"When a painter goes home, he might not want to paint more walls... But he may paint murals or canvases... regardless of the monetary reward"

Building software is a form of artistic expression for many people, doing it without the limits of business requirements can be very satisfying.

The author has some point in there, however, focussing on side projects does help you expand and broaden your experiences. Its supremely helpful when switching between slightly different industries.

This is like a writer telling you to "forget blogs/articles/novels/stories and focus on your newspaper writing job".

There is always something for everyone.

As with many other things in life, there is now one-size-fits-all. For someone else, a complete opposite will work.

Stay informed, learn about different approaches, and simply choose what you think is best.

But article is good, nonetheless, everything needs a balance.

or another advice - you need to diversify your skills, choose the skills you believe will be in demand in the future to learn, also try to choose ones that it will be ok you are older.

that doesn't make sense, why do you apply to jobs if you want to work for yourself?

My side-projects gave me the career I have today. They have gotten me jobs without interviews. Because of my side-projects, every job I have had in the past two decades has been without a formal interview or usual take home/coding/white boarding/hazing ritual. I have used a resume precisely twice in the past 15+ years, and one of those two times was because of the company we built and turned profitable was being acquihired.

Some of my side-projects have turned into products that generated real world value. Side projects let me explore new technologies that I don’t get to deal with at work.

I would say, because of my side-projects, that I have frequently drowned in opportunity in terms of offered work. I have gotten offered a “when can you start” job, without interview, in an unsolicited approach, on more than one occasion simply because someone was using one of my side-projects in their day-to-day work.

I recently did a few “test the waters” interviews with a couple of companies (FANGMAN being two of them), just to get some practice in, to see if I “still got it.” Only the FANGMAN companies required a resume before they would even talk to me. Apparently, I’ve still got it, but I realized those kinds of positions weren’t for me.

Having spoken to several people about “focusing on your job” many realise that they have a great job, but what they don’t have is a great and diversified career. They get pigeonholed in to a single role, whether that is marketing, or project management or even software development. When that career dries up, Flash programmer anyone? COBOL programmer? Then they have to reskill and hope someone gives them another chance. “I am an $X” where $X is how they identify themselves. I’ve always struggled to answer that question of “what is it you do?” Perhaps that is a failing on my part.

The majority of software development is code that is not customer facing, that is never seen outside of the business unit for which it was developed. For each and every job you will have through your career you will be told to take a number, stand in line, wait your turn, do as your told, learn to compromise and if we like you enough and you check all the boxes, we’ll let you know at our convenience. In the words of Casey Neistat, “this… is terrible advice.”

My last job was without anything more than a 20 minute chat and “here’s what I’ve been building these past few months as a side-project.” My job before that was “we really liked what you did on Project $X for Company $Y, do you have any experience in Technology $Z?” (Yes, here’s a side-project you can look at that uses Technology $Z). Every single job, for 20+ years, “here’s something I did on a side-project that’s really neat and interesting, do you want me to do that neat and interesting thing for your company?”

I have studiously avoided any and every company that has tried to pigeon hole me, or get me to jump through the hoops of their hiring process, so far it has worked out pretty well for me. I don’t think I have ever worked a single day in my entire life.

Not everybody can do this, not everybody wants to do this, but it has worked out pretty well for me.

If I had to give advice to my younger self, if my younger self would actually listen to the advice, I would say “Do more of the picking one project in any given year, and hyper focus on that for 12 months, rather than only doing things for a few months. If you need to figure out which project that is, do three or four for a couple of weeks, then abandon the ones that don’t have enough interesting problems.” I do focus on single projects for extended periods of time, and it is those projects that have built my career.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG7dSXcfVqE

But side projects have tons of other benefits outside of making money:

* It satisfies your curious mind.

* It is a learning tool to discover new technologies. Consider this as investment for your future career. Imagine learning Kubernetes or ReactJS when it just came out.

* It is a learning tool to understand old technologies (because you simply don't have the time to do so on day job).

* It's a teaching tool if you have kids that's interested in computer.

