Advice to my young self: forget side projects and focus on your job
manuel.darcemont.fr> 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.
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.
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.
There are bad pimps and there are good pimps (erm...?). But you should aim for a sugar daddy.
I admit, I'm tempted to change all of my bios to "aiming for a sugar daddy" and see where life takes me.
> One thing I learned about all of us first-gens, we're all equally angry cunts.
Speak for yourself :)
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.
> survivor-ship bias
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.
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.
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.
He/she/it's right. I tried: https://adequate.life
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.
For future reference, Use they to cover all of the bases. "It" is degrading for folx who don't fit society's binary.
Luck is one of the factors very few give enough credit to imo.
you're omitting something very important in your list of related aspects: health
> My parents moved to the US with $2000
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.
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.
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.
Kudos on making something of yourself from humble beginnings. You are now privileged.
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.
I feel that the world "privilege" (like many others) has lost its meaning.
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.
I agree with your position.
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.
Isn't it a privilege in itself to have a wife that asks for money vs a wife that makes money?
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.
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.
> 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 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.
Anyone not choosing STEM has done a major mistake. It wasn't by luck that I (and I assume I am representative) chose STEM.
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.
I'm so sick of this trope, I have so very many recruiters with "american-sounding" names sending endless irrelevant or poorly explained job posts.
>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.
You left out 18 years in that story so it's hard to tell.
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).
Yeah. Lots of privilege.
Living in a farm house sounds like privilege compared to trailers :)
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).
Yeah I did let myself get worked up.
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. :)
I think what they meant was not needing recruiters puts you in a relatively well-off and thus "privileged" position.
If you earned your privilege, how does that not make you privileged nonetheless?
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.
I think people are using the word in different ways. The person you are responding to is using it as a description of the current state.
So the person is misusing it.
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.
> Because I worked literally every day from the time I was 17 in high school until I got a full time job.
Frankly, the recruiter route is simpler and has a higher success rate than what you did.
Well, yes. It wasn't planned though. I just needed money while I was in school. Parents wanted to charge rent and I wanted to buy a car.
What year was that?
Which part?
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.
Calling people privileged reminds me a lot of a different social strata saying 'I'm not racist but...'
> 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.
What year was it? I don't imagine a CV fresh out of high school passing a first HR filter in the current decade.
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.
Can we please stop assuming we know someone's life story based on one comment they write on HN?
Funding someone else's education is never a good idea (with the exception of your own children).
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.
Yet wisdom is considered privilege now?
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. :(
> This speaks to the generally lower moral behavior of our society today.
Lol of course disadvantaged minorities were treated far better in the olden days. /s
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 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.
> 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...
PS - I wish it weren't so.
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.
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.
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.
> the process still goes through recruiters
Does it? Idk, maybe it’s because I’m not a SV SWE, but I’ve found all my jobs through my network.
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.
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.
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.
I've found jobs through my network, but my most lucrative one to date was though a cold linkedin message from a recruiter. YMMV.
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).
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.
And did that network care about side project all that much?
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.
Disclaimer: I don't have a FAANG on my CV.
How many people are hired through standard recruitment process and how many people are hired by impressed CEO?
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.
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.
> However, if it was such a rare thing, what are the odds that someone like me would exist?
Someone wins the lottery every week. What are the odds of winning the lottery? Is playing the lottery a good strategy to make money?
Did you not see the "n=5" bit?
Do you understand the concept of correlation?
"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?"
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.
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 guess I'm a fan of the old adage: "Dress for the job you want."
Wearing a suit on an assemly line doesn't seem like a good idea to me...
I do like that phrase a lot, though it does have its limits
Isn’t everyone always supposed to show up to an interview in a suit anyway?
I guess maybe that’s counterproductive for a job as garbageman, but...
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).
I think a suit would be overdressed for a lot of west coast tech interviews.
That is directly proportional to the size of the company.
Inversely proportional not directly proportional? Nitpick, I know what you mean, but... https://byjus.com/maths/inversely-proportional
The bigger the company the more its employees are hired through the standard recruitment process -- is that not directly proportional?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> recruiters are bottom-of-the-totem-pole, lowest-common-denominator, bottom-feeders
Recruiters are just people just doing their jobs. It's a shame that you've labelled a diverse group of people so heavy-handedly.
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.
I'd argue that even as engineer 2, or VP of whatever, you're still replaceable.
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.
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.
> Why are you trying to impress recruiters?
I don't know whether this is a flippant answer... but to get a job so they can eat.
Everyone should just do “x very specific thing that happened to work for me”
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 think the parent comment to yours was being sarcastic to the very top comment.
Oh major cultural misunderstanding here.
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.
Interesting....
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.
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.
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.
Yea dawg this is a horrible take. Most jobs go through recruiters, not chance impressions of CEOs.
This reads like an overly pumped up alpha macho business guru telling his disciples how to "crush it".
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 read it the same way. Hiking is a stereotypical hobby along with playing an instrument.
It's not saying its exciting, its that its equally boring.
I don't think the parent poster is giving any judgement to how people spend their time, only qualifying how.
All hobbies are irrelevant.
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 feel hiring managers enjoy talking about my side projects a lot more than about my boring day job.
What prevents someone from just BSin'g you in response to your questions? Code doesn't lie.
That’s what the coding screen is for.
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
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 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.
What percent of Snapchat engineers got hired by impressing Evan Spiegel.
I think the author used the term recruiter to mean "person who is recruiting" - so I think your comment is sort of agreeing with the OP.
Recruiters are not bottom of the barrel. How is this the top voted comment? Where do I even start here!
>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.
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 ;-)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totem_pole#Meaning_and_purpose
> 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!
I disagree. I think your analogy is flawed:
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!
Every time this topic comes up on HN I feel like the only person who does side projects because I enjoy them as a hobby. Learning for the job is distantly secondary, and getting my next job is tertiary. They're perks to something I'm doing anyway, not justifications for doing it.
Yeah, I program at work, but the tasks I get at a software job don't scratch the itch that got me into tech in the first place. Just like how most workers in "creative" fields don't get paid to do the interesting things that first attracted them. They're stuck using their arts degrees to write marketing copy instead of their dream novel, or they became a civil engineer to design inspiring architecture but their day job is trying to update someone else's vision to include the safety features the designer didn't leave room for.
I get that lots of people get their fill of technology at their job and don't want to see a screen when they get home. Live the life that makes you happy. I'm just boggled at how many people appear to find it unimaginable and unrelatable that a technologist likes technology enough to mess with it for fun, even after work.
> I'm just boggled at how many people appear to find it unimaginable and unrelatable that a technologist likes technology enough to mess with it for fun, even after work.
It's not that I can't understand it. I don't have that urge personally but I can see where it comes from and if that makes you happy go for it! The reason I personally get so defensive and anti side project is because as someone who's very defensive of their non-work time (due to spending it on other productive hobbies that bring more joy into my life than anything else) I've experienced a lot of colleagues/managers who have tried pressure or belittle me into doing side projects. It's been implied that I'm not a 'real' engineer or that I can't be successful in my career if I don't. And frankly I resent that attitude because it's bullshit and it tries to take away time from the things that make my life truly joyful.
As you say do what makes you happy, side projects or not. Unfortunately a lot of folk on the side projects side don't/won't accept them as optional if you want to be seen as a competent engineer.
