I have no side code projects to show you
codementor.io
codementor.io
I don’t really disagree with your philosophy of working while you’re working and NOT working in your downtime. I think the same way.
But I have a whole pile of stuff I can show you that I’ve worked on. I don’t ask anybody to take my word for it. In computing, you just can’t. The signal to noise ratio is too bad, there are too many guys out there making unmaintainable junk, if they actually ship anything at all. There are shops out there that can afford to hire a bunch of maybes and just weed out the duds when they wash out, but I don’t have that luxury. Nor am I going to go on some weeks long hiring safari where I hire you for a week or two and see if you can cut it. No time man. Sorry, don’t have it. I’m going to give you the job or I’m not going to give you the job.
Sure, you can use side projects to complement other data, but if you're relying on it as the primary measure of a candidate's programming skill, you're doing it wrong.
Unless you're an awesome company, with really cool projects and offering me a jaw dropping salary and benefits, then no, I'm not going to do free work for you. Even if you are an awesome company, people probably have to actually work for you to see that, so no, I'm not going to do free work for you.
I'd rather spend those hours doing work that I expose on GitHub.
> in-person assignment where they have several hours to complete a smallish design-and-build task
That's another proxy that's as useful (or as useless) as a coding exercise.
Our industry could follow after the restaurant industry and implement stages/trialing. You come in and work a full day. If you get the job that days pay shows up on your first paycheck, if not they send you out the door with a check.
I think most companies just don't want to take the time to set this kind of thing up. Easier to just pass on people that won't do the requisite song and dance.
Also I've had many dev interns at my company, it takes work on my end to enable them to be productive quickly, but it's not impossible. Maybe you need to write some skeleton code for them to fill out and unit test, maybe you need to document things well and spilt up your tasks well, but you absolutely can have some one come in and be productive day one.
In fact my interview was a college hire group interview, we were given a laptop with skeleton code in multiple languages, a problem to solve with fixed inputs. The problems were similar to what you'd likely encounter for whiteboard coding, except I got to be left alone with a computer, the internet, and my editor of choice to write actual code to solve the problem.
It's probably the best phone screen/coding assignment experience I've ever had. No pressure from someone looking over your shoulder, but limited in time and scope, so I didn't spend all day working on it.
In fact, we just hired someone who did that, and her assignment came back better than expected. At first we were so-so on her due to potential lack of experience, but the assignment (and her projects on her personal site) showed us were wrong.
Ha, but seriously, I hate take home assignments.
This is almost entirely the point of take home assignments. In fact, this is almost word for word what my response would be to anyone who doesn't like take home assignments!
> Thanks for admitting that, the first step is accepting you are no good at evaluating people.
Step two is admitting that, in general, evaluating people using non-empirical means is an enterprise fraught with peril.
Was it paid? If not, then it's free work. Call it whatever you want, in my experience the people talking about passion the most are those that are just looking to pay the least they possibly can.
Until we have established a name (track record) for ourselves, and/or have a number of respected people vouch for us, we are called on to demonstrate our skills, just as musicians and actors are.
In principle, I think this is reasonable, especially since there are reportedly many fakers and exaggerators applying for jobs.
In practice, it appears that there are so many shoddy auditions that we must endure when looking for a job, that it becomes almost a full-time waste of time. This is unreasonable, methinks.
The problem will become serious when nearly every company that is hiring runs a low-quality dog and pony show in which we must perform, or not be hired. We can already see an analogous issue in the ubiquitous presence of objectionable binding mandatory arbitration clauses in seemingly every contract we sign nowadays.
"Well do you have any recordings you can show me instead?" "No, I do other things with my free time. I don't work outside of work."
If the musician is any good compared to the people they've already auditioned, many times you won't play another song. The band will hire you on the spot.
I think I prefer the coding test.
