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The only reason I have my job that I do now is because of side projects. How else are you suppose to learn different parts of the stack when you're (usually) o

The only reason I have my job that I do now is because of side projects. How else are you suppose to learn different parts of the stack when you're (usually) only hired to work in one part? How are you suppose to learn DevOps/CloudOps unless you're on an Ops team? Many (most?) companies don't delegate full stack responsibilities to individual teams.

lsiunsuex 6y ago
Agree with this. At least 2 jobs (I've lost count) I got based on side work I did. Full time employment history helped, but it was the side projects that showed a certain skillset that they wanted.
s1dewaysjects 6y ago
Yeah, I share your experience and I disagree strongly with this piece. If I had joined a good company and focused on that, I would still be comfortably building web services for them like I learned to in school, and I would probably continue doing that indefinitely. That's fine, it's a nice salary, but it was also boring and soul-crushing. When I started to see the damage wrought by mass-scale social media, my side projects made it easy for me to transition into a much more interesting but specialized field that I saw more of a future in, and that has worked out great. The author's main complaints seem to involve recruiters and the poor value proposition of shallow projects. But if you have deep projects and poke your nose around the industries that you're interested in, you won't have to deal with recruiters, and you'll often be able to avoid the technical side of interviews entirely. Talent is very scarce. Although, I write this from a USA perspective and I notice this is a .fr domain; the labor markets and hiring practices might be very different.
bradstewart 6y ago
It depends. On company culture, your manager, and your role, among other things. If you're doing a huge career change, side projects may be your only way. But most companies (in my experience at least) recognize the value in having their application developers understand some Ops work, and vise versa. Many (most?) companies won't entirely "firewall" you from other groups. Even if you're throwing an application over the wall to ops, there's usually opportunities to learn from them, help out on specific tasks, etc. That said, learning at work is probably _better_, but I do think side projects with a specific goal (e.g. to learn a technology) are a valuable supplement.
cableshaft 6y ago
Yep. I didn't learn C# or Objective-C or Swift or Python at whatever job I had at the time, I learned them on my own, and then made a side-project with them, and was able to show that to future jobs and get hired that way. One job I got because my side project was a finalist in a contest and was shown off at a convention my employer attended, and they called me as a result and brought me in for an interview. Another job interview, I kind of stumbled on their programming test, but I was able to show something I made on the side, and that convinced them I knew enough to give me a week and bring me back in, and I refreshed my knowledge during that week, and I aced the test the second time and got the job. My current job is at least in part thanks to those side projects I worked on in the past. And my side projects I'm working on now are giving me skills that I am not gaining at my current job, and will hopefully help align me with my next shift in my career (and if not, at least I'll make a few bucks and some people will enjoy the product).
taylodl 6y ago
I think we need to differentiate between a "learning project" and a "side project." Those are two very different things, at least to me. A learning project is a project you're doing with the express intent of learning a new technology. The focus is on the learning, not the delivered functionality. A side project is a project you're doing for the community. It's a labor of love. The focus is on functionality and meeting the needs of your users, not learning technology. You may even be able to grow it into an actual business. From a career perspective you want to focus on learning projects. As you've mentioned learning projects are very important for your continued learning. Side projects on the other hand have the risk of distracting you from your work and my advice would be to avoid them unless you're scratching your own itch or maybe even want to explore starting a side business. Bottom line - be clear with yourself on what you're doing and why you're doing it.
- dheera 6y ago
  I disagree here. In the business world, delivered functionality matters. I think building something for the community that the community actually uses teaches you a lot about product management and building reliable systems and designing products people want. You learn a whole lot about the reality of the industry by doing something purposeful. There's a big difference, for example, in machine learning engineers who can train a model in a Jupyter notebook and an engineer who can both train and actually deploy a model like that on a self-driving car. Companies often very much appreciate having dipped into the practical aspect of things, where things like optimization, uptime, and consistency matter. Also, building things that give you a feeling of success make you more driven and motivated to learn and improve. Sometimes having a thousand users is that feeling of success that is the driving force for more learning.
- tasuki 6y ago
  So we have three already: - learning project (focus on learning) - side project (focus on functionality) - cv-enhancing project (focus on optics, what the original article was mostly about and against) In my experience, side projects are by far the most fun. All of the learning projects I've done in the past had some goal to achieve, something I could show someone and feel proud. I find it difficult to learn just for the sake of learning. Perhaps this is why I struggled with schooling.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
Similar experience here. I can attribute all my jobs to side projects - it always so happened that the technology I got employed for was something I tried to write a game in few months to years ago.
ObsoleteNerd 6y ago
Yeah I never went to college/uni and got my first job in IT due to doing web/graphic design projects on the side of my non-IT job. Then after getting sick of front-end/design I started coding back-end side projects and taught myself enough to ultimately get hired doing CMS development. Then same again to get into Sysadmin, after running game/file servers as side projects. Etc etc... Five distinct career changes/upgrades over ~20 years inside IT, all thanks to building stuff I wanted to build for fun and that impressing the right people to get me hired. The only IT job I've ever gotten through working my way up in a company was the last one, into Project Management, and that was only due to the breadth of skills I taught myself throughout the years... on all those side projects. If I didn't do side projects, and didn't always strive for more, I'd still be running/packing cables for concerts and working 20 hour shifts for barely enough money to survive.

