Can you elaborate on this belief? It hasn't been my experience at all. I love to ask difficult questions in interviews.
Anecdotally, I once confronted a director about negative Glassdoor reviews which claimed the company's CEO was a serial abuser of employees. I did so in a friendly/appropriately phrased way, so it didn't come across like confrontation, but that's what it was. Not only did I still get an offer, but they tried to hire me again several months later.
A company that got mad at me for asking reasonable questions about it in an interview isn't one I'd want to work for.
I am a full-stack developer with a strong background in building great software, back-to-front. I got my start building production mobile apps, web apps, and backend software when I was the sole developer at HungerPerks.
I am the kind of developer who gets things done. I am able to enter a situation, understand the core business & product goals, translate that into a software specification, rapidly self-educate and fill in any knowledge gaps, build, test, and automatically deploy useful software.
I have a prototypical background. I started programming at 15 and started a software company with my friends in college. We raised venture funding, and I built 2 mobile apps, a web app, and automated deployment infrastructure (knowing none of those things beforehand) by myself in 6 months flat. I communicated the development implications of business decisions with founders and stakeholders, supported customers, and rapidly iterated. The company failed to validate, so we moved on.
I learned a lot, and since then I've been building great mobile apps as a freelancer, but I'm ready for my next challenge. I'm looking for a team that is working on something cool and is looking to add a remote mobile, web, or backend developer (or all of the above!).
In summary, this article says:
"I like side projects! I have done a bunch of them, and here are the reasons why you should do them too:
1. You can make money
2. They're a gateway drug to entrepreneurship
3. You can learn new skills, including business skills
4. They look good on a resume/when networking
5. You can learn about yourself
6. Work with friends/make new ones”
I don’t think there is anything _wrong_ with this article, but I think it misses the mark a bit.
In my experience there are 3 reasons to work on a side project:
1. Learning- picking up a specific skill you didn’t have before.
2. Experience- doing more programming in total (making you more experienced).
3. Fun- sometimes programming is a fun thing to do!
I think if you don’t really hit at least one of those, you shouldn’t be doing side projects. On some days I take the even stronger position that unless you are trying to make a career change or you really find programming fun, you should not be doing side projects.
Making money can be part of it, but as the author says it can't really be the driving force of a side project. If making money is your goal, I would argue that that isn't a side project, it's a small business and should be treated as such.
It’s also worth thinking about what value you get out of which parts of side projects. You can hit all those goals without actually finishing and releasing your project. I see a lot of devs not bother starting projects when they hit all 3 reasons, because they don’t want to polish their project into a full product.
Hello! My name is Sam Borick, and I’m a developer who speaks business. I’ve been building mobile apps since I was in high school. I got my start building production mobile apps when I started my first company, HungerPerks. That experience taught me that the most important thing about apps isn’t the software, it’s the understanding.
I consider myself a full-stack developer. For me, that's customer discovery, UX design, mobile apps, web apps, backend systems, and DevOps pipelines.
This is a tool that I personally wanted for a long time. I'm considering turning this into an actual service, please let me know if this is something you would use if it actually had things like a UI.
I can't say that it is something that I would pay for, but I would gladly let you data mine my subreddits of interest to sell (anonymised) data to advertisers for it.