The homeworks are mainly a time saving device on one hand, where they replace an hour of phone screen time for an engineer with hopefully less than 30 minutes of grading. For the candidate, they may take a couple of hours instead of 1, but they also allow for a more relaxed setting with use of IDEs, Google, etc. and no interviewer watching the typing and tapping their foot.
I've gotten complaints from companies where I've done homework assignments for interviews that it didn't seem like I put enough effort in and my reply has always been that I get payed good money to do this stuff at work, they're getting the left over hours in the evening when I'm of course not performing at my peak. If they want work-level quality they should pay me for the assignment.
A few weeks later I came onsite for in-person interview. I brought up the assignment and was able to use it to show my interest and capability of quickly learning and putting something to use. I really believe it worked to my advantage.
If the assignment were to implement something very specific I would not have done it. In my case the assignment was so completely open-ended and was able to convince myself that it wasn't a 'work for free' situation.
It's kinda funny that so many people have this attitude, when, as a salaried employee, we likely have all done more than a standard 40-hour work week on occasion (or habitually), without extra compensation.
Do you also consider time spent prepping for an interview (brushing up on algorithms, learning about the company, researching interview questions, whatever) as "doing free work"?
I just really don't get this attitude. It's not "work", it's a evaluation. And it's an evaluation that actually displays skills relevant to the job, unlike many other approaches.
My current employer, when hiring me, said "Have you ever looked at the Firefox codebase? No? Good. Here, take this Firefox bug. Fix it by Monday, or at least analyze the root cause, and let's talk about it during the interview".
Needless to say, they had no interest in Firefox per se. It was just a cool open-source project, and a good way to give me "actual work" while making it plainly obvious that it wasn't for their own benefit/ they weren't looking for "free code via tech interviews"
After I submitted my solution though, the company came back to me and said that they had received a lot of submissions and would not move forward with my candidacy. This made me intensely angry as I had spent an entire evening coding up the solution.
To add insult to injury, they even asked me to remove the solution from Github where I had posted it (I had not posted the question so it wouldn't really make sense to someone just glancing at it). At that point I stopped all communication with said company.
Employers don't care. Employers say they care, but it's signaling. If I didn't write code on my own because I like it, it would be a serious negative to do so on the off chance that you run into the black-swan employer who takes the question seriously.
If you have projects that you're proud of — mention them on your website, on your Twitter's bio, on your LinkedIn profile, mention them everywhere. Even better, once per year go to a conference and talk about those projects in front of an audience, such that you can then have videos on YouTube too.
We like building things and there's absolutely no shame in marketing ourselves or in talking about the things we've built.
Employers do not care. Other people? Sure. Employers? No.
You just have to know your real market value, how good are you compared to others.
I guess that isn't the idea here. I think the idea is for them to grab a dev from the next cubicle/floor, point them to the repo, ask "can he code?", and the dev says "sure looks like code to me, yeah."
"Showing up" is 90% of every move. Sure, the guy who copy-pasted something together could get the job that more talented dude who was too timid to share their stuff would be much more suitable for, but such are the trade-offs here.
In my experience, it is employers signaling how cool they are before they ask you to do their multi-hour coding test for no money.
Where do all of you keep finding those companies? Is that an SV thing, or am I just not applying to "prestigious" enough companies? I've been on my fair share of interviews and haven't had that happen once, along with no whiteboard interviews. I can echo your experience about Github projects playing a small role apart from signaling though. Once, an interviewer mentioned one of the Github projects I worked on and we exchanged 2-3 sentences about it, but I don't think it had a significant impact on the result of the interview.
As a rule, I don't and have never consented to them because I find them exploitative.
Nothing to do with prestige, it's a simple "will this monkey jump through hoops" test to see if you'll work in shitty conditions for shitty pay.
My go to response is asking them to look at my git instead, which ends the process in about half the cases. The other half they look at it for <5 minutes and point out the error that isn't an error (yes I know what an SQL injection is, and I've taken steps to make sure it won't be an issue).
