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Comment by cpursley | Hacker News Reader

This 0%. Side projects are how I've gotten all of my real jobs. Side projects* demonstrate that not only can you write code, but that you can also architect and deploy an application that solves real world problems. There's a lot more to software engineering than can be tested by fizzbuzzing on a whiteboard.

* (I'm assuming your side project is an application)

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side projects show you can clone code on github and push it to your own repo. Interviews show you can articulate what you know in a convincing fashion, and that you have done homework on the company as well as your skills of inference and general personal skills to glean into what sort of answer the particular interview is looking for at the time. Something a lot of people really miss out on when bikeshedding over how terrible whiteboard questions are or interview question xyz is

Pass off someone else project as your own? Doubtful. This attitude comes across as having trust issues. To me, it's a sign of a company with a rotten culture to be avoided.

But if someone was able to clone and deploy someone else's project and pass it off as their own, it at least demonstrates that they know git, the command line and some ops.

I've had companies remark about code I've "written." It was merely code I forked and they made an assumption.

>your skills of inference and general personal skills to glean into what sort of answer the particular interview is looking for at the time.

Interviews beget interview skills. How does this translate into job performance?

Even if you glean into what sort of answer they are looking for, you still have to know the answer.

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