
How to not waste time on a side project when trying to get a job - djchung23
http://hackcareer.com/side-project/
======
jefe78
I don't understand the logic of this article. My side projects tend to be
efforts in self employment, not 'click bait' for an employer. While not
everyone has the same approach, this article seems to imply the only value of
side projects is for future employers. I'd hate for people to get the wrong
impression about the value of these projects.

~~~
dheera
And many times, my side projects are my way of relaxing. Some people relax by
partying, some relax by walking their dog, some relax by spending time with
their kids. And my choice of relaxation time is often just building something
interesting that has zero self-employment or market value, but is just funny
or cool. It is refreshing to do something for pure happiness and fun, after
dealing with the unhappy real world, is all about traction and money and not
happiness.

I also have another set of side projects with specific intent to learn
something new, which I consider an educational time investment in myself.

Neither is "click bait" for employers, and I consider neither to be a "waste
of time".

~~~
bloudermilk
Like you, I find it extremely relaxing to build pointless things. Do you have
the same trouble I do in explaining that this isn't "work" to people close to
you?

~~~
dheera
I didn't have that problem much in Boston, but I do have that problem after
moving to the Bay Area. People just don't seem to get it.

No, I'm not planning on raising money for this side project.

No, I don't have a million users.

No, I don't know why people would want this.

No, it's not for a startup.

No, it's not related to my actual startup at all.

It's called having fun, damn it.

~~~
jmcgough
This is why I participate in the Stupid Shit That No One Needs And Terrible
Ideas Hackathon every year. It's super fun to build goofy things that you can
laugh about with friends.

~~~
expertentipp
Landlord, utility companies, car mechanic, partner, and kids roll on the
ground from the laughter as well.

~~~
ben_w
I can’t tell if you’re saying everyone outside software has goofy hobbies and
this is nothing worth writing about, or if you’re trying to say that software-
based hobbies stop software developers from doing their day jobs and paying
the bills related to your list of other humans.

------
alexkavon
I totally stop my side projects when job hunting. There really doesn't seem to
be any practical time. Often I find that I need that time to study new
concepts and play catch up improving my skills so I can be even more
presentable to a company. I mean the tech industry, especially software
engineering is rife with testing merge sorts, parsing csv files, and non-real
world coding challenges when interviewing. Who has the time? Let alone the
shear amount of frameworks and systems you need to understand depending on the
companies specific pipeline. Forget your side project and reduce the strain.

~~~
dundercoder
I had never even heard of HackerRank before applying at a few places. I was
supposed to write a binary search tree algorithm without using anything except
the language docs. I rarely write anything new without a quick search, it
wastes valuable time reinventing the wheel.

~~~
ashark
I find I often forget basic language syntax when I don't have adjoining lines
to crib from, say, when white boarding. And that's with languages I'm actively
working in—I'm hopeless in anything I haven't used in a couple months, even if
I wrote in it daily for the five years before that. I'll flat out forget which
language features it supports, or how to address them.

~~~
Pokepokalypse
Same. 25 years experience. (especially now that I have about a dozen obsolete
languages under my belt). This is fine in daily practice, and does not
interfere with productivity. But getting through that hiring filter;
devastating.

~~~
ashark
I hope that this is because I have, over the years, become like Liezi's good
judge of horses[1], but fear it's just that I have a bad memory for
programming language details. Probably it's a bit of both.

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/taoism/comments/38h66v/liezi_book_8...](https://www.reddit.com/r/taoism/comments/38h66v/liezi_book_8_part_9_judge_of_horses/)

------
mganekko
To be honest, this submission gives me the impression that it's clickbait
material. The article is field with platitudes and small things you can glean
from Cracking the Coding interview book. Judging from the user's submissions,
this seems to be self advertising.

~~~
Apocryphon
It resembles the lightweight listicles of a career site's newsletter.

------
noncoml
Forget about side projects if you are looking for a job. Focus on leetcode.

It is like buying stamina when the next boss can be easily defeated using
strength.

~~~
ch4s3
Can you elaborate on why that might be the case?

~~~
fardo
Regardless of how impressive your side project is, unless it is a very special
exception (e.g. you’re head maintainer of a linux distribution or open source
tool the company hiring you is extensively using and needs your expertise on),
it’s only getting you into the door to talk to people, and it’s not a route
around the interview process.

So, ultimately that process is going to be whiteboard coding, because it
(let’s be honest) basically always is. That whiteboard coding tends to draw
its questions, most often, from question pools like those on Leetcode.

This means if you’re resume’s strong enough for someone to talk to you, you
probably should be optimizing to pass the whiteboard section.

~~~
codingdave
Yes/No -- In my last job hunt, I talked to more than one employer who said
they had declined people who rocked the whiteboarding, but had nothing else to
show. People are building teams who can work together, communicate well, and
dedicate their efforts to completing projects together. Good whiteboarding is
a prerequisite to being part of a team... but not the entirety of a hiring
decision.

~~~
vonmoltke
I have yet to be on a team where good white boarding was a prerequisite.

------
kraftman
It would be interesting to know what proportion of employers even look at your
Github, let alone dig into detail enough to investigate your side projects to
this level.

I work on quite a few side projects in my own time because I enjoy it, but
I've never been asked about my projects on Github or my blog.

