Recruiting for privilege
medium.com
medium.com
When recruiting you should recruit for people that you think would be most useful to you, and by extension your customers. If information about side-projects helps then you should take that into account. Side projects are most helpful for people that don’t have college degrees and that lets them bypass an expensive credential. Basically anybody else doesn’t need to have side projects on their resume anyway — they’ve got a job history.
I don't think the author disagrees with any of that. The question is whether a lack of side projects is a reliable negative signal. If you pre-filter for who has side projects to show at all, and then look at who's good at them, you're basically doing the same thing as the person who throws away half the resumes to get rid of the unlucky candidates. Your job as someone doing hiring is to find the best candidate, not the best candidate within some arbitrary subset that just happens to be easier to evaluate.
> Side projects are most helpful for people that don’t have college degrees and that lets them bypass an expensive credential. Basically anybody else doesn’t need to have side projects on their resume anyway — they’ve got a job history.
This is not my experience. My resume shows a degree and teaching experience from MIT and multiple serious jobs, and I still get asked "So, what's on your GitHub" at interviews.
Of course asking about GitHub specifically could be a signal of an ageism problem but I would hope your thoughtful answer would compensate in their minds for an absent or sparse GitHub account.
It's reasonable for employers to seek people who are life-long learners. It's probably better for interviewers to ask a candidate about learning and growth rather than specifically something like GitHub but a savvy interviewee can recognize why such specific questions are asked and respond with other ways in which they've learned and grown, on company time or not.
I have no side projects. I read a lot and work at companies that allow me to keep my skill set up. Over the last 10 years that has meant changing jobs every two years. 10 years before that I stayed at one company too long and paid the price.
When I’m looking for a job, I go after jobs that will hire me based on my skill set but also give me the opportunity to ramp up on skills I don’t have. That usually means spending the first six months doing 60 hours a week to get 40 hours of productive work. Complaining about “fairness” in corporate America is like complaining that it’s not fair that the lion didn’t eat you because you didn’t eat it.
Pre-filtering based on how easy somebody is to evaluate has actual utility — it reduces hiring costs. If it’s useful, do it [0]. As for the author’s intentions, it’s clear some notion that you should be sympathetic to the candidate and thereby waste your time is encoded right into the title.
Edit: [0] Just to head off an unnecessary argument, I don’t think it’s useful to have a hard-edge like that — it’s one piece of information that can be useful.
Taking your beliefs to their logical conclusion means businesses should actively work to blackmail their employees, and make their lives away from work as miserable as possible.
EDIT: For those who don't understand the sarcasm, I'm merely arguing that it's not solely the responsibility of the individual, who spends their life as a cog in the wheel of someone else's legacy, to make themselves useful to that "wheel".
Tech and startup culture gets romanticized as this kind of extended hackathon, but in reality we're the means of production for one of the richest and most powerful industries in the world.
Edit: spelling.
No union in the world is able to save the jobs in a bankrupt company, no matter what they tell you.
Sure, they can try to blackmail and force the employer's hand from time to time, as long as the company can survive, but I'd rather get my salary increases because I was more productive, then to get them because somebody used me in a blackmail deal.
What do you suggest, that I'm privileged because I'm doing my job properly and that I have some sort of social responsibility for the incompetent and the lazy in the company?
I was never much of a family man.
It's great that tech is fun for people, and we should encourage that! What we shouldn't do is marginalize people who won't — or can't — devote the same amount of time and energy to it outside their 9-to-5.
Developing a culture of learning and sharing knowledge, where passing on what was learned to the rest of the team is valued, you end up in a stagnation situation that seemed to inspire the frustration of this article.
I'm betting that other developers have different skills and something to teach you, they just lack the proper venue and means.
This sounds great, but you're going to need a very supportive manager who thinks that spending work time on professional development is more useful than doing the work that you're capable of that's right in front of you.
Companies and workers are fundamentally not aligned wrt professional development unless the labor market cannot provide enough trained folks with specific desired skills.
People starting companies can build the company culture they want, but unless the company lands on a gold mine, this kind of thing will probably get cut.
This is the same argument we get about how companies should invest more in training rather than expecting the labor market to provide. Without a way to capture the value of that training, they have very little incentive to do so.
So, while this definitely does benefit people who have easier life situations, I don't really see this changing.