I think your attitude is right, and you just have to ignore the "what?!?! no side projects!?!?" people. I've known plenty of extremely competent engineers who either don't do side projects or simply don't want to invite their coworkers into talking about their personal lives. I do a ton of small side projects and I haven't been asked about any of them in interviews, nor have I advertised my github on my resume or anything like that.
Out of all 9 members of my current team, the only ones I can remember ever talking about any side projects are the dev manager, who is obviously addicted to setting up tech stacks like he did when he was a developer (we recently compared notes about our experience using prometheus and grafana on home servers, for example), and one guy whose side project is a heavy metal band. Everyone else? Nothing I've been told about. Maybe they occupy their time with being a parent, or SCCA racing, or mountain climbing, or building dollhouses; I don't know and it's not really my business.
I think there's a lot of value in being able to confidently say "yeah, I've got different hobbies <shrug>."
I think side projects can open career doors that you wouldn't otherwise have, and not doing side projects can close some doors. There is a probabilistic value of pursuing those doors and a cost to the time spent doing so, and it's fine to decide it is or isn't worth it. I'd happily do side projects even if there was zero chance they'd help my career.
Two of the best engineers I've ever worked with did basically nothing on the side that resembled a technical side project. The worst engineer I ever worked with also did no side projects. And I knew brilliant engineers who were big into things like the Hacker Cup or aerial robotics, just for fun. It's tempting to think that if we ourselves are competent, people who act similarly must also be competent. But the longer my career goes on, the less weight I place on seeing someone does or does not do side projects.
IME, once you get your foot in the door (in any career, not just software), side projects, hobbies and such become irrelevant to securing a job compared to real world experience. All that really matters in the initial stages of career progression is to prove to potential employers that you can do whatever work they may ask you to do. I think some employers do like to see initiative, but that can be conveyed during an interview, you don't necessarily need a starred out Git repo to demonstrate you are passionate about software, and of course, a Git project is not enough to show employers you are passionate about software.
Exactly this. I do my side projects for personal development and enjoyment. It's my opportunity to grow in whatever direction I like, and I'm not going to let my job dictate what kind of side projects I'm taking on.
If that results in skills useful at work, or for finding work, that's a nice but entirely secondary benefit. The more important benefit is burnout prevention - because I too "don't get paid to do the interesting things that first attracted" me to software, or science and technology in general.
> I'm just boggled at how many people appear to find it unimaginable and unrelatable that a technologist likes technology enough to mess with it for fun, even after work.
Me too. I sometimes wonder if I'm not missing out, but try as I might, I don't enjoy the "normal" stuff as much as I enjoy intellectual stimulation. I also sometimes wonder if this isn't because my eyes just don't get tired from screens. I can look at computer screens 16 hours straight, and my eyes don't get dry or itchy. I had co-workers who had to use saline drops at work, and I can understand if they didn't want to look at any screen when they got home.
I'm the same. I've been working for my current employer for over 30 years. I'm not doing side projects to impress recruiters. It's an extenuation of the love of programming I picked up when I was first exposed to a Tandy Level I at my local junior high school.
I enjoy going hiking or going swimming in a lake or river or going to movies with friends when that was still a thing, but it's mostly experiencing, whereas programming side projects is creating. I much prefer creating over experiencing.
> I also sometimes wonder if this isn't because my eyes just don't get tired from screens
I don't have the eye fatigue, either. My hunch is it's because I turn my display brightness way down, down far enough that coworkers insist they can't see my screen when I show them something. It seems like colleagues keep their screens near full brightness. I could imagine that being tough to look at all day.
You're far from alone, it just seems like as hobby/passion programmers tend to spend more time programming and less time posting about work life balance on Twitter or HN. So naturally they have a quieter, smaller voice in these kind of discussions.
Not sure if that's true. The (small, local, biased) sample I have suggests the reverse. People I know who program only on the job generally don't participate in the wider programmer community, and don't frequent discussion sites, unless they're looking for something directly job-related.
I also think that passionate programmers are way more rare. We are used to being weird so we don't care :)
My only problem is I spend so much energy on work, I don't have it when I go home, no matter how excited or interested I am in the side projects.
I realize that's also a personal problem - poor time/resource allocation - not allocating a proper amount of time/energy to work vs. personal projects.
However, I can say, doing a full time, involved job and giving it all my attention tends to use up all the cycles. Is that true for other people too?
I go through cycles. I'll have a long stretch where I come home and I'm just fried and can't do anything that takes critical thinking. And then I'll go through a period where either work is more boring or I've found something to do on the side that's so exciting to me that I have tons of energy and focus on side projects.
One thing I've been doing for the last 2ish years is having side projects that are really far removed from my work. So for example a lot of my work is infrastructure automation and related problems, so I've been doing some side projects learning basic electronics and hacking on microcontrollers. Figuring out why my I'm getting weird readings on a temperature sensor is a great break from figuring out why my load balancer didn't do the right thing.
After reading your comment I felt like I was reading mine! I've been working on infrastructure automation too, and recently purchased a microcontroller kit to hack it and mess around with it.
Just connecting the microcontroller and turning on a LED light is satisfying sometimes. Right now I'm in that cycle where I hesitate to look at screens after work.
Thank you for sharing your perspective! Good idea on doing something different from the daily job to generate the energy/drive. I should do that more often.
You're not alone. To me, side projects aren't a means to an end -- they are the end. They are the entire point. They're what I'd spend all my time on if I wasn't forced to work a day job, because the act of creating is what I enjoy the most.
This. I had projects before I started working, and still have projects now. They are a hobby. Just that. When I don't want to code outside of work, I dont. When I want, I do. I don't feel guilt for not completing something. Most of them fail or are never finished, yet still I enjoy them, and I've learned a lot from them.
> I'm just boggled at how many people appear to find it unimaginable and unrelatable that a technologist likes technology enough to mess with it for fun, even after work.
I do get their point though, they feel bad because they are not one of those. But that's just the way things are. There aren't many people who got into tech because they REALLY like it. Not because it's a "good" job or because it's the lesser evil.
And by that I don't mean the people who only code at work or learned about tech later in life are bad developers, not at all. Nevertheless, they are the vast majority and they are quite different than the passionate young kid who codes for shits and giggles. It doesn't help than they are socially pressured to be like that. They end up hating it. Like when you have a brother/sister that is better than you at something and your parents always say "WHY CANT YOU BE LIKE YOUR BROTHER/SISTER".
It's really too bad how many people are in tech for the money.
I think that was kind of the beginning of the end for the golden era.
I used be like that when I was younger. Hell, I taught myself to program doing this exact thing. But nowadays, I really don't want to spend weekends looking at a monitor all day. Before you know it, you've spent 8 or 10 or whatever hours tinkering away.
There's a point where it's not healthy. It'll catch up with you and there's a danger you'll find yourself not having the enthusiasm to do your hobby projects and also your real job.
I wonder what will catch up with us exactly. A serious question - because I'm by no means young, and I'm still in the "forever tinkering" phase. I wish I could spend 8 or 10 hours on it on a regular basis - but the job that's funding my tinkering is also taking away the time for it.
I think the point is that most people don't have such amazing genes that spending even more time than just work for decades in front of a monitor does not impact their bodies. The worst part is sitting. I want to move my body, and I sacrificed computer hours. I don't watch any TV at all already either, so there's nothing I could move from that time-budget to programming projects.
Life, other priorities.