~~~
lkrubner
This surprises me all the time. Most people hire me without ever doing any
research on me. I get to a job interview and they ask me if I know what
"object oriented programming" means. Had they searched for my name, they would
have found my name on the Wikipedia page for object oriented programming:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-
oriented_programming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-
oriented_programming)

And I've never gone to a job interview where people knew I had a blog, even
though I list the blog on my resume:

[http://www.smashcompany.com/](http://www.smashcompany.com/)

I have to assume that other people put a blog on their resume, but its a
mostly un-used site, so the maybe the employers get in the habit of ignoring
personal sites? I've written on hundreds of technical topics over the years,
but no one is ever aware of this when I arrive in a job interview.

Likewise, no one has ever checked my projects on Github.

~~~
Pokepokalypse
I don't even cop to having a github, and I don't have anything useful on my
"public" github.

But where I have public-facing projects' URLs on my resume - interviewers seem
to be completely clueless about them. They'll ask me questions about a topic,
and I'll point them to that URL on my resume as an example of how I know that
area, or did that task.

It seems like they only read the "skills overview" blurb at the top, that we
put there to get through the search filters - and they don't read the work
history.

------
symlinkk
Why do I have to build side projects and memorize algorithm trivia to prove to
employers that I know enough to do a job? What's the value of my degree if it
doesn't tell employers that I know what I'm talking about? Why are software
engineers the only ones with this problem (can you imagine if doctors had to
memorize random trivia to get a job)?

~~~
natalyarostova
> (can you imagine if doctors had to memorize random trivia to get a job)?

Comparing yourself to doctors, with the implication that it's easier for them,
is pretty silly. Doctors have to memorize perhaps the most shit to get a job,
and are frequently reevaluated on it through examinations to keep their
license.

~~~
vonmoltke
> are frequently reevaluated on it through examinations to keep their license.

Not in the US. Keeping your license, whether for medicine or engineering, is
just a matter completing continuing education units. There are nearly
worthless activities that count towards CE units, and I have yet to see any
that are actually graded (they are all just butt-in-seat things).

People here seem to have anloftier view of licensure than it deserves. Sure,
it's better than nothing. However, licensed != competent and should never be
used as a substitute for measuring competence.

------
pulkownik
I am confused now. I have been working on my side project almost 2 years
(started working on it a couple of months after my first job in it). Firstly
my plan was to deploy this project and open to users finally, however after
some time, I realized that there is a lot of similar web pages and it is not a
good idea. So I decided to work on this project as some kind of battlefield
for testing new frameworks. Finally I ended up with a quite big project (about
390 commits, front-end, and back-end part). Overall the quality of this
project is not so good in my opinion, I see a lot of places where things can
be done better. Do you think does it worth to put information about this
project and link to the github? Even when the code quality is not so good,
code coverage is low?

~~~
stefantheard
I would also love to know the answer to this. I have an app that is nowhere
near what I would consider ideal quality-wise but it's a project that is done,
deployed, and open source. Do I even mention it? I wouldn't as it stands.

~~~
devdad
I don't know about how bigger firms feel about it, but I'd probably not regard
it as a positive. Only show me code you think I'd accept at my work place.

For juniors it could be a positive signal though, if you're the kind of person
that always looking to learn new things. Depends on the situation if you
should show it or not: who are you trying to come across as?

If you have the resume, don't show it. Otherwise, do show it and let me know
what parts you like and why some other parts are WIP (comments are great
here).

Another thing to take in consideration is your own criticism. You might be
really critical of the project since you're an exceptional programmer, and
great programmers tend to move forward quickly and look back at their own old
code with distaste. :)

------
eigenhombre
I was a bit nonplussed reading this as well. If I'm interviewing a future
colleague I am especially curious about their side projects on GitHub ... but
I don't care how well what they have done dovetails with my current technical
needs, or many "iterations" they have shipped, but rather: are they
passionate/do they make things they care about? Can they write clearly? Is the
code of high quality? Have they interacted with others well
(respectful/helpful tone in PRs, Issues, etc.)? I find most candidates don't
bother with half, or any, of these, but the ones that do tend to be good ones
(and, alas, are also employed already).

------
s3nnyy
My own experience as tech recruiter, who looks at dozens of resumes a day, is
that I only take some minutes to review your publicly available code.

If I see commented code, rough violation of coding standards etc., that is bad
and I will ask about it.

So if you share side projects, remember that it gives the interviewer "attack
surface" to disqualify you. However, good interviewers won't look 20% for your
weaknesses and 80% for your strengths.

If you are a regular open source contributor, I might use this information to
argue that you are be better than other engineers who don't _regularly_ code
in their free time.