* It solves some practical annoyance at home (for example: Homebridge).

Basically, what I'm doing now, when I should be doing what I'm paid to be doing is what I'll be paid to do in a few years' time.

Experimentation and side projects are vital to stretch creativity and learn new things. Not all of my side projects have been successful, but they've all played a vital role in my career development, more by happy accident than design. It's all about following interests to see where they lead.

Instead, I have started shifting my focus to "side-gigs" rather, with the goal that they create future value for me in some sense.

So the author originally found much satisfaction in his exploratory, entrepreneurial, and hacking activities, as it offered a counter-balance to the corporate culture that he perceived as shallow and alien. It didn't matter that his ventures ended up as failures, he found something worthy out of the process.

Sometime later he had a change of heart and decided to pursue a "career". He was then confronted by a clash of culture when he realized that all his tinkering didn't matter to HR.

Now, he's a manager and he understand HR's perspective on reality. He gives you a glimpse. His time spent working on projects was a waste at best and a liability at worst. Companies don't need innovators or free thinkers, they're afraid of them. What they need are good soldiers unburden with ideas of freedom. Exploring new shiny stuff does not make you appealing to HR, your capacity to endure the grind does.

The author offers some philosophical digression where he posits that side projects, much like the theoretical stuff that you learn in school, serve to expand your mind, but don't let them delude you into thinking that you can make that enriched vision serve you in the real world (of employment I suppose).

True valuable experience comes from getting a first job and to do that you should brush up on your DS & algo theory and do coding exercises. Don't expects all your shallow side projects to come to your rescue at your next technical interview.

The author concludes that if you want to make things easier for yourself, you should get a job. It will free you to be yourself, to go fishing, to have a life. If you still want to work on some side projects, you'll do so because they truly matter to you, not because you think they will be strategically helpful in your career. It will suck becoming dependent on a company, but it's the price to pay to be safe from the relentless competition in the job market.

Since it's an 'Advice to my young self'. I would say either forget side projects (to be boring as hell), or invest more in side projects (take some risks).

I have been haunted by sloppy side projects for many years because day job makes me both mentally physically exhausted. Until recently I realized if I quit my job and my life wouldn't fall apart that much, and I can spend more time on the projects I'm interested in without worrying about the return rate.

If you want to grow as a programmer (in my case), then side projects are going to get you the skills to advance your career and get you a better job over "buddying up" with recruiters. Sure, you can be a 9-5 kinda person and then "switch off" when you get home, but you will be the one stuck wondering where it all went wrong and write a blog article complaining about it.

insert principal skinner out-of-touch meme here

#1: No one will ever look at your side project. However, it can still be of use to your job hunt if you can talk about it. In fact, it's possible to get away with a empty project provided you can talk about what would have been in there in great detail (as if you'd actually done it).

#2: If you can't talk about your project in great detail, then it has as much worth as if you'd never actually completed the project.

This one I learned with the years, that it is so much work to introduce new technology to a team, sometimes not the most productive endeavor. Involves some perfect timing, support from key stakeholders and a team open to the idea...

Unless the current stack is absolutely insufferable, it could be better to try and find what's interesting about it and become proficient with it.

Most of the most successful companies started out as someone's side-project. So, I don't see the point of that article that is basically saying be passionate about your job, not your own ideas. And he's saying that to his younger self. Wow.

Heck, my entire career was born out of immersing myself in an area of interest in my free time, outside of my original field of study.

I feel most of us would disagree with that. All new jobs in my career were result of learning something new on side projects. Recruiters show that as passion for learning. Many jobs don't allow for much exploration and you don't have leverage to call shots. It's usually uphill battle to even introduce any significant changes in large stable products. Also, side projects shouldn't be just for goal of finding new jobs and making recruiters happy anyway. It should be for passion for creating things, realizing ideas.

It really depends on your goals. My goal has always been to have my own business, so I put lots of time and energy into side projects.

If I only wanted to have a career, I probably would use that time and energy on something more career-oriented.

