[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What kind of projects make a junior candidat...
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Ask HN: What kind of projects make a junior candidate stand out
from the rest?
As a self-taught I'm getting the impression that, while I'm
learning the basics following tutorials, FreeCodeCamp, the Odin
Project etc. there's no one calling me back for interviews, and the
cause for that is the type of projects that I'm building. So, what
kind of projects are they worth building? I'm not talking about
"just follow your heart and build something you would want to use"
because I'm sure no one would care if I made yet another Genshin
Impact wishes simulator, or a character planner for an RPG/MMORPG,
or even a chess game. Since my goal is to build things FOR OTHERS
I thought it's wise for me to ask what would someone want to see in
my portfolio. My goal is to start with frontend and pivot to
backend after a few years (or sooner, depending on the company). I
only do that because I read pretty much everywhere that the
frontend world is more open to self-taughts than the backend world,
so I'd hate climbing the metaphorical wrong wall.
Author : Arisaka1
Score : 28 points
Date : 2021-11-04 16:06 UTC (6 hours ago)
| jvanvleet wrote:
| Accepted pull requests to open source projects run by someone
| else. If PRs look even decent that will almost guarantee an
| interview with me for a young dev. It will guarantee me a look at
| just about anyone.
| elefantastisch wrote:
| I want to know that a junior candidate:
|
| * Can actually produce something
|
| * Cares about the craft of software development (learning the why
| behind things instead of just copy-pasting examples until it
| works)
|
| * Has the initiative to be self-directed (learning and growing
| and pushing through obstacles instead of just waiting for someone
| to tell them answers)
|
| * Understands how to work with other humans
|
| Everything else will come naturally if the above are true. What
| will make someone stand out is showing that they are outstanding
| in one of the above categories. Almost any side project will show
| the first category. A side project that involves some complexity
| under the hood that you can talk about and talk about the
| struggles of learning it is even better because it can show some
| of the others.
| eps wrote:
| Also:
|
| * Doesn't have any obvious gaps in education
|
| ... which will be _the_ concern with someone self-taught.
|
| We hired a very bright and enthusiastic guy who dropped out of
| college after a year to work on his own sales/marketing funnel
| tool. It all was going well until out of the blue he pointed at
| a screen and asked what "a |= b" did. Pulled on the thread and
| not only he had no idea what bitwise ops were, he also didn't
| know quite a few of other basics. That's the kind of
| uncertainty that formal education usually removes and the
| reason why self-taught people having much harder time getting
| to the interviews.
| clpm4j wrote:
| I imagine it was important for the specific job you're
| referring to, but there are plenty of dev jobs that don't
| require an understanding of bitwise ops.
| eps wrote:
| What it was exactly is secondary. The trouble was that
| there were gaping holes where it should've been solid and
| this complicated things in more ways than one.
| codegeek wrote:
| In my opinion, it is not so much about the "type of projects" but
| more about the "understanding of your work" and ability to
| explain why/what you built.
|
| I have interviewed candidates who supposedly had a great Github
| Repo of apps they built but couldn't answer simple questions like
| "Why POST, why not GET. Can you do GET instead of POST. If yes,
| why. If yes, Why not". They got mad at me and told me "haven't
| you looked at my Github". I replied "I did and that's why I am
| asking how you built that project".
|
| If I am hiring entry level, I wouldn't care if you built a Game
| or a CRUD App. I would care how you built it and how far can you
| explain the process of building it. How much do you really
| understand of what you built. For example, let's say you built a
| "Contact Form". I want to understand do you really know the
| difference between GET vs POST requests (you will be surprised
| how many candidates fail at this). I couldn't care less if you
| can just memorize how to add a GET API. I am more interested in
| your understanding of it. I want to know how the form gets
| submitted to the server (lot of candidates don't know how an http
| Request is formed, header vs body etc). Lot of candidates truly
| don't know how an AJAX request works. For example, if you submit
| a Form using Ajax vs Regular action, whats the difference ?
|
| So, build anything which you can explain and walk through the
| process of. I would at least hire you.
| sander1095 wrote:
| I am curious. What is the difference between an ajax and form
| post
| warrenm wrote:
| I don't care if you even _have_ "side projects"
|
| I care that you _care_ about your work - doing your best, taking
| constructive criticism (and knowing how to ignore non-
| constructive criticism), improving, etc
|
| If you can show that to me with your "side projects" - cool
|
| If you don't have any "side projects" - also: cool
|
| You don't have to spend your entire professional and personal
| life in front of a screen to "stand out from the rest"
|
| You have to be able to coherently communicate and tell me how you
| currently add value to your present position, or how you expect
| to add value to a position with my company
| legerdemain wrote:
| If I meet a candidate and they haven't used back channels to
| find out what challenges my team is facing, it's an auto-reject
| for me. You should at least care enough to do some sleuthing
| behind the scenes.
| thebean11 wrote:
| What job do you ideally want? Build something relevant to that.
| I'm an experienced dev but this helped me a ton during my recent
| career move into a different niche (where many jobs require
| experience in that niche which I did not have).
|
| Put another way, build something targeting the skills you
| want/need.
