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CEO’s Advice
Did you see the recent post about people losing hope in this subreddit? The CEO of Y Combinator has some valuable words for you:
- Build real projects, side projects, open source, and things for fun to stand out.
- Many CS degree holders struggle to build anything substantial.
- The key is not just proving you can build, but showcasing that you enjoy building.
So instead of losing hope, start maximizing your projects! Check out this tweet for more inspiration.
I agree as long as they are ***good*** projects.
Open source contributions to popular / complex software are an automatic interview at a lot of places.
My projects did not get me my job.
Not really an “antidote”, just something that makes you more competitive.
It’s absolutely a good thing to do, but it also comes across as gaslighting and victim blaming the way it’s phrased. It comes across as, “The only reason you don’t have a job is because you haven’t personally done enough.” No, the reason is a compilation of massive layoffs and decreased hiring. Even people with tons of amazing personal projects that have real world users are STILL having a hard time finding jobs.
The market is tough right now. There is no “antidote”. Just maximizing your odds. And even if you do everything right, you may still have a tough time.
Give people hope, but don’t shame them for complaining. The ability to unload to peers is an important social mechanism for dealing with hardship as well as keeping one’s perspective.
Of course thats true but everyone started building nice projects, it’ll just become an expectation, thats just the nature of supply and demand.
Being better than your competition is a solution for one individual, it doesn’t solve the market being too competitive.
I been saying this, I interview so many people that can’t build shit but can solve weird problems on leetcode.
What he’s saying definitely has some value but when personal projects are mentioned I think people default to them being toy projects like todo site/app, portfolio sites, or some other rudimentary task
While I agree, it’s far from an antidote. I have two projects on my resume, one has research citations and is used in research across the world, the other is a CRUD app hosted on AWS with a non-zero number of daily users. Popular and hot tech stacks and everything.
Still have yet to get an interview after 200+ apps, this along with 3 YoE and about to graduate with MSc in Comp Sci. I think the Canadian job market is dead, truly dead.
I’ll start by saying I “agree” with the central premise that you need work to get work, and if you can’t get work, create something to show for work.
The problem is that a “project” doesn’t get you work it gets you an interview… maybe.
So to get that interview you need to put together a halfway decent project, or contribute to an open source project BUTTTTTT it can’t be something that you did during school, because that doesn’t show “passion” or “commitment”. However, now that you’ve gotten the interview did you also put in the weeks/months of prep on Leetcode plus possible system design prep to actually pass that and get the job?
Where is all the time to commit to this? I’m at 14 YOE right now and I’m still pounding LeetCode between jobs, and maybe if you’re a fresh out of school college grad you can pound coffee and energy drinks until you have something, but in general this is not a healthy way to do things, but this is what the industry demands.
If I may voice the true angst.
Fuck that. I didn’t sign up for this valley of despair between university and entry level. What the fuck is this joke?
Anyway, now that that’s out.
No fuck this shit, fucking rug pull bullshit.
Okay, now it’s out.
Maybe I’ll see y’all again if my second degree doesn’t work out. :clown:
I sort of agree with this. But at the same time, I agree with not working nights/weekends and burning yourself out. So it depends.
If I was unemployed, had a lot of free time, then sure. But if I had a job with kids, it is much more difficult.
Good projects matter. Especially if they are unique and of-scale. My current job is a result of a project I built and sold. The product is similar to *creatomate* I built in 2016. The complexity of an online video editing platform that does motion graphics for Instagram/Facebook isn’t something trivial that you can just pull from an open source git repo. That personal project got me a lot of offers that I ended up selling it after an interview at a prospective employer. They bought it. I use that story for every job I interview for.
This is BS. If you like building something do it but if you want to be an employee the selection process is based on interviewing skills, work experience and if you’re early career your degree.
No one has time to look into your projects unless it’s something extraordinary, but in that case you’re better off monetizing it than looking for a job.
Remember when the author of brew was rejected by Google ?
This is stupidity. I only code for money. I do other stuff the rest of the time
Your resume gets you interviews, your social skills get you the job. guys, please start doing projects, not just because it looks good on your resume, but because it gives you something to talk about. even if your project has absolutely nothing to do with what I’m looking for, seeing someone motivated and excited goes A LONG way.
Ok millionaire 🙄🙄
Garry tan is a huge piece of shit and I reccomend people get career advice from anyone else
Tbf if you haven’t already started doing this then you probably weren’t going to make it anyway
He went to stanford, had 3 internships while in school, then started as a PM at msft.
The guy may be super smart/talented/whatever but I don’t think I’d take that as gospel for how to break into the industry when no one will hire you at all.
I don’t give advice anymore to people trying to find their first job because it’s been 10 years since I got my first job/even looked for a job at all. Wtf would I know about the current job market.
So many people in comments saying building projects is good but those should be unique,
Bro , it’s really hard to come up with an unique idea these days , the idea that is sounding unique to me some guy may have had already built it 10 or 20 years ago
What I would say is that cloning is good as long as one chooses to clone a good project and clone it from scratch
In the recent interviews I have given none of the interviewers even bothered to ask about the projects that I built in college or during the training, they only asked questions related to my current skills and the project that I’m working in my company
What I’m trying to say is that not every software engineer has to have an unique project that’s not even feasible
Many time we just need a copy pasta engineer who can read code and understand the flow of any code
Building something unique is good if you are passionate about it but just for the sake of writing it on resume working extra hours on the things that interviewers won’t even bother to ask about isn’t that good I would say.
Finally in my opinion good coding skill > good projects on resume.
This isn’t bad advice, but puts the software industry into a weird space. Most professional and STEM jobs don’t require a project portfolio, that’s something you see a lot more often in the arts. But I also think having to do 5 rounds of interviews and exams to get a basic IC job is also weird. Software jobs do more screening than airline pilots or medical doctors to build a submit button.