The problem for me comes down to screen time. I spend so much screen time at work programming that I don't think it's healthy to do the same thing as a hobby.
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.
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.
I disagree here.
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.
So we have three already:
- 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a little ironic that this is on "hacker" news since I think that the original "hacker" ethos wasn't that you built things just to impress recruiters.
If your goal is career advancement, then it is fair to acknowledge that some projects won't be useful for that. But there's plenty of other reasons that people work on side projects besides just career advancement. "Just for fun" might be the most famous reason, that is I believe how the Linux kernel started.
While maybe big companies won't value side projects directly too heavily, there's still a good chance that if you learn new things and try to build interesting stuff, that it might open new doors in all sorts of unexpected ways. But there's no guarantee.
I also think that full time coding jobs can be a lot of work, and people shouldn't feel too pressured if they don't want to have side projects, because they have other things like a busy family life or non-technical hobbies. But for many people, programming can still be fun and interesting, especially outside of the usual corporate routine, and that's all the motivation they need to pick up a side project. That to me is really what a "hacker" is, not a leetcode grinder climbing the ranks at FAANG.
So many times on HN I feel we disagree because we each touch different parts of the elephant(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant).
Systems programmers have different experiences than web developers who have different experiences from ML researchers. Things that benefit junior Ruby devs may make no sense for a middle aged, embedded dev working for the defense industry.
There are people who benefit greatly from side projects, and others who should never bring them up in an interview. I don't think anyone should be significantly swayed by the arguments I've seen here so far. Know your situation and react accordingly. Don't lose sight of the complex world of software and how many times the experiences of others only apply loosely, if at all, to your situation.
Right? Maybe the speck of hostility is as little as we interpret the word 'side projects' differently and forget about other context and variable, or simple fact that not everyone have a knack on side project...I found that if you're not side project guy, then you're not, and that's fine.
I mean, I believe many people don't have side project and still have perfectly happy life.
Coming from the sysadmin side of things I have noticed this glaringly many times over my years on hn. So much miscommunication just because it's easy to assume other people are like you or like your company.
Thanks for sharing that parable. It reminds me of the times I've discussed about Kubernetes with colleagues.
Hello HN! Author here. I wasn't expecting so much comments! I would have chosen a less provocative title if I had known :)
Just to clarify: I founded a company a few years ago from a side project I had started three years before, and this year I released two projects, so I can say that I love side projects. I simply regret this tendency to start so many shallow side projects (which are little more than tutorials) just to build a portfolio instead of focusing on creating something really substantial, or something that at least you really like. It's a waste and an illusion to think that it could help to be hired. I know too many developers stuck into this pipe dream.
I think the overly general title doesn't help as your article narrows down exactly who that advice applies to.
Boo! This is awful advice.
I'm constantly commended on my side projects, and I excel at them because I enjoy them:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x034jVB1avs
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XTi-jf-ans
The laser stuff made me wealthy, and that wasn't even my intention. People at the time told me it was a huge distraction from my academic career and a waste of time.
My current side project is a real time voice converter (like Mission Impossible).
Follow your passion. You'll deliver better results and open lots of doors.
Your side projects will also usually be pretty novel. It's fertile ground for startup material.
Vocodes is super cool and fun to play with, well done. I wonder if it's possible to turn it into a text-to-speech donations service for Twitch streamers? The current TTS voices are rather monotone. Some donators test how their text donations would sound like on this website: https://textreader.pro
P/S: Small typo on the first sentence on the about page.
Thanks! That's an awesome idea I hadn't thought of. Is there anybody in particular I should reach out to?
And thanks for the bug report too :)
Hmm, I'm not sure. On second thought, it could be a legal copyright issue to use famous voices in a monetary setting. Also, it could perhaps be abused somehow despite its huge entertainment potential.
The laser stuff is cool. If you don't mind me asking, how did it make you wealthy? Do you sell it as a service for events? Or maybe sold/licensed the tech to someone? Or maybe it just got you a really great job?
I tried to monetize it, but the luck was in connecting with the right people. Visibility and connections.
I immediately put in the FUN song from spongebob and was slightly disappointed lol
awesome project though! How did you build the voice encoder for each character?
Lots of sample data!
This stuff has gotten a lot more accessible. You can download Tacotron and give it a try.
Advice to my young self: put MORE effort into one of your 100 side projects, and stop messing around with other stuff.
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.
On size advice does not fit all.
If only you knew which one!
>If only you knew which one!
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.
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.
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.
Where did you get 100 ideas worthy of implementation? My imagination is so terrible, I can only imagine stupid ideas like Reddit clones.
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 :)
Why'd you go for gRPC in particular for your Reddit clone?
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.
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.
The ideas aren't the problem.
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.
Somewhat relevant, PG has a post on startup ideas http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
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.
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.
Think about things around you that could be better. You'll get 100 ideas per day.
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.
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.
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.
Reddit clones can still be novel.
How would you go about choosing that one project?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I know when I see a fellow alumni of my almamater, I think, well they are probably not much dumber than I am.
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.
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 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.
This is decent career advice, but it doesn't address the root of why.
If you want FIRE, the best way is to optimize your career. How do you do that? It starts early before your first job, as you try out different school subjects, books, friends, hobbies. As you look out to the future, what do you see on the horizon?
Thinking about the time I entered school, programmers were near the bottom of the totem pole. Mathematicians were trapped in academic ivory towers. Data was barely used as the alpha bros of finance dominated the talks of high compensation. The most sought after jobs did not even exist then. Youtuber, data science, deep learning, cloud computing, analytics, ecommerce, cryptocurrency, even professional video gamer were not real careers.
Increasing revenues solve all problems. Jump on the waves of industries that are booming and will continue to boom.
The world and culture is constantly changing as we march towards the future. Put yourself in a position to succeed by learning the fundamentals needed to pass interviews and recognize when something seems obvious to you but not to everyone else yet.
For people unaware, FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early).
There is some interesting stories of how people achieved it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/top/?sort=top&t=year
It's also important that one understands the career game. Especially early on. See this https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/early-career-tactics... for example
In this dynamic world, one need to constantly assess their career.
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
It may be useful to remember that the author lives in France and has spent his whole professional life in France.
As a French having worked in Germany, Canada and New Zealand, I can say that the recruitment process is very different in other countries, where side projects and open source contributions are really valued.
In my opinion, his article should mention the geographical setting of his experience, and his advice should only apply to people living in France (and writing the article in French may have been more appropriate too)
> 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.
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.
How did you learn about cloud?
That's what I'm missing ATM.
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.
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!
Interesting post. I don't necessarily agree 100%, but I think it's a useful perspective in addition to the counter-idea that side projects and meetups will get you jobs.
It's not every company or set of interviewers, but there are lots of interviewers and recruiters who don't care at all about your side projects. I've done plenty of interviews, and don't really ask about them much, or really have time to check them out in any detail before the interview.
Lots of tech meetups are also jammed with aggressive recruiter-bros and newbies who need a paycheck and aren't all that interested in tech. Keep your expectations in check for finding good employers or employees at them.
For side projects, I wouldn't say not to do them. But don't do "hello world" level side projects in a trendy language in the expectation that anybody will care or it will get you a job. Do a side project to accomplish something that you are actually interested in. If you don't feel like it or don't have any interesting ideas, then by all means do something else instead. Half-hearted projects to fill a perceived recruiting checkbox definitely won't get you anything. Doing something interesting, or even doing something kind of boring in an interesting way, might help. Or doing something and taking it into Production enough to feel some of the pain points of maintenance, uptime, marketing, etc.
