I've spent several years working on side projects and would like to return to remote work. I have a bit of management experience and a bit of coding experience. I think the employment gap is hard to explain for either role. What is the best way for me to start doing remote work?
Don't call them side projects. Call them apps, products and businesses. Each one used a particular tech stack, each one had a life-span of some kind: a start, a launch or a middle, users maybe, etc.
How would you explain all this work if you were hired by a small company to build them? You wouldn't hesitate to claim the years working on these interesting projects as valuable years and part of your career growth and progression.
We tend to downplay things we do or build ourselves, as if the very fact that another person (a boss) tells us to do something makes it immediately more valuable than if we choose to do that something ourselves.
It doesn't. The app you built because you chose to has just as much value as the app you built because someone paying you a monthly check told you to build it.
Wrap your 'side projects' inside a business and claim the credit for all that work.
I list my job title as “Failed Internet Billionaire” and then list the projects, the problem they were solving and the tech stack. The “job title” always gets a laugh from interviewers. Remember if it’s a technical interview, the person interviewing you most likely has done side projects as well.
If I were in your shoes, I would AB test phrasing it like this and then also as the op said in a more serious tone. Do it on some jobs that you wouldn’t be devastated if they don’t reply and see where your (I hate myself for saying this) brand gets traction
Problem there is fun dev teams can still have terrible HR filters. That's the sort of thing I'd jokingly say in the interview, but come up with a more normalized title for the resume.
Haha, that happened to me with my current job. The HR guy told me to my face that he thought my resume was unprofessional and if it were up to him I never would've gotten the interview
That is true. HR is told to filter outside of their wheelhouse. This explains A+ certifications and bullshit resumes.
In general: always be extra nice to HR. They are underpaid, under-appreciated, under-loved, put in the middle of every dispute, and told to make the impossible possible. Like IT, but with squishy meat bags.
> I list my job title as “Failed Internet Billionaire” and then list the projects, the problem they were solving and the tech stack. The “job title” always gets a laugh from interviewers. Remember if it’s a technical interview, the person interviewing you most likely has done side projects as well.
This is invaluable advice. I had a similar problem when returning to the market after years doing my own things. Someone here suggested leaning into the failed startup I’d attempted with a colleague rather than downplaying it. Despite that, I still had a tough time getting initial calls.
I eventually landed a three-month contract job. That rehabilitated my resume and I had no trouble getting callbacks once I had some recent work history. Don’t be above taking a short term gig if you find that the phone isn’t ringing. It might be the thing that turns that around.
I love this idea. I always like to see side projects (even in place of a "real job") and this seems like the perfect way to integrate it with a resume. Funny, humble, and probably a pretty honest job title for a lot of developers with actual side projects to show off.
I like this a lot. People underestimate coming off as a bit memorable and likeable, even in technical interviews. If you don't mind I'll probably use something very similar if I ever wind up in that situation.
Nice touch. Except maybe better not to use the word "failed". It's a needless association. Maybe something like partially successful internet entrepreneur.
I recommend against attempts at humor front and center like this on a resume. It’s too early.
I’m in a serious mood trying to solve a serious problem when I’m reviewing resumes. This would fall very flat with me. I would not think you were serious about finding work.
Sneak in some humor later and it might work. If I’m interested enough to read the details of your resume, something humorous later on might get a chuckle out of me.
> I would not think you were serious about finding work.
Then why are they interviewing? Taking people at face value until you know you shouldn't is an important interpersonal skill. Second guessing what people tell you is pointless. This would be one item in a list of his experience, not what you see first.
Definitely agree. It comes across sort of “cocky” as well as if their only goal was to become Billionaire and they failed at that goal.
The goal should be to build a great product, company and reputation. If that makes you a billionaire, that’s fine. Most likely you will achieve this goal but not the billionaire status.
Yep - it indicates a level of self-awareness and the ability to not take yourself too seriously, which is something I would appreciate even subconsciously as an interviewer.
I agree with the sentiment, but be careful approaching this from the mindset that closing a handful of GitHub issues or "launching" a zero-user app with no marketing is at the same level as having a job and being assigned tasks by other employees.
> We tend to downplay things we do or build ourselves, as if the very fact that another person (a boss) tells us to do something makes it immediately more valuable than if we choose to do that something ourselves. It doesn't.
It does, in the sense that it's actually a pretty high bar to get to a point where you can afford employees with management and have directed product growth. It doesn't mean it's better in an absolute sense -- sometimes the very opposite! -- but you might be setting yourself up for disappointment if you don't acknowledge the differences.
> We tend to downplay things we do or build ourselves, as if the very fact that another person (a boss) tells us to do something makes it immediately more valuable than if we choose to do that something ourselves.
Oh wow this just clicked something for me. I need to do that for me too so that I actually work on the damn things instead of thinking of them as projects on the side
Pre-revenue businesses with no product fit "I learned a lot so your startup won't fail trust me lol" and no references
But yeah they won't care about the crappy products since all the companies you interview with are doing the same, honestly the real followup question would be what do you do about references
I don’t. I’m Danish and almost everyone here has some kind of higher education, so our hiring practices are a little different from other countries.
Anyway, there is no reason to spend the time looking at what people have done on GitHub. Once you make the final five or ten candidates, we could honestly use sheer chance to decide and end up just fine. The only reason we don’t do that, is because it would be disrespectful to the applicants, but the interviews are as much an opportunity for them to figure out if they want to work with us once they’ve met us, as it is for us to do the same.
Hiring people once you move past a certain skill level is much more about finding a common fit, so that you can continue having the good culture that you have already established.
It’s not that I think you are wrong to look at github though. It’s just that I don’t feel it’s really ever worth the resources you need to allocate to get a proper picture. I feel the same way about the coding interview, it’s just a waste or everyone’s time. I mean, how can you tell if their GitHub profiles aren’t doctored? If it was too clean or too good, I’d personally be suspicious why they’d work for us.
One thing I'd like to mention about being "fine", you'd be fine, but you could be extremely well off if you are able to find the engineers that go way beyond. I find the multiplying effect of engineers within top 1% can be more than 5x. These folks will take responsibility for everything, innovate and work intelligently, tirelessly and passionately to solve any problems thrown at them as opposed to someone who will just pick up Jira tickets blindly.
It's just a little attitude thing that makes so much difference. The way salaries work, they probably don't get 5x salary so they are extremely valuable for the company and to find in general.
If you just look at general performance, resumes and things like that you might just get "rest and vest" types.
These great engineers you describe are almost never making more than 1.5x the “pack”. If you can find (or create) and retain them, it’s the best overlay I’ve ever found in employment.