lsiunsuex 6y ago

Agree with this. At least 2 jobs (I've lost count) I got based on side work I did. Full time employment history helped, but it was the side projects that showed a certain skillset that they wanted.

s1dewaysjects 6y ago

Yeah, I share your experience and I disagree strongly with this piece. If I had joined a good company and focused on that, I would still be comfortably building web services for them like I learned to in school, and I would probably continue doing that indefinitely. That's fine, it's a nice salary, but it was also boring and soul-crushing. When I started to see the damage wrought by mass-scale social media, my side projects made it easy for me to transition into a much more interesting but specialized field that I saw more of a future in, and that has worked out great. The author's main complaints seem to involve recruiters and the poor value proposition of shallow projects. But if you have deep projects and poke your nose around the industries that you're interested in, you won't have to deal with recruiters, and you'll often be able to avoid the technical side of interviews entirely. Talent is very scarce. Although, I write this from a USA perspective and I notice this is a .fr domain; the labor markets and hiring practices might be very different.

bradstewart 6y ago

It depends. On company culture, your manager, and your role, among other things. If you're doing a huge career change, side projects may be your only way. But most companies (in my experience at least) recognize the value in having their application developers understand some Ops work, and vise versa. Many (most?) companies won't entirely "firewall" you from other groups. Even if you're throwing an application over the wall to ops, there's usually opportunities to learn from them, help out on specific tasks, etc. That said, learning at work is probably _better_, but I do think side projects with a specific goal (e.g. to learn a technology) are a valuable supplement.

cableshaft 6y ago

Yep. I didn't learn C# or Objective-C or Swift or Python at whatever job I had at the time, I learned them on my own, and then made a side-project with them, and was able to show that to future jobs and get hired that way. One job I got because my side project was a finalist in a contest and was shown off at a convention my employer attended, and they called me as a result and brought me in for an interview. Another job interview, I kind of stumbled on their programming test, but I was able to show something I made on the side, and that convinced them I knew enough to give me a week and bring me back in, and I refreshed my knowledge during that week, and I aced the test the second time and got the job. My current job is at least in part thanks to those side projects I worked on in the past. And my side projects I'm working on now are giving me skills that I am not gaining at my current job, and will hopefully help align me with my next shift in my career (and if not, at least I'll make a few bucks and some people will enjoy the product).

taylodl 6y ago

I think we need to differentiate between a "learning project" and a "side project." Those are two very different things, at least to me. A learning project is a project you're doing with the express intent of learning a new technology. The focus is on the learning, not the delivered functionality. A side project is a project you're doing for the community. It's a labor of love. The focus is on functionality and meeting the needs of your users, not learning technology. You may even be able to grow it into an actual business. From a career perspective you want to focus on learning projects. As you've mentioned learning projects are very important for your continued learning. Side projects on the other hand have the risk of distracting you from your work and my advice would be to avoid them unless you're scratching your own itch or maybe even want to explore starting a side business. Bottom line - be clear with yourself on what you're doing and why you're doing it.

dheera 6y ago
I disagree here. In the business world, delivered functionality matters. I think building something for the community that the community actually uses teaches you a lot about product management and building reliable systems and designing products people want. You learn a whole lot about the reality of the industry by doing something purposeful. There's a big difference, for example, in machine learning engineers who can train a model in a Jupyter notebook and an engineer who can both train and actually deploy a model like that on a self-driving car. Companies often very much appreciate having dipped into the practical aspect of things, where things like optimization, uptime, and consistency matter. Also, building things that give you a feeling of success make you more driven and motivated to learn and improve. Sometimes having a thousand users is that feeling of success that is the driving force for more learning.
tasuki 6y ago
So we have three already: - learning project (focus on learning) - side project (focus on functionality) - cv-enhancing project (focus on optics, what the original article was mostly about and against) In my experience, side projects are by far the most fun. All of the learning projects I've done in the past had some goal to achieve, something I could show someone and feel proud. I find it difficult to learn just for the sake of learning. Perhaps this is why I struggled with schooling.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

Similar experience here. I can attribute all my jobs to side projects - it always so happened that the technology I got employed for was something I tried to write a game in few months to years ago.

ObsoleteNerd 6y ago

Yeah I never went to college/uni and got my first job in IT due to doing web/graphic design projects on the side of my non-IT job. Then after getting sick of front-end/design I started coding back-end side projects and taught myself enough to ultimately get hired doing CMS development. Then same again to get into Sysadmin, after running game/file servers as side projects. Etc etc... Five distinct career changes/upgrades over ~20 years inside IT, all thanks to building stuff I wanted to build for fun and that impressing the right people to get me hired. The only IT job I've ever gotten through working my way up in a company was the last one, into Project Management, and that was only due to the breadth of skills I taught myself throughout the years... on all those side projects. If I didn't do side projects, and didn't always strive for more, I'd still be running/packing cables for concerts and working 20 hour shifts for barely enough money to survive.