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.
Agree -- recruiters don't care about side projects. But, if you hustle and track down the hiring manager they might be impressed, and at a minimum it could be a good conversation starter.
My side projects have opened a lot of doors for me, particularly they have enabled career switches. I'm a B2C product manager, was interested in moving to B2B and was ignored until I launched a small SaaS side project (B2B vs B2C PM is considered quite different.)
But the theme of this article is true, recruiters don't care and you should focus on enjoyable side projects.
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.
howd you find the idea
> ” He may not be smarter, but he has been hired by a company with a most demanding hiring process”
> ” As we all know, the interview process is broken.”
I don’t know how the author conciliate these two opinions.
Other than that, I agree that being hired by a FAANG company is better for your career than any number of side-projects. The problem is that I don’t think I will ever be hired by a FAANG company (as many many many others). It is not about not wanting to focus on leetcode and Cracking the Coding Interview (and I don’t), but my resume would be rejected for sure much before that stage (as a self-taught developer with 41 years old and a degree in Eocnomics from an university in Brazil).
I think the biggest advantage of side projects is for when an interviewer asks you an open-ended "tell me about a project you enjoyed working on".
As an applicant, I can speak in great detail about any of my side projects, discuss any design decisions, trade-offs and compromises I made. Personally this usually involves some interesting trade-offs made on personal projects to optimize for AWS bill, vs decisions I'd have made at any company where a $100 /mo bill wouldn't even register as a line item on a budget. It also is a great way to differentiate yourself if you're trying to make a move from eg an Enterprise Java B2B company to a consumer-facing SaaS startup using $NEW_TECH.
As a hiring manager, I can see the candidate isn't being challenged enough by their current job, or they had a curiosity they wanted to satisfy outside their regular hours. Either way it shows initiative and a hunger to learn, both of which are good signals. Usually when people are talking about these projects, they are passion projects and you get a good feeling if somebody actually likes programming, as well as hints towards what specifically they find interesting. Did they spend 10 minutes talking about progressive enhancement techniques and bundle sizes? Did they talk about user feedback? Or maybe they focused on CI/CD, auto-scaling, or API design choices? This to me is far more useful than "Worked on team X and performed assigned tasks Y, Z".
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.
I've been putting more and more effort into my side projects recently (all on GitHub). It's kept me sharp, passionate, always gives me something to optionally think about (e.g. when exercising), provides conversation pieces (with the right crowd of course), has taught me a whole bunch of new techniques and has kept me relevant in this fast moving industry.
My side projects include:
- An Air Quality Monitoring Dashboard
- A leaderboard app built with redis
- A WebGL globe to show live wikipedia edits
- A web service to scrape any number of GitHub stars from any number of people
- A node.js app which extracts 1 second of footage from your media library, and combines it into a '1 second everyday'-style video
- An audio reactive image slideshow from instagram selfies
- A visualisation dashboard to show stats about your blood from some diabetes bluetooth thingymajig
- 3D renders of popular logos, like the GitHub logo
- An Alfred workflow app to trim X seconds from the currently playing video from VLC
- A script which downloads the top 250 websites to your drive, so you can then run other scripts upon them, as often as you want, without getting blocked
- An augmented reality music website (where you can use the webcam to control audio)
I'm really grateful I'm able to do such things and have no intention of stopping.
How do you feel about the author's conclusion?
> I don’t want to make this blog post a rant against side projects. In fact, I’m advocating the exact opposite. 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.
IMHO, that's over-doing it, but fairly on target. Like dating, one wants to be an interesting person. Your projects, to me, demonstrate that you are an interesting person, but as per the topics of collaboration & communication that the author starts with, while yes I want to work with interesting people, it's not what I've found to be the primary nor even all-that-distinguishing characteristic of hirees. Somewhat sadly; keep hacking! ;)
Thanks for the compliment :)
A long time ago I would've agreed. But now I think we live in a world where you can land a job with the right sort of Instagram post which goes viral. Side projects can broaden your horizons, increase your network size, put you in touch with that random CEO who wants to interview you because you used their API in your side project.
I agree with you, most hirees still don't care. However the people I've enjoyed working with most in my career had fascinating quirks to them, maybe they do carpentry or maybe they're building a compiler for fun.
Work can drain people, so having a bit of naive optimism that your side projects could help people/make money/land you a job/or whatever, is not a bad idea IMO. Like with anything, one should manage their own expectations though!
The creator of homebrew flunked a Google interview because he couldn't invert a binary tree. Everyone at Google that he interviewed said they used homebrew and loved it, but ultimately it didn't matter. He couldn't invert a binary tree.
So side projects or even real projects that are used by millions are literally meaningless.
Study LeetCode instead to get a job and focus on your job at work.
I don't think Google is a good place to work at really... And when interviewing a web developer, I don't think caring if they can invert a binary tree is a good thing.
If you think things like LeetCode makes you a better programmer then you only show how inexperienced you are. You can know a lot about theory and algorithms and still write shitty, unmaintainable code.
It's like a little puzzle snack type of a thing that I've certainly never been lucky enough to need to solve in 15 years of programming yet.
Yes, I think it's really limited in utility. But it can offer some insight into how quick and flexible you are generally speaking.
My first impression is you can do a quick DFS recursive function that does a swap (can prolly use xor operator) on the left & right pointers
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.
I don't think I would have arrived at the non-shallow project without churning through the shallow ones first.
Reads like someone who's deeply frustrated with their career history...
"Forget side projects and focus on job" sounds as terrible as the opposite: "ignore your job and just send time on personal interests"
It is my experience that most recruiters are superficial to the point that unless they received instructions to literally hire someone with most meetup attandances, they will ignore any candidate that list those in resume.
But, there ARE recruiters who can see through a weak resume and help you make it more targeted, surface keywords that help you get interviews.
I see .fr in domain: is going through recruiters the main way to get hired in IT in france? Where I am the best way to get hired (beyond entry level) is through referrals and for those, I find that side projects and collaborations are much better at generating a future lead that just proving you were good at your job
Important note: the author is French, working in France.
I am French myself and from what I've heard about how it happens in North America, the way recruiting works is a bit different.
The general idea is that French recruiters are more cautious, which is understandable since there are stronger employee protection laws and it is harder to let go of a problematic employee. For that reason, employees are also expected to stay longer.
It also looks like recruiting criteria are less technical. Your degree, years of experience, companies you worked for, certifications, etc... play a more important role than showing off your skills. Wages also tend to be defined more by your experience and position than how much money the company can expect to make out of your work.
So if you are not working in France, keep that in mind when reading such advise.
Side Business > Side Project
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.
A lot of people who do side projects do them for themselves rather than simply for improving career prospects. Many folks need a balance between being an independent creator, and being part of a bigger organization and side projects are a great way to get to that.
You weren’t wrong. You gave up too early, accepting the salaryman fantasy of steady growth if you just “work hard.” If this works past 50, you are 80th percentile. Past 55? 98th percentile. How will you feel when you begin to be handed boring, or fix-it projects? When your salary doesn’t keep up with 29-year-old versions of yourself? Layoffs? Perfectly acceptable or ignorable at 20-38. Lethal >48.
