Recruiters of Reddit, what kind of Full Stack projects impress you?
As a CS college student looking for Full Stack Developer Internships this summer, what kind of projects really shine on the resume?
The bar is really low. If there's a demo and it works and isn't too buggy then you're already well ahead of the curve.
300 IQ play - have a second account from which you introduce the typo, and then correct it from your main
Seriously, I'd be impressed by even one non trivial bug. I've had to contribute to libraries my work was using because of bugs we needed fixed and seeing someone take initiative to fix OSS shows a great attitude.
I'm not a recruiter but interview people regularly. This is what I want to see. Something that works end to end, even if it is simple. Ability to answer question about how it works and what it does, and why certain technologies where chosen, even if the answer is simple "it was good enough and easy to get working."
Some basic but decent design, DI and unit tests. I'd rather see this than something that is fancy but non-functional, or very narrowly focused.
Man if I saw a project with unit tests I'd fast track them to the final interview. Also if the git commit history is cleanly written that means a lot to me because people don't expect anyone to read it so if they're diligent and organized in their commit history you know that's an ingrained habit.
This gives me hope as a full stack developer who feels like my projects are trash. But, I only present working trash I can explain.
Not a recruiter, but I did a small project for REI with some other students. Nothing fancy, just a tool that helps REI sort customers who dropped of gear to be repaired. Was a huge hit in interviews, almost everyone asked me to go into detail more on it even tho the project wasnt that impressive.
Point is, the project doesn't need to be huge or fancy. As long as its outside the scope of a typical homework project or personal project (i.e attract some users, maybe something a small business can use?) recruiters and interviewers will be curious and itll be a good topic to talk about and looks nice on your resume.
This. As someone who’s been interviewing interns, ANY project that isn’t homework is a plus. Especially if it’s in a language you didn’t learn for a class. That being said, I don’t put too much weight on side projects because I know some students may not have time for them.
If I already have internship experience and developing software at my internship, is it still worthwhile to work on side projects or would recruiters just start paying attention to my actual work experience at that point?
TBH, your internship experience is gonna be THE focus once u have it. Side projects are most helpful for people without internship experience and/or traditional education. That being said, if you have the time for it, side projects will definitely help your personal growth and can only help you for the job search but if you're short on time and HAVE to choose between that and LeetCode practice to get an even better internship or a full time job, I'd say LeetCode (sadly).
I think the quality that impressed people was that it solved some real-world challlenge or problem. This kind of project always has a story, one in which you say you saw a need and addressed it with your skills.
This is very important. Side projects that create any kind of actual value for other people or organizations are usually more powerful than hypothetical projects / class projects. It communicates intangible skills and gives you a story to tell in a context / scenario similar to the future working environment.
Anything where you worked as part of a team, and an ability to describe how the team was other than “I did all the work”.
The nature of the project is not all that interesting to me, it’s unlikely to be in an area relevant to the job you are applying for. What stands out is the ability to write clearly and concisely about the technical challenges and solutions. Indicating what technologies you used to solve the problems you faced.
A resumé is all about presenting evidence you will succeed in the role.
Are you a recruiter yourself? How do you feel about small open-source contributions?
I'm an engineer who also does recruitment. Open source is fantastic! It proves someone values your work enough to include it in their project. And you can work to someone else's standards.
even if the contributions are not that significant (at least yet)?
Yeah even if they are small. Anything is good, and shows you are interested. That alone sets you apart from the majority of candidates
Pick a couple projects you care about that host code in GitHub and look at the open issues. Try replicating and fixing the issues.
If I do make some small contribution to open source, how do I present it on my resume? I feel as if it's not resume-worthy if I write "fixed bug XYZ in open source project ABC", and it seems kind of try-hard to bring it up if I'm not asked about it.
I am not a recruiter. I am willing to bet though that a GitHub account with decent amount of pulls, a personal repository or two of something you like working on, and small bug fixes here and their in the community will put you miles ahead of many people also starting out.
I agree that if your putting your GitHub on your resume don’t make the bullet points ‘fixed small bug in repository c’. But that is far from your only option.
The resume could mention your own repos/forks and fixin bugs in more prevalent repos is just gravy that comes up in an interview if you can swing it.