The only thing that needs attention paid to is have a flow of income while you're still working on your side project. It becomes mainstream as your only job when it starts bringing back decent money or VC support.

There's a reason they're "side" projects.

I'm not saying "you should definitely do side projects". I'm just disagreeing they aren't always useless. Like pretty much anything in life, your mileage will vary.

The side projects I was working on were pretty small potatoes, so that needs to be pointed out. But overall a higher focus on my job has led to two promotions and a ton more money.

Maybe I could have struck it rich with a startup, but the golden handcuffs feel so nice right now that I may never find out.

Anecdotally my side projects are of a consistently higher standard than the projects I work on at the company.

I also get way more chance to experiment with new things than I get at my job.

Clickbait title that even author doesn't agree with.

While they both netted positive outcomes for me, if I had gone all-in on either one, I think I would have had an order-of-magnitude better outcome. Splitting my attention cost me serious advancement & money at both.

This is a very good & important assessment, realization, & I appreciate the author's reassessment.

> Secondly, I don’t think that multiplying the side projects is useful unless they are substantial.

A phrase that recuringly comes to mind when hearing of a lot of side projects is, "Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men."

I very much want to see a world where computing is a good & sensible place, for scratching your own itch. But at the moment, just getting started on a modest web project is pretty hard. Even if you don't need user accounts, it's still a lot of grunt-work, gulp-work, webpack-work, and or babel-work. Oh you want users with their data? Now multiply the number of hours by 20x. Folk like hood.ie & UserGrid have attempted to lower the effort-to-start, Firebase & others are certainly selling themselves on trying to accelerate the mid-level lift here, the 200's & 300's level courses of "getting your app going". But it's hard. We're not great.

So at the moment, scratch your own itch is hard to do well in a time effective manner. My take-aways are two fold: 1. on a macro scale, we should work harder to build a better systematic base to work from, and 2. a lot of side projects are over-invested in. As a chronic maker-of-side-projects, knowing how to put something down & walk away is a crucial skill. Unlike the author, I do think there's a quite considerable value in having some shallow experience, including with things you are not likely to use (understanding the meta-patterns of computing, seeing similarities across systems is where mature understanding starts).

> I don’t want to make this blog post a rant against side projects. In fact, I’m advocating the exact opposite. Continue to do as many side projects as ever, code on nights and weekends if you want too, but don’t think about how they could be useful to you to get a new job. Don’t do all the tutorials you find about Vue.js, but use this weird technology that you saw yesterday on Hacker News.

An imo unfortunate & accurate statement of a dwindling spirit of the technical community! We have heavily industrialized[1] these days, & our hunger to explore outer bounds & interesting potential is much diminished. As a result, those of us who are pioneering by nature are less in demand, more settlers and town planners are needed[2]. For now, we are "technically mature", we believe we have "good solutions" to the problems that are common & identified. For this to shift, we need more cause for adventure, more sense that computing has bigger open possibilities than what we've settled down around. I for one continue to believe the future is still exciting.

[1] https://daverupert.com/2020/01/the-web-is-industrialized-and...

[2] https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-to...

I got a job because of my side projects and would be unemployed if I didn't work on side projects.

Now, who's opinion is correct?

There are two primary paths from that level: middle management and senior management. If you like the first, learn to speak well, work on your image and build the reputation of a responsible and reliable person who takes the rules seriously. You'll get promoted and eventually you'll stall at the "director" level.

The senior management path is about financial and personal risk. This is where you'll need to build a successful side gig, turn it into a multi million dollar business and negotiate a senior manager position, with very nice compensation, with competitors who will try to take you down in the process. A lot more fun, more risk and a lot more reward.

During the recruiter phase, they're not going to understand the projects anyway. The only value they have at this point is they boost your confidence and let you move on to next questions. Just list them briefly if asked what you've been doing recently. Most recruiters can't recognize a good programmer, so they approximate it by judging your confidence.

The weapon of choice against recruiters is being prepared for the questions they ask. You pull out a lot of paper, write the questions down, and write answers. Ron Fry's 101 questions book describes them in detail. What the recruiter wants to hear, what she doesn't want to hear. All recruiters have the same set of questions, and although it changes every couple of years it's a solved problem. Yes, I know telling a recruiter what she wants to hear is manipulative :-(.