You need to own the economic value of your output as early as possible. Read that sentence again. Side projects are about 10% effective here, if you get my drift.
Interesting comment. How do you capture value if I may ask? This article https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/dont-hinge-your-care... Uses Nikola Tesla ad an expample of not depending on your technical skills alone
You are thick! (I’m not trying to insult you!)
You capture value by OWNING shit! That’s a syllogism.
Sorry that I used “corporate” words when I was suggesting the opposite.
> Past 55? 98th percentile
Reference? Are you implying that developers over 55 are unemployed against their choice?
I suspect sampling bias: Any half competent 55 year old has lived through some golden opportunities to make bank, or decide on a career change by choice. Also the intake cohorts results in not many over 55 as a % of total. My experience in New Zealand is that older devs are doing fine as a cohort, although I also can see poor performers who stuck with old tech who may have bitter anecdotes.
> You need to own the economic value of your output as early as possible
I disagree. I have plenty of 50+ acquaintances doing very nicely on their boring salary without the stress or risk of trying to get a slice of equity. Plenty of people do not have the traits required, or their personal circumstances are not flexible enough to allow for risk, or they just want a 9 to 5 and a comfortable retirement (which they will get, and their rockstar friend might not).
Edit: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. The outcomes for the first cohort of developers is very unlikely to be anything like the latest cohort who you are advising - “as early as possible” doesn’t apply to 55+ year old developers?! We haven’t had 30 years of hindsight bias to know what the successful path for a current 20 year old will be.
This may be NOW. Sounds like “they” could save a lot of money automating the boring stuff. I wonder if they are working on that...
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!
This should be taken with a generic serving of salt.
The fact is, (even different parts of) organizations vary widely in their hiring practices. Some care and some don't. I've hired people almost solely on their side-project (nearly a proto-startup), and I've hired folks without them.
If you interviewed Mssrs. Bellard or Hunt (and you didn't know of them beforehand) and they talked about their side projects QEMU or haveibeenpwned.com (respectively), you should probably rate them highly, maybe even hire them on the spot.
You should aim to work for groups that value such projects.
Honestly when I interview someone and they have no side-projects, or any interest in that sort-of-thing, it's a huge warning sign they're not likely to succeed and/or stick around long.
I mean I don't expect people eat/sleep/breath code but I also don't want to hire folks that just got into CompSci/Coding cause it was a 'good/safe' career choice. In my experience the guys that are self learners, doing side projects, playing with the latest 'for fun' are the dudes that really get stuff done.
That's a false dichotomy. There are plenty of smart, capable, hardworking programmers who enjoy their jobs and aren't just taking the easy-street, but have enough else going on in their lives that they don't want to spend their free time writing code. I say this as someone who does write lots of code outside of work: it is not fair to gate people based on the number of side-projects they have. It's not even a reasonable indicator of job performance.
Isn't it reasonable to assume the person spending a lot of extra time programming will generally become a better programmer than someone who doesn't? I'm aware that there are many factors that have nothing to do with raw programming skills which are factors of job performance. But considering the day to day duties of most junior/ic roles often consists mostly of programming, shouldn't this extra time spent programming make them, at least eventually, better, more efficient developers on-the-clock?
I agree with this - an exploratory mindset is super important, and high quality side-projects do make you stand out - that's a fact.
Likely unintentional, but your language around hiring is quite gendered. Guys / dudes ?
Not relevant to his point.
What kind of companies and roles are you hiring for? How do your offers compare to the top bands on levels.fyi for equivalent roles/experience? How many engineers with big names on their resumes do you get in your pipeline, and how many convert to full-time offers?
In my career so far, every time I've encountered an employer (or more specifically, a representative of an employer, e.g. a recruiter or hiring manager) who cared about side-projects and off-the-clock programming to the point where it was a dealbreaker / red flag for applicants, and not just a nice-to-have, the following things were true:
- they paid significantly below market rate (when accounting for bonuses and RSUs)
- they did not respect engineering work/life balance
- they had high turnover
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.
FYI, the title is a bit misleading, the content here is moreso just about not expecting side projects to be good career development strategy, but it ends on a note saying that you should do side projects just because you feel like it:
"I don’t want to make this blog post a rant against side projects. In fact, I’m advocating the exact opposite. 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. Don’t do all the tutorials you find about Vue.js, but use this weird technology that you saw yesterday on Hacker News. Don’t think about what are the best blog post topics that could expand your personal branding, but write poetry or a review of the last movie you saw. Create the apps, services, websites, or video games you want to use. This may not make your portfolio or your public image convincing for the next recruiter you’ll meet, but this is how you will be able to express all that you have in you and end up affirming yourself. At least, you should end having something meaningful to show, something to be proud about."
"The satisfaction of seeing your career flourishing without you having to do anything will give you a valuable peace of mind."
Without you having to do anything?
I believe they mean, you have to work either way and most people do as good a job as they can. You can either do this for a no name company or at FAANG. At FAANG, you’ll probably do the same work, maybe a little harder in crunch time, but you’ll find yourself in a far better situation five years down the line for virtually the same effort.
Side projects remind me a lot of extracurriculars in college admissions.
To the extent that they show that you have really accomplished something difficult they can be very impressive and differentiate you from other candidates. E.g. in terms of high school extracurriculars, if, say, you've reached the title of chess grandmaster that's impressive, if you went to chess club practice a couple times a week and were just decent at it that's not going to help.
As a software engineer, if you've built a site with millions of page views or written an open source library that many engineers have heard of, that definitely opens doors. (Though even then, maybe not in the way you're expecting. Any given recruiter still might not care or might not be able to remove the red tape for you just because of that. But you'll likely have certain unique opportunities become available). If you've thrown together a few sites in your free time and then moved on to other things, it's not that impressive.
My side project over the last few years was more or less the deciding factor in me getting hired at my current employer and my previous one.
Being able to demonstrate turning an idea into reality and talk about technical (and design) problems I encountered and how I solved them seemed to be much more interesting to interviewers than most of what I had done at my previous day jobs.
Most of the interviews I’ve ever gotten in my career have been a result of the side projects I’ve created. Never the job. This is just bad advice and I feel bad for anyone who feels this way.
Side projects open the creative pipeline. Your job, all too often, closes it.
Also, who cares about recruiters? This is your life—you should find a bigger pool of people to impress and delight.
I don't know where this advice comes from. If this can be advice to your young self, good luck with your young self.
Do you know how many successful startups come from side projects? To some extent, a large number of startups are from "side projects":
If a college student starts a company when they are at school, by definition, that's pretty much their side project from the beginning, because their main job is to study and get degree at school. Those are side projects. Zuckerberg stole the FB idea from his side project.
Look at how many successful people quit their jobs and then started their successful companies. You think they all really quit their jobs first and then begin to work on the startup they founded? Come on, very few of them have this clean start. Even if they are on paper looking clean, there are overlaps. Those are side projects, side ideas.
Here's my experience. Until you have the luxury to pursue any side project you want, I found that side project that scratch your itch on your main job work best. You have fun with problem solving at your own pace, and also make your work life continuously a little better(because you know where your itch at, and since no one cares, so you do it yourself)
At the end of the day, you ship something useful and practical and learn something new along the way. Ain't that count?
Unless your side project = side business, now that'll be another beast.