> One thing I'd like to mention about being "fine", you'd be fine, but you could be extremely well off if you are able to find the engineers that go way beyond.
Really? Because that’s not what our data shows on it. It shows specifically that regardless of what we submit applicants to won’t matter. Maybe we’re just bad at hiring, but with 25 years of data from a very broad range of job types (public sector) we can at least be comfortable with the knowledge that everyone else sucks as much as us.
I get your point though. Some engineers are more valuable than others, but the thing is, that it’s not a constant and there are no real way to make sure you both attract and keep them.
We employ an engineer who just might be the countries leading techie on ADFS and how it plays into our national and EU vases strategies for NSIS certifiably authentication. With a background as a bouncer, I’m not sure how many places would have guess that when he was first hired.
I’m another such story though in a different manner. I used to be real rockstar developer, and a real workhorse. This was way before I got into management and long before I had children. Because when I did have children it turned out that may undiagnosed ADHD could no longer fit into the responsibilities of adult life and I worked myself into first a nice range of stress, then anxiety and then a depression. Now I never work more than 37 hours a week unless there is a big event, like elections, and when there is, I make sure to not-work the extra hours after wards. If you had hired me the year before my first daughter was born, you would have gotten the workhorse with a very high degree of both creativity and getting things to actually do something useful for the business end. A year later you would have been sitting with a depression stricken employee who was on partial sick-leave for 9 months.
I understand the dream of course, but unless you can show me some data on someone who figured out how to actually purposefully hire the dream employee, I’m personally going to consider it a dream. An unhealthy one even, because almost nobody is ever really irreplaceable in an enterprise organisation. Sure the loss of some employees are felt harder than others, but the truth is that IBM could stop selling consumer PCs and still trundle on. So in my opinion it’s much better to create a team of people who work well together and who have a good culture, because that means it’s also easier when someone moves on to other things. It also means that you’re not as effected by the life changes of your employees.
To add to this: it's very unlikely you have a company that knows how to manage a dream employee efficiently. Or just regular employees really.
Ask yourself this when hiring: you genuinely have a series of actually-actionable tasks ready to go for the new hire? Do you have the right resources on hand who understand that a part of their job is to answer questions about those projects from the new hire (and it will probably be a whole lot of stuff)?
The answer is going to be that you probably don't, and so whoever you hire, no matter how good they are, your company will just never know.
> there are no real way to make sure you both attract and keep them.
In my experience, it's pretty simple. Pay them lots of $$$. My circle of friends is in their 40s now, and the ones we all generally consider really good make boatloads. It's hard for them to switch jobs because most places aren't willing to pay a "regular developer" nearly as much.
Works the other way too. I had to take a paycut to leave my last company because it was full of people who didn't really like the company but couldn't find a job that paid as much, and it showed. It was really toxic.
I consider an engineer like this a "nice to have." Sure, for the time they're there and still motivated (I've been that person and after a few years the motivation and drive wore off), they can be super productive. But you can't base a business on the expectation that most, or any of your employees will be like that.
Same, but I don't get too much from it. If its not there I really don't care anymore and never ask for it. Whats the point of showcasing your github profile today? Little to no experience (entry level / jr) makes sense but for anyone else - don't fret.
I really don't and I am not aware of anyone at work who would. I rarely even read resumes and that if I am very mixed after the 1 hour coding/design/arch whatever round.
I never send my GitHub links either. If I am coding a side project and I think it has business potential I am unlikely to start with open source and if it doesn't have business potential, I wouldn't bother. Also if I am building something on the side, code is likely to be rushed and seemingly horrible.
I have no idea what in GitHub was written by the owner itself, what was copied, how long it took them etc.
People without a Github/Gitlab start with a huge disadvantage in the hiring process at my company since they don't have code to support their claims and that they can walk us through together.
Now I get some people don't have time for open-source after work but it's way way easier to ace an interview when it can be based on something you build yourself, can show and can talk about the ins, the outs and the design constraints and your architecture choices.
That's almost as poor a signal as FAANG's hazing rituals. It sends a certain signal, too. That signal, to me, isn't "this person's company really supports open source!" The signal is, "we want to select developers who are willing to produce code for literally no compensation." Think about that.
Also, the vast majority of developers don't have open source contributions or projects worth pointing to. Further, it strikes me that the ones that do have such projects can be much more selective about which company they work for than companies can be about them.
I have a mass of "open source" that I churned out while I had more free time. Trouble is it's quite out of date with my skills, especially since being busy at work. I still do tinker and release rushed code, but I don't know I want to be judged on taking someone's code and gutting it for my purposes
Do you have a backing statistic for "the vast majority of developers" or are you speaking purely anecdotally?
Furthermore you're making an assumption that anyone who has code on their github produced it for no compensation, as if that was their sole motivation.
Maybe it was a previous project, maybe they open sourced a side project that at one point made income, or maybe it was something they did as an experiment or for purely personal reasons and compensation had zero relevant bearing.
So few previous employers who bet on you and paid you hundreds of thousands on a yearly basis is not enough cred to prove that you can deliver software that solves business problems?
If you were at a place for five years, got two promotions, and shipped three products while you were there? Strong evidence.
If you were at five places for 9-18 months at a time with several six month gaps interspersed? Not evidence of absence, but that’s absence of evidence to me. (Immediately, I’m assuming several of those gaps might be flameouts.)
I would be wary of anyone job hopping every 9-12 months or even two years. For one reason, they dont stick around long enough to see the long term effect of their work and learn from it. So even if there is no 6 months break, thats still a yellow flag to me.
That’s better, because it suggests four times out of four, the decision to leave and timing was yours rather than “seven times out of nine [four listed], the change was employer-initiated”.
None of these are signals that I rely on as binary go/no-go gates; the main point was “just because you got other employers to pay you for a short while, that’s not standalone evidence that you can deliver business value through working software”.
I don’t believe in jobs-for-life, “putting in your time”, “paying your dues”, “never quit before 2 years”, or other nonsense advice, but if you’ve never had a long stint at a place, at minimum you’ve never seen the pain from your decisions 24 months prior play out and the maximum negative case is far worse.
And, furthermore, if you've never worked anyplace longer than a year or two--and I really want to hire someone longer term--it would be pretty silly for me to assume I'm so special that you'll stick around. My loss perhaps. But that would certainly factor into my thinking.
IME (and this certainly is what's happened in my career, but I've seen it in many), this is usually a lack of mobility options or undercompensation. Few enough quality workers leave places where there are opportunities to grow and (not or) where yearly raises are in the ballpark of the salary delta from moving to a new position. And if you fall into the trap of working for a bunch of startups, you also get the fun "aaaand sometimes startups just explode from underneath you" effect, too.