Workplace culture changes are a _massive_ reason why popular support for globalization is on the decline, and why a populist candidate gained traction in both parties. Even though our economy is "better," most people have been experiencing a declining quality of life.
I think if we as Americans support a busy-body work culture that OP describes, our culture will go the same way that Japan did, except the inequality will make our situation much, much worse.
Hopefully things will change, or else things could get very bad in our country.
You don't want to go down this path. Companies don't want to spend $LARGE on employee training just to see employees walk right out the door and leverage that training into a higher salary from a competitor which doesn't have to train them. There's an argument to be made that employees should therefore be paid more when they finish their training, but such pay increases are usually pre-determined at a fixed rate by policy and aren't in tune with the market value of the new skills, and employers with such a policy will more often than not end up either over- or under-paying for new training. Where pay increases are not determined by a fixed-rate, the decision by how much to raise pay typically rests on an individual, who will exhibit bias in some fashion, and when the decision is made by committee, the result is either political infighting or corruption or both.
The historical solution was non-compete clauses in employment contracts, so that new employees could be trained without fear of them going to a competitor. Like I said, you don't want to go down that path.
Anyhow, I agree with the author completely. You can be great at your job, while preferring other hobbies (or just preferring to prioritize self-care or family care). Choice of hobbies does not make a candidate necessarily more or less capable at a particular role.
Also, In case you haven't heard about it, I found "spoon theory" (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory) to be a great analogy to explain how people with chronic illness or disabilities can often be able to fulfill the core things they need to do in the day (job, self-care) but not have enough energy left to devote to things like hobbies. It's another potential cause to mind when you wonder why a person is great in many aspects of a job, but doesn't work on side projects after work.
Many people who turn their hobbies into a profession have difficulty with that. Suddenly, "cost overruns" is something people actually care about.
I never thought of it this way but they're essentially saying "Not only are you going to be allowed to work on projects that can have immediate positive impact on the entire world, but in the event that something should happen where we need to have layoffs or if you decide to leave, we've got you covered there too. You're not going to need to scramble to try to build up your GitHub profile for your next opportunity, since your code you provided during work is already out there in the open for folks to see".
Our field is unlike other fields in that it moves at a blistering page. Compared to say, carpentry or brick laying, software engineers have to keep abreast. Software companies that ignore new trends in technology are at risk of becoming obsolete.
EDIT: And I've never seen a worse work product than from those who have the worst work-life balance.
In my long experience, the best developers I've encountered have had basically the same attitude.
Why is it ridiculous to expect your employer to give you the training you need to be successful? This is standard practice in many other professions, some of which even have ladders of apprenticeship.
If for example the language they needed you to use changed, would you then learn it on their time?
If you expect that, I don't think it's ridiculous, but I have not observed any correlation between programmers who have that expectation and programmers who are in the top echelon in terms of skills and productivity.
> If for example the language they needed you to use changed, would you then learn it on their time?
I'll be happy to answer that question, but I need clarification. Do you mean, if my employer hired me to program in language A, and now they've decided that future development will be done in language B? Or do you mean that a new version of my current language has been released, and I need to learn and apply the new features?
I don't think this is a debate about what makes a better programmer (although other commenters have argued that many skills gained with side projects are not the same skills needed to succeed in a company) but rather whether it's fair to penalize people who — for whatever reason — literally cannot devote their out-of-work hours to what's essentially unpaid overtime training themselves.
> Do you mean, if my employer hired me to program in language A, and now they've decided that future development will be done in language B? Or do you mean that a new version of my current language has been released, and I need to learn and apply the new features?
I didn't have a specific scenario in mind — IMO that's not a meaningful distinction and a company should not expect you to learn it on your own time either way. What do you think separates one case from the other?
I think it's perfectly fair, and I disagree that it's "penalizing" them. If I choose to buy a product that gives me more of what I want, I'm not "penalizing" the manufacturers of the competing products I didn't choose.
To flip it around, If I do choose to spend my free time acquiring skills and knowledge that make me more valuable to my employer, why should I not be paid more than those who, for whatever reason, provide less value to my employer than I do?
> I didn't have a specific scenario in mind — IMO that's not a meaningful distinction and a company should not expect you to learn it on your own time either way. What do you think separates one case from the other?
