I'm working on a social networking site with a web developer friend of mine. I do not do anything technical. The idea for the site was mine, and I basically tell him how I want it to look, what to add, what color to make it, etc. When we launch, I'll be doing the promoting (marketing) as well, but it will not be anything extensive. I know the odds of it hitting are really small. I'm realistic. If it does not make it, is there any way I could use that "experience" to get a job, in tech, or other areas for that matter?

While on the topic, how advanced in experience does a web dev need to be to make a basic social networking site? Languages and db you recommend we use? Will JS be enough or would it be useful to use something like python as well?
As for the db, we prefer to use something really cheap, or free, if that's even possible?

Lastly, if we do not use our own server, how would we get out data from our db to a service like Digital Ocean? I don't know how that part works. We will be using a db on our own pc but if we don't use that pc as the server, how will that info be relayed when people use our website?

Thanks

What kind of job do you want to parlay this into? If you're not doing any dev, it won't be a dev job.

If your partner can't answer your other questions then you are well and truly screwed, no offense.

There are plenty of reasonable free databases. Mysql and postgres are two free SQL databases that are decent, mongo is a free nosql database and I'm sure there are some others also.

I am sure there are websites written entirely in JS (using node as the backend). I don't know that much about that. I don't care for JS that much myself. I mostly use python for backend stuff these days, although I have used all kinds of unreasonable garbage in the past.

Getting data from one db to another varies depending on database type but almost everything has an export/import method and most of them are not very hard.

Or, you know, just start on AWS or digital ocean to begin with? I don't use DO but getting set up with a small single server and a database is like $20/mo, less if you are new to the platform, where you can use some of their lowest tier stuff free for a year.

Thanks Rusty. Always good to hear from you. Crap, it’s hard to tell if that’s serious or sarcastic! Definitely not sarcastic. Anyway, as for parlaying the project into a job, are there any business or marketing or “visionary” roles that it could open doors to? I know it’s not nearly as much of a resume boost for me as it would be for my web dev friend. Part of this problem stems from me trying to find an alternative job to my only means of income atm...poker. I could go the developer route myself but my personality is geared a little more toward business/management.
Good point about my developer friend not being able to answer these questions. She was a programmer 10 years ago, and she believes she can pick it back up enough, with the help of some of the free online tutorials, and tackle this project. But she isn’t certain. Since I have no idea if it’s an easy project or something more like the Mount Everest of development, I thought I’d ask you folks. My understanding is that creating the actual website is fairly straightforward, it’s the scaling that’s the real hurdle. I could be wrong. Scaling would be a very welcome problem too. That would mean we have traffic. But if creating the website is a very senior developer level task, this will be over before it begins.

Does DO provide us a db...how does that work exactly (them getting our db architecture)?

Business/marketing/visionary roles require being successful at something.

The level of success is relative to the position you are looking for, but if you get a barely working site up that only attracts bots as users, what makes you a visionary? Why would your experience help a real company?

An entrepreneur would pick the right market, be creative about a new product, and do everything possible to make it succeed.

I don't know if DO offers managed databases. AWS does (their 'RDS' instances). If they don't, then you just stand up another DO instance and install a database on it.

Beasting, in what specific ways do you envision your experience and skills will be useful to a tech company? Any business? What do you imagine that needs to be done at these places that you can help with? What other skills and experience beyond this do you bring to the table?

I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking. If we create a really nice website and others can recognize its creativity, I thought perhaps that might appeal to some companies/hiring managers, for some (non programming) role. Suppose the final product is a really well thought out, nice looking, functional website/app...but it has no users. That can happen. Good quality doesn’t guarantee users. Other skills are ability to work really well with and manage a team. This is more apparent if I can make the interview. Seeing it on a resume doesn’t mean, nor display anything. You can’t really “see” a personality on a piece of paper.

What actual skills do you have? What did you do to acquire these skills? How have you successfully applied your skills in the past and what objective evidence can you provide that you have them? How do you compare to others looking for the same types of positions? It's generally safe to assume for most people that if you didn't do much to acquire these skills, they are common and not particularly valuable in the job market. It would be strange for someone to have uncommon valuable professional skills without having any idea of how they may be applied in a professional setting.

I will add that working in a small group on a small new project where you have no real constraints is not that representative of the professional reality where it's difficult to manage the complexity that comes from having too many features, users, stakeholders, developers, non-technical contributors, etc.

