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Comment by toastercat | Hacker News Reader

> “It is difficult to find the motivation to keep applying,” said Mr. Taylor, adding that he was now building personal software projects to show prospective employers.

I know it's common advice for students and newly grads to do this, but in my experience, employers do not care about personal software projects or open-source contributions unless the work is aligned with their product. That, or you built something that is easily lucrative. Otherwise, they do not care, they do not care, they do not care.

If your goal is personal enrichment, by all means, but don't kill yourself on a personal project with the intention of impressing an employer.

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As a new grad in this job market who got 2 offers (1 FAANG), I heavily disagree. My projects (specifically my toy operating system) got me my offers.

Projects are just about the only thing you can add to your resume to show competence. Everyone has a degree, and no one has work experience.

Not only did my projects show that I have completed semi-relevant work in something considered relatively complex, which presumably got me past resume screenings (confirmed by my hiring manager), my projects also gave a prime talking point in interviews that let me showcase my domain knowledge and way that I work. (Consider cliche interview questions like “what is the biggest challenge you’ve faced”, and how they relate to your projects)

This is especially beneficial if you’re being interviewed by other engineers, and you can geek out over a project. Being human and enjoyable, while demonstrating technical competence, is a great interview winner.

Ofc I have limited experience, but small samples can add up if other evidence corroborates with it.

This is nice to hear and congrats, but I'd be willing to wager that your project didn't get you your offers; your interview performance got you your offers. Yes, your project gave you something interesting to talk about, and of course, invaluable experience building an operating system. But that isn't enough, and it never has been when it comes to obtaining employment.

The ROI is simply bad compared to grinding LeetCode/NeetCode/Cracking The Coding Interview and learning how to game the interview process. This should be every new grad's priority if they are interested in employment. It's even worse than just having gone to a highly reputable university, ideally with a pipeline to FAANG companies.

To clarify, the reason I say that the projects led me to offers was only because they helped lead to the process being started (I.e. led to a first interview). Indeed, other skills are necessary to close the deal.

The way I see the current market, the hard part isn’t the interview-to-offer ratio, it’s the application-to-interview ratio. Grinding leetcode and improving your skills unfortunately doesn’t help you with that. Having a good resume helps (or having good networking).

Referencing back then to what I said originally, everyone has a degree, no one has work experience. Given this, having a cool project is one of the ways to specifically increase this application-to-interview ratio.

However, given this analysis, putting more effort into networking could yield similar results, so this suggests the original point possibly has some truth.

I employ ~10 devs, and have hired quite a few over the last few years

I have no interest in looking at their resume, the first thing I do is look to see if they have a Github and what they've done with it

My green bar on Github and open source contributions have gotten me everything in life. Money, jobs, contracts, community support, etc.

As an employer I have to say I care about it, a lot. But obv can't speak for everyone.

Really? I find it pretty nice to be able to look at the code a candidate writes, even if it's in a completely different context to the job they're applying for. It'll speak far better to their abilities than even most technical interviews.

Me too, and I also like to look at candidates' Github pages. But I also really think we are in the minority.

There is also a difference between what we like to do and what we have time to do, particularly when it concerns multiple candidates.

Exploring the counterpoint: in this era of LLMs, how do you assess code quality?

I haven't heard anyone claim LLMs are good at the architecture yet.

Ask the candidate to explain how their project works.

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