Ask HN: I got laid off and I want to showcase my skills, any suggestion?

maury91 · 2024-05-18T09:41:48.000Z

I got recently laid off (the first time in my life ), and I have worked for around 11 years without being more than 2 days unemployed; I'm currently doing rounds of interviews and for the first time in my life, I have an extreme amount of free time.I can imagine people would recommend me to use this free time to follow my passions, get some rest, play videogames or do anything that is not working; but I'm not the kind of person that likes any of those things, I like to do something constructive, and I would like if this something can help me now or in future with my job search.I saw many job posts asking for a Github account to see what contributions I have done to open source, and unfortunately, my contributions amount to none, the companies I have worked for do not publish open source code, and with 2 hours of commute + 9 hours being in the office when I'm home I don't feel like I want to open my personal computer.With this in mind, I thought "Why not do a video series where I show my front-end skills". This will kill two birds with one stone, first I will get some contributions to dummy projects on Github and second I can show my reasoning on video.The first problem is that I don't have video editing knowledge, and I feel that will eat the majority of the time, resulting in a project that is less focused on what I'm aiming for.To avoid the video editing problem, I plan to do live coding, I believe thousands of developers did this before me, and I want to do a topic that is different than usual, with this in mind my topic of choice is to live code a web framework, my framework of choice is React.I plan to go through these milestones: 1. Rendering JSX directly into the DOM: get a js compiled through babel and just make it work 2. Create a shadow dom 3. Optimise the shadow dom 4. Support all react hooks 5. Further optimisations 6. Re-create redux 7. Suspense ( Lazy loading ) 8. Re-create react-router 9. Using babel API create a different output for jsx files ( different syntax ) 10. Create browser extensions for developers Note: I chose these milestones to make the video series help people understand how React works on the insideAnd following these rules: 1. No peeking on React source code 2. No stack overflow 3. No copilot/chatGTP/any AI 4. Looking at React documentation is OK The idea is to retro-engineer React, I know this looks like it contradicts the point of helping people understand the inner workings of React, but I want this video series to have some challenges ( and external help will remove that ), and the final product must be compatible with a subset of React capabilities so with it being compatible it must have similar inner workings, so even if not identical I believe they will be similar enough to help people understand how React works.Now that I laid out all my thoughts, I ask you for some advice: 1. What platform is best to start? ( I was thinking youtube ) 2. How to get the first views? ( My feeling is that I would be live-streaming to literally no one for months ) 3. Any other advice that I could not think of asking?

PaulHoule 2 years ago |

Speaking as someone who learned to edit video on tape:

I disagree with the people who think you are overthinking it. If you are planning to do something this big you’d better have a plan.

How many hours on camera is this going to take? How much off-camera think time do you expect this to take? I’d imagine if I was coding something this big I’d make at least one major wrong turn that I’d want to if not have to redo.

I think you should try a mini-project that is not part of the series so you can test your setup before you make something that you want to promote. You want to design things so that you get an interesting series even if you quit early.

I’m a little skeptical of the turn to video in the last ten years. I mean, 10 years ago if I got stuck in a video game I could find the answer in a FAQ in less than a minute. Today I have to find the right video in a collection of 60 one hour videos and then seek to the right point in the video. From the viewpoint of a literate person this is a huge step backwards but I’m left with the feeling we’re on the path to Fahrenheit 451.

Who has time to watch it? Is a recruiter going to watch a video that is longer than Game of Thrones?

Myself as a photographer I’ve found that I want to share my works in progress and show people a bit of my behind the scenes work but I’ve found people don’t have time for anything less than the final polished works. People have never been rude to me the way they are to the Midjourney artists who always post the nine images they got without any filtering but I know the engagement isn’t here.

maury91 2 years ago | |

I understand your point of view about polishing, and from the other comments too it is a common theme.

I believe polishing will be needed, but that doesn't exclude the creation of also unpolished worked.

From all the feedback gathered I will:

  1. Live stream the unpolished work, this will help creating a sense of community and people would be able to be part of the short feedback loop
  2. Collect the most interesting parts from point 1 and create polished videos
  3. Write articles for whom prefers this media

Regarding the audience I'm not thinking of mid-senior developers that like to watch something on the second screen while working

llmblockchain 2 years ago | | |

The audience for such content is incredibly tiny, and those that watch it are not hiring people.

People have incredibly short attention spans these days. If your video isn't 20 second shorts with large text and jump cuts you will lose the viewer.

Video is a terrible medium in general.

You're not Tsoding/T3/Primeagen and you're better off spending your time elsewhere. Note-- their audiences are primarily young junior developers or developers to be.

llmblockchain 2 years ago |

First and foremost, fuck Github. It doesn't define who you are and what you are capable of. Don't buy into it.

For reference, my Github is set to private and has a single repository pointing people to my personal site. My personal site has 8 sentences on it. It says who I am and what I've built (software products). I don't blog. I don't share code.