If an employer hires me as, for example, a Java developer, because that's what I represented myself to be, and then she decides that all future development will be in Perl, then she made that business decision knowing that her current team was (presumably) not Perl experts, and she can expect that's going to impact their productivity. I would be less inclined to let her business decision impose a huge burden on my own time, learning a language that is no longer very marketable. I might tell her to be patient while I develop Perl expertise on the job, or, more likely, I would find another job.
Jake, I'm not going to keep going back and forth with you on this, because I don't care whether or not anyone agrees with me or changing anyone's mind. In fact, I'm really glad that a large portion of the developer population has the attitude you do, because it makes it easier for me to stay at or near the top of the heap. If 98% took my approach, then it would be much more work for to be among the highest paid ones who have never had any trouble getting or keeping a job in the software development field.
> In fact, I'm really glad that a large portion of the developer population has the attitude you do, because it makes it easier for me to stay at or near the top of the heap.
I, too, would be really glad that a large portion of the developer population considers others in their community people rather than "competing products".
You're obviously not familiar with what an analogy is. You should look into it.
The problem is, in my opinion, is that articles like this and anecdotal evidence like yours show that developers do in fact do what you do, you are from from the top 2%. People are mostly self taught.
It occurs to me that the Peter Principle implies basically the opposite: in companies where it applies, you're not promoted based on any evaluation of whether you can do your target job, you're promoted based on demonstrated ability in doing your current job, and a presumed ability to pick up new things as needed. If these companies handled promotions the way tech seems to do hiring (a lot of companies expect experience with large-scale deployments before they'll hire you for large-scale deployments, with specific languages before they'll hire you for that language, etc.), you wouldn't have the Peter Principle; you'd have the opposite problem of failing to hire/promote people who could be quite competent but have no experience to prove it a priori.
Programming is not like that. Pick any mainstream language, and all of the resources you need to develop a deep level of expertise in it are readily available, for free or relatively inexpensively.
And accordingly, many developers proactively develop deep levels of skill and expertise on their own initiative. And my observation has been that these are the ones sitting atop the profession.
Relatedly, this is also the main ingredient for a successful career in consulting. Clients will pay handsomely for someone that shows up and can magically solve problems in disparate domains. They have no interest in hearing that you need to spend today writing "hello worlds" because you've never worked with this particular stack.
It's basically saying that learning on your own time counts as unpaid overtime. How is that worse than actual overtime or a second job?
That is the crux of meritocracy. The amount of time someone spends on a task should have a strong correlation, if not a strong causation, to their professional success.
And on the privilege side of the argument, not having the time to learn or to do work makes someone less efficient at their job. Signals for high involvement in programming tasks are most likely also signals for high involvement in programming related jobs. That's just how life works. There isn't any way around it.
Also, I'd argue that this analysis doesn't apply to all "programming related jobs", just those that are primarily about programming. Very quickly in my career, the most important thing wasn't the ability to write code myself, it was the ability to make sense of code that other people have written, work with teams to develop code together, understand customer needs, take existing code and make it more reliable, pay down technical debt, etc. But all the side projects on my GitHub are solo work that is essentially for show: if I churn out some code that happens to work and has no testing or security or resilience to future changes, that's not a problem at all, as long as I push some code that works. That skillset is extremely different from the skillset I use at work.
Yet there is a correlation there. Someone working minimum wage is going to have a really tough time making it through college. Someone with a working wife, kids, and family will have a very tough time living in a high COL area working 70 hours a week.
Should those people be forced to be antisocial busybodies just so large corporations can maximize output per employee? When does quality of life enter the equation?
If I'm privileged I have the means to take risks. I can spend the time learning a new skill that other people can't.
The broke person might be able to learn just as quickly and just as much as the privileged person, they have the merit.
The larger point of the article is that the idea that "people should work and learn in their spare time" has many built-in assumptions that select for a certain kind of person. For example, do you think you could spend as much time learning after work if you had kids to take care of? What if you didn't have a spouse/partner to pitch in? What would you do if one got sick?
> That is the crux of meritocracy.
This is true only if everyone has equal circumstances, and (in this example) you don't have to spend your nights and weekends taking care of children/helping relatives pay their bills/etc.
You can't get good without putting in the time, and those who put in the time usually have absurd passion. He's got some great points, but the "shaming" of working hard here is a loud aside from his main (and better) points.
Where Kobe Bryant excelled was in recovery from that absurd effort.