many companies.
Barbers definitely need to keep current and I know for a fact attend meetups and workshops or whatever you want to call them to learn new and fashionable techniques. Seems like a weird comparison to make in an article that impresses humble beginnings.
It was not a slight! And of course there are exceptions. But it's not the same as in tech. You could be using some esoteric statistic framework or like coldfusion which goes deprecated for 10 years and you simply would not have modern experience. This happens all the time.
A heartwarming story, but the thought that someone is now driving around in a modded car with a self-driving system installed by someone whose experience with the command line amounts to a few (half-completed?) online ML courses and who had never done hardware modifications before does make me feel uneasy.
Really not trying to be dismissive here, and I realize it was only the setup not writing the full software, but there's probably still a zillion things that could be missing / go wrong if you don't really know what you're doing (which is the case if you need a tutorial and help from Discord at every other step, let's be honest). "Failing forward" may work for consumer-facing web startups where nothing really sensitive is on the line, but if your software can physically accelerate two tons of metal to 100mph, it's a bit of a different game.
The risk is very real if that guy is driving around on public streets with this system. There are lots of regulations regarding road safety, but at no point in the article did that guy mention anything about them, what steps he took to ensure compliance, whether the solution was indepently audited afterwards... Laws are only as good as they're enforced, that's why it's important to call out questionable tinkering when you see it happening in the wild.
My first tech job was with a Vogelback computer with punchcards for programming. Who knew about side jobs in computers then? Thank goodness you grandkids came along and straightened us out!
Seeing a lot of folks criticize the claim about needing side projects/GitHub. I think if you already have experience it doesn't matter too much, but if you have a nontraditional background/lacking experience, it is totally the difference between an offer and never hearing back. I've experienced this from both sides of the table.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 38.4 ms ] threadYour stories show a less traditional but just as valid approach, and I think it's an important thing to show people that you can get into tech and still make a decent living even if you're not one of the stereotypical HN FAANG crowd. The whole world isn't Silicon Valley, in spite of what you often see here.
Almost all my changes were because either because of change in management or job getting boring. But networking and knowing people played a huge part in ever move.
A huge break for the company owner! You were clearly able to ship things, and he was able to just hire you, instead of having to go through a long and painful process with the recruiters.
> Still didn’t really know what I was doing though.
I'm pretty sure no one knows what they're doing...
Because the fashion industry never changes ???
Someone's hair changed quite a bit.
Someone who goes out into the world, improves themselves, and tries to show that to other people will have more opportunities to be lucky than someone who does none of these things. Obviously both people can strike out, but the person who never tries is way less likely to succeed.
In other words, you’ll be “lucky” if you put yourself in a position to succeed whenever opportunity comes.
I think at any age/level you can get bit by that hacker ethos, and it seems like you got it ;)
This is the painful reality that anyone self-taught who wants to break into this industry will have to face. I spent my entire 20s grinding endlessly. Constantly learning, constantly coding, working 18 hour days nonstop. I studied CS theory, engineering principles, frameworks, OS internals, etc., etc., etc. to the absolute exclusion of anything else in life. Now at 32, I see my peers all married with families and personal lives. A life that I do not, and probably will not, ever have at this point because of the sacrifices I made back then. But I am also lightyears ahead of them technically. At my current job I've been promoted 3 levels past the midlevels I started with 4 years ago.
Life is full of decisions, and unfortunately attaining excellence requires commitment, dedication, and focus. You can do alright otherwise, but if you really want this and have the aptitude to reach the top, it will consume you.
At the moment, I'm a bit younger than 32, but I almost consider relentless tech grinding to represent a silly sort of immaturity, or at least a bit confusing. As in "You seriously haven't found something else to do with the little spare time you have?", not that I'd say that.
For the reasons above, I think it's crucial that people take extended breaks every few years to really think about whether they enjoy what they're doing, or if they're just doing it because they have the ability and otherwise kind of fell into a certain path.
Most people I know, if they are even married, are having kids around 35 after getting married in early 30s.
Getting stuck in “career” mode consumed the majority of the last decade. Self taught is not an easy path, but my life is much better than it would have been had i continued what i was doing before getting into tech.
