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.
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.
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.
- "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.
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.
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
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.
You'll be fine!
Example: See how I list AppFeeds and ObjectCloud: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gwbas1c/
You could even put them on your CV and close the gap, work is work. Being able to show you can build something on your own is a big + in many ways.
Developers are in demand, so it would not surprise me if a gap doesn't matter in any way.
Maybe just try to apply to something. Even if you don't get hired it might give you some pointers what you need to focus on to get back to it.
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.
Anyway, best of luck to you in yours. Hope you find something fulfilling.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Showing you have a passion for a field/tech. etc. will probably be a plus.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
What percentage of each week was spent:
• designing, coding, or otherwise building the product • selling or marketing • researching the market and interviewing customers • other
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.
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.
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.
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.
You will likely get more bits for an IC role unless you were managing people on your "side project".
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.
Working in a larger organization requires a different skillset, but if you're good, you should rise quickly.
Apply to jobs, show your GH, get hired.