If I die tomorrow and all I did was focus on my career that would be so sad.

I never wrote any code to impress someone. I always wrote code to learn things, for my own benefit. And yes, usually there was a lot of synergy, but with high latency. Much of the knowledge I use at work comes from so-called "side projects" I used to do months or even years earlier.

I also find the headline rather sad. As if everything you do in your spare time has to be geared towards maximum efficiency in the day job. That is a pretty sad path to go down.

So side projects or even real projects that are used by millions are literally meaningless.

Study LeetCode instead to get a job and focus on your job at work.

"Forget side projects and focus on job" sounds as terrible as the opposite: "ignore your job and just send time on personal interests"

It is my experience that most recruiters are superficial to the point that unless they received instructions to literally hire someone with most meetup attandances, they will ignore any candidate that list those in resume.

But, there ARE recruiters who can see through a weak resume and help you make it more targeted, surface keywords that help you get interviews.

I see .fr in domain: is going through recruiters the main way to get hired in IT in france? Where I am the best way to get hired (beyond entry level) is through referrals and for those, I find that side projects and collaborations are much better at generating a future lead that just proving you were good at your job

I am French myself and from what I've heard about how it happens in North America, the way recruiting works is a bit different.

The general idea is that French recruiters are more cautious, which is understandable since there are stronger employee protection laws and it is harder to let go of a problematic employee. For that reason, employees are also expected to stay longer.

It also looks like recruiting criteria are less technical. Your degree, years of experience, companies you worked for, certifications, etc... play a more important role than showing off your skills. Wages also tend to be defined more by your experience and position than how much money the company can expect to make out of your work.

So if you are not working in France, keep that in mind when reading such advise.

A side project is a great way to get better at things you already have interest in.

A side business is a great way to discover new interests and challenges.

You need to own the economic value of your output as early as possible. Read that sentence again. Side projects are about 10% effective here, if you get my drift.

I'm heading soon to do the same thing at another fast-growing startup.

I've actually talked about my side projects each time I've hopped jobs, and actually, when I took on advisory work. Niches are good!

The fact is, (even different parts of) organizations vary widely in their hiring practices. Some care and some don't. I've hired people almost solely on their side-project (nearly a proto-startup), and I've hired folks without them.

If you interviewed Mssrs. Bellard or Hunt (and you didn't know of them beforehand) and they talked about their side projects QEMU or haveibeenpwned.com (respectively), you should probably rate them highly, maybe even hire them on the spot.

You should aim to work for groups that value such projects.

I mean I don't expect people eat/sleep/breath code but I also don't want to hire folks that just got into CompSci/Coding cause it was a 'good/safe' career choice. In my experience the guys that are self learners, doing side projects, playing with the latest 'for fun' are the dudes that really get stuff done.

"I don’t want to make this blog post a rant against side projects. In fact, I’m advocating the exact opposite. Continue to do as many side projects as ever, code on nights and weekends if you want too, but don’t think about how they could be useful to you to get a new job. Don’t do all the tutorials you find about Vue.js, but use this weird technology that you saw yesterday on Hacker News. Don’t think about what are the best blog post topics that could expand your personal branding, but write poetry or a review of the last movie you saw. Create the apps, services, websites, or video games you want to use. This may not make your portfolio or your public image convincing for the next recruiter you’ll meet, but this is how you will be able to express all that you have in you and end up affirming yourself. At least, you should end having something meaningful to show, something to be proud about."

Without you having to do anything?

To the extent that they show that you have really accomplished something difficult they can be very impressive and differentiate you from other candidates. E.g. in terms of high school extracurriculars, if, say, you've reached the title of chess grandmaster that's impressive, if you went to chess club practice a couple times a week and were just decent at it that's not going to help.