I'm not sure what this means but if you have a small group of reasonably smart college students, wouldn't they be able to do this? How do your design skills stack up against recent design school graduates?

Do you have professional experience producing successful results working well with others and managing teams? If so, in what context and why can't you leverage that directly to get some kind of job? Could you get referrals from some of your past coworkers?

Other than rare toxic candidates that manage to disqualify themselves in a short period of time, this isn't something that you can easily see in an interview either. And this isn't assessed these days in an interview through a spontaneous display of personality, but rather a methodical examination of how you have handled various professional situations in the past.

Maybe better than some, on par with others, not as good as the best. But I imagine the better graduates will get jobs, largely in part because of their good quality projects.



Yes, but it was too many years ago and the gap between then and now has been filled with poker. I doubt they will care about a job I had over a decade ago. But I was good at managing. I'm not trying to brag, honestly, but it's just something I happen to have a knack for. I don't have an ego about it however. It is what it is. So what. Some of us are naturally good artists. I am not. Working with people is one of my strongest attributes though. I can rally the troops to get things done without being a douche about it, and I keep the atmosphere light and happy. It takes a certain personality type to pull that off. I'm sensitive to others but I'm not a pushover. It's a fine line, to manage effectively. Too nice, you get taken advantage of. Too pushy/rude, people hate you and morale suffers. Historically, I have balanced this well, in jobs, with friends, managing rec leagues, you name it. I've been around the sun quite a few times. By my age you (should) know exceptionally well if you can manage effectively or not.

I somewhat disagree with this. I get what you're saying, and I know they bombard prospective candidates with how they handled various work situation questions, etc. It's true, for many people under the bell curve, that personality isn't something easy to see in an interview, but I don't think it's an absolute rule either. Besides being able to rule out bad (toxic, as you say) candidates, you can also rule in, so to speak, positive personalities....people that really stand out (in a good way). Some things are hard to fake, even in an interview. I've been offered several sales jobs (that many other people were turned down for) based on how I interacted with the interviewers. It had nothing to do with my resume, and I know this because my resume displayed zero sales experience. Moreover, I've had a quite a few HR manager friends over the years confess to me that more often than not it comes down to whoever they thought had the best personality, since so many of the candidates were more or less equally qualified. People may not like to hear that, but it's human nature to a large degree, whether we like it or not. I'm a big meritocracy guy, so I don't love that realization, personally, but I know it's a fact of life, for the better or worse.

Beasting, how old are you? There's just so much wrong here that I'm not gonna respond point-by-point but the main theme I'm seeing is that everything you're good at is due to some kind of natural ability without any real effort, while any skill that you could develop that takes effort, you're able to rationalize as something you don't need.

It doesn't add up - if you were great at working with others and managing, you surely must have people who remember you as this exceptional coworker/manager that can help you out if you could take the least bit of effort to reach out. If you have this incredible personality that shows through in an interview enough to make a big difference, you should go out there and meet tons of people and use this ability to create a large network of people that are impressed by your personality who can open doors for you. If you can impress people with your personality, you should be able to find a project partner better than someone who was a programmer 10 years and has no idea how web development works in 2018. If you're as good at design as a whole bunch of design school graduates despite virtually no effort spent on learning, you should be able to study design formally and become exceptional and actually employable. But it seems to me that you're just waiting for success to come to you.

The world doesn't work that way. Not even for the things you're taking for granted. Working well with others is mostly about effort - having the discipline to figure out and do what is needed in a team environment. Managing others well isn't something that comes as a result of your inspiring personality and natural ability to just know what to do - it's a lot of hard work, both in terms of learning what works and implementing what you've learned even when it's hard. Sales isn't something that you can do just because you're naturally likable - it's a craft you work on, while experimenting with tons of things that seem counterintuitive or unappealing, not to mention having to deal with tons of grunt work and facing rejections every day.

What are you good at as a result of putting in tons of effort instead of just natural talent? Even this whole web project - it looks to me like you found someone to work with you that happened to be around that took you no effort to find, while you're using your charm mainly to get her do everything you don't really want to do. And now you're trying to figure out how you're going to leverage some project that is 90% her effort and 10% your idea to get yourself a job. That's not how you succeed.