EDIT: Even without bug fixes just being familiar in a public way with popular projects through pulls and having interest in maintaining your own things in repos would look great and be good for learning
So I recently completed a team project in school, how would you recommend including about it in the resume? The main purpose, the fact it was a team project, and the stuff I worked on in it?
I’ve interviewed hundreds of devs for a large tech company in California. Not a recruiter , but as a software architect.
A few things OP ;
first I would change the focus from what kinda of projects impress recruiters to what kind of projects impress hiring managers . Hiring managers are the technical minded person. That will make a decision on you. Recruiters are often non technical HR like people who know a few buzzwords . While some might know how to code , most won’t.
as for projects , we actually cared less about what the project did ,instead focusing on the code itself . Stuff that we look for :
code structure . Are you consistent in style and naming convention ?
Is there a lot of duplication? ( which is bad)
is the code maintainable and easy to grok?
do you have unit tests ?
is there a readme file ? Does it do a good job documenting the project and how to run it ? ( and I will try to run it )
is the code loosely coupled ? How you separating concerns.
Bonus points :
* do you have a ci build for your project and a build badge
* is there a dockerfile in the project .
The point being what it does is less important than the implementation details and code style. We’ve had candidates build simple to do lists but show pretty awesome code and architecture .
(Please excuse any grammatical or spelling errors , on my phone )
It doesn’t matter what the project is.. its more how well can you communicate the project details to other people
Basically anything, as long as it's well made you're ahead of the curve.
Mine is a web game and a specialized image repository.
What kind of image repository? I'm asking for a friend. He's a photographer and is looking for new ways to catalogue his images.
A photographer will probably want something snazzier looking, these guys are into super technical stuff.
That's awesome but you should start using https, friend. Easy to set up a cert with letsencrypt or something.
I know it's a really petty thing but it's literally the first thing that I noticed and you want to make a good impression.
Adding onto this, how do you present projects you built for your current job, if they're hyper-protective of anything built for them? Just describe them in detail?
EDIT: Not a college student, nor a SWE, but looking to shift over in the future.
If it is a web app, link the url if you can. If you are allowed to fork the code, link the repo. If not, just describe it.
I'll have to see if they allow letting code out externally. It's absolutely nothing fancy, just a PHP+JS CRUD with visualization for my divison's employee ranking/rating, but it's the first useful thing I built there, so I figured I'd ask early for when I have other stuff.
The one that has the most buzzwords crammed into its description, because that's all a recruiter's gonna look at.
I used to think exactly like this, but I've changed my mind completely. If all you have is buzzwords, all you get will be a shitty dev job with poorly defined requirements mumbled by buzzword thirsty management. I feel like whenever a recruiter is excited by my buzzwords I'm taken back. Best job I've ever had is the current one. No buzzwords were exchanged during the whole recruitment process.
And if you present something more than buzz words to the typical recruiter, their eyes will glaze over as they patiently wait for you to stop talking so they can get back to asking you how many years of experience you have with each buzz word on their checklist.
Sure there's exceptions. But not many.
To add to this, the buzzwords get you in the door, actually knowing / demonstrating implementation of the buzzwords gets you through the next interview. Lot of people say they do full stack but are really glorified graphic designers that fold at "describe the APIs you used"
Not really true. Not at top companies anyway. For one thing many of them are language agnostic throughout the stack. If you're an infra engineer sure, probably looking for Java, C/C++, Scala maybe even .NET. But the languages in an of themselves are less relevant than what you are actually building.
It doesn't matter what it is as long as it is complete, it works, and it can be easily run. I don't think I've seen one that meets all three of these.
When I evaluate a candidate's project I basically run through a quick UAT/QA test on it.
For the first thing, does everything do something? If everything I click on says "Sorry, this isn't implemented yet", that's not great, but better than blowing up or showing a 404. But it still brings up the question of whether you are able to follow a project to completion once the "fun" part is over. If something isn't in the scope of the project, don't include a button for it.
"It works" should be obvious. Nobody likes broken software. I'm going to check basic stuff like input sanitization, etc.