| brudgers wrote:
| Personal, professional, alumni connections matter more than the
| specifics of a resume or portfolio.
|
| Because someone has to look at the resume/portfolio for its
| content to matter.
|
| If you want a job, look for a job.
|
| That's hard because looking for a job is mostly experiencing the
| risks of rejection.
|
| Building a project for your portfolio first is easy because it
| completely avoids the risks of rejection.
|
| The reality is, that no matter what you build the odds are no one
| will call you back because that's the default.
|
| In the world of work, what you know is a value from 0.00 to 1.00.
| Who you know is a factor from 0.00 to 1000000.
|
| Good luck.
| rajacombinator wrote:
| Any non-bullshit project is good. But if you can do some basic
| coding and communicate clearly, I will teach juniors the rest.
| ZainRiz wrote:
| Most resumes only get looked at for 6 seconds before they end up
| in the discard pile.
|
| You want to fix your resume so that that quick glance is enough
| to make you look interesting.
|
| That means: - Having a summary section at the top that highlights
| somethings special about you (which shows you'll be a valuable
| employee). Anything that shows initiative or curiosity is a big
| win here. - The work/project experience sections should call out
| projects that you've worked on. The online title describing what
| it does is what matters. No one will look at your code. No one
| will click on your links (unless they find you really
| intriguing). They'll make a judgement based on the text and what
| they assume you actually did on each project, so simple is fine.
|
| So what does this mean for projects? Work on the stuff you find
| most interesting. Whatever scratches your itch
| warrenm wrote:
| In addition to "curiosity" or "initiative", I want to see _how_
| you measurably saved money /time with something you did - like
| "implemented and maintained Ansible environment to cut system
| build times from 4 days to 10 minutes" or "implemented and
| maintained XYZ product, cutting intrusion response time from
| 'never' to under 1 hour"
| muzani wrote:
| With juniors, I'm looking at a few things:
|
| 1. Bullshit. Juniors are mostly blank slates and anyone who hires
| a junior can train. But you can't fix a liar.
|
| 2. Potential. The variance for a junior is a lot higher than a
| senior. It's sometimes a bit of lottery.
|
| So I do indeed look for people who can be amazing over people who
| can get the job done. A chess game would be a hint of amazing.
| Many great devs started with a game.
|
| I hired one junior because she made a crappy robot. It didn't
| matter that the robot was crappy. It mattered a lot more that
| robots aren't a software developer "thing". The first page of her
| resume was typical, but the crappy robots on the second page
| onwards were interesting. She turned out to be an excellent
| programmer and I paid her about 30% more than the usual, but alas
| we couldn't afford her for long.
|
| What's interesting was that nobody else gave her an interview, so
| from a statistical view, she did poorly. But she got some above
| average jobs from it later so ultimately she succeeded.
|
| There's a lot of dumb "rules" around applying for jobs, but I'd
| say it's a lot like dating. Don't dress for who you expect to
| meet. Dress for who you want to meet.
| [deleted]
| greenie_beans wrote:
| i suspect i got discarded as an entry level developer because
| somebody thought i was lying about some web design work done
| for a now-defunct web business in a tiny town. i made a website
| as a freelancer for the business, and the sites had vanished
| whenever somebody with hiring power asked to see them. he
| ghosted me.
|
| in retrospect, i'm glad it didn't work out because he invited
| me for coffee but it was really a job interview, just unstated.
| talk about not being honest.
|
| but it sucked, because later i had another "coffee" with the
| CTO for company who was friends with that guy. i mentioned to
| the CTO that i had met with his friend. later, after the
| meeting, he basically backtracked on the potential for working
| for them. i've always wondered if the two dudes talked and i
| got passed on because of my presumed dishonesty.
|
| i'm doing fine without them, though. both of those dudes are
| pretty gate keeper-y in this small city tech scene, but i've
| made a network with some co-workers from my first job as a
| developer, since those are the ones who really know what's up
| anyway.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Most places use a screener that will automatically trash your
| resume is you don't have a degree.
| jmkr wrote:
| Companies probably aren't even looking at your projects, but I'd
| keep it simple if all you wanted to do was build projects for a
| portfolio. Simple website with login + database.
|
| If you're not getting a call back for interviews you should
| probably improve your resume. Maybe list and describe your
| projects as well, stuff you've learned from it, books you've
| read, communities/meetups you've gone to.
|
| > I'm not talking about "just follow your heart and build
| something you would want to use"
|
| In my opinion I do just build what I want. Passion projects are
| more interesting imo. You can describe and talk about them
| better, your goals, what you've learned, how you would do it
| differently, etc.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I would say the opposite.
|
| Whenever I have started a serious side project it changed my
| life in 18 months or so. It goes from "not getting called back"
| to recruiters (not from Amazon) contacting me.