~~~
gagabity
Commented code is a negative now? Damned if you do, damned if you don't in
this industry.

~~~
zcoyle
I think they meant commented-out code.

~~~
s3nnyy
Yes. And good commit messages are better than (stale) code comments.

~~~
zcoyle
Of course. But I think we're talking about two different things.

------
paulie_a
Personally when I was unemployed my side projects helped me learn new skills,
and fit my desire to do something with my spare time. Applying for jobs was a
pain, building something was enjoyable and gave me hope

------
ronilan
I have nothing to add to the article, but just wanted to point out regarding
that YouTube instant thing:

1\. Feross never got the job he was "offered" and reportedly "accepted"[1]. He
went on to do other things.

2\. He is on Patreon, and you can support his Open Source efforts here:
[https://www.patreon.com/feross](https://www.patreon.com/feross)

3\. Or... you can try and hire him. He was excellent to begin with and seemes
to have only gotten better through the years.

4\. 2010. That was an era. "Must have been love, but it's over now."[2]

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/24/youtube-instant-
instant/](https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/24/youtube-instant-instant/) [2]
[https://youtu.be/s-XolL_1dN0](https://youtu.be/s-XolL_1dN0)

------
J2K
Feel like some of the other comments are sort of missing the point of the
article although the author probably could have been clearer in what his point
was.

My take is that this is targeted toward people without any sort of
traditional/university CS background trying to get into tech from scratch and
in addition to taking a basic javascript course or whatever are following the
standard advice you hear of "you need to have some side projects to get
employers attention." Think its just trying to give some pointers to people
going down that path with the very specific larger goal of it leading to a
full time job.

So ya, I would bet the author would probably agree that side projects are
almost valuable in and of themselves, but some are going to be more likely
then others to lead towards a full time position, etc.

------
spraak
Another great way to impress employers (and in some ways much simpler): write
blog posts about what you've read, learned or done. Even if it's on a current
employer's blog.

------
eggie5
here's my side project I just finished: [http://www.eggie5.com/126-semantic-
image-search-video](http://www.eggie5.com/126-semantic-image-search-video)

Semantic Image Search: takes high dimensional images vectors from a Deep
Convolutional Neural Network and searches for similar images using Locality
Sensitivity Hashing.

Search is O(1) + O(n/B) where the last term is a small fraction, B, of the
complete search space n.

The goal was an E2E machine learning project: modeling, training, validation,
deployment and serving. Using VGG-mased CNN w/ tensorflow, redis for database,
Flask for web frontend , tensorflow serving and docker+kubernetes for
orchestration.

It all works on my local machine but when I went to deploy it to my prod
website the tensorflow serving part broke down and I haven't had time to fix
it yet :(

It was just supposed to be a one weekend project after I got the inspiration
from the AlexNet paper, but it took over a month. Most of the time was
fighting k8s.

So another data science project doesn't make it to production...

------
dvt
Man this article is so flawed, it's not even funny. I was going to comment
earlier today but I was certain it would get buried. I'm a bit disappointed
that it's still on the main page. Here's my take..

> Make sure your side project isn’t a waste of your time

A side project is _never_ a waste of your time. It's a way to build something
new, to exercise your creativity and passion, and to (when it's all said and
done) ship something! I'd wager that 90%+ of "coders" have never built
something from zero to hero. That is _inherently_ a valuable thing, regardless
of what your future boss thinks.

> Your side project, by itself, probably won’t get you a job

Okay, so? I'm pretty sure no sane person is going to go through the hard work
of building a side project to impress during an interview. Not only that, but
for a side-project to be successful, it also needs marketing, PR, networking,
and so on. You probably won't have to do any of those things at your next
programming job, but you _most definitely_ need to do it when launching a side
project.

> 1\. Is your side project relevant to the job you’re applying to?

Again, who cares? Side projects should never be contingent on what jobs you're
applying to.

> 2\. Does your side project have depth?

Doesn't matter. A side project can be as shallow as Snapchat 1.0 (disappearing
images? Sign me up). Run with it. Build something awesome and win at life.

> 3\. Has your side project at least had 2 iterations?

I actually agree with this. Most of my MVPs are kind of shitty until I show
them to a select group of friends and family that more often than not rip them
to shreds. Fail fast, fail often.

> You have to bring attention to your side project

Yes, yes you do. But guess what: looking for a regular 9-5 programming job is
completely antithetical to "bringing attention" to your side project. The
latter of which involves emailing zillions of people, setting up mailing
lists, getting featured on blogs, product design, going to talks, giving
talks, and so on.

~~~
drvdevd
The article also misses the point about intrinsic VS extrinsic motivation in
software. Personally I think being motivated by money, careers, nice cars —
whatever — is just fine. But I think the only way to know if you _really_ want
to stick with Programming, and especially any particular branch of
programming, is by finding out what _intrinsically_ motivates you.

That can be your rock to hold onto as burnout approaches...

------
hemendrasingh
If you have more time remain after you get a job. Side project is not waste
your time.side project also gives you extra work & money for you.