Even something you do out of love that doesn't involve money making, you still have to think about it, find time to do it and when you can't(mostly because your main job took all your time) you will feel guilty and depressed. And the cycle continue.... seriously, I think it's worse than having no side project.
"If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery—isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is." charles bukowski expressed it better.
I've always had a side project (I enjoy it) but I understand the author's sentiment. When it comes to financial matters, working on a side project doesn't make any sense. Unless you're connected to big VC money or have a good business network, your side project has 0% chance of success no matter what you do. No matter how much better than the competition it is. On the other hand, corporations or hotshot startups are connected to big VC money so they have a very good chance of success and most of the founders of these companies don't fully realize how lucky they are and so it's easy to get a sweet deal from them... You can get a lot more money for a fraction of the work. You don't need to add any value, just support the status quo (which requires almost no effort).
This sounds like great advice if you want to be a follower and never accomplish anything innovative personally but just contribute as an employee until you retire.
Which is fine if that's what you're looking for, but not so great if you consider yourself an entrepreneur.
I think I agree with this post, I personally almost never discuss side projects with a recruiter, but I've gotten jobs based on having code I could actually (to say, legally) show in interviews that I made in my free time. I can abstractly talk about what I've done professionally, but, having solid code I did in isolation, especially early in my career was invaluable. And to that end, "culture fit" probably worked more in my favor than my code, it's royally messed up, but being young-ish and a cis american white man totally gave me an unfair advantage. And those side projects probably spoke more to me as a culture fit than a technical one in retrospect.
I am who I am due to my side-projects.
- 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.
Side projects are great (for recruiting) if:
1. You don't much or any professional experience with software development.
2. You are experienced, but are trying to break into another field - and haven't done any relevant work in your current position (for example - front-end developer pivoting to systems development, or whatever)
I've encountered a lot of recruiters lately, that were more than interested in checking out personal projects. Hell, I've also seen some data science and ML positions where they explicitly asked for cool/interesting side-projects, where you'd use the tech to solve some problem.
Is the goal to have a boat load of money? If so, then optimizing your day job preferably at FAANGMULA, is the way to go.
But side projects have tons of other benefits outside of making money:
* It satisfies your curious mind.
* It is a learning tool to discover new technologies. Consider this as investment for your future career. Imagine learning Kubernetes or ReactJS when it just came out.
* It is a learning tool to understand old technologies (because you simply don't have the time to do so on day job).
* It's a teaching tool if you have kids that's interested in computer.
* It solves some practical annoyance at home (for example: Homebridge).
Personally, my goal is to amass a boatload of money so that I can spend the rest of my days doing nothing but side projects without any care as to whether or not they make me any money.
More of a dream, really. I doubt it will happen anytime soon. I think I can swing it by 401k/IRA withdrawal age, though.
Every change in my career began as a side project or idle curiosity, from design to development, to product to UX, to whatever's next.
Basically, what I'm doing now, when I should be doing what I'm paid to be doing is what I'll be paid to do in a few years' time.
Experimentation and side projects are vital to stretch creativity and learn new things. Not all of my side projects have been successful, but they've all played a vital role in my career development, more by happy accident than design. It's all about following interests to see where they lead.
The possibility of side projects to create future value or wealth is rather low.
Instead, I have started shifting my focus to "side-gigs" rather, with the goal that they create future value for me in some sense.
It is interesting reading the comments. It's funny too because I would say most of the time people advocate others to create side projects because you never know if it will become the next big thing. Obviously there are some amazing success stories here related to side projects, but I wonder if that's just luck. Is the actual success rate of a side project going viral just as unlikely, for example, as a young basketball player getting a contract and going pro? (which is a scenario most people actively discourage pursuing)
There was much I disagreed with in this post, but I had a hard time even addressing a single point, as I felt that it was a bit all over the place. I decided to first try to condense it a bit. In the end I realized that I understood the author a bit better. I still don't agree, but I get where he's coming from. Here's my paraphrased summary.
So the author originally found much satisfaction in his exploratory, entrepreneurial, and hacking activities, as it offered a counter-balance to the corporate culture that he perceived as shallow and alien. It didn't matter that his ventures ended up as failures, he found something worthy out of the process.
Sometime later he had a change of heart and decided to pursue a "career". He was then confronted by a clash of culture when he realized that all his tinkering didn't matter to HR.
Now, he's a manager and he understand HR's perspective on reality. He gives you a glimpse. His time spent working on projects was a waste at best and a liability at worst. Companies don't need innovators or free thinkers, they're afraid of them. What they need are good soldiers unburden with ideas of freedom. Exploring new shiny stuff does not make you appealing to HR, your capacity to endure the grind does.
The author offers some philosophical digression where he posits that side projects, much like the theoretical stuff that you learn in school, serve to expand your mind, but don't let them delude you into thinking that you can make that enriched vision serve you in the real world (of employment I suppose).
True valuable experience comes from getting a first job and to do that you should brush up on your DS & algo theory and do coding exercises. Don't expects all your shallow side projects to come to your rescue at your next technical interview.
The author concludes that if you want to make things easier for yourself, you should get a job. It will free you to be yourself, to go fishing, to have a life. If you still want to work on some side projects, you'll do so because they truly matter to you, not because you think they will be strategically helpful in your career. It will suck becoming dependent on a company, but it's the price to pay to be safe from the relentless competition in the job market.
I wouldn't agree.
Since it's an 'Advice to my young self'. I would say either forget side projects (to be boring as hell), or invest more in side projects (take some risks).
I have been haunted by sloppy side projects for many years because day job makes me both mentally physically exhausted. Until recently I realized if I quit my job and my life wouldn't fall apart that much, and I can spend more time on the projects I'm interested in without worrying about the return rate.
I wholeheartedly disagree with this entire statement.
If you want to grow as a programmer (in my case), then side projects are going to get you the skills to advance your career and get you a better job over "buddying up" with recruiters. Sure, you can be a 9-5 kinda person and then "switch off" when you get home, but you will be the one stuck wondering where it all went wrong and write a blog article complaining about it.
insert principal skinner out-of-touch meme here
Here's a more reasonable take:
#1: No one will ever look at your side project. However, it can still be of use to your job hunt if you can talk about it. In fact, it's possible to get away with a empty project provided you can talk about what would have been in there in great detail (as if you'd actually done it).
#2: If you can't talk about your project in great detail, then it has as much worth as if you'd never actually completed the project.
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.
> I’ve always been involved in my work, being proactive in bringing new technologies
This one I learned with the years, that it is so much work to introduce new technology to a team, sometimes not the most productive endeavor. Involves some perfect timing, support from key stakeholders and a team open to the idea...
Unless the current stack is absolutely insufferable, it could be better to try and find what's interesting about it and become proficient with it.
First: Don't do side-projects. Then later: Do as many side-projects you possibly can, but don't think your projects will impress recruiters.
Most of the most successful companies started out as someone's side-project. So, I don't see the point of that article that is basically saying be passionate about your job, not your own ideas. And he's saying that to his younger self. Wow.
Eh. I'd tell my younger self the exact opposite. My side project is what eventually led me to a 2x increase in income. In fact, it was only after I started to spend time on a open source project that I started getting recruiters to initiate contact with me.
Heck, my entire career was born out of immersing myself in an area of interest in my free time, outside of my original field of study.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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).
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.
My 'side project' turned into a full-time business for 5+ years and it was making a million dollars in sales/year at one point in time.