For most of the folks I've worked with, it's the case that if they take a job and they're not learning something, they're not going to stay long. And if they take a job and the choices are "stay here, even if they enjoy it" and "take a 15% compensation bump that will ripple through the rest of their career", it would be foolish not to go for the latter.
The places that understand that retaining people takes effort are less rare than they used to be, but they don't grow on trees. If you want to hire someone longer term, I hope you're putting the money, and the investment in that worker, on the table.
That's all fair. At the same time, there tends to be a certain amount of gripe-age with any job and some people are more inclined to try to work through it and others are more inclined to start job-hunting. Which is perfectly fine but, if it's a persistent pattern, I probably won't hire you.
To be clear, I'm talking about a persistent pattern. Even those of us with fairly long-term employment (~10 year stints) in general often have one or two short stints for various reasons. E.g. dot-bomb in my case although the job wasn't a great fit anyway.
I have done this a few times. Be honest about it and describe what you did in details on your resume, so you are able to explain what you did or tried to do in an interview setting. Often these project can be good to have a conversation about because you care more about the technology choices and have full ownership of it.
>We tend to downplay things we do or build ourselves, as if the very fact that another person (a boss) tells us to do something makes it immediately more valuable than if we choose to do that something ourselves.
I disagree, if you built something that involved collaborating with others thats inherently more valuable than what you build on your own. The reason is simple -- external assessment is ALWAYS preferred to self assessment of skill.
It's the difference between you saying you're a good programmer and someone else saying you're a good programmer. That small bit of indirection is very important.
If the apps still exist or had users he can just point to that. You don't really need to have collaborated with others. Plenty of valuable software is done by solo developers.
Yes but those "solo devs" are assessed externally usually from open source development etc. They haven't gotten where they are by saying they're really good. It has always been other people valuing and praising their contributions that gives them perceived value.
any example or inspiration to build awesome narrative for that? I think you are right I used to downplay my side projects. when someone ask about it I just said "just another simple projects "
They weren’t side projects if they were your main projects. Think of it as self employment and find a way to spin that.
If you applied to a job I have, I’d mostly interview you like a normal person, and then I’d say “If you’ve on your own for 9 years, are you sure you really want a normal job? I want to hire you. But this is a job, and that means sometimes you’re gonna have to put up with this company’s bullshit. Even though we do our best to keep the bullshit to a minimum, we still deal with crap we’d rather not do. Tell me why you’re interested and willing to put up with bullshit, and don’t just tell me you need the money.” If you have a good answer to that question, I think you’ll be fine for a job that matches your value proposition.
"Tell me why you’re interested and willing to put up with bullshit, and don’t just tell me you need the money."
I don't think there are many sane persons around, who honestly want to deal with company bullshit, if not for the money.
I mean, you can find a million fake answers, "I want the challenge", "I want to improve myself in difficult situations", blabla, - but this is exactly the kind of bullshit I am only willing to put up with, if I need the money. So why can he just be honest and say so?
I mean, it is a valid concern, if a person who was on his own for a long time, can fit back in into a coporation, and it needs some convincing that he actually can - but telling people to fake motivation, when all they actually want is the money - just increases company bullshit.
Because nobody wants to hire someone because they need 3 more months of income so they can leave. "I want the challenge" is an obvious bullshit response. "Your company deals with _________ at a scale larger than I can on my own" is a potentially real answer to that question. If it's true it also means they're probably not going to bail once they have replenished their savings account.
Even if the your knee jerk truthful answer is "I just want the money" it might be deeper than that. When I went from consulting full time for ~4 years to corporate work, I would have told you it was just for the money, but it was actually for the stability and peace of mind to not worry where my next rent check was coming from.
Those people who lie about the time they plan to work for the company, will also lie about their motivations.
My point was, that I want honesty on both sides. Otherwise it is coporate bullshit to me.
"would have told you it was just for the money, but it was actually for the stability and peace of mind to not worry where my next rent check was coming from."
Yeah well, thats another way of saying you mainly want to work for the money.
And about the "real answer":
"I want to build great things in a team and I am aware that every organisation has problems it needs to overcome, to succeed, which usually require the ability to make compromises. And I am willing to make the necessary compromises, for a successful project."
Which is actually my honest opinion, but I don't need any hypocrite bullshit. I only would put up with it, if the pay is adequate. And starting by having to fake my motivation, would mean a higher expected compensation from my side.
> thats another way of saying you mainly want to work for the money.
Is it?
Years ago... I had a friend who was just getting in to dev work, but he was pretty good, even then. He was doing low-pay work someplace, not even dev work entirely, but he got to learn a bit on the job. But... was making around $37k (2007?). I offered to connect him with a recruiter who had a 6 month python gig lined up for him at ~$50/hr. That's... after his taxes... it's about $45k for 6 months of work.
"But... what would I do after that? I wouldn't have my health insurance! There's too much risk!"
I said "you'll be making more in 6 months than you do in a year... you can figure things out then, and very likely there will be more stuff after that, once you're 'in' there".
"Too risky..."
So... the 'stability/peace of mind' is, imo, not just another way of saying 'in it for the money'. I think stability with known lower pay is a stronger motivation for some folks.
>I think stability with known lower pay is a stronger motivation for some folks.
And there's sometimes this baked in assumption that you can call a recruiter on Monday and end up with three $300-400K offers by the following Monday. Which may be true for some people with very in-demand specific skills. But is utter fantasy for people in more specialized roles, older, etc. who actually are making a comfortable amount of money and like where they are. Why take a jump they don't really need to just for some extra cash?
> And there's sometimes this baked in assumption that you can call a recruiter on Monday and end up with three $300-400K offers by the following Monday
I have never had this illusion, but I think my wife has had that idea (for me, not for her), and I had to disabuse her of that notion :) We're not in a terribly HCOL area to begin with, nor in a major tech hub, so... traditional w2 9-5 jobs, even in tech, are, for most senior folks I know, topping out in the mid $100s. If you want to count 401k/insurance/etc in total comp, you're still generally going to be under $200k (probably even fully loaded cost). Not so say there aren't any higher paying jobs, but they're relatively limited, and are going to have higher competition, etc.
> I don't think there are many sane persons around, who honestly want to deal with company bullshit, if not for the money.
I really don't think this is true. I know a fair number of people who don't really have to work but choose to. And far more who could do something else tomorrow, including self employment, without trouble.
One common factor is the desire to achieve something bigger than you can do as an individual. There is probably some selection bias at work here but I don't think it's so unusual.
