What is one project that will make you hire someone?
I am a self-taught programmer. I need to make projects to show potential employers that i have the skill set needed to get an entry level job. If anyone of you who hire could be so kind as to suggest a personal project that employers would find impressive, please comment below. P.S: particularly, what projects do think someone at Amazon find impressive. Thanks and happy holidays!
For amazon? Anything with 🍌
Something that has real users
Design an already existing app. Search Chat Photo sharing File sharing If you’re FE, design it well, intuitive. If you’re BE build so it could scale to 1B users. If you’re ML, implement one of their ML algorithms.
Anything with real users and real scale. I am also self taught and got a job at Amazon on a project that isn't even to beta, it's just fucking cool.
Hey brother, could i hear about your journey? How long did you work before you got the Amazon job?
Around 6 months. I had a very low level demo. Amazon casts a very wide recruiting net, so it's probably not thst hard to get talked to
to be honest, i did a lot of hiring at multiple companies and engineers who interview ALMOST NEVER base their decisions off of someone's github or personal projects. have a good commit history chart on github, all green and nice so you will get emailed by a recruiter. also focus on just one language - the way """"technical sourcers"""" work is, if they are hiring for a java heavy team they search for github users with a lot of java commits and etc. Doesn't matter what you actually wrote in java. I uploaded all of my school projects once on my github (most of whom were written in java) and got contacted by several sources for a senior java developer role (LOL). So yeah quantity >>>> quality. Sad but true. Even people interviewing you, if they are motivated to read your CV in full, they probably won't read your project's source code.
Personal projects give you a lot to talk about though. And it can be used by recruiters that you’re knowledgeable about something or passionate about a similar business like/tech
I didn’t do internships in school, and went solo projects route instead. I did projects that fixed problems I felt most people could understand or had themselves. That way I’d show them that Im using my skills to make my personal life better, not just to use them. The one that got most discussion: I live in Bay Area, I love going to yosemite, yosemite reservations suck. You have to look through each campground individually and you can’t look at multiple dates, you just can look ata single week at a time. It could take 30 minutes just to find out there are no sites available for any weekend you want to go. I wrote script that could scrape date ranges for all sites, and would return available dates and could even string together campsites at multiple campsites to make the longest stay in yosemite you can have, with least amount of switching of campsites. Then built a node server and API around that, then plugged a react front end. Even used twilio to send me updates when sites became available. It wasn’t my hardest or biggest project but it’s the one everyone focussed on. A lot of people even asked if I could send them a link to the repo so they could use it because they know what a pain in the ass getting yosemite reservations is.
I was doing the interviews and tech screening in previous workplace I saw 0 personal projects that were worth anything to talk about All looked like half assed apps or web scrapers of sorts. Sorry but honestly? I’d rather hear from someone he worked in a team with workflow , code reviews , real product with scale and users etc If you look for what to do in free time that would be impressive - open source contributions to large libraries in your domain (I did some for a logging framework , Facebook framework and an open source google plus utility when it was still a thing for example - all brought lots of interest and things to talk about) and hit stack overflow and create impressive profile there with good answers (it’s hard to fake if you look beyond points - you can easily spot domain experts and people who dove deep)
Build something to catch rainwater in 4D