It really depends on your goals. My goal has always been to have my own business, so I put lots of time and energy into side projects.
If I only wanted to have a career, I probably would use that time and energy on something more career-oriented.
Your side projects will never go to waste - you'll get to keep that learning and experience at the very least.
The only thing that needs attention paid to is have a flow of income while you're still working on your side project. It becomes mainstream as your only job when it starts bringing back decent money or VC support.
There's a reason they're "side" projects.
That's the most stupid thing i heard lol, I'd rather drag my body across 87 miles of sharded glass and blades than do that.
My personal experience has been quite the opposite. My side projects (and my blog) have been instrumental in me getting two key jobs that really boosted my career quite a bit.
I'm not saying "you should definitely do side projects". I'm just disagreeing they aren't always useless. Like pretty much anything in life, your mileage will vary.
I made this same decision a few years ago and can attest that this is true.
The side projects I was working on were pretty small potatoes, so that needs to be pointed out. But overall a higher focus on my job has led to two promotions and a ton more money.
Maybe I could have struck it rich with a startup, but the golden handcuffs feel so nice right now that I may never find out.
What a weird perspective. While I agree that side projects ultimately matter less than your previous working experience, I am highly sceptical that they don’t teach you anything.
Anecdotally my side projects are of a consistently higher standard than the projects I work on at the company.
I also get way more chance to experiment with new things than I get at my job.
FTA: "I don’t want to make this blog post a rant against side projects. In fact, I’m advocating the exact opposite. 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."
Clickbait title that even author doesn't agree with.
I split time between a successful side project and early Twitter, both at around 30 hours a week, with spikes up to 50hrs.
While they both netted positive outcomes for me, if I had gone all-in on either one, I think I would have had an order-of-magnitude better outcome. Splitting my attention cost me serious advancement & money at both.
I think side projects have become a casualty of Goodhart's law, they stopped being a very good metric for hiring as people started gaming the recruitment system and building side projects that were really showpieces. But a genuine curiosity for technology outside work is still a very valuable attribute I think.
Technical expertise and experience doesn't really tell the whole story. CV bling is mostly irrelevant to know if someone will perform well on a job. You can have the best engineer in the world coming from a top tech company and be a total asshole that will only cause problems and make the team underperform.
I switched from web to mobile through learning Swift and Kotlin in my spare time and building and releasing side projects. I'm not sure how else I would have done it, if I'd been at a larger company maybe I could have transferred but I'd likely still have to show some examples of work.
How do I downvote this?
A good analogue is:
"When a painter goes home, he might not want to paint more walls... But he may paint murals or canvases... regardless of the monetary reward"
Building software is a form of artistic expression for many people, doing it without the limits of business requirements can be very satisfying.
Its super important to focus on your career based on your interests, rather than recruiters priorities.
The author has some point in there, however, focussing on side projects does help you expand and broaden your experiences. Its supremely helpful when switching between slightly different industries.
If you have made it to the stage of talking to a recruiter, haven't you already passed that hurdle? My experience is the recruiter talks to you to tell you more about the company, the job, and to explain the hiring process, not to evaluate you.
What's the point of knowing a powerful, creative skill like coding and not using it to create stuff?
This is like a writer telling you to "forget blogs/articles/novels/stories and focus on your newspaper writing job".
There's also another strategy: focus on the company you work for until you begin managing people, projects and may be never write a line of code again. And that would probably be good if that made you happy.
There is always something for everyone.
This is just one of the many approaches to building a career.
As with many other things in life, there is now one-size-fits-all. For someone else, a complete opposite will work.
Stay informed, learn about different approaches, and simply choose what you think is best.
I feel working on side projects actually helps boost my career. Having a diversified portfolio betters myself in other areas I didn't get an opportunity to do at work and employees love the creativity factor.
I understand what the article is getting at, but to me side projects are not a means to an end, they are the entire point. They are the thing I would work on full time if I didn't need a day job to survive.
heh, this seems common with devs who get to around the 10 year mark, they try and distil wisdom from their experience, but all too often it is quite rigid advice...I did it too, I would have plenty of advice for my "younger" self when I hit the 10 year mark. I'm at 40 years coding now, and I'd be hard pressed to make any definitive advice or claims about anything. Maybe my advice now would be don't buy into any strong claims about anything, instead, try and understand what underlying forces are shaping advice / claims
Best response so far imo. There are so many opinions and advice about how to get ahead in this field that it is literally debilitating. Should I work on side projects? Should I grind leetcode? Shoukd I study algs? Should I build mobile apps...the list goes on and on. Seems like the only thig to do is chase down what's most interesting and hope the time spent will benefit the career as well? Would your 40 years agree with that?
My main job used to be a side project while my main job was working at some company. And I still have side projects because they keep my interest in programming alive even if they turn into total failures.
I think the question to ask here is, why your side project is not actually within the company! You can try to move it there or find another one that would "fit" better.
This is a really stunning representation of how someone started out with the right idea, shifted to the wrong idea due to outside pressures, and then wrote a blog post about it.
that's interesting to me, cause the complete opposite worked out for me well. I treated 9-5 work as a necessity to put food on the table and pay for rent(I always tried to find a comfy job where I can put in a few hours/day max and survive), and my side projects as the possible real money makers. And it worked out very well for me - have been able to achieve my main goals in less than 10 years since graduating.
If I would have went deep on a weekend hack I did once, I would probably looking at $25K MRR or something like that.
But article is good, nonetheless, everything needs a balance.
I see most of comments in disagreement with the topic, either partially or totally. And yet, the post has so many upvotes. What does this mean exactly?
This means that whoever is upvoting the item, isn't doing so because they disagree/agree with it. but instead for item visibility, because of which it will attract more discussion. this is what i always use the upvote button for.
It's a good thing Steve Wozniak didn't get this advice (Woz created the Apple I as a side project while he was working for HP).
I hire exclusively on side projects. everything else in a résumé is a lie or boring but side projects show you who they really are.
This is the kind of advice that applies perfectly to groups of people but is terrible advice for individuals.
advice to your older self - your job is now relatively secure, try to do side projects.
or another advice - you need to diversify your skills, choose the skills you believe will be in demand in the future to learn, also try to choose ones that it will be ok you are older.
I wouldn't have been half the programmer and architect I became without side projects.
As always, it depends... depends what your side project is, what your job is, etc etc....
so this guy starts by explaining that he doesn't want to work for any company and then complains to not be hired by recruiters?
that doesn't make sense, why do you apply to jobs if you want to work for yourself?
Marketing 101 - don't present as hot shit research programmer to IBM
Anecdotally my experience is completely orthogonal to the author’s.
My side-projects gave me the career I have today. They have gotten me jobs without interviews. Because of my side-projects, every job I have had in the past two decades has been without a formal interview or usual take home/coding/white boarding/hazing ritual. I have used a resume precisely twice in the past 15+ years, and one of those two times was because of the company we built and turned profitable was being acquihired.
Some of my side-projects have turned into products that generated real world value. Side projects let me explore new technologies that I don’t get to deal with at work.
I would say, because of my side-projects, that I have frequently drowned in opportunity in terms of offered work. I have gotten offered a “when can you start” job, without interview, in an unsolicited approach, on more than one occasion simply because someone was using one of my side-projects in their day-to-day work.
