This is one great thing about the software engineering profession, there's really no excuse for not being "employed". Even if you are laid off from your job and can't find work...you can always start a side company or work on a project. Those look like perfectly valid employment from a resume perspective. I can't imagine a scenario in which there will ever be a gap like that in my resume.
Oh what bullshit. Best excuse for not being employed is that you don't need to be. If you've got the cash to enjoy a year or two off to go on a vacation, go back to school or whatever, then you ought to take it.
Why? As an employer, I'm certainly going to give more preference to the kid that was hacking away at his side project trying to build something exciting than I am to the guy who was on vacation for the last two years.
Personally, I believe that kid will be eager to go on vacation a few months down the line, when he has money in his pocket. If the guy who went on vacation for two years wants to get back on the game, most likely won't experience any burn out.
Of course it all depends on the context, but nothing is so simple in this situation, I guess.
Economic sanctions against people who don't want their life to be work? The logic actually makes some twisted sense - "Oh, you don't want to work all the time? Well you're not getting any work at all then." Personally, I'd give preference to whoever does a better job because how a person got to that stage is none of my business. Either way, that attitude is borderline discrimination.
Exactly, which is why thematt is more likely to hire the guy who's been hacking away for two years than the guy who's been traveling for two years ceteris paribus.
I have a one-year gap in my resumé—I took no new freelance assignments in that year, and had three vacations abroad, two in the summer and one in the winter, and studied semiconductors and new software technologies for fun—and I decided to write it down as a 'sabbatical year'.
Had a year off traveling. First lot of interviews after that, everyone was very suspicious - e.g. wondering if the plan was to work for a few months then take off again. Fast forward two years when interviewing again everyone thought it was a "fantastic life experience". Basically employers saw it as a risk first time around, second time around it was proven that my intentions were good. YMMV.
"and what is/was the response to the 'sabbatical year' on your résumé?"
I'm not sure. I don't actively mail around my résumé, since I'm employed at the moment and not looking for work. Sometimes recruiters email me, but they have never mentioned the sabbatical. Probably people just ignore it. I haven't updated the details on my résumé since 2004, shame on me ;-)
FWIW, I've been "out of work" for ~2.5 years, traveled SE Asia, lived in Japan for six months, and bicycled from Canada to Mexico. When a Google recruiter talked to me, he seemed really impressed, and not put off in the least.
You get it, as long as you have a legitimate story and reason people who you would actually want to work for wouldn't care or even be envious. However, if you just sat around the house, went out drinking with your buddies all the time, and lived off savings - that could look bad to most people (not all, but most).
Or just take the time to beef up your Github contributions. I'd rather see someone with great contributions to the FOSS community than continuous employment at random places.
> Or just take the time to beef up your Github contributions. I'd rather see someone with great contributions to the FOSS community than continuous employment at random places.
Yes, exactly. The software industry is great in that, even if you can't find a job right now, you can do actual real-world work. Contributions to significant open source projects is a huge plus for getting hired where I work, and I don't think it's just here.
In fact, you can sometimes build your skills faster doing open source stuff than when employed - since you can more easily pick what to learn and what to do.
But in other industries, it is really very sad - if you can't get a job, you often can't do anything at all.
Started off as just a random project by 8 people, turned into some consulting, open source software releases, published papers, citations, several talks at conferences, press coverage (NYT, MSNBC, Forbes, etc). Now we've reverted it back to a side project. Yet most of us keep it on our resumes and it seems (and I think is) fairly legit.
When I was unemployed, I spent a chunk of the time writing an open source project. I put it down on my resume as "Hobby project to hone skills in Ruby, Javascript, and HTML5 Canvas" and it ended up being the best demonstration of actual work I could share with my interviewer.
Same, I got my job based largely on the quality of my code which was created for a hobby project. Those who are hiring programmers love to see real work even if it was a hobby project. The quality of your code speaks for it's self.
I wasn't intending for it to be a ruse. Rather if someone had enough money to float for a year and chose to dedicate their time to an open source project, that would be some great experience.
> just that they shouldn't attempt to make a project look like employment if it isn't.
What is the difference? I am having a little trouble drawing the distinction.
- If a self-funded project is not employment, does it become employment when someone else funds it?
- If you self fund a project and you are able to sell the result of your project, does that make the work leading up to the sale employment? What if you are never able to make a sale?
- Do you have to be just another cog in the wheel of a big business to be considered employed?
- Why is searching for a job not the same as searching for new customers (i.e. sales, a real profession)?
As far as I can tell, they are all exactly the same. Where does the line get drawn?
What is the difference? I am having a little trouble drawing the distinction.
Employment means you are employed. If you start a company, you are an employee of said company ("self-employed" is a misnomer if you have a corporation). "A project," implies that there is not a company, otherwise you would say that you started a company. "A project," does not constitute employment.
You can talk about edge cases of pet projects making sales, but it doesn't change the fact that claiming a project as employment experience is unlikely to get you very far.
Again, I am not saying that people should not work on projects. Just don't confuse projects with employment.
On a resume, you would state that you worked under "Your Name", and you can elaborate by describing "A project" to stick with generally accepted formatting rules, but in day to day dialog I have to disagree with your assertions.
A project is exactly how I describe what I am working on, whether I am being paid by someone else or if I am paying myself – someone is always paying for your time, even if that someone is you. I'm sure even you would agree that my day job projects are employment.
I believe my question still remains. If not all projects are employment, when does working on a project become employment? What criteria need to be met?
I believe my question still remains. If not all projects are employment, when does working on a project become employment? What criteria need to be met?
I believe I answered that very clearly in my last response. One likely works on projects as part of employment. One may work on projects outside of employment. 'Project' does not imply 'employment' though typically 'employment' does imply 'project'.
If you start a business, you legally become employed by that business. If you work on a project without a business, you have not constituted employment. As for interviewing, even if you start a business and work on a project, with no completed product or sales to speak of, I think you'll still have a difficult time claiming legitimacy.
> One likely works on projects as part of employment. One may work on projects outside of employment.
I guess my confusion in your original response comes from the notion in my belief that all work is employment. Although I do believe I have a little bit of a better understanding of where you are coming from now.
With that said, even when I'm hacking away for fun on purely personal projects, I still consider that an act under the umbrella of my business – which does happens to be a corporation in my case, but it need not be. If the project turns into something that is marketable, it will be sold under my business. That also adds to the confusion of where to draw the line.
Ultimately, I strongly believe the employer is going to be interested in what you have been doing no matter what the circumstances. If it is interesting and applicable to the job, it is not going to matter who commissioned the work or how much you were paid to do it and it is certainly going to look a lot better than a job at McDonalds.
What about when people are employed to work on a project?
It's not a semantic game, contractors are hired this way all the time. Programming skills like most crafts can be applied equally to paid and unpaid work. When you get hired for a programming job, presumably the main concern is whether you can program, which has nothing to do with whether or not you were previously employed to do it (that has more to do with your cashflow situation).
What about when people are employed to work on a project?
Then they are employed. Working on a project without an employer is not employment. Working on contract for an employer is generally referred to as "self-employment" although, technically, if you're operating under your own business, you're an employee of your own business. I really don't understand why HN is so upset by this distinction. Everyone here is perfectly happy to distinguish between "project" and "start-up" but not, apparently, "project" and "employment".