I do agree that when considering hiring someone who has been working individually for a long time, you'll want to probe how they will fit into a team. That's not the same thing.
I guess it depends on the definition of "company bullshit"
"I know a fair number of people who don't really have to work but choose to"
Because those people probably do not have to put up with lots of "coporate bullshit", otherwise they would indeed go find something more fitting, if they are not desperate for the money.
But also people who are mainly desperate for the money, can be good employes - and if they do not have to start by having to fake enthusiasm ("don't tell me its because of the money") - there is a good chance that they will stay, even when they are not desperate anymore. That was my main point.
There's many non-bullshit answers. When you work on your own projects, you rarely can impact many people. It's much easier to leverage the company and their existing user base to make changes that impact more people than you could possibly do so on your own.
Running your own business still has bullshit too. It's just a different type of bullshit. You have to deal with paperwork, accountants, lawyers, marketing, sales, engineering, product, customer support and more. There are probably a few of those at least you'd consider bullshit.
People don't just work for companies because the money is more certain. Sometimes it's nice to be an individual contributor and yes you have a boss or two. It's more of a choose your bullshit adventure.
Well: IMHO, "company bullshit" really has nothing to do with the word "company"; you could as easily substitute "interpersonal" / "human" / "team dynamics". People are the hardest part of any problem...
...but also the most rewarding. For me, no, the money would not be enough to put up with the bullshit, not by itself. Much more compelling is the idea that multiple people working together as an effective team can build things of greater scope, quality, and importance than one person can working alone.
Of course, if "people here can't work together as an effective team" - e.g. because the culture is overly cutthroat, or the environment is interruption-prone, or project teams are demotivated by a lack of trust / agency / autonomy, or impossible deadlines are the norm - well, if those things are part of the bullshit, no amount of money will make that enjoyable and rewarding.
In such an environment, what's a rational strategy? Probably to save up a bunch of money, to the point where the next job search can be motivated by things other than immediate financial need, and quit once that's achieved. (Hence "rest and vest" behaviour, which is often a huge red flag about the organization and not the individual person.)
Type 1 is characterized by broad policies and processes indiscriminately applied that may not always make sense at the ground level. This type is not only inevitable, but is actually necessary for a company to work at scale—once you get into the hundreds and thousands of employees it just doesn't work leave things to each individual manager's judgement as it won't be fair, and it will eat a lot of cycles.
Type 2 is characterized by the people problems you mention, including all manner of incompetent management, and other inefficiencies that prevent the essential work from being done properly. While some amount of this is also inevitable, it's generally avoidable by competent management as long as the org doesn't release a tipping point of dysfunction at which point all the competent folks start to leave for greener pastures.
Distinguishing between type 1 and type 2 can be very tricky, especially for low-level employees at a large company where they won't have the experience or the visibility to make an informed read. However making the distinction is super important if you want to be upwardly mobile in large companies. There is a level of bullshit you will need to put up with anywhere, you just need to be able to understand what is worth putting up with for the greater good and what is not.
By company bullshit, I just mean the standard bullshit that comes w/ any job. As an entrepreneur, I was accustomed to solving problems my way. When I became an employee, it took me a while to understand that just because I could make an impact in some way, that doesn't mean the company would be interested in letting me do it that way. Basically it's hard to go from being in full control to doing it someone else's way.
There are lots of developers who realize that running a business is not for them. It's completely valid to say something along those lines; "I love the tech work, but not the admin/sales work."
You just described me. I ran a company. I was good at generating referral business & closing it, but I was not good at throwing money at something that generated business in an outbound fashion. So the bigger my business got, the more vulnerable I was to my referral pipeline drying up. I did not like that, and I didn't want to remain small, so I got out.
Geez, this is such a negative outlook. I know this is the trendy, anti-capitalist, labor-friendly view of the world these days. But it is still possible to believe the tech product you are working on is contributing something positive to the world. Or to simply enjoy creating and improving on things that are used by many users, even at a big company where your own scope of work might be much more narrow than on a personal project you have 100% control over.
It is possible to be motivated by both the money and other aspects of the job, and in my own experience this is the case for all of the best coworkers I've had over the years.
> telling people to fake motivation, when all they actually want is the money - just increases company bullshit.
With this perspective, anyone who chooses to see the glass half full instead of half empty is bullshitting. Anyone who says or does something kind to somebody else even though their own life is not perfect, is bullshitting. You could make that argument but that's not what most people would call bullshit.
"It is possible to be motivated by both the money and other aspects of the job, and in my own experience this is the case for all of the best coworkers I've had over the years."
Sure it is, but the question was about the motivation to put up with coporate bullshit, not the motivation in general.
"I'm tired of handling every single aspect of everything on my own".
Doesn't mean I'll never want to leave again, of course, but... working on your own is one type of challenge - working with a team, and losing some autonomy is another.
"Tell me why you’re interested and willing to put up with bullshit".
This presumes someone working on their own isn't dealing with bullshit already. If you're solo, but doing any form of client work, you have a level of bullshit you're already handling. Invoicing/collections/payroll/legal/insurance - it's not necessarily overwhelming in most cases, but... it's another thing that many would happily give up in exchange for a different type of 'bullshit'.
Yes, getting to work on certain type of projects - there's things that only 'bigco X' can realistically tackle - I may be willing to put up with corporate bullshit to work with a certain class of projects (scale, industry focus, etc).
If I knew some of the folks on the team already, and wanted to work with them, that would also be a big factor. Perhaps they'd even want to work with me! :). I have a list of a handful of folks I've either worked with or watched work/progress over the years, and if the opportunity came up to work with them, in whatever capacity, I would probably consider putting up with whatever 'company X' wanted to make that happen.
Regarding the comment "and don't just tell me you need the money", why would their personal financial situation matter if the person has already proven their skills and abilities?
The only other motivations I can see as being viable as a response (other than working because you have to earn money to live a certain lifestyle) is "I really want to learn XYZ and I can't do that on my own without working in a team with more resources" or for NGOs hiring there could be further social good motivations.
>I predict that the file explorer specifically will be completely replaced
This is probably the best way back in. Employers are less fussy if it looks like you can solve their immediate problem and once you have proved your worth they will probably offer a full time job anyway.
The context is worse than that single comment. It's a "tear you down to bring you up" entire comment. Hurtful to someone we can only assume is genuinely seeking out help.
Yeah, the poster is not engaging with how the recruiting pipeline really works.
Concretely, to get back into the top of the funnel, you should pay for a compsci masters program at a respectable university. This is a good career reset opportunity and will nullify the need to investigate your past.
Another commenter mentioned leetcoding, which is essential.