I recently did a few “test the waters” interviews with a couple of companies (FANGMAN being two of them), just to get some practice in, to see if I “still got it.” Only the FANGMAN companies required a resume before they would even talk to me. Apparently, I’ve still got it, but I realized those kinds of positions weren’t for me.
Having spoken to several people about “focusing on your job” many realise that they have a great job, but what they don’t have is a great and diversified career. They get pigeonholed in to a single role, whether that is marketing, or project management or even software development. When that career dries up, Flash programmer anyone? COBOL programmer? Then they have to reskill and hope someone gives them another chance. “I am an $X” where $X is how they identify themselves. I’ve always struggled to answer that question of “what is it you do?” Perhaps that is a failing on my part.
The majority of software development is code that is not customer facing, that is never seen outside of the business unit for which it was developed. For each and every job you will have through your career you will be told to take a number, stand in line, wait your turn, do as your told, learn to compromise and if we like you enough and you check all the boxes, we’ll let you know at our convenience. In the words of Casey Neistat, “this… is terrible advice.”
My last job was without anything more than a 20 minute chat and “here’s what I’ve been building these past few months as a side-project.” My job before that was “we really liked what you did on Project $X for Company $Y, do you have any experience in Technology $Z?” (Yes, here’s a side-project you can look at that uses Technology $Z). Every single job, for 20+ years, “here’s something I did on a side-project that’s really neat and interesting, do you want me to do that neat and interesting thing for your company?”
I have studiously avoided any and every company that has tried to pigeon hole me, or get me to jump through the hoops of their hiring process, so far it has worked out pretty well for me. I don’t think I have ever worked a single day in my entire life.
Not everybody can do this, not everybody wants to do this, but it has worked out pretty well for me.
If I had to give advice to my younger self, if my younger self would actually listen to the advice, I would say “Do more of the picking one project in any given year, and hyper focus on that for 12 months, rather than only doing things for a few months. If you need to figure out which project that is, do three or four for a couple of weeks, then abandon the ones that don’t have enough interesting problems.” I do focus on single projects for extended periods of time, and it is those projects that have built my career.
Leetcode is the new side project if you value a day job.
What if you are Albert Einstein?
Good advice, much needed
It’s interesting how the author equates independence with leftist ideology. That seems more libertarian to me, leftist support of government expansion is more authoritarian. Ideally a career is a launch pad to a business, or else what are we all doing here?
Is this satire?
> I’ve always been involved in my work, being proactive in bringing new technologies, mentoring the other developers, helping the team to grow, but I was doing this just because I liked my job. I was not considering this as something important in my career, simply because I didn’t want too. To develop my career, I was spending a lot of time outside work reading technical books, doing toy projects, going to meetups, browsing Hacker News.
This is a very good & important assessment, realization, & I appreciate the author's reassessment.
> Secondly, I don’t think that multiplying the side projects is useful unless they are substantial.
A phrase that recuringly comes to mind when hearing of a lot of side projects is, "Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men."
I very much want to see a world where computing is a good & sensible place, for scratching your own itch. But at the moment, just getting started on a modest web project is pretty hard. Even if you don't need user accounts, it's still a lot of grunt-work, gulp-work, webpack-work, and or babel-work. Oh you want users with their data? Now multiply the number of hours by 20x. Folk like hood.ie & UserGrid have attempted to lower the effort-to-start, Firebase & others are certainly selling themselves on trying to accelerate the mid-level lift here, the 200's & 300's level courses of "getting your app going". But it's hard. We're not great.
So at the moment, scratch your own itch is hard to do well in a time effective manner. My take-aways are two fold: 1. on a macro scale, we should work harder to build a better systematic base to work from, and 2. a lot of side projects are over-invested in. As a chronic maker-of-side-projects, knowing how to put something down & walk away is a crucial skill. Unlike the author, I do think there's a quite considerable value in having some shallow experience, including with things you are not likely to use (understanding the meta-patterns of computing, seeing similarities across systems is where mature understanding starts).
> I don’t want to make this blog post a rant against side projects. In fact, I’m advocating the exact opposite. 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. Don’t do all the tutorials you find about Vue.js, but use this weird technology that you saw yesterday on Hacker News.
An imo unfortunate & accurate statement of a dwindling spirit of the technical community! We have heavily industrialized[1] these days, & our hunger to explore outer bounds & interesting potential is much diminished. As a result, those of us who are pioneering by nature are less in demand, more settlers and town planners are needed[2]. For now, we are "technically mature", we believe we have "good solutions" to the problems that are common & identified. For this to shift, we need more cause for adventure, more sense that computing has bigger open possibilities than what we've settled down around. I for one continue to believe the future is still exciting.
[1] https://daverupert.com/2020/01/the-web-is-industrialized-and...
[2] https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-to...
This _opinion_ can be countered with a single ancedote-
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?
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.
The best thing is to do both. Work at a top company, and have a side project that you can discuss with hiring managers.
My experience is identical to yours. Both my first programming gig as well as subsequent advancements has been a result of my side projects.
First job or subsequent jobs?
Both are correct
That's about the right advice for folks who are still climbing the ladder. As an IC, if you're talented and lucky, you'll eventually stall at the "senior coder" at FANG level. That comes with a respectable salary of 500k/year and a hard glass ceiling. At that point doing even more IC work won't bring you any further. Most settle there, buy a house, start a family and continue doing their "senior coder" work till retirement. Nothing wrong with that.
There are two primary paths from that level: middle management and senior management. If you like the first, learn to speak well, work on your image and build the reputation of a responsible and reliable person who takes the rules seriously. You'll get promoted and eventually you'll stall at the "director" level.
The senior management path is about financial and personal risk. This is where you'll need to build a successful side gig, turn it into a multi million dollar business and negotiate a senior manager position, with very nice compensation, with competitors who will try to take you down in the process. A lot more fun, more risk and a lot more reward.
This is one of the most unrealistic descriptions of the reality of work & life that I've ever read.
I think side projects are for fun and potentially for impressing technical reviewers in stage 3. Soft skills are for impressing recruiters.
During the recruiter phase, they're not going to understand the projects anyway. The only value they have at this point is they boost your confidence and let you move on to next questions. Just list them briefly if asked what you've been doing recently. Most recruiters can't recognize a good programmer, so they approximate it by judging your confidence.
The weapon of choice against recruiters is being prepared for the questions they ask. You pull out a lot of paper, write the questions down, and write answers. Ron Fry's 101 questions book describes them in detail. What the recruiter wants to hear, what she doesn't want to hear. All recruiters have the same set of questions, and although it changes every couple of years it's a solved problem. Yes, I know telling a recruiter what she wants to hear is manipulative :-(.
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.
Was it always like that? Did people only write free software to eventually get hired by someone for their great side project?
I never wrote any code to impress someone. I always wrote code to learn things, for my own benefit. And yes, usually there was a lot of synergy, but with high latency. Much of the knowledge I use at work comes from so-called "side projects" I used to do months or even years earlier.
I also find the headline rather sad. As if everything you do in your spare time has to be geared towards maximum efficiency in the day job. That is a pretty sad path to go down.
I've found that an effective way to bypass recruiters and advocate for employment with your personal projects is to a) aim at small companies and b) cold-email with a cover letter. YMMV.
Sounds rational till you're 40 https://archive.is/4lhX6
The irony is that this poorly argued piece was written by a guy who founded a company to teach you to write. _In the blacksmith’s house, wooden knife_