Ask HN: Recruiters want people who do side projects, yet contracts forbid them?

Re:Ask HN: Recruiters want people who do side projects, yet ... by jandrese on Thursday July 15, 2021 @02:56PM (#27848625)

For me College was High School but more. The big thing that killed me in college was multiple professor assigning a big collaborative out-of-class project each semester seemingly on the assumption that none of my other professors would do something like that. So I'm trying to coordinate three different big projects with three different sets of students and keeping them all straight, while also trying to learn the underlying concepts. Oh and there is regular homework on top of that.

In the real world I'm generally only working one project at a time with only one group of people. And crucially we can fire people from the project who don't contribute.

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Re:Ask HN: Recruiters want people who do side projects, yet ... by lobocinza on Thursday July 15, 2021 @07:06PM (#27851147)

Also, in my case, the projects that I found most interesting were those with less scoring value or on what people referred to "easy disciplines", those whose professors didn't bully/pressure us into delivering high quality work. Most of nightmares were doing boring projects which I thought and later confirmed to be majorly bullcrap.

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Re:Ask HN: Recruiters want people who do side projects, yet ... by Infernal on Thursday July 15, 2021 @03:05PM (#27848733)

I'm curious, what sort of program were you in that had professors assigning "big collaborative out-of-class projects"?

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Re:Ask HN: Recruiters want people who do side projects, yet ... by jandrese on Thursday July 15, 2021 @08:01PM (#27851596)

Mine was CS. Build an application that takes in topo data and produces a 3D plot of the output and allows the user to edit the data on the fly.

Remember this was in the late 90s so it was all OpenGL immediate mode and I didn't have a 3D accelerator so it had to run at a reasonable framerate on a 75Mhz CPU. Luckily we didn't have to texture anything, flat shaded polys were fine.

Another project was a web application with a database backend that was basically just IMDB. Of course this was the 90s so it was CGI.

Sadly there was no Git either. CVS was it, but since everybody was on dialup modem and there were not cloud services you could use it didn't work so well. One had to be good at compartmentalizing mostly. One guy would work on one part and someone else would work on a totally different part and integration was always fun.

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Re:Ask HN: Recruiters want people who do side projects, yet ... by MattGaiser on Thursday July 15, 2021 @03:12PM (#27848829)

Not OP, but engineering did a lot of it.

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