If I were interviewing a junior dev who had no work experience, here’s what would impress me 👇🧵

Form a group with one or two others, and work to complete a side project together. Give your group a name. Decide on a high level idea. It doesn’t need to be extremely challenging, but it should be enough work to give each of you a handful or more of small tasks.
You don’t need anything other than GitHub issues to break down the work for each other. Create tickets to divide the work into individual contributions as best you can. Don’t over think this part, just do your best and get coding.
Start coding, and create PRs. Add continuous integration, and review each other’s PRs. Don’t approve PRs unless the tests are passing and you’ve critically reviewed code. For tooling Travis CI is free for open source projects. it may be annoying to set up but don’t skip this.
Set up deployment so you can see your project in the wild as you build. This is the fun part of coding. Vercel and Netlify are good options.
Keep at it until it’s done. This won’t be easy at all, but if you are able to complete you will have demonstrated: 1. You communicate and organize. 2. You deliver. 3. You accept feedback from others. 3. You have leadership and initiative to see something from nothing to success
You will have natural answers to common interview questions like: “tell me a time you had a disagreement with someone”. Or “tell me a time you overcame a setback”. You will basically have work experience, which is the easiest way to get an interview / hired.
The biggest takeaway is do not work alone. anyone can code alone. Coding professionally means you need to work with other humans.

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"I lied about my basic beliefs in order to keep a prestigious job. Now that it will be zero-cost to me, I have a few things to say."


We know that elite institutions like the one Flier was in (partial) charge of rely on irrelevant status markers like private school education, whiteness, legacy, and ability to charm an old white guy at an interview.

Harvard's discriminatory policies are becoming increasingly well known, across the political spectrum (see, e.g., the recent lawsuit on discrimination against East Asian applications.)

It's refreshing to hear a senior administrator admits to personally opposing policies that attempt to remedy these basic flaws. These are flaws that harm his institution's ability to do cutting-edge research and to serve the public.

Harvard is being eclipsed by institutions that have different ideas about how to run a 21st Century institution. Stanford, for one; the UC system; the "public Ivys".