8 ms·

I graduated college in 4.5 years, with 6 different short internship stints at companies and research groups. At my first internship, I was more dead weight tha

by gen220 7y ago

I graduated college in 4.5 years, with 6 different short internship stints at companies and research groups. At my first internship, I was more dead weight than productive, but by my last three I was a contributor to many nontrivial projects. Those experiences (1) were absolutely invaluable in my growth into a capable engineer (2) gave me a sharp perception of what life is like at different-stage companies (headcount 5-10 to headcount 5000+), and (3) gave me an idea of how “industry trends” actually manifested in different companies. By the end of my years in college, it seemed like these experiences had put me on a different track, career-wise, even though I was no smarter than my peers. Friends who had maxed out their investment in GPA and personal projects were in a relative bubble. They could crack the coding interview, but didn’t know their way around a shell, or what the relative risks of adopting one database over another might be. In hindsight, I guess these internships might have leapfrogged me past the “junior engineer” phase. In any case, the experience had positive impacts on my career. I guess it might not be a path for everyone (and I’m very grateful for those first few companies that paid me for those relatively unproductive summers), but I agree that these kinds of expected-to-be-unproductive incubative periods are under-looked milestones to growth that I can’t recommend enough, especially if you get them at completely different places.

vsareto 7y ago
Most colleges would do well to get this into their curriculum at some point: https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ >what the relative risks of adopting one database over another might be Entire companies get that wrong. Those licensing terms are complex legalese a lot of the time. Databases are not trivial things. You always get new risks as more product features get added. It's very difficult to predict the future on that front and how your database(s) will handle those challenges.
iffybookmark 7y ago
>Friends who had maxed out their investment in GPA [...] were in a relative bubble. Yep 1000% agree > Friends who had maxed out their investment in [...] personal projects were in a relative bubble. -0% agree, I'm actually a bit baffled that you mention it in the same breath. I've found, in my own xp and in others', that personal projects on your own are almost the only way to learn how to be high-impact. In many companies, they've already decided their db, their frameworks, etc. and you'll need a lot of political capital and technical trust to be able to start a real conversation about splitting the stack and so on. So, here, you'll learn about how to work on existing rails doing n+1 tasks and bugfixing. In a personal project, you start with an empty dir and work from there. You end up knowing why you like pg over mysql. You know why it was worth it to use rails instead of rolling your own. etc etc. I have some social friends who also do software who don't really have it as a hobby (just a job) and while that's totally fine, they're unable to answer questions like "what framework does your work use?" (answer I found later: Spring). To their credit, it's probably a good thing at some level that the company has managed to shield people from that much detail. Obviously everyone's journey is different, but I've always found that individuals who can go "I want to build <thing>" and then google/IRC until it's built are generally pretty impactful people.
- gen220 7y ago
  I pretty much agree with you and second guessed including it. My only justification for including it is that personal projects teach you about how technologies work at the 0-to-1 step (and maybe 1-10). I knew smart people who were extremely confident in the superiority of tool/framework X, because they could write unreadable boilerplate in it for all of their personal projects. Everything was a nail for the hammer. I generally agree that it’s good practice to start with an empty dir and build from there. But IMO it is no substitute for working on or around projects that have been in prod for at least a couple years. I agree that working on your own projects is a great way to develop instincts that lead you to being high impact, but it probably took me a year of working experience context (2 or 3 internships) before my side projects actually began training that muscle. I can easily imagine mileage varying there, however.
deleted 7y ago
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Joof 7y ago
I had shit GPA and maxed out personal projects and self-taught a masters via MIT / Stanford. I could do research and build just about anything, but political capital is a bitch. That said, I speak PhD, so I trend towards working with Google folks and people with fancy degrees. So far, my career seems to blow away everyone else I graduated with. Plan is to work maybe 5 years, then effectively retire to graduate school or family / cave expeditions. Explore, research and build shit for the rest of my life. :) Compound interest should handle the whole 'you gave up salary to do some cool thing'

by gen220 7y ago

vsareto 7y ago

Most colleges would do well to get this into their curriculum at some point: https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ >what the relative risks of adopting one database over another might be Entire companies get that wrong. Those licensing terms are complex legalese a lot of the time. Databases are not trivial things. You always get new risks as more product features get added. It's very difficult to predict the future on that front and how your database(s) will handle those challenges.

iffybookmark 7y ago

>Friends who had maxed out their investment in GPA [...] were in a relative bubble. Yep 1000% agree > Friends who had maxed out their investment in [...] personal projects were in a relative bubble. -0% agree, I'm actually a bit baffled that you mention it in the same breath. I've found, in my own xp and in others', that personal projects on your own are almost the only way to learn how to be high-impact. In many companies, they've already decided their db, their frameworks, etc. and you'll need a lot of political capital and technical trust to be able to start a real conversation about splitting the stack and so on. So, here, you'll learn about how to work on existing rails doing n+1 tasks and bugfixing. In a personal project, you start with an empty dir and work from there. You end up knowing why you like pg over mysql. You know why it was worth it to use rails instead of rolling your own. etc etc. I have some social friends who also do software who don't really have it as a hobby (just a job) and while that's totally fine, they're unable to answer questions like "what framework does your work use?" (answer I found later: Spring). To their credit, it's probably a good thing at some level that the company has managed to shield people from that much detail. Obviously everyone's journey is different, but I've always found that individuals who can go "I want to build <thing>" and then google/IRC until it's built are generally pretty impactful people.

gen220 7y ago
I pretty much agree with you and second guessed including it. My only justification for including it is that personal projects teach you about how technologies work at the 0-to-1 step (and maybe 1-10). I knew smart people who were extremely confident in the superiority of tool/framework X, because they could write unreadable boilerplate in it for all of their personal projects. Everything was a nail for the hammer. I generally agree that it’s good practice to start with an empty dir and build from there. But IMO it is no substitute for working on or around projects that have been in prod for at least a couple years. I agree that working on your own projects is a great way to develop instincts that lead you to being high impact, but it probably took me a year of working experience context (2 or 3 internships) before my side projects actually began training that muscle. I can easily imagine mileage varying there, however.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Joof 7y ago

I had shit GPA and maxed out personal projects and self-taught a masters via MIT / Stanford. I could do research and build just about anything, but political capital is a bitch. That said, I speak PhD, so I trend towards working with Google folks and people with fancy degrees. So far, my career seems to blow away everyone else I graduated with. Plan is to work maybe 5 years, then effectively retire to graduate school or family / cave expeditions. Explore, research and build shit for the rest of my life. :) Compound interest should handle the whole 'you gave up salary to do some cool thing'