I can think of at least one person who sort of fits the bill - almost everyone who met him in his 20's and early 30's thought he was this incredibly charismatic person who will go on to do amazing things. Incredibly charming, amazing presence, even good looks and a great voice. Not a dumb guy either. He never managed to have any kind of real career and was jumping desperately from one MLM scheme to another in his 50's. One problem with being able to impress others easily is that you end up feeling entitled to easy success.

Then we have a difference of opinion. I also think you don't quite get what I was trying to say. I've known that MLM guy too (not literally, of course, but I've known plenty of folks like him). I never said a great personality equated to a great work ethic. And I never said personality is an entitlement to success. But it is important, at least in many jobs, particularly salesy roles. Work ethic obviously is too, but that was assumed to be a given.

Beasting,

Nearly everything you have said in this thread is a massive read flag. That said, you could probably get a job at a C/D tier marketing/advertising agency type company with an unsuccessful website that looks nice.

If you can build a successful website, you should do that and grow it.

Massive red flags? I ask if I could get a job based on x, then defend my position on the power of a good personality. Larry, are you just grumpy because Kyrie is out lol? Nice win today, nonetheless.

I actually got a programming job with no prior experience nor formal education by building a pretty crappy (in hindsight) website/app and selling it well in an interview, so it's theoretically possible.

I still agree with the others, you just don't read like you'll succeed at this. If you build a really good looking site with no users (that's like the best possible outcome) your friend might leverage it into a job but you won't, sorry.

I consider mysef very lucky and I didn't need to ask any of the questions you did - if this actually works out for you, you'd have to be much more lucky than I was, even.

Just wanted to know if there were non technical jobs at tech companies for a website creator that is not actually a web developer. Sounds like there is not.

if you created a website, yea, maybe.

recruiting someone to build a website for you and then having it fail is not that.

I mean, if you're trying to get a non-technical job at a tech company, you don't need to have created a website or whatever but the important thing is that you have to bring some actual tangible skills to the table. That could be design skills, product management skills, project management skills, technical writing skills or even domain/industry expertise. Having someone else implement your generic idea doesn't demonstrate any of this. You don't seem familiar with the basics of any of these disciplines - what do you want to do and what have you done to learn the things needed to get a job doing that? You've been posting about wanting to get a job for quite a while now.

It doesn't start with a winning personality. It starts with a winning product.

There are lots of non technical jobs at tech companies: eg. sales, management, marketing, accounting. Those jobs are valued as highly as dev jobs (if you're good at it).

project manager or business analyst are 2 important and ubiquitous jobs at larger companies. not sure you could parlay this experience into those roles, but they do work closely with devs to makes sure requirements are met.

yea I would leverage the "project management" portion of the work you are doing. managing a skilled developer, setting priorities and expectations, translating business/market needs intro product deliverables etc. there is a huge market for product/project (those are distinct roles mind you) out there right now. I've worked with a few hundred entrepreneurs over the last 10+ years to help them launch their apps/sites and I've seen many translate missed objectives with their venture into successful business careers (a few of which have even gone on to VP level positions at the likes of Uber, AirBnb etc.) So certainly possible, but you should try to be more involved in the project and product execution side itself (great book I recommend all PM types to read, "The Mythical Man-Month".

BOL OP, let us know how the site goes.

This is it right here.

I would guarantee everyone itt that has expressed either having done this, or knowing people who have, went into their personal venture at 100% effort believing they could truly build something awesome and potentially be incredibly successful. Which led to them learning tons and gaining very valuable experience. It is a long and hard road to build something and get adoption.

Having someone else build something for you is step 1 of 100.

Steps 2-99 are you selling/marketing/hustling/grinding/iterating and putting in a ton of sweat equity in trying to get the product off the ground.

Having someone else build something basic, and then declaring mission accomplished is not how it works.

Also consider your competition.

Who would you rather hire?

Candidate A - Comes from an associate project management role at a marketing agency. Has assisted the main project manager and project resources in the build of over a dozen websites for clients. Some of which can be pointed to as very strategic/successful/case studies demonstrating creation of value for clients. 2-3 years total experience with a traditional background.

Candidate B - Led a single developer to build a single website. The website looks pretty nice, but has no users, no useful growth metrics, was unsuccessful. Non traditional background and considers themselves a visionary with exceptional personality.