For the last one, for the love of God, please include a URL where it can be seen running. I don't want to have to deploy it on my own machine, especially if it has dependencies. (unless you provide a Dockerfile, that might actually be a +1, but only because I already have Docker installed)
What do you think about me making a site where I just create a bunch of features to display without any real meaning to the site overall.
For example I'll have several tabs that lead to a feature, I plan to make those features icreasingly more impressive as I improve.
The key point being is that it'll be a sort of playground with a bunch of independent features rather than a well thought out website with a purpose.
I personally find like this would be a lot more fun for me, what do you think?
I haven't run into that before, but the thought that comes to my mind is that developing a complete site with a specific purpose demonstrates the ability to manage components into a cohesive whole, and there are inevitably struggles in completing a full application that can be avoided in toy examples. But, there aren't many features I can think of that can't be shoehorned into a tip calculator or todo list app.
Ya I can totally get that. It's just that I doesn't really want to dedicate myself to one specific website as I'd need to figure out ways to implement things I want to do. I rather just do them. I also personally find it more fun to work on smaller projects so that it remains fresh. This is what I'd achieve by having a site with multiple features.
Also another point is that at my current Web Dev internship I'm basically creating features for the company and thats what I assume is going to be the majority of what I do as a Web Dev. I doubt I'd need to create an entire site from scratch.
But I do agree, creating a full-fledged functional website requires and shows a lot of skill. Hopefully no one thinks I'm weird by creating this style of website. Thanks for your input.
As someone who interviews junior devs for full stack positions, what impresses me is building and hosting a site all by yourself. I am actually surprised when juniors know how to deploy code to production, configure servers and manage dns records. It's not even that hard these days with heroku or google or aws.
You'd be surprised how many juniors send resumes to us and link git repos of their 'portfolio site' and no other projects. Like they couldn't even bother (or didn't know how) to host it and send me the url.
I want to see something outside of just college work or boot camp projects.
As someone who interviews junior devs for full stack positions, what impresses me is building and hosting a site all by yourself. I am actually surprised when juniors know how to deploy code to production, configure servers and manage dns records. It's not even that hard these days with heroku or google or aws.
I'm someone who judges a lot by position, for instance, someone whose job it would be to maintain an older application that has no CI/CD system in place. They would be interviewed differently to judge a different set of skills.
However, if I had the chance to interview a candidate that could screenshare their terraform/aws/lambda "hello world" app, that person would immediately qualify for at least an introductory role on a larger team as a junior, given the size of the company has an engineering department of at least 25.
Smaller companies, you won't be able to get away with just that. You'd need to prove to me that you're comfortable working in a team-based coding environment, don't bring too many bad habits, and overall, strike me as an experienced individual who is capable of ingesting bad requirements and producing results that the team can brainstorm on and make progress on together.
Of all this talk about automation in the news today, I've yet to hear any comments on how "devops" exists less and less as a dedicated role. You must have an engineering department of ~100 if you're going to start seeing things like dedicated security, site reliability, user experience, maintenance, and "quality" teams that offer reliable ways of getting your foot in the door at a company that hires a lot of tech workers. You don't have to be an "official" software developer to get an interesting office job, and work to begin automating parts of it. The field has a lot of problems, and not everyone is a developer.
I say this as someone who has been working at a great tech company for 5 years, who supports a large ticketing desk which can get extremely difficult to keep up with. A lot of the best software developer candidates I ever got to interview there were already working at the company, usually as a low-level phone or support team tech. They'd figure out how to talk to internal APIs, or create easy to download extensions that might talk to these systems we were building. Really crafty and impressive stuff. They'd get honest to goodness grassroots users on these systems they'd hack together, some of them shaping up and becoming dedicated systems that we'd begin to host and maintain once this struggling superstar would leave the company, leaving their users to implement their own features and fixes.
Some tips from me: I put everything I can into external hosting, especially free or low cost ones.
My current project idea that'd I'd be proud to share would feature the ability to lend me your GitHub oauth token on my GitHub pages blog, and use that to write "comments" (which are just part of a larger pull request containing the blog entry contents itself), and using that to create comments on the article or post you're reading.
