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I Built 7 Side Projects That No One Cared About. The 8th One Got Me a FAANG Offer.
The difference wasn't the code but the strategy. Here’s the simple framework I stole from the startup world.
Jobless
September 09, 2025
In partnership with
Hey people,
It’s that time of year. You’re staring at a half-finished side project, wondering if adding one more feature will be the magic bullet that lands you the internship.
I’ve been there. My hard drive is a graveyard of projects that never saw the light of day. Today, we’re talking about why most of them fail and the simple mindset shift that took my 8th project and turned it into a FAANG offer.
Let's get into it.
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Us rn.
That Side Project Won't Get You A Job
I have a folder on my desktop named _PROJECTS_FINALS and it's a graveyard. Inside, seven abandoned Git repos are collecting digital dust. There's the obligatory to-do app, a weather dashboard, a half-baked Reddit clone... you know the type.
For two years, I was building a portfolio of ghosts. I was following the advice - "Just build things!" But all I had was a list of projects that solved problems nobody had.
The change came from desperation. Our university had a notoriously terrible course registration system. To get into the famous "Advanced Algorithms" class, you had to be one of the first 50 people to click "enroll" at exactly 8 AM. I was 52nd. I was waitlisted.
This wasn't a hypothetical "app idea." This was a real, painful problem. My problem.
That's when I finally understood what the startup gurus mean when they say "build something people want." I had to stop thinking like a student trying to impress a recruiter and start thinking like a founder solving a customer's problem.
This led me to a simple framework.
The "Audience of One" Strategy
The core idea is to stop building for a vague audience of "recruiters." Pick one person even if it's yourself and solve one of their specific, annoying problems.
Step 1: Find a Real-World Annoyance.
For me, it was hitting refresh on the course portal every 30 minutes, hoping a spot would open up. It was inefficient and maddening. The problem wasn't "I need a project idea." The problem was "I need to get into this class."
Step 2: Build the "Just Barely Works" Solution.
The goal is the fastest path to a solution. I spun up the cheapest AWS EC2 instance, wrote a 70-line Python script using Selenium to log into the portal and scrape the class status page every five minutes. If the "(Full)" tag was gone, it would use the Twilio API to send a text message to my phone. It was ugly, brittle, and had zero features. But it worked.
Step 3: Document the Impact, Not Just the Tech.
After two days, my script found a spot. I got in. A friend heard about it and asked if I could add her class to the script. I modified it to read from a text file of course numbers and phone numbers. By the end of the week, it had helped five of us get into classes we needed. Now I had a metric.
Before: "Built a web scraper with Python, Selenium, and Twilio." (Lists tech, but no "why.")
After: "Developed an automated monitoring tool for my university's course portal that notified students of open spots in high-demand classes, helping 5+ students enroll in previously full courses." (Tells a story of impact.)
How This Actually Gets You the Offer
Fast forward three months. I'm in a final-round interview at a FAANG Co. The interviewer leans back and says, "Tell me about a project you're particularly proud of."
In the past, I would have just listed the technologies. But this time, I told him the story.
"Our university's registration is brutal, and I was waitlisted for a critical class..." I began. I framed the problem first. I explained the stakes. His posture changed. He was actually listening.
Then, when he asked how it worked, I got to talk about the tech in a context that mattered. I didn't just say "I used Selenium." I said, "The biggest challenge was that the portal used session cookies and had CSRF tokens to prevent this exact kind of scraping, so I had to programmatically handle the login flow and persist the session to make it work."
This showed I could solve real-world technical hurdles, not just follow a tutorial.
But here's the part that sealed the deal. He asked, "If you were to turn this into a product for the whole university, what would you do?"
Because I had already thought like a founder, I had answers. We spent the next 15 minutes whiteboarding it. It wasn't an interview anymore. It was a product design session.
He saw me not just as someone who could execute a task, but as a potential colleague who could think critically about a problem and its solution.
That's what they're looking for. They're not hiring a list of technologies. They're hiring a problem-solver.
Wrapping Up
The next time you ‘git init’, ask yourself who you're building for. If the answer is "a recruiter," close the terminal and go find a real, painful, annoying problem to solve instead.
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Until next time, – The Jobless Team
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