Now i just want to play an instrument and sit outside. :)
That said, it's simply not true that getting to a senior staff-level, or even director-level, position in tech requires busting your ass with 996 and no personal life. It might take a few extra years, or switching jobs a few times, but the higher end of the ladder is one with extremely diminishing returns on your personal time input. In certain positions your value is your ability to pattern match with previous experience, and such experience won't come to you any faster when you sit at the computer for a few more hours.
And if you go past that, into the c-suite, it's full of people who have a lengthy resume/connections and leave work at 4pm to go pick up their kids.
I agree with your comment really. It doesn't say anything about future potential or paths you could go down. Simply that to get where you have you had to act a certain way.
I know not your intents. If you like where you are, good job. If not, act different to get different.
That's with many things, not just with a tech career. Jordan Peterson* mentions this many times: there are people that just work for the sake of working and then become miserable.
* I do not endorse every opinion of him, but I find this opinion of his great food for thought. I especially have issues with his Christian and conservative side. He's one of the few people that can break my filter bubble while I can also listen with interest to what he has to say.
I think you've decided that you don't want a family/etc. any time soon. No problem with that. But the other side of life that isn't about work requires lots of commitment, dedication, and focus. It doesn't work well if you don't put in the time and the effort.
So, I'll add one word to your list of excellence-attaining requirements: balance. You'll need it if you ever want more than just work. And you also might realize that a singular focus on one thing is not worth as much as you thought. I don't think you made the better decision among the potential universe, you just made a different decision.
Curious to hear more from you about what you want beyond work.
8 or so years ago I used to frequent a meetup only because it was hosted at our office. I figured a chance to hang with a few coworkers I liked and a free beer was worth it.
I ended up learning scala.
During those meetups we kept getting these really awesome presentations about concurrency and things. At the time a company who was just bought by a really known guy would present their solution to handling massive amounts of traffic. To us Java people we brushed it off as we’ve been handling volume for a while with Spring and stuff.
Anyway, what I’m saying is. Keep going to the meetups for the tech you are interested in learning. You WILL learn something. Then, when you ask questions (because you won’t be able to help yourself), you’ll end up networking. Strange I know.
I don't think this is actually true. Employers don't give a crap about your side projects, what you do in your free time, or what you learn at the weekends. Many don't even want you to learn things in your job. The reason it's so widely believed in our industry is four-fold;
- people who are "Twitter famous" devs often work as developer advocates for businesses, and spend their work days building small projects to demonstrate things. Then they talk about them but never mention that they're work projects. Their audience thinks "I could never get to build that in office hours, must be a side project!" and extrapolate from there that getting to be a rich and famous dev advocate means working on weekends.
- devs involved in hiring say they want to look at Github repos. I've been hiring devs for the last 15 years and while I do look at repos if they're available I still interview loads of people who don't have them. In fact, to be honest, having public repos is more likely to push me to rule someone out rather than arrange a chat. Most people's public repos are examples of very bad quick hacks, starter projects with no additional work, or things so poorly documented I can't even tell what they are.
- we like making side projects and need an excuse to spend time on them. When your partner or kids or parents are nagging you to do something being able to stress that our career will wither away to nothing if we don't spend time on something on Sunday night is useful.
- it's a route out of a bad job. If you're working with tech you don't like, at an employer who refuses to give you a training budget, and you don't have any opportunity to learn things in work time, then side projects are an obvious alternative. A better alternative is to find a job where you can grow. An important thing to note about this is that there are a ton of skills that are really hard to learn at home on a weekend (running meetings, talking to clients, using focus groups, mentoring juniors, writing clear docs, etc). Being a dev is about much more than coding after all.
For me, Github/personal projects have not been a useful signal either way, but it is apparent in recentish years that the advice has been to have one regardless.
It just happened rarely. 95% of github profiles held almost nothing of interest.
Impressive github + well known employers + gregarious/outgoing as a combination also always basically signaled that the candidate wasnt going to be within budget.
side projects’ intended audience isn’t future employers. It can be anything the creator wants to hack on just because.