So, can you use ChatGPT for projects?
Do you think interviewers will care if you jump started or had AI assistance for projects?
Pros: You can write and publish an app way faster if you don’t need to rely on your own memory of how to build/deploy/code or whatever a tech stack you’re not 100% familiar with. Thinking if you want to use a mobile framework that you’re not used to using, or need some backend/infra stuff that you don’t usually do.
Cons: Interviewers might hear that you used AI and think that you don’t really know the codebase.
“CEO of a monument to grind culture says to work outside work” – obviously he thinks that. Now let’s ask oil execs what they think of EVs!
Projects don’t get you past the HR bot sir. That requires a degree.
Person is completely out of touch with reality. Comes off something a wealthy person that doesn’t have to work anymore would say.
It’s good if you can for sure. Anything for an edge over other people. But if you actually seriously think about doing a real project, you quickly realize it will take months of work to provide anything of value others can see. That’s if you aren’t doing other things, such as looking for a job. And if you are doing your best to not waste time with this real project, half the time or more is going to be planning out what you build. Plus to a hiring manager all it says is you know how to work with some technologies and don’t have to be told to work. You won’t be working with tools all companies want that are met to manage projects with scale, you won’t be dealing with tradeoffs that you can find with projects with scale, you won’t have to extensively deal with coworkers and clients like you would have to be with projects with scale. The real biggest benefit to some real project is if you realistically think there is a good chance it will make money, and you can hold off looking for any work for 1-2 years.
Don’t bother posting actual advice here. People just want to complain and feel sorry for themselves
Bro people with actual work experience can’t even land jobs, forget about your one commit to an open source project or crud web application.
> A lot of people with CS degrees can’t actually build anything
My *job* building products for real world companies that pulls in millions in revenue says otherwise.
There’s something to be said about programmers that don’t do well in solo green field projects, but overall your job should be enough to justify that you can actually build something.
My anecdote: I have a GitHub portfolio project and I did a tech talk on it that’s on YouTube. You can literally watch me live code in front of 50 strangers, and it’s on both my LinkedIn and resume.
Every interview I had, no one looked at it. Not one. The most I got was “oh wow that’s really cool” and they never clicked either link lol. I did get invited to speak at some conferences but it never did anything for me on the job front.
Not trying to be negative or anything but that’s just my own personal experience with this approach.
>A lot of people with CS degrees can’t actually build anything
Well yes maybe, but he is literally the CEO of a company that creates companies with toxic hiring rounds with like 5 different tests and leetcoding and so on
Lol the entry barrier to this field is insane. You need to grind LeetCode, building extremely complex that require senior level expertise projects that take years to do. Only then maybe you can land something-at-all around 100k or so.
While my HR friends job hopped for 3 years and moved from starting 80k to 155k and keep moving and advancing. Same with accountants, financial advisors, product managers, etc.
Hack, my home daycare friends pulls in 180k/year in Greater Boston.
Hack, my friend handymen/trades makes over 300k/year here.
And here we are — spending years upon years on prep, then layoff, then repeat again. Working in startups overtime on miniscule base with some *equity hopes*. And all this for what? Literally salaries arent different than in most other college-required fields, especially in HCOL areas. Maybe only top tech pays well but most wont get those jobs.
Now I see all those places keep asking for Masters. If you want to do AI then Phd please.
And salary offer is like 150k. This much time you can spend on MD and pull in 500k+ with job guarantee.
Oh an yeah, lovely early ageism wall in tech industry. 40+ bye bye unless you are senior stuff.
This industry is just no longer worth it tbh.
I wouldn’t say it’s a bad strategy, but in my experience, specifically preparing for interviews by leetcoding, studying system design, practicing behavioral questions, hiring a tutor, and getting mock interviews has been more practical based on my experience.
This is stupid most developer jobs are about learning the existing systems and problem solving. Building projects has nothing to do with it. Of course if you are applying for a Java dev position you better played around with frame works and tools but building many projects means nothing. Usually the company has specific architecture and specific problems. This is pure capitalism. You will learn the job on the job and companies will pay for your first months even if you dont contribute. We are humans not machines. Stop making companies richer and richer! Most teams have underemployment imo at this point they dont hire new engineers and force existing ones to work more because they can and managers especially do that I believe some of them under hire and just get the money in their own pocket.
What project guarantees me a job? Cuz I don’t have enough passion to just think of a random project.
You gotta be fucking nerd to spend your free time breaking your head over code and not doing something more meaningful like spending time with loved ones. It’s scary how religious tech workers get about staying up to date with frameworks and side projects like damn. Even I drank the koolaid. Only nerds with no other redeeming qualities than their ability to code gives shitty life advice like this
yes, certainly the CEO of Y Combinator is the person to listen to when it comes to the minutia of hiring CS juniors.
Its not necessarily bad advice, but its not some magic wand that you can wave and say “HEY I HAVE PROJECTS.”
This is mostly nonsense. I have two projects of decent quality and whenever I am contacted by a recruiter, I check the server logs and user analytics software to see if any of the recent visits were plausibly from that individual. I would estimate that less than 20% of recruiters even bother to take a look, let alone click on things and navigate around the site.
Unless your project or FOSS contribution can directly tap you into a community or network of developers doing paid work, there are better returns on investment for your time. The people are YC might be interested in your projects, but you’re lucky if the average 9-5 recruiter at an IBMified tech company takes 30 seconds to read your resume, let alone look at your projects.
I disagree. Modern tech interviews don’t work like this. Nobody is probably going to care or even understand what you did on an open source project. Your ability to get hired will depend on what leetcode question you receive. Or, how you answered “how I spend my typical day”. It’s all very random and luck based once you have experience.