What you need is to be able to demonstrate what you are capable of. If you have it in you, it's even better to demonstrate you are not another code monkey that is more interested in 1s and 0s than humans.

My suggestion (biased, from what I've done) is to build one or more products (ex: a SaaS product, etc).

In the best case your product brings in enough money you never need to work for someone else. In the worst case you demonstrate the ability to build a product geared towards regular human beings.

maury91 2 years ago | |

I do agree that job postings asking for personal projects are a little bit over the top.

The main problem with building products is the idea, the spark, honestly I can't see at the moment a product that people need, or even less, a product that I would need

_mlbt 2 years ago | | |

I don't worry about what other people need. I build for what I need and if it's not too much effort I also make it available to everyone just in case it's useful to them. A couple examples:

I got tired of configuring emacs by hand for use with Erlang. I had lookup the specific incantation that needed to go into the configuration file every single time. Yes, it only takes a couple minutes and it's not something I do often, but now it's just a simple script away.

https://github.com/dlachausse/erlmacs

Another example: like a lot of people I anxiously wait for certain days to come or need a reminder of just how close we are getting to certain holidays and family birthdays. So I built a quick and dirty app in SwiftUI to countdown the days until a specified date. (It's free with no ads or IAPs, since I built it for my own needs and don't care to monetize it.)

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/countdownula/id6479545149

llmblockchain 2 years ago | | |

Ideas are easy. You don't need to think of a new idea (in fact, I highly suggest not doing that). Instead, pick an idea that has been done to death and do it again.

Make a cronjob monitoring service. Make a "privacy focused analytics" platform. Make a session replay service. Make a "javascript error collection" service. Make a user feedback widget as a service.

It doesn't matter what you make. Pick something that has been done before and do it on your own.

If you are hell bent on live streaming-- live streaming that would be far more interesting than watching someone rebuild react.

skydhash 2 years ago | |

This! While I do have a blog, it just to share my thoughts and learnings. I kept my Github repo open, but I've moved my work to my own instance of forgejo.

Code is just your understanding of the problem and its solution. What I found count more is the ability to express it in a more natural language. Talking to your teammate, talking to your manager/client and getting that understanding across. And that means being aware of more than the technical space.

nprateem 2 years ago |

Who would watch it? It's super technical so not useful for beginners, it doesn't really help anyone do anything, so no use for people trying to do x with react, so... who would watch it?

CharlieDigital 2 years ago |

You are making this too hard; don't overthink it.

Video editing: OBS and DaVinci Resolve. OBS to record and Resolve if you really need to edit.

I posit that for technical content like this, most of the time you do not need to edit heavily.

Second is that your mindset on this for someone starting out is all wrong. You're already overthinking it and therefore increasing the impedance for yourself. Look at the first few dozens of videos for any long running channel and they are almost always just someone sharing and doing so consistently even with miniscule viewer counts.

I follow a carpenter on YT (Scott Brown) and he had a great clip from his 100th episode where he talks about how you get better at things: you just do it, reflect, and repeat. Do this enough times and your 10th cycle looks nothing like your first. Your 20th looks nothing like your 10th because you learn with every attempt.

So with that said, I encourage you to not overthink it and just start making content. Every day, there is someone trying to learn React and JS and that person is trying to find the right voice to learn from. That's why there can be hundreds of thousands of videos and recipe posts on how to make fried chicken; everyone has an affinity for a different voice.

So with that said, challenge yourself to creating quality content once a day, even if it's short. Your first week, you'll struggle just to learn the tooling and workflow. Your second week you'll have nailed a pretty good process and focus on improving your content and defining your voice. The audience will come as long as you are consistent.

For professional reasons, I think written form is better (so GitHub project plus blog writeup). I think rather than your proposed approach, just build and explore something fun and topical. How about building an app using AI tools and you review the tools and their output? Compare it to a human and give your commentary.

maury91 2 years ago | |

Thanks for the input, I like your proposed approach of "don't overthink it and just start making content", that is exactly what I will do.

I agree that written form is better, but it doesn't have any time constraints, this is why I was thinking more of live coding, or why not both? In the end, I will need to do the coding part in both cases, so why not stream it?

My problem with building an app is that I honestly don't know what app to build, and recreating React sounds fun to me

PaulHoule 2 years ago | | |

Recreating React means you’ll really understand how React works under the hood.

CharlieDigital 2 years ago | | |

Your feedback loop will be stronger with YT, IMO.

csomar 2 years ago |

Why are you doing this? No interviewer is going to look at this or maybe even understand it. After 11 years (assuming you are around 35), you'll probably be interviewed with someone younger.

I didn't find Github helpful either in the last 2-3 years. Culture has shifted and now it's about jumping leetcode like platforms and scoring highly on them. Then bullshitting your way into the interview.

