Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

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My experience is that side projects are 90% ignored. They are treated strictly as line items like education.

I got furious tired of this so on my last resume I treated my employment history strictly as employment history. A list of employers with dates and dates of promotions plus a sentence or two what I worked on. Supremely lowered emphasis.

I also put my personal projects into a separate section above my employment history. Between my personal projects and employment history I put in a small two paragraph section for personal bio. In this bio I mention how long I have been programming, some of my accomplishments. I also explicitly mention to carefully consider my personal projects to make an informed decision if I will be a good fit for their organization and that two of my personal projects contain over a thousand commits. I follow up that up with a mention that I am not waiting on administrative approval or a budget authorization to innovate and that these personal projects are years of experience other developers do not have.

This a recent change I have made so I cannot say if it’s successful.

>>"a mention that I am not waiting on administrative approval or a budget authorization to innovate".

I think what gets lost in a lot of these threads is that different employees, and different employers, look for different things. And that's OK. There's filtering going on all sides and not everybody is a right fit.

For example - depending on how you phrase that sentiment on your resume, you might be an immediate No for our team - we are in a very traditional production mode with a procedure-focused client, and the sentence is telling me you might not follow process, wait for approvals, engage the team and client, and will just do your own thing. That may or may not be what you're saying, as I said it depends on the phrasing... But! That may be in fact excellent and mutually beneficial filtering - you probably don't want to be on my current team, and the ideal company/team for you may see that very same statement as a positive signal :).

My point is - not all filtering is bad. In threads like this we focus on "doing / not doing this on a resume will be a red flag for many employers" - but that's not necessarily a wrong thing. It's like dating - some people will advise "don't be yourself", but I ask - Why? Sure, be a good version of yourself on first date / interview, but be fundamentally honest what both of you are looking for. You don't have to have relationship with everybody, you don't have to get hired by everybody. You need to find that one person/job that works :)

I have no experience in hiring and can't really talk about it from my experiences of applying for jobs, but this sounds a bit weird to me, essentially telling the person reviewing your CV: "I've been focusing more on side projects than on my previous jobs, that's why you should consider me for this _job_".

It makes perfect sense to anybody who has contributed to personal projects. At work there is an institutionally locked velocity for a variety of reasons. Some of these reasons are highly qualified, some are accidental, and some are completely nonsense.

With personal projects you set your own velocity. Output is the result of initiative, time spent, speed of delivery, competence in product development, and expertise on the problem.

You're gravely generalising, as if everyone who does side projects has to do them the same way you do.

And even disregarding this, you're still not proving my point wrong. You're saying personal projects show you can work in some set of conditions that have little to do with how work in a company gets done. Yeah, you can "prove" yourself somewhat when you're on your own, does that automatically translate to being a good engineer in the office?

Again, I have no experience hiring, but I fail to see a logic here. Good luck with trying the CV out, and do write a blog post when the results are in!

As an employee you do what is assigned plus administrative things. That is incredibly limiting. On a personal project you accomplish whatever you want, regardless of demand or ambition or challenge.

You are your own principle audience. You aren’t trying to prove anything. You are trying to build something. Unless you are the kind of person just likes building things I suspect it will be impossible to understand.

You're still missing OP's point: an employer needs people who can take assignments and do them. Deemphasizing the evidence of that skill in favor of evidence of ability to complete passion projects isn't necessarily a good move on a resume.

For the record, I am someone who just likes building things. I totally get why building things on your own is more enjoyable. I just don't think that an employer really cares all that much about that.

The necessary technical competence is identifiable in the personal projects. In my experience though the prospective employer is incapable making any such determination from provided evidence.

I suspect that technical competence is an irrelevant aside to what you are looking for. It sounds like you are looking for someone who can check a box, perhaps copy/paste or a gear on an assembly line. If you are strictly looking for a box checker then I would suggest hiring people who never mention personal projects of any kind on a resume. You are looking strictly for labor, a hard worker, not initiative. Work harder, not smarter, and your targeted candidate will do exactly that.

The whole point of personal projects is the opposite: initiative building something new because there is a passion to build, grow, and improve.

"institutionally locked velocity" is a great turn of phrase

I've struggled with this quite a bit. My current employer initially hired me for a less senior position than the one I applied for... and then promoted me to the one I applied for within 2 weeks of me starting the job. I think a lot of that is because they didn't consider my side-project experience (especially the ones I did before my first dev job) as valuable whilst it actually contributes significantly to my capabilities as a developer.

You sound like a good engineer, but I’m afraid many of the people reading your resume would rather hire someone who can navigate their way through the administrative process instead of being stopped by it. Maybe that’s a good thing, because it will filter out jobs that aren’t a good fit for you, but it probably includes many of the top employers.

When I evaluate someone for hire, if they have side projects I will be looking at those much more extensively than I will their employment history.

How you spend your time, what you spend it on, and how you executed your vision are much more interesting and informative to me about how you'll handle your work than which corporations you've fit into a slot for.

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