Your Passion Projects Are Killing Your Career. Here's the Uncomfortable Math.

About the role

Three years ago, the author had 34 unfinished side projects in their GitHub. They called it "building in public." Last year, they finished one—a boring CLI tool that scratched a personal itch. This one project led to a staff engineer offer at a company they couldn't interview at eighteen months earlier. The other 34 projects were deleted last month.

Responsibilities

• Logged every hour spent on side work for two years.
• Audited 47 developers' side projects and their career growth.
• Discovered that developers with the most active side projects had the slowest career growth.
• Identified the rule of one: one side project at a time, with a hard deadline.

Requirements

• Experience with side project management.
• Understanding of the impact of side projects on career growth.
• Knowledge of the rule of one and its benefits.

Qualifications

• Strong analytical skills.
• Ability to prioritize and manage multiple tasks.
• Experience with GitHub and similar platforms.

Skills

• Side project management.
• Career growth analysis.
• Rule of one implementation.

Benefits

• Improved career trajectory.
• Enhanced ability to prioritize tasks.
• Increased focus on shipping real projects.

Pay

Negotiable based on experience and qualifications.

Schedule

Flexible, with a focus on completing one side project at a time.