If you are strictly tied to front-end, you may want to look out for different options. The front-end market is by far the worst struck and is super tight. I also, most importantly, don't think it's going to be better anytime soon and it's going to get much worse from here.

unsupp0rted 2 years ago |

You're overthinking it.

Although if you made a series of videos like "Re-creating redux", "Re-creating react-router", etc that could go a long way, yes.

Don't make up rules. Don't tie one hand behind your back. This isn't a circus act.

ipaddr 2 years ago |

Use your extra time to apply to more places the roi is higher. Get feedback from interviews than focus on those areas. What you think you need might be different than what the market thinks

maury91 2 years ago | |

Unfortunately I already applied to literally all of them

mmarian 2 years ago | | |

How many jobs have you applied so far to? Have you done everything you could when it comes to applying to those jobs? (eg virtual coffees with potential colleagues, contacting the hiring manager, etc)

ipaddr 2 years ago | | |

Have you tried cold applying?

codingdave 2 years ago |

It may be worth asking yourself if your career goal is to be "The React Guy". If that is your desire, you are on-track. But I've found that most people I know who hit an absolute wall in their career are folks who tie their career identity to a specific technology. Because over the course of multiple decades, odds are your chosen tech will fade.

If I were you, I'd put this energy into learning something new, and your video content can show your progress and show off your ability to pick up new skills.

maury91 2 years ago | |

I must disagree with your comment, I don't think re-creating React ( without looking at the source code ) makes you the React guy, the skills to be a good React developer, and the skills to be a developer that can create a framework like React I believe are not the same.

I think by creating a React-like framework what I will showcase is a deep understanding of the inner workings of the browser ( for optimization), the inner workings of React, and a good knowledge of languages and tools used to create this framework.

SkyPuncher 2 years ago |

What’s your goal for showcasing your skills? Is it just to do something fun? Or, is it to get hired?

If it’s the prior, this is a fun project.

If it’s the latter, this is going to be a low effort activity. Employers aren’t going to watch it during your application. Further, Your target audience (people learning react) isn’t going to have much overlap with hiring managers.

maury91 2 years ago | |

It is to showcase, I see it as a long-term project, I don't expect I make a video today and get hired tomorrow, my expectations are lower, more "I make a video a week, in a year I have enough to showcase ( and maybe a following )"

Yes I do agree that managers and target audience don't overlap, but also I don't think it's people learning React, but more people curious about inner workings of React

ilrwbwrkhv 2 years ago |

Hiring managers are usually dumb.

Interviews at most tech companies are broken.

They are run by developers who are usually poor communicators which means they cannot tell you what they are looking for etc.

What you are trying to do will not help you at all.

At 11 years of experience if you are not getting direct invitations to join teams without interviews you have done the biggest mistake so far: you haven't created a network.

Your goal should be very simple. Make a list of director of engineering from top companies, see if they have a GitHub, check if they have a open source project and then contribute to that.

All you need in your GitHub is a hyped up version of your skills.

Do not do interviews, that is key.

winterplace 2 years ago | |

Good advice for the guy

What do you think are the causes for the first three things you wrote about?

Do you have an email address or a contact method?

ilrwbwrkhv 2 years ago | | |

Interviews are broken because companies are cargo cults. What Google did yesterday, Stripe will do today.

It's because to find true signals of a senior engineer needs longer than 35 mins spent on a problem and you need to pair that with a developer who is trained in the art of interviewing so that they can extract the biggest things one needs to test: overall architectural principles, thinking through things, how one protects their code from mistakes etc.

But companies are not willing to spend time doing this because HR is basically not trained even today to deal with real technical thinking.

Unless there are a bunch of devs moving into HR, things will not get better.

Companies don't care that much either. Most companies pretend they need much more talent than they actually require.

gsuuon 2 years ago |

This sounds like an interesting series, I'd watch it. If you do go for livestreaming, keep in mind a big part of that is interacting with chat. If that's not something you're into then maybe recorded content with light editing might be better.

maury91 2 years ago | |

Yes, I plan to interact with the public. I got the idea of a live streaming during a coding interview, I believe they would feel similar

deadcoder0904 2 years ago |

1. Twitch/YouTube/Twitter/Instagram Reels/TikTok - Basically every platform is becoming a video platform. You might need to edit a bit if you want to post on other platforms or make short videos but it would pop-off if you write hooks well

2. It'll be a grind but you can post on places where followers don't matter. And if possible, create new accounts as new accounts are given more push. Also, pay the rent of platforms like blue check as it pushes the content to more people. Atleast that's how its on Meta/Twitter

3. Use AI & build a useful app like Job Application using Personalize AI messages. Someone might've build this but recreate it. Why? This will get you job faster & if it actually works well, you can make it into a SaaS so you never have to work a job again if that's what you want or you can sell it for 10x with the AI hype that's going on