As a software engineer, if you've built a site with millions of page views or written an open source library that many engineers have heard of, that definitely opens doors. (Though even then, maybe not in the way you're expecting. Any given recruiter still might not care or might not be able to remove the red tape for you just because of that. But you'll likely have certain unique opportunities become available). If you've thrown together a few sites in your free time and then moved on to other things, it's not that impressive.

Being able to demonstrate turning an idea into reality and talk about technical (and design) problems I encountered and how I solved them seemed to be much more interesting to interviewers than most of what I had done at my previous day jobs.

Side projects open the creative pipeline. Your job, all too often, closes it.

Also, who cares about recruiters? This is your life—you should find a bigger pool of people to impress and delight.

Do you know how many successful startups come from side projects? To some extent, a large number of startups are from "side projects":

If a college student starts a company when they are at school, by definition, that's pretty much their side project from the beginning, because their main job is to study and get degree at school. Those are side projects. Zuckerberg stole the FB idea from his side project.

Look at how many successful people quit their jobs and then started their successful companies. You think they all really quit their jobs first and then begin to work on the startup they founded? Come on, very few of them have this clean start. Even if they are on paper looking clean, there are overlaps. Those are side projects, side ideas.

At the end of the day, you ship something useful and practical and learn something new along the way. Ain't that count?

Unless your side project = side business, now that'll be another beast.

Even something you do out of love that doesn't involve money making, you still have to think about it, find time to do it and when you can't(mostly because your main job took all your time) you will feel guilty and depressed. And the cycle continue.... seriously, I think it's worse than having no side project.

Which is fine if that's what you're looking for, but not so great if you consider yourself an entrepreneur.

- They allow me to grow my skills and also test ideas in public.

- Every code pattern or library I use in my main job has been put to test on my side-projects.

If I had more hours per day, I would pour them all into my side-projects.

1. You don't much or any professional experience with software development.

2. You are experienced, but are trying to break into another field - and haven't done any relevant work in your current position (for example - front-end developer pivoting to systems development, or whatever)

I've encountered a lot of recruiters lately, that were more than interested in checking out personal projects. Hell, I've also seen some data science and ML positions where they explicitly asked for cool/interesting side-projects, where you'd use the tech to solve some problem.

In my career so far, every time I've encountered an employer (or more specifically, a representative of an employer, e.g. a recruiter or hiring manager) who cared about side-projects and off-the-clock programming to the point where it was a dealbreaker / red flag for applicants, and not just a nice-to-have, the following things were true:

- they paid significantly below market rate (when accounting for bonuses and RSUs)

- they did not respect engineering work/life balance

- they had high turnover

It's totally a shit job in a ton of ways but the best recruiters absolutely make a killing. It's a sales job though so what makes a recruiter good from an engineers prospective is orthogonal to what actually makes them good.

It bugged me at the time, but I’ve come to accept he was probably correct. It’s not a good idea to bring attention to matters that might work against you. Focus on selling yourself, and treat your business associates as customers (in the sense that you work hard to please them, in exchange for getting what you want). http://www.paulgraham.com/judgement.html

It’s important to know how people in better situations open doors. Because you can play that same game, with crafty use of time and words. And you might have more time than it seems, even in the position you mentioned (though I would not ever say it’s a guarantee): between Uber shifts, I’d park in a random store parking lots and build things, partly to keep sharp, but partly to get a job at a certain place, since the work was related. I didn’t get that job, but I gained so much knowledge that turned out to be much less obscure than it seemed; I still use it to this day.

You’re right in general though. People on a strong upwards trajectory have different concerns.

Sanitary worker turned software engineer is a very powerful story that can help you get a job, since if you’ve shoveled shit, fixing a nasty bug or doing a menial task wouldn’t be beneath you, and you’d make sure you do a good job. Managers seem to like that.

Disclaimer: I don't have a FAANG on my CV.

Outside whatever thin veil of prestige your job offers you, the larger world couldn't care less about what you do or what you make.

It might actually be 10000 to 1. I HAVE worked with tech recruiters (I can think of a specific local company) that were good, but it's incredibly rare outside maybe a major metro.

