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Hiring Managers Don’t Care About Your Projects
Here’s how to fix that.
If you’ve been job hunting in tech, I’m willing to bet you’ve heard the same advice over and over: “build projects.” So you did. You pushed it all to GitHub, added it to your resume, and then… nothing happened.
I’m a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon. I came from a non-tech background myself, and I’ve coached over 200 people working on breaking into tech. And the most frustrating thing I see is people doing everything they’ve been told to do (building projects, studying consistently, etc) and still getting ghosted by every company they apply to.
And it sucks because it actually makes sense. When you look at what hiring managers say they want, it makes the whole thing feel even more impossible. Because what they want is experience. That’s it. Not projects, experience. But every job posting requires 2+ years of it, entry-level roles aren’t actually entry-level, and internships are basically impossible to get unless you’re currently a student at a top school.
So you’re stuck in this loop. You need experience to get hired. You need to get hired to get experience. And the projects you’re building to try to break through aren’t actually helping.
But there is a way out of this, and it doesn’t require going back to school or…