Since these comments link directly to GitHub, I could post the comment first, and take all the links and references straight from it in the final comment body that gets rendered in the HTML. Bam, GitHub blog comments that reference people, groups, issues, other projects...
However, cross domain requests like that probably wouldn't work since my current GitHub blog points to an unsecured http site, so you might not want to take my word as bottom line here. Ideally there'd be a way to do it without relying on a 3rd party like aws to pass those messages along. Being able to do it directly in the browser would be much more elegant.
I don't think "shine on resume" is that important as "you know how to explain what you did and can tell me about it". What problems did you face? How did you go about solving them? What would you improve or do different? It's about how you think and not so much about the quality of the project.
Mostly the ones that work. It gets trickier with technologies choices and source code - since these tend to be subjective, I’d almost say focus on having a working site/url rather than giving access to source code (can always explain it in person or give access on request).
I did a lot of high profile nonprofit work during college. I've been a few years out of school and had a few jobs since, but I'm still asked about them by every recruiter and hiring manager that's brought me on.
Can you expand on what type of work you did for those nonprofits?
Primarily mobile development, also database organization, CMS architecture. My college campus has a center that helped lead nonprofit outreach efforts, and when I heard about these organization's problems and learned I didn't have to sign an NDA, I decided to go for it.
Not a recruiter, but this helped me land several offers: https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/9g20iz/my_first_react_app_postgui_to_query_edit_and/
Yeah, no pressure at all... Just create the next Facebook /s
Disagree. An applicant who is running a business is a red flag to me. I don’t want to hire someone with other work commitments. Unless they can convince me they are going to dedicate 100% of their work time to the company (during contracted hours), they are going to struggle to get the position.
Edit: FYI I am a senior software engineer who hires interns, grads, seniors. Not a recruiter, but also not a hiring manager.
I think that sucks on your part. As long as they do the work or hours that they were hired for, you shouldn't care if they have a side project/business/whatever
Seems pretty dumb to me. There are more then 40 hours in a week, and you don't know the amount of time commitment they even put into their business (I guess that's the convince you part). Companies just wanna be the only hand that feeds you I guess. Maybe I should stop disclosing my side project business that I work on in my free time because of people like you...
I meant within working hours. I don't want someone getting calls, or fixing their web server, or whatever when I am paying them to work for me. If you can do it without affecting your work, good for you. I'm not going to reject someone for having run a side business, but it's a red flag and will be discussed at length during interview.
I am wondering if this is shooting me in the foot as I operate two side projects/businesses I have created that are profitable and 90% automated at this point and require very little manual intervention. As a result, I've been looking for a job so I could work on a team again (working alone can be lonely) and tackle an issue bigger than I could work on by myself.
I have a couple interviews next week and am going to make sure to point out that my personal work will not interfere with my main role whatsoever.
That being said, I still have to wonder if disclosing the side project business will yield better results or not :/.
I think making that clear should be fine. It would be for me.
Is it? You are being paid for your time. If you want to spend time doing other things you need to negotiate a different contract with fewer hours and comp to match
Anyone reading this comment should take heart. You can bypass these short sited recruiters and find the hiring manager and contact them directly. It won't always work but trust me... it can work. I mean no disrespect towards this kind of recruiter but they are born of corporate bureaucracy. They probably haven't gone at it "on their own" and so discount the value of it. They have no idea how much it leathers your skin or improves your overall value because they've never done it themselves. I could go on... but that's not the point. This message isn't to the recruiter. It's for you. You already know how it has made you a stronger candidate. It has never been easier to find the hiring managers. LinkedIn is your friend. It costs nothing to do a little research on the company and staff and find the real person who will appreciate your value. It costs nothing to contact them directly and plead your case. These managers don't bat an eye at hiring vendors who do the exact same thing as you. Think of yourself as a service vendor... not a cubicle monkey. It's a little harder sell but it can and does work out.
What if the applicant wanted to create a business, but it failed, and he doesn't have any work commitment anymore.
Sure, that’s fine. But also entrepreneurs are a flight risk even if they don’t have anything at the moment.
Edit: Downvotes because you disagree? A business only cares about extracting work from you, in the most efficient way.
Whether this is fair or not, this is what a business is thinking.
