How to not waste time on a side project when trying to get a job

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.

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.

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.

Forget about side projects if you are looking for a job. Focus on leetcode.<p>It is like buying stamina when the next boss can be easily defeated using strength.

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.<p>I work on quite a few side projects in my own time because I enjoy it, but I&#x27;ve never been asked about my projects on Github or my blog.

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&#x27;s the value of my degree if it doesn&#x27;t tell employers that I know what I&#x27;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)?

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?

I was a bit nonplussed reading this as well. If I&#x27;m interviewing a future colleague I am especially curious about their side projects on GitHub ... but I don&#x27;t care how well what they have done dovetails with my current technical needs, or many &quot;iterations&quot; they have shipped, but rather: are they passionate&#x2F;do they make things they care about? Can they write clearly? Is the code of high quality? Have they interacted with others well (respectful&#x2F;helpful tone in PRs, Issues, etc.)? I find most candidates don&#x27;t bother with half, or any, of these, but the ones that do tend to be good ones (and, alas, are also employed already).

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.<p>If I see commented code, rough violation of coding standards etc., that is bad and I will ask about it.<p>So if you share side projects, remember that it gives the interviewer &quot;attack surface&quot; to disqualify you. However, good interviewers won&#x27;t look 20% for your weaknesses and 80% for your strengths.<p>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&#x27;t <i>regularly</i> code in their free time.

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

I have nothing to add to the article, but just wanted to point out regarding that YouTube instant thing:<p>1. Feross never got the job he was &quot;offered&quot; and reportedly &quot;accepted&quot;[1]. He went on to do other things.<p>2. He is on Patreon, and you can support his Open Source efforts here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;feross" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;feross</a><p>3. Or... you can try and hire him. He was excellent to begin with and seemes to have only gotten better through the years.<p>4. 2010. That was an era. &quot;Must have been love, but it&#x27;s over now.&quot;[2]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;09&#x2F;24&#x2F;youtube-instant-instant&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;09&#x2F;24&#x2F;youtube-instant-instant&#x2F;</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;s-XolL_1dN0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;s-XolL_1dN0</a>

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.<p>My take is that this is targeted toward people without any sort of traditional&#x2F;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 &quot;you need to have some side projects to get employers attention.&quot; 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.<p>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.

Another great way to impress employers (and in some ways much simpler): write blog posts about what you&#x27;ve read, learned or done. Even if it&#x27;s on a current employer&#x27;s blog.

here&#x27;s my side project I just finished: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eggie5.com&#x2F;126-semantic-image-search-video" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eggie5.com&#x2F;126-semantic-image-search-video</a><p>Semantic Image Search: takes high dimensional images vectors from a Deep Convolutional Neural Network and searches for similar images using Locality Sensitivity Hashing.<p>Search is O(1) + O(n&#x2F;B) where the last term is a small fraction, B, of the complete search space n.<p>The goal was an E2E machine learning project: modeling, training, validation, deployment and serving. Using VGG-mased CNN w&#x2F; tensorflow, redis for database, Flask for web frontend , tensorflow serving and docker+kubernetes for orchestration.<p>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&#x27;t had time to fix it yet :(<p>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.<p>So another data science project doesn&#x27;t make it to production...

Man this article is so flawed, it&#x27;s not even funny. I was going to comment earlier today but I was certain it would get buried. I&#x27;m a bit disappointed that it&#x27;s still on the main page. Here&#x27;s my take..<p>&gt; Make sure your side project isn’t a waste of your time<p>A side project is <i>never</i> a waste of your time. It&#x27;s a way to build something new, to exercise your creativity and passion, and to (when it&#x27;s all said and done) ship something! I&#x27;d wager that 90%+ of &quot;coders&quot; have never built something from zero to hero. That is <i>inherently</i> a valuable thing, regardless of what your future boss thinks.<p>&gt; Your side project, by itself, probably won’t get you a job<p>Okay, so? I&#x27;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&#x27;t have to do any of those things at your next programming job, but you <i>most definitely</i> need to do it when launching a side project.<p>&gt; 1. Is your side project relevant to the job you’re applying to?<p>Again, who cares? Side projects should never be contingent on what jobs you&#x27;re applying to.<p>&gt; 2. Does your side project have depth?<p>Doesn&#x27;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.<p>&gt; 3. Has your side project at least had 2 iterations?<p>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.<p>&gt; You have to bring attention to your side project<p>Yes, yes you do. But guess what: looking for a regular 9-5 programming job is completely antithetical to &quot;bringing attention&quot; 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.

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 &amp; money for you.