| >Friends who had maxed out their investment in GPA [...] were in a relative bubble. Yep 1000% agree > Friends who had maxed out their investment in [...] personal projects were in a relative bubble. -0% agree, I'm actually a bit baffled that you mention it in the same breath. I've found, in my own xp and in others', that personal projects on your own are almost the only way to learn how to be high-impact. In many companies, they've already decided their db, their frameworks, etc. and you'll need a lot of political capital and technical trust to be able to start a real conversation about splitting the stack and so on. So, here, you'll learn about how to work on existing rails doing n+1 tasks and bugfixing. In a personal project, you start with an empty dir and work from there. You end up knowing why you like pg over mysql. You know why it was worth it to use rails instead of rolling your own. etc etc. I have some social friends who also do software who don't really have it as a hobby (just a job) and while that's totally fine, they're unable to answer questions like "what framework does your work use?" (answer I found later: Spring). To their credit, it's probably a good thing at some level that the company has managed to shield people from that much detail. Obviously everyone's journey is different, but I've always found that individuals who can go "I want to build <thing>" and then google/IRC until it's built are generally pretty impactful people. |
My only justification for including it is that personal projects teach you about how technologies work at the 0-to-1 step (and maybe 1-10). I knew smart people who were extremely confident in the superiority of tool/framework X, because they could write unreadable boilerplate in it for all of their personal projects. Everything was a nail for the hammer.
I generally agree that it’s good practice to start with an empty dir and build from there. But IMO it is no substitute for working on or around projects that have been in prod for at least a couple years.
I agree that working on your own projects is a great way to develop instincts that lead you to being high impact, but it probably took me a year of working experience context (2 or 3 internships) before my side projects actually began training that muscle. I can easily imagine mileage varying there, however.