> Most people's public repos are examples of very bad quick hacks, starter projects with no additional work, or things so poorly documented I can't even tell what they are.
lol ok. Having worked at several corps generating hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, most of them have been powered by the gnarliest of hacks duck taped together and kept alive by armies of pitiable engineers with a pager. Your expectations are wildly out of touch with how most software companies operate.
On the contrary, I write code in my spare time a lot. I have a ton of GH repos, CodeSandbox things, Codepens, etc. I tinker with things all the time. I'm just aware that others don't so I try not to let my own preferences bias how I hire people. Missing out on a great candidate because they're not like me would suck for my team. Plus, I'm also aware that people's 'free time code' often isn't representative of how they write code professionally. I wouldn't want to be judged on mine...
Your expectations are wildly out of touch with how most software companies operate.
I've run a software company. I've worked at a lot of them. I'm very aware of how much things are held together with duct tape and undocumented YAML files. I don't see how that would impact how I'd review someone's public GH commits though. The company they work for might be operating a codebase that's one commit away from catastrophe, but it might not. I don't get to see that code so I can't really use it as a reference.
Of course, this will also cause people on HN to shout at you for making things too complex, but you can't have everything.
http://www.nichesoftware.co.nz/2021/07/10/magpie-driven-deve...
There are too many good people out there who don't have interesting public github repos. It isn't a decisive signal although it might help a resume stand out from the crowd.
That sounds like a good thing? Looking at the quality of someone's public work lets you rule out more candidates who are not a good fit.
A great example is the projects I do to learn things or for fun; such as this awful ruby port of a BBC Basic game from the 80s which does _nothing_ the right way: https://github.com/dijit/SpyQTest-rb/blob/master/spyqtest.rb
The constraints are fewer on side projects, the motivations are not the same.
I am not certain that I'm amazing at my job, I'm definitely decent enough to be employed for 15~ years, but the gulf that exists between my GitHub repos and code I write for my employer is extreme enough that I'm relatively certain that if I was judged on my GitHub profile alone I would not get jobs; and if my proprietary code were open it would lead to jobs.. so *shrug*
More generally, it would be helpful if you explained more why you disagree. This comment and the paragraph you reference are both devoid of any actual explanation for your opinion beyond "it worked for me", while the commenter you're replying to has clearly thought things through.
* What if one spent a year doing the bare minimum at their job because their creative energies were wrapped up in their side projects, while the other took the lead on important tasks at work?
* What if one spent a long time working on side projects that use arcane technology, while the other worked at a job that uses the same tech stack I do?
* What if the one who worked on the side projects is distractible and never finishes anything while the one who didn't is focused and get stuff done?
* What if the one who works on side projects doesn't get along well with others, while the other one avoids side projects because they prefer to be on a team?
* What if one did side projects because their job bored them to tears, while the other was a key player on a small team and learned a ton from their job?
The point is, side projects are just one signal among many, and they're far from the most important signal. This is important to keep in mind when strategizing your career, because it means that there are other things that are valuable to focus on; it's not just side projects or bust.
The one who interviews better, and who sounds like they'd be a better fit for the team. If one of them has been learning the things the team uses then that will shine through on their technical interview and coding test. If they've been learning something that's not used then it won't make any difference and won't put them any further ahead than the candidate who spent their spare time doing other things.
Anecdotally, and this is just me rather than something that applies broadly in tech, but I don't want people on my team to work (or learn, or whatever) 16 hours a day. I want to work with people who are fun, interesting, and have interests outside of just working all the time. There's few things I find more tiresome on a Monday morning than when the PM asks "how was your weekend?" having someone on the team who never has anything to contribute. Those people are boring, and they make the rest of the team less willing to engage with one another.
Coding is a team sport. If you're doing your best work on your own at 2am learning something new then you will not do well in many companies.
Really not trying to be dismissive here, and I realize it was only the setup not writing the full software, but there's probably still a zillion things that could be missing / go wrong if you don't really know what you're doing (which is the case if you need a tutorial and help from Discord at every other step, let's be honest). "Failing forward" may work for consumer-facing web startups where nothing really sensitive is on the line, but if your software can physically accelerate two tons of metal to 100mph, it's a bit of a different game.
And thank you!