Is this like a known consensus amongst recruiters? I thought entrepreneurial skills would be impressive on ones resume?
The best way to stop inmates escaping from a prison is to convince them that escape is impossible. Once you have done this, you don't need guards, you don't need walls, the prison will exist permanently in their minds.
Ingenuity as a "flight risk": capitalism™. That is just one of the most depressing insights into the mediocrity of someone's existence. Oh, someone is trying to do something new? Better drag them down - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
Depends on the company or team's culture. There are jobs I've worked where half the team had some kind of a side-hustle going on, and frankly, at every place I've worked somebody was at the very least consulting on the side. Heck, some of them are adjunct professors at colleges in the area.
Speaking from my own experience, as long as your side hustle cannot compete with your primary income you're generally fine, but once you start pursuing it as something you could potentially live off it's going to start affecting your work performance. Because in not very long it will start sucking up more and more of your time. Time your body and mind need to rest so you don't burn out. At my current place, doing that cost a couple of folks their internships.
I would much rather see that you’ve made contributions to some open source project(s).
Shows me that you have the ability to dive into an existing code base and deal with whatever contribution standards the project has. This is a much closer approximation to the type of work you will be doing as a professional.
Realistically I don’t have much time to look at your code, and having your code being vetted by the open source project maintainers is a nice quick indicator of quality.
You’re giving back to the community instead of creating some throwaway project no one really cares about.
Major bonus points if I use or have heard of the project. E.g. if you’re a contributor to sqllite then in the back of my head I’m thinking I can just ping you the next time I have a question about it.
I've had a working website up that I thought was really shitty but back then was the only project I ever did that had a an actual customer to it and I listed it, he visited it a second and I got the job basically lol. Anything where you can show off project management is a huge plus, but a simple, working website with JS, CSS (some animation or whatever), a working form and maybe a DB backend (depending on how much you wanna pay to host it) or alternatively a github JSON file in a burner account lol.
201k
Subscribers
898
Online
A subreddit for those with questions about working in the tech industry or in a computer-science-related job.
Welcome, one and all, to CSCareerQuestions!
Here we discuss careers in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, and related fields. Please keep the conversation professional, adhere to the reddiquette, and remember to READ OUR RULES.
Wait, what goes here vs /r/csmajors?
Good question! It's like this: if the question is more about college/university, it goes in /r/csmajors; if it's more about a job, it goes here; if it's in between, it can go in either one.
Examples of questions that can go in either would be, "Are college career fairs worth it?" or "What do you actually use from CS classes in real jobs?" or "Someone gave me this advice about getting an internship, is this right?" For more details, check out the rules.
Want to ask a question?
First: Read the rules
Second: Check out this awesome "quick answers to common questions" thread
Third: Check the FAQ
Fifth: Post post post
User Flair??
Noticed some cool user flair around? Take a look at this thread to see what it's all about.
tl;dr: darker colors == more posting experience here.
Salary Sharing Survey
The survey and response spreadsheet have been updated as of November 23, 2018.
Survey | Responses
These are the old responses to the previous survey
Share your current compensation and review the data submitted by other users in the two links above. More info about the salary survey can be found on the subreddit wiki.
Salary Sharing Threads
These are only posted by mods, following the schedule listed in the FAQ. You can find past threads here.
CSCQ Demographics Survey
Daily Threads
In addition to a chat thread that's newly spawned every day, we have a daily rotation for threads for certain topics. Please don't start new threads about these topics without getting mod permission first, lest we be forced to...intervene.
Sunday: Big N
Monday: Interviews
Tuesday: Resumes
Wednesday: Big N
Thursday: Interviews
Friday: Special Rant Thread
Saturday: Resumes
Contribute to the FAQ!
We could always do with more help and wisdom, friend! The better the FAQ, the harder we can come down on lazy posters with low-effort OPs, which means a higher quality subreddit experience for you.
Don't see your link?
5,808 subscribers
2,726 subscribers
5,886 subscribers
9,122 subscribers
417,560 subscribers
51,513 subscribers
9,390 subscribers
203,177 subscribers
54,916 subscribers
55,350 subscribers
6,399 subscribers
344,205 subscribers