|
| Usually my side projects involve finding some use of a new
| technology that other people aren't doing that doesn't seem
| that hard. Some examples are
|
| * In the late 1990s I made a Java applet that knocked off
| Apple's Quicktime VR
|
| * I built a web site that had an XML-based back end the week
| XML 1.0 was finalized and got a deal to write a chapter in a
| book
|
| * I made a web site of animal pictures, went on to make sites
| about cars and New York City, then made a list of topics from
| DBpedia and attached over a million images with near perfect
| accuracy
|
| * I made a workflow system for handling job applications and
| classifying job listings with machine learning that got me the
| first job I applied for
|
| Right now I have three side projects that form a series
|
| * a system for making "three-sided cards" that have a photo or
| art reproduction on the front, a description and QR code on the
| back, an associated web site as well as installations of the
| cards that have "digital twins" like
|
| https://gen5.info/$/XQ*42RXF-TLY:$B.8/
|
| that one is nearly wrapped up.
|
| * a persistence-of-vision display that mounts on the passenger
| side of my car (I need to have it perfectly debugged before I
| drive with it so I invented an error-correcting communication
| protocol to send graphical data back to my computer)
|
| * I want to do a sketch comedy act with a video game character
| projected like
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper%27s_ghost
|
| which is a "moon shot" for me because it involves software,
| hardware, being funny, finding a venue, etc.
|
| If I were looking for a new web-based project I'd use WebGL to
| give people a videogame-like experience. You can't make an AAA
| game but maybe you can make something like the trailer for an
| AAA game. In general I am seeing videogame interfaces (say the
| Pokedex or other "guides" you find in a game) as an inspiration
| for mobile interfaces.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| I'm curious, what exactly do you mean by "persistence-of-
| vision"?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| See
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hASOre63Nk
|
| That device has a single line of LEDs but they cover the
| space by spinning to make a 2-d image.
| muzani wrote:
| The first filter (HR/recruiting) may not look at your projects.
| By the time they get to me (an engineer), I'm going to spend 15
| mins digging through this candidate before the first interview.
|
| I will check whether your projects do CDN or whether you write
| functions with more than 4 arguments. There was a guy who put a
| project in a certain framework on his resume to prove he knew
| how to work with that framework. That project had one commit
| and it was titled something like "fris commit". That made me go
| "hmmmmm".
|
| I don't judge too harshly because I know not everyone puts
| their code open source. But I do pay a lot of attention to what
| someone puts out there. I have interviewers who say "Hey I
| loved your Medium posts" or "Hey I saw your screenshots on AI
| on Facebook", so I doubt I'm the only one.
| hank-biteline wrote:
| If you're not getting called back for interviews, you probably
| need to work on your resume / cover letter / personal site.
|
| If I get an applicant that writes a competent cover letter they
| stand out significantly from others (who often don't even
| bother!).
|
| On your resume try to minimize details that aren't relevant to
| software development - keep it focused on software-related
| education/experience, skills, and projects. If you have
| significant non-software related education or experience that's
| worth mentioning, keep it short, as a side note.
|
| An applicant with a reasonable personal site also stands out (it
| doesn't have to be extraordinary, just something simple and
| aesthetic that serves up your resume, links to your projects,
| etc.)
|
| As for the projects themselves, the best advice I can give is to
| demonstrate business value. Creating a game or some nifty 3D site
| is neat, but it could be hard for an employer to be confident
| that your portfolio can translate into what they are doing. So
| aim for "business-like" websites, with beautiful landing pages,
| and functionality like forms, buttons, modals, etc. If you can
| also brag about how fast you got your project(s) done, that might
| also catch an employer's eye.
| trs8080 wrote:
| as someone who is constantly hiring frontend engineers and who
| has a partner who is hiring frontend engineers, i can tell you
| that the industry is absolutely flooded with entry-level
| candidates from other industries who took a two week bootcamp and
| whose github profiles are full of the exact same projects.
|
| my only advice: don't make a todo app, a weather app, or any
| other kind of simple productivity/display-results-of-single-api-
| call apps. everyone has those and they're a signal that the
| candidate does not have real-world experience or experience
| building applications on their own (i require at least one of
| these).
| chexx wrote:
| You're whole premise is wrong, a similar mistake we often make as
| programmers is trying to optimize without profiling.
|
| You can build homebrew but still be rejected at Google.
| mathgenius wrote:
| If you are not excited by what you are building then there's
| something missing. I'm not sure that "build things for others"
| means anything. But maybe you're just a really great person and
| want to help others, I don't know. There's nothing wrong with
| "yet another Genshin impact wishes simulator" (wtf is that?) if
| you are excited about it! But you don't sound excited about it.
| comeonseriously wrote:
| As others have mentioned, fix your resume. Regarding projects, in
| your resume talk about your projects in terms of what value the
| learning would bring to the company you're applying to. People
| WILL care that you made a chess game if you can tell them the
| value that learning how to implement a chess engine could bring
| to their organization.
| xupybd wrote:
| If you can solve a real business problem you can prove yourself
| and learn a heap. Do you know any business owners that you might
| be able to produce some software for?
| thedevindevops wrote:
| Write something rubbish/terrible, use it as a talking point about
| your learning journey, what you did wrong and what you learned
| from it. Maybe throw in a suggestion around how you would do it
| now. Bonus points if you mention using a technology the current
| company is using.
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(page generated 2021-11-04 23:02 UTC)