I'm not sure where I'd put the comment, since in the part where router paths are set up, it's self-documenting/obvious that it isn't an issue, and if the person skips that and looks at individual functions only, then I'd have to put it in too many places.
Another option is to create a function like _escape_numeric_string that returns its input after asserting the string is numeric and has a comment explaining, and use it everywhere. Although yes, that does mean changing all your individual functions.
Generally if a code reviewer suggests a change it is worth documenting why the change isn't practical. That can be adding a test or adding a comment.
- Long home coding challenge (for no pay of course) - Hours of whiteboard coding talk. If you're lucky it relates to the job at hand, most of the time it doesn't - Doing coding tests online, either through their propitiatory app or through sites like HackerRank. - A conversation type interview, where you talk about the job (have only had this one in my recent attempt. Didn't get past that phase)
Of the roughly 30 interviews that I've done in the last ten weeks, only one place ever asked about my github profile (which I don't have yet, currently revamping it since most of the code was years old and pretty meh). Almost every one of them had questions about my linkedin profile though.
There is a way to do this. But some people go a little too far.
Last years one start up asked me to write an entire backend application for them for free.
That they declared bankruptcy this year has been a tasty bit of schadenfreude.
The interviewer has checked the "codes in his spare time" checkbox" and I've guilt tripped them into skipping the dance like a monkey test once or twice by pointing them at my github but that's about it.
I'd be super impressed if a prospective employer looked and made some sort of salient comment, but it's never happened and probably won't.
The wrong empoyers don't care. The right ones do. My github portfolio is a means for me to determine if a potential employer is suitable for me, not the other way around. It's not a test for me to pass, it's a test for a potential employer to pass.
If a recruiter brings up things listed on my LinkedIn page, I know they're not suitable for me. If they bring up things on my github, I'm reasonably positive I want to talk to them. One company's CEO asked me a whole bunch of questions about one of my projects. Not as an interview, but as a peer. He had a genuine interest in my side projects. If he'd asked me to come work for him, I would have said yes in an instance.
I will never understand the belief that side projects are in any way necessary. I'd much rather have a well rounded individual who isn't moonlighting on other things but rather can bring his clear focused mind to the office.
I don't think it's wrong to work on side project. Some people like or want to. Who am I to judge what they do on their free time? It might happen to overlap with their job, or it might not.
But I agree, I don't require my surgeon to do surgery in his spare time. I've worked with plenty of great engineers who wanted to leave work at work, and after 40 hours of engineering, enough was enough and spent their free time doing something that wasn't engineering. I've also worked with people who did side projects, and were equally amazing.
I don't expect a brain surgeon to mess with somebody's head because he's bored at weekend, though :p
Why it's cool... I don't know. I agree it helped me in the early days of my career, but at this point, as a senior developer I can pick up new technology much faster than my early days. I can come up with a working solutions much faster.
I like my job, and I like programming... But there are other things I like too.
So, why do I need to work long hours and program outside of my job? I have good enough communication skills to convey my experience. If I'm not hired for not having an active github account, or a side project, there are five other companies that would.
Just because we do side projects does not mean that we do not have a life outside of coding.
But certain people believe that in order to be a good coder, one of your hobbies MUST be coding.
This is a huge problem in the industry and is the source of massive waste.
Some of the things you can learn outside of this field are what overtraining is (actually not that different from the AI concept), perspective on the learning and teaching process, the importance of preparation and good tools, patience with new ideas, and the dangers of trying to rush through the learning process.
I bet that even people who have spend 20 years on side projects haven't reached those 10K hours of practice yet.
Roughly 220 work days a year, 5 hours a day at work if you are full time, 6 if you dabble a bit outside of office hours, that’s around 5 years out of school, which isn’t too far off from my experiences prior to Malcolm Gladwell.
When I'm building some CRUD interface for my job, there's nothing I'm practicing with that. When I spend my entire day doing that, I've gained 0 relevant hours for Malcom's 10