Hah, this is super interesting. I'm almost certain that I heard or read the "bottom-of-the-totem-pole" saying before, but you're totally right that I may have reversed it!

OP disparages people in my sister's line of work as "bottom-feeders", which is just a more euphemistic, if not cowardly, way of saying 'parasite', or 'scum'. My point is to draw attention to the decent people who work as recruiters (I'm implicitly holding my sister here as the archetype of a good person) and expose the original insult as unwarranted. An axe murderer is clearly someone who is indefensible, so could never be invoked as a positive example in argument with a statement like "Axe-murders are the worst people ever!"

Also, an 'axe murderer' is a caricature of a real murderer, used in comedy, horror films etc..., and not a honest counterexample to my sister.

But I digress..., thanks for the note on Totem Poles, I was unaware!

Just connecting the microcontroller and turning on a LED light is satisfying sometimes. Right now I'm in that cycle where I hesitate to look at screens after work.

I often think I should forget about this project altogether and focus on a viable one.

And if you choose wrong, you'll find out soon enough. Personally, I had a lot of projects I couldn't stop thinking about, but when I finally started working on them, I quickly realized it's a bad idea. The usual reasons were: a) I already found it done by someone else in a form that satisfies my needs, b) it became obvious that either the process or the outcome won't be as satisfying as I thought it would be, or c) after scoping it out, I realized I'm not in a position to invest the required amount of time and effort.

Abandoning a side project early is not a bad deal. Your research and thoughts put into it stay with you forever, and it often happens that you'll get secondary value from them on some other endeavor.

I do like that phrase a lot, though it does have its limits

I guess maybe that’s counterproductive for a job as garbageman, but...

In large US companies, they're more a public figure and who negotiate large contracts in person and send regular emails to employees telling them they are the greatest company and the greatest employees in the world.

In French companies. CEO/CTO are basically absent, they don't exist and don't send any communication. You can ask some French workers who are the executives of their company and they probably have no idea. The startup scene being pretty weak with no unicorn, there isn't any example you could quote either, there isn't a French Zuckerberg or Elon.

If you wonder who's there for real, there's a bunch of rich folks who sponsor one another to board and executive seats of the 100 largest companies and that's about it.

It’s an advantage to conceal that fact, and the one company I did disclose it to, fired me about a month later. For completely unrelated reasons that totally didn’t violate any disabilities laws, of course /s.

It was also partly my own fault, but in hindsight I wasn’t able to recover until I even understood what was happening. I wrote a bit about it several years ago, shortly after being diagnosed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10984478

So my career progression has been more of a stochastic random walk. And I’m fine with that. :) Ended up being able to contribute one or two things to the ML scene, which is all I really wanted anyway. Just a scientist at heart, I suppose.

There’s nothing wrong with being used, and using someone, by the way, if it’s mutually beneficial. Aligned incentives are how society comes together.

The other is how are you getting the job. Are you sending in your resume through a jobs site or are you calling your old friend the startup CTO to see if you can help out? Side-projects, failed startups, and networking will make the latter strategy easier for you but won't help much with the former.

Looking for a senior role through an impersonal application process depends very heavily on your primary, full-time employment track record. Otherwise I think there is still real value in developing along other lines.

1 was from a college recruiting visit.

1 was from a direct, blind application.

1 was from an in-house recruiter.

2 were from third-party recruiters.

Well, continuing your line of thinking: what's the incentive structure for company owners/stakeholders? And how does it stimulate them to seek global efficiency?

In vernacular, "theory" is completely different from the scientific jargon meaning of a "theory", which leads to people saying "Evolution is just a theory".

Similarly, the economic jargon term "efficiency" is not at all the same as the commonplace definition you used. The economic definition barely covers anything beyond profit maximisation and cost minimisation and is precisely the reason we see so many externalised costs. Companies are "efficient" only in monetary terms, but that doesn't preclude waste, missed opportunities, myopia and environmental or societal fallout.

You know my hypothesis why, because they don't have side projects. They have silo'd themselves into whatever niche project or have been on maintenance mode on a piece of software for years and never evolve. Sometimes it's not their fault, their company has pigeon-holed them into whatever software and they can't escape for whatever reason.

