Anecdotally my experience is completely orthogonal to the author’s.

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