Comment by justin_vanw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justin_vanw | Hacker News Reader

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It has nothing to do with being there on Saturday. It has everything else to do with the kind of people and their ability to invest themselves in their goal, and showing up on Saturday is a great indicator of that.

I interview a lot of programmers, and I can tell you with about 95% precision whether they will work out and be great based on the single question 'tell me about the programming projects you work on for fun'. If they have some project they work on for fun, even one, that isn't for a class at school or for their job, then they are very very likely to be a great hire. If they don't they are very very unlikely to be a good hire. Side projects don't magically make you smart and capable and good at problem solving and getting things done, but it sure seems to be fundamentally related.

And from personal experience, I've worked for 2 startups, one where people worked all weekend and one where they didn't, and interestingly they were doing almost the exact same thing. One had an $80MM exit, the other just slowly went away. Small sample size, for sure.

That's also a key question that I ask, but I don't think a side project is necessarily important as simply finding out how they invest in themselves.

I want to invest in people that invest in themselves.

It may be a side project. It may be challenging themselves with new languages. It may be learning marketing or working on their writing. But they should be hungry. I don't run a large enough company to have to hire people that punch in and punch out [1].

Edit: [1] by punch in punch out - I mean no ongoing personal time invested in their professional skillset. I'm fine investing in people that only want to do 40 hours per week so long as they continue to spend personal time learning something.

I'm not sure I agree entirely with you. As a startup engineer who already had some 14+ hrs work day, and when getting home have a family + kids waiting for me fill in a role as a father. I'm not even sure we have extra time for a side project for fun on the weekends. To me, being a dad is always take higher priorities.

I guess people like us will never be good engineering hire. That's fine. Standing on the shoes of a startup founders, I probably wouldn't wanna hire someone who's not committed either.

I see no exit for this. I'm preparing to be fade out by the younger blood and eventually lose my engineering value.

How do you know? I mean, how do you test for false negatives in the hiring process? Perhaps you're rejecting lots of people without side projects, but they go on to be successful anyway?

Sure, I mean I didn't say I actually use this test to make hiring decisions. I can just directly test lots of things like ability to code or problem solve (not perfectly for sure, but I do my best to evaluate directly the skills that can be evaluated directly). I am just making the point that there are often very highly correlated attributes that people can have, and one that is easy to test for can give you a lot of information about the ones that are harder to see.

I agree their might be some correlation. What I'm saying is:

- If you really meant you can get 95% precision in hiring from the answer to one question, I believe you only if you're super-conservative in hiring (i.e. will reject unless you're super-confident). In this case, your recall and false negatives is also going to be really high, so your single-question test isn't really helpful.

- If you actually meant 95% accuracy (i.e. precision in the everyday sense, not the math sense), then I don't believe you, because you probably can't estimate your accuracy, unless you also hire some people who fail the interview process.

There are awesome programmers and technical leads who don't have side projects just because they are so focused on their work and being a good parent.

I'm probably over-analysing your original statement, so I'll stop here.

Right, I understand what you're saying, but even being a parent people might put a side project on hold or not have as much time to spend on it, but that doesn't mean they can't talk about what they have done in the past.

You can never truly get rid of false negatives efficiently. However, false negatives are orders of magnitude better than false positives. So just try to minimize false positives and try not to lose sleep on the false negatives.

Agreed. It's especially important for smaller companies where each hire has a big impact. You're trying to minimize risk and have a good to great hire (technically and culturally), not hire the absolute best.

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