It's really concerning you're focusing on remote work. If anything in-office work is super uncompetitive right now, which you can always turn into whatever arrangement you want. Don't start off by talking about stuff that makes people say, "fuck this guy."
I've been self-employed for over ten years, and part of me likes being fiercely independent/etc. Part of me feels hopelessly cut off from the modern programming world, having not coded properly on a team feels a bit sad/like I'm missing out on a really fun part of work/existence. Part of me feels like it's useful self-sabotage in that it means I'm putting myself in a situation where I have to continue being fiercely independent. But yeah, I'm reading the replies here with interest, and I wish you the best :) Thanks for asking an interesting question!
I agree with the other posters that you shouldn't really term them side-projects if they were your main focus. Then they're just projects! :) Don't undersell yourself.
I've worked for myself for 20+ years, but always in a shared office or co-working space which addresses any social side of a regular work environment. But, like you, modern/collaborative programming or project work has passed me by and I suspect I'm unemployable now. I think beyond the ability, there's also the interest/willingness in working for someone and it likely doesn't marry well with the fierce independence. I don't think I could do it now.
Thankfully, I have no intention of getting employed, so it's a reasonable stalemate; I just carry on working on my various projects.
> modern/collaborative programming or project work has passed me by and I suspect I'm unemployable now.
You’re not missing out on anything. If something you’d be unpleasantly surprised how convoluted team work and new pipelines have become. Being independent is a healthy path to keep away from toxicity. But I agree about the unemployabiloty nagging feeling, it’s psychologically unpleasant to feel that but should you ever reenter the corp pool you’d hate it with all your guts.
Understand the sentiment, I took a cyclical approach over a decade or so, a couple years self-employed, a couple years on a coding team, repeat. Although the last employment period gave an equity windfall, (and not to mention crypto investments) so only doing entrepreneurial stuff moving forward.
Commenters, please stop generalizing from your own anecdotes and then representing the generalization as a universal truth. Some examples from the thread:
- "there is no reason to spend the time looking at what people have done on GitHub"
- "Employers don’t really care [about a github link]"
- "None of that extracurricular stuff matters"
There are literally hiring managers in the thread saying that they like seeing Github links, and have hired founders of one-person companies. So these generalizations are false.
If you have evidence that your opinion represents the overwhelming majority, feel free to post it. If you're talking about FAANG, then you should qualify your statement. Most programmers don't work at FAANG.
Don’t look for a job, instead look for the person you can help.
There is a senior executive out there, a line manager who you can serve and solve problems for.
Get clarity around who this person could be. What kind of organization? Where do they sit? (LinkedIn is a great resource for this). * I’ve found smaller companies, less than 100 people easier to work with.
Now, reach out to them for a discovery conversation. See if your circles overlap.
Essentially, avoid the common trap of filling out job applications, hoping to pass the HR filter.
During my CS undergrad I got hired by a VP of a company before I graduated, as he also attended CS classes for fun.
I am decent with computers built gaming rigs, overclocked, built servers, set up home labs and networks, built html sites, wordpress sites and was doing extremely well in school. We often talked about how I always was working on different projects.
I have been IC at this company for 4 years now with minimal supervision delivering apps. I did not have an interview.
Therefore, I agree with this advice. Many companies are looking for developers who can develop apps for them as ICs, and OPs experience would be perfect.
Focus on what your intent was during the employment gap.
The key is the intentionality of the experience. Unless you had no choice but to work on side projects, odds are you had some goal. Whether it was to learn how to build something from start to finish, provide support to someone in need, discover a passion, get experience with something specific, or something other, concentrate on that element.
Employment gaps are typically a concern if:
1. It suggests the candidate wanted to work but couldn't get a job.
2. It suggests the candidate will not stick around for long.
Employment gaps that served a purpose in someone's life are just as valuable as an employment history. Make it part of the narrative by explaining its role in your life, and how it characterizes you as a person ("I took a year off to care for sick parents") or how it served as growth ("I wanted to get more experience with X").
From experience, early in my career I took time off because I wanted to get better at understanding, structuring, and maintaining code test suites. Later on I had a gap when I tried to start a business. These aren't just times where I wasn't working, they are times deliberately devoted to something in my life, and they actually help the job hunt rather than hinder it.
As a hiring manager at a startup-ish SaaS company:
I love seeing side projects, both because
- it shows you have entrepreneurial skills (care about and able to think about more than just code)
- as well as the technical side (shows you’re able to build from scratch, probably work across the stack, etc.)
Show off as much as you can:
- leave the websites up even if the business isn’t viable. Better to be able to see and play with a side project versus just seeing a line on a resume and having no idea how significant or good it was.
- open source what you can. It can be very helpful to point to code from real projects you wrote, especially if you have a gap in employment.
Try to foster great references. Even if they aren’t recent, you will do better if you have a few raving fans.
Unless you had a lot of management experience, I suggest trying to find a job as an IC. More open roles / people seem more desperate for developers. If you’re good, it won’t matter much if you have a gap. Personally I prefer to hire ICs who have a little management experience because they tend to be better employees as well as are more likely to be someone who can eventually lead/manage with us as well.
Overall: the biggest thing is you want to show that you have been doing good technical work over the last few years versus just some unemployable person who had “projects”.
I’m hiring frontend/React and backend/Python engineers: phil@close.com
I tried starting a business. 18 months later I realized it was going nowhere. (I also wasn't making any money, and continuing was about to get financially irresponsible.)
In hindsight, I was just working on my side project for 18 months, unpaid.
What I did was list the business on my resume just like any other job. I put myself as "co-founder" instead of putting in a fancy title like "CTO."
When questioned about details of the business, or why I was looking for a job, I just point that I'm a horrible businessperson and better off working for someone else. If pressed further, I point out that no job is perfect, and the ups and downs of a normal job are preferable to getting my way all the time but not getting paid.
I have a tendency to take 6 months or a year off between jobs and the uncertainty around Covid pushed my most recent funemployment round to 18 months. It was also the first time I've had trouble finding work. I tried a bunch of different things, applied for ~30 positions, but posting on the HN Who Wants to be Hired thread in May got me 6 good leads within the week and I had two offers within 4 days. If people ask I tell them the truth: I'm busy when I'm working and not working gives me time to investigate all the weird corners of programming that aren't necessarily commercially viable.
Yeah exactly this. How to get a job if you have perfectly marketable skills and just spent time building things? Idk, just apply? Worst case you notice a company finds it odd and you can better explain what you have been spending time on next time. Just apply, don't make shit up, you'll be fine right?