They should have side projects (if they care to keep learning) or lest be left behind those in more dynamic companies or those that have side projects to evolve.

Frankly, the recruiter route is simpler and has a higher success rate than what you did.

We actually ended up loosing the farm house to the bank. I say farm house because that's an easy way to describe it, but it was really just a house on the edge of another farm in the middle of nowhere. Lots of peace and quiet. :)

"A recruiter is your pimp and you're a prostitute. Work with them so they get you better dates." Was all she really told me on the matter.

From there, I reached out to recruiters and worked with them. I ended up choosing to just take contract jobs for the 1099 pay and flexibility. Plus, the guy I ended up working with was able to pimp me out more often and made more money. I got more and better work. Plus, they're stellar on re-writing your resume for you.

7+ years after leaving that, I still have a few emailing me with jobs. No one forgot me because I didn't let them. Recruiters are only shitty bottom feeders to folks with shitty, privileged attitudes. They like working with partners, not self-centered assholes.

Also, I call bullshit on your pivoting/jump ship comment. They jump ON folks that they can pad their resume and pimp them out for more money. The more roles you "could" fill, they can translate to a vertical and horizontal experience spectrum that crushes the competition, which they then sell you for double even though you're still only doing one job. They're the salesmen. Let them sell you.

That and my parents came with $15 bucks and a kid to the USA with the state funded sponsor disappeared with their grant the day before they landed. But hey, just like you, I didn't mention that to podium in the Victim Olympics. One thing I learned about all of us first-gens, we're all equally angry cunts.

it's survivor-ship bias at its most obvious. Most people are not getting jobs by doing something extraordinary at a public event and getting offered it right on the spot.

I got a good college education and have a cushy software gig. Now I sit on my butt all day drinking LaCroix watching the checks come in. I sure as hell consider myself privileged.

Just because you started out lacking privilege, doesn't mean that you don't have it now.

If you think for a minute your experiences can be translated and reproduced by the masses, you're kidding yourself.

My parents also say this, except they say $40. But US immigration policies generally require immigrants to have some way of supporting themselves. While my parents didn't have much cash, they did have college educations and my father had been accepted to a PhD program — which is privilege.

I'm not trying to assume your parents' particular situations — just that there are things we unconsciously take for granted.

LinkedIn exists for exactly this reason: as a directory of hiring managers you can connect with.

Cold-emailing / cold-calling people for finding roles is a good way to accomplish this, if you craft your pitch right and do your research well on how you can deliver value.

That's basically what branding is about, isn't it? Identifying where and how you can make a difference better than other people, making that your elevator pitch, and broadcasting that to people who need that difference in their lives.

I'm not impressed by the other comments arguing reaching people in positions of impact is next to impossible, at least in tech. There are two high-schoolers right now in the latest batch of YCombinator who literally cold-called Sam Altman for funding, and got it (see https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/08/11/2-t...).

This isn't even that crazy a way to connect with people. I once knew a recruiter who was fanatically inventive about connecting with people - he once got a cybersecurity consultant who was perfectly happy with his existing job to switch roles by (1) using the Wayback machine to find copies of the engineer's (taken-down) personal website, where he had his Foursquare link, (2) using the Foursquare API to figure out he enjoyed playing chess at his local club and would frequent a bar, (3) showing up at said bar, striking up a conversation about chess with him, getting him to talk about his job, casually slipping in that he's a recruiter for company X looking for someone exactly like him, and leaving a business card behind.

This is not an endorsement of that guy's method - just a reminder that there are crazier things in life to do than picking up the phone and trying your luck.

I don't think recruiters ended up recruiters due to familial circumstances though - many of them I know worked in the same fields they help recruit to, and largely pulled out due to burnout or some other unintentional consequences.

Also it is to be noted that recruiters are usually the only way forward once you reach a level of seniority - you won't be able to cold-email after a while.

My comment was largely targeted at the above comment which said that it's only possible through being part of the privileged.