Stay in your lane... if you apply for IC engineer roles and say you want to be a manager then this is not a good signal (they're hiring for an IC engineer). Or if you apply for manager roles and you want to continue coding then this is not a good signal (they want someone to manage). So pick the one you want to focus on and simplify this story for the next few years to make a success of the one you choose. I would say that whilst there is more need for managers in tech those are harder to find a fit on, and so you will have far better success finding a role as an IC. If you want to start in one lane and change lane after 1-2 years then aim for a startup that has 50-500 people and is growing as then you'll have the greatest number of opportunities to pick a different lane.
The employment gap is not an issue, and could be viewed as an advantage: Self-motivation, bias-to-action, drive. Of course it can also be viewed as a disadvantage: Not a team player, will they be onboard with the company goals/mission. You get to frame this, so when you present it ensure you do so in the former... "work was not stimulating and you had some tech itches to scratch so you applied yourself to those to support your own growth and learning and now wish to apply some of that to a role at a company".
On applying for roles... just apply. You don't mention where you are located but remote roles don't typically pay SF/tech hub salaries as they can opt for a far larger pool of people and don't have to prop up landlords in hot markets like SF. This too will be an advantage for you if you happen to be pretty much anywhere else so be sure to treat that as an advantage that you have, know that for remote your not being in SF is a plus.
TBH there's so little info in your post and nothing personally identifiable that it's hard to give specific and concrete advice, but the above comes to mind immediately.
I've been wondering the same. Spent the past eight months on a mental health break from employment after being thoroughly burnt out at my last job. The combination of remote working, pandemic isolation, bad management and increasingly heavy workload really fucked me up. Been doing some simple side projects recently to try to get back into the swing of things, but no idea how I'm going to explain it when I start job hunting again. Reading the comments here with interest.
Anyway, best of luck to you in yours. Hope you find something fulfilling.
As someone who took 2 yrs out of s/w dev then got back in, I'd say, you just need to find 1 employer initially that needs your skills and is open-minded about the gap and/or, has something limiting their pool of possible candidates, e:g location, salary etc. After my gap I found an open-minded startup which also couldn't afford to immediately pay particularly well so couldn't be picky. You could also, to echo a helpful comment in yesterday's discussion on burnout, find a "bad" employer that people keep quitting from and needs to hire replacements, then stay there for a time-boxed period, enough to get your work history back on track then hop to a more desireable employer. That might be a bit grim for a limited time, but if it fixes your career long-term, could be worth it. Good luck :)
I'm starting on the second 5-year cycle of doing this. If you have done any contracting during the time I'd also encourage calling that out. Right now I'm doing contracting and working on my own ideas. I realistically expect to get burned out and desire to return to full time employment in a year (if not sooner).
You may not always have your preferred choice of company but you shouldn't need to give up too much either so long as you are not actually desperate.
Reiterating: doing what you're doing has worked out for me in the past (though saying "I was contracting" also helped I think), I'm doing it again right now, and I expect to be able to find full time roles again in the future without a big problem.
List your block of time outside regular employment as consulting.
Then provide a list of notable projects/clients that highlight what you completed during this time. If you don't have interesting clients/projects I would just say you consulted for various companies doing x when it comes up.
I just did this moving from consulting to a full time dev role and the various interviews were fine.
It's pretty typical for developers to do their own thing for periods of time.
Get some contracting work then don't stop interviewing and use it as a stepping stone. Problem solved.
However, first principle question, why is an employment gap "bad"? Realistically, you are at a disadvantage if you are unemployed so you will take a below market rate, and the skills you applied to your adventure are at least slightly above average. You are basically gold from a SMB or mid-stage startup perspective.
Do you think you have sinned against some convention? If you think it makes you seem unreliable, unreliable to what? To forego opportunity, or believe your wage is your place? You haven't challenged the gods, you took risks to build a product and have learned more first hand about that than most people whose job is to manage someone elses. Imagining these barriers is just inventing reasons not to do it because you don't want to. Just take a 3-6mo programming or QA contract somewhere and improve your bargaining position so you aren't desperate.
Spending time working on side projects is a common occurrence in-between employment for devs. I've done the same in the past, and simply explained that I was working on open-sourced software. If you've spent several years working on side projects I would assume that you have something to showcase on your resume.
Speaking just for myself, usually side projects are too small to really be a showcase; expecting they have something nice might not apply to OP. Then again, I also didn't make it my day job to work on these things, but still OP could just have taken it easy. Doesn't mean they're out of touch or anything. They should just apply to a place they like, and if there is something to showcase that's indeed all the better.
I’ve gotten job offers on three separate occasions off the back of side projects I was playing with between jobs, and neither was particularly impressive. The benefit of going in with a side project is that during interview you can show what you’ve been working on, and you can dig into the code. That’s not something you can typically do with things you’ve built for an employee because everything is under NDA so you can only talk in general terms.
Doing side-projects is really useful for a lot of companies. Basically they are hiring a talented product people into their team. You know how to handle development/devops/support/marketing for your product. This is a huge plus for the team you are going to join.
Depends on what your goals are. But it comes across as selling yourself and your hard won skills way too short.
Are you looking to just be a coder or are you willing to use your product dev experience?
If you want to be another coder in a seat, go for leetcode and apply to 200+ companies. Use LinkedIn religiously and pad those skills with obscure frameworks and references.
If you are serious about a job then you must position yourself as someone who can help, and that won't neccesarily mean "coder". Technical project management, business analyst someone who can understand what deployment to a kubernetes cluster means and the importance of a well structured support pipeline - is etremely valuable.
There must be a reason you are under-selling yourself but good luck.
I agree with the other comments - I wouldn't worry about it too much. If the projects were pertinent to the work your trying to get - throw them on your resume and call it good.
Showing you have a passion for a field/tech. etc. will probably be a plus.
Just be upfront about it and have a well thought out explanation of why you are returning to the job market instead of continuing.
Like if it is a startup say it is a startup or recuring revenue project be prepared to talk about why it didn't get traction. I've also seen people who just spent time investing their own money and living off that and even some who were doing great but wanted more socialization.
Being full stack and having some well developed entrepreneurial instincts are well respected things especially in small to medium companies. And there are more remote jobs than ever.
It's about the same situation as a full time parent re-entering the workplace. Some companies have internship-like return-to-work programs. It's not clear if this is your situation, but maybe there's a story behind your gap that would resonate with a hiring manager.
Also consider expanding your target to on-site roles in the short term. 6 months of that should be long enough to fill in the employment gap. And you can always keep applying for remote roles until you land one.
Most companies just care that you can pass their interview gauntlet and then LARP like you're really super into their mission or whatever. You'll be ok.
I think something to keep in mind (really for any job search scenario) is that there will be companies, people and company cultures that just won't get what you're doing and what you stand for. Some hiring managers who know great teams are made up of players from very differing backgrounds will get it. Hiring managers who have been there themselves (gone the entrepreneurial route) will also get it. You may have to pace your audience here and select companies that seem to embrace bringing on people like yourself. You can do this kind of research on the company itself, on the hiring manager (check their LinkedIn) or see if you can set up a call with someone on the team. It's easier said than done, but if you can honestly believe (by yourself) that what you did for those years is an asset then it will just come through in telling your story. For context, I've come from a mixed experience background with some gaps where I started things and experimented. Although it did slow my formal career path, it's made me much more valuable than someone else with the same traditional years experience. Good luck!
I had that problem after working a year on my open source projects.
Then I went to get a PhD. I thought it would be flexible enough that I could keep working on oss. But there was no time for that. If it had been in a similar field, I could have worked on the oss as part of my thesis, but it was too unrelated
Now I have a PhD and a completely outdated oss project, and do not know what to do next
facinating how much advice here only applies to FAANG jobs & startups in SV/NY.
there is absolutely not enough info in the OP to provide meaningful advice. what kinds of side projects were they? what tech stacks? how technical the implementations? etc. etc.
there are plenty of well-paying software jobs that need neither leetcode nor a masters CS degree from MIT. telling someone that these are the current barrier to entry without any context is absurd.
my 65yo father went from being laid off a $100k php job due to covid to another $100k php job 6mo later. the first at a small mfg company with 3 devs; the other at 10 person front-office online retailer with 4 devs. he is not a 10x dev, still prefers jquery and no one he spoke with knew or cared about leetcode. he's probably never written a merge sort impl in his life, though i suspect he has sorted lists in production a time or two.
As many have said, don't treat them as side projects. They were apps or products you were working on - if they were at all "real" (e.g., had users or customers) than it was a startup you were trying to get off the ground (a lot of startups are bootstrapped that way).
I've done a lot of this in the past - I built a platform and apps for consumer-focused location aware in the early 2000's, and another app that ended up with around 12 million users.
When I interviewed at Microsoft Research, we barely talked about my "day job" (fairly straightforward C#/.NET enterprise stuff). They ended up focusing on the side stuff - because it was just me doing the design/architecture/coding/company, it was innovative, it was interesting - and I was super passionate about it.
As soon as somebody demands me to explain employment gap I consider the next offer. Because that is bullshit. Why do I have to explain my life? I'm not a slave for whom it would be a crime to live a life instead of always working when not sleeping.
To be honest I can hardly understand how do people survive working 11 months a year without having a year off every some years or full-summer vacations. I have a blessing of living in a non-expensive (yet reasonably good) place where this is possible for me but most of the people supposedly can't afford this and I find this fact a horror. I can hardly see a reason to live if you have to spend most of you time at work.
I'm in a similar situation but with an even bigger gap. My strategy, so far untested, is to concentrate on a newer technology where I can be a bit rusty but no worse than anyone else. I'm looking forward to other comments here.
Just remember that knowing the tools isn’t the part they really care about. They wanna know if you can build stuff that someone asks you to build, maintain legacy code, communicate well enough, etc.
That's encouraging to me as I feel that those are areas in which I've done well. I guess I get the most value out of staying up to date on the newest tools by knowing when NOT to use them.
Unless someone is hyper committed to a laser focused tech stack (e.g. we're a React/Node shop), I don't think you'll have much trouble. If you only know older stuff, say mid-2000s PHP & .NET, but you take a month or three to pick up Python & JavaScript, you don't need to advertise that your PHP & .NET are much stronger than Python & JavaScript. Just say you know all four. Talk about what you've built, and what you know, and let them dig into what you built w/ what you know. If you really want to modernize your skillset, by all means keep working on it, but don't let your ancient tech subtract deflate or inflate your confidence. Focus on being effective, not a myopic "you can do anything with my tech" weenie.
Think of it this way:
- If someone worked in a 100% Perl shop, but they were doing things that sounded modern-ish & had dabbled in React after hours, would you still want to interview them?
- Now if think of a Perl developer who is maintaining a server by hand, pushing tarballs of code with FTP, not using version control, and hadn't learned anything new since jQuery, would you want to interview that person?
Assume your side project is something that our society accepts as normal business, you can just say you were the CTO/CEO/Founder of "Advanced AI, LLC". If it's open source, you can just flat out say that.
Just so we're crystal clear here: calling yourself CEO or some other inflated title would be an outright lie. Some recruiters and HMs might fall for it, but resumes like this that come to my desk end up directly in the garbage bin.
FWIW about half the coworkers I most respected at Google came to it by way of being CEO of their own small (oftentimes 1-3 person) company, and another 25% left to go be CEO of their own small company.
What you're saying is that you don't want to hire former entrepreneurs. That's fine, but you're also inflating it to imply that your preferences are universal, which is as much of an outright lie as someone working on independent projects calling themselves CEO.
He didn't say he didn't want to hire former entrepreneurs - you are saying that. He said don't be misleading about your previous position. If you say you are a CEO of a company I expect at least > 1, otherwise are you a chief of yourself? It's incredibly misleading.
Also there's a huge difference between being a CEO of a one person company (don't have to deal with another human being) and a > 1 person team. As the team size increases, the title becomes increasingly more meaningful. You are free to draw the line wherever you want, but allowing it to rest on a 1 person team is pretty close to lying.
But there's a black-and-white difference between actually founding a company and operating in the role of a CEO and slapping a "CEO" label on "I messed around with code for a while".
One entails actually making a go at running a business, with all the activities that entails. The other is more of an individual contributor thing which can result in useful experience for that role, but is nothing like being a CEO. To mislabel the latter activity is just lying.
> slapping a "CEO" label on "I messed around with code for a while"
I've worked for several companies that were basically just a "CEO" and (sometimes other people) messing around. For whatever reason, investors seem happy to give them millions of dollars to do so.
I did a startup with 3 people on full time. I don't like the inflated title either, but it's necessary for raising funds or selling a company. People want to know who's taking responsibility. Some use light-hearted titles like "Dictator" or "Astro Girl" but I find those less appropriate. If my job is to convince some guy in a suit to put $150k in my bank account, deal with legal repercussions, audits, and so on, I think it's the appropriate title.
Founder seems to be the other good one, but it says much less about your scope of responsibilities. Founder can be tech or sales related too. I just try to make it clear what the size of the company is.
Why would you penalize people for this? Most CEOs do the same thing - do you feel its dishonest or something?
To me, it's more of a "yes, this is dumb, but it's a mistake that someone could make out of naivete or lack of confidence". It doesn't strike me as something particularly misleading (since, as you say, you see right through it). In fact, given all the outright lying that already happens in hiring, I would say this is one of the more innocuous annoyances. (And it does annoy me, but I'm annoyed at how people use the phrase, not at the one particular candidate.)
Despite whatever YOU think it means, it's a formal legal term.
Even a sole proprietor is legally an executive officer.
You should dig those CVs out of your trashcan. We all try and choose an appropriate term, founder, owner, CEO, etc., but there's no rulebook and you're just making up a meaning for CEO that it doesn't actually have.
Even though it's a legal term it's incredibly misleading to say the least. It's like calling yourself a top 3 finisher in a race of 3 people. Sure you are technically correct, but also very misleading.
CEO implies you are the chief of a group of people. At the minimum > 1. If you are the chief of yourself and a question pops up, "Who were you managing?" or "Talk about a conflict with your team and how you resolved it" it can get embarrassing pretty quickly.
Again, I feel this is just you. You're ascribing a deeper meaning to the term than it actually has. Even in this thread there's someone saying "Well it's OK to call yourself CEO as long you actually tried to start the business".
Think about it a bit more. How many employees before you can call yourself a CEO in your opinion? 1, 2, 10? Do they have to be employees or do freelancers count? Do free interns? Does your company have to have made a profit, or does it count if you just blew a bunch of seed cash and never made a dime?
And what term do you want to use if they fall out of your personal guidelines? As you haven't actually suggested one, nor has the GP. FlibbleFlobble? Pertankywank? PersonWhoDidSomething?
You are making this significantly more complicated than it has to be. Like I said, you and 1 or more people. If you work with other people you can call yourself a CEO. Doesn't matter if they're part time or what not. You still worked with another person.
By your logic my example of the top 3 finisher in a race of 3 clearly illustrates why your view is very misleading.
Returning to the job market sounds a bit defeatist. I’d take a different route and just look for some contracted work or consulting through your network. Go above and beyond with it and try to spin it to a full time role.
One option is to do some contract work either direct if you have the connections or through an agency. I've been working through Facet at facet.net for a couple of years and I've found them reputable, they put their fee on top of the rate you set and are transparent about that to the clients, you pick what to work on, etc. I'm sure you could find direct employment (there are monthly "who is hiring" and "who is looking" threads here for starters) but if you want to get your feet back in more gradually, contracting is nice in many ways.
From what I see (on the employer side), in most markets the way to get back into the top of the funnel is to flip every profile flag that says “actively open for new opportunities” and to respond to recruiters.
A gap where you worked on technical projects that didn’t work out business-wise will make for interesting interview slots (in a good and memorable way for the interviewers).
Three months ago may have been 2% better, but from a macro perspective, this is likely the best time in history to be looking for remote work.
You can list it as "Unpaid Sabbatical: Application Name". Then, put bullet points for the things you were trying to accomplish with this application, what challenges you encountered and how you addressed them. Be careful not to puff it up beyond what it was, but absolutely don't shy away from the work done. How you frame the work matters -- if you list something as an actual startup, for example, I'd probe you on your customer discovery process, etc.
When I get serious about a side project often people are calling me offering jobs after a year or two. It’s one reason why my career hasn’t gone in any straight direction.
First of all, most developers have gone through similars phases in their careers, so don't feel like this is some sort of mistake you made. Take all those side projects and spin them back up so you can use them for demos during interviews. This approach has worked remarkably well for me in the past. It shows initiative and the ability to drive a project to completion, so I would focus on ways that you can leverage these projects to your advantage.
Don't worry at all about it. Embellish your experience as "consultant" and just make sure you actually understand the tech. That's after all what people need from you.
I get the feeling you're just a little anxious about jumping back on the interview carousel. The market is super hot right now and employers will allow you to explain yourself.
When it comes to salary, answer the question of how much you want, not how much you were getting paid.
I put my experiments under a "freelancer" role. The role of a resume is to summarize your career in a 30 second glance. I include a portfolio for those who are curious what I actually do but few do.
You could probably just include all your projects under a "founder" role. It says a lot more than leaving it blank. Many people would be happy to hire someone with that kind of iterative experience.
Lump together the time you spend working on your side projects as 1 employment entruy.
Bets if you have a company name (and you should have) but if you don't, call it "self employed" and list your activities as if you were working at a company (because you were), best if some of the project have some web presence.
Be prepared to answer the question about your salary at the time, in which case, tell the truth.
If it's what you were doing (nominally) full time, it's not a "side" project, it's a project.
Were these project technical? If so, emphasize that and tailor it to the job you are targeting. If not, emphasize what you were trying to do, how it worked out, and what you learned.
Similar to what others have said, say that you were trying your own startup for a couple of years but it never panned out. Be ready to describe what you wanted to do. That's what I did after 1 year of taking off to do my own thing. No one gave it a second's worth of questioning.
I’m currently doing this as well and for anyone else who is doing this you should continuously share your thoughts and progress on Twitter or your blog or YouTube or whatever. It’s easier to leave a track record and you’ll feel a lot better for doing it.
> What is the best way for me to start doing remote work?
send out resumes.
hiring is so hot that if you can do the work, nothing in your history besides "embezzler, intellectual property thief & saboteur" would slow you down much.
Where do you find low level positions? I'm in a similar position as the OP and I'd be fine with an entry level job (at entry level pay), but they're all labeled as 'intern' or 'new grad'.
If your code is available then make it into a portfolio and use it to your advantage. When I used to hire techies I loved having a portfolio of projects to look at.
Yes, show what you've developed/produced, as opposed to more abstract items of e.g. job responsibilities.
Also, skillset and capability is more important to me than a pristine employment history, but you need to find an effective way of demonstrating it. A portfolio of projects is a good way I think.
Personally, if I were to take a break from being employed, I'd invest some time to leetcode, because I love problem solving and I'm competitive. I just feel that I've never really had enough time or focus to get deep into it, but I think it's a good way to keep sharp. And one can show an achievement record for such activity as well, which is a good indicator of skill.
How would you explain all this work if you were hired by a small company to build them? You wouldn't hesitate to claim the years working on these interesting projects as valuable years and part of your career growth and progression.
We tend to downplay things we do or build ourselves, as if the very fact that another person (a boss) tells us to do something makes it immediately more valuable than if we choose to do that something ourselves.
It doesn't. The app you built because you chose to has just as much value as the app you built because someone paying you a monthly check told you to build it.
Wrap your 'side projects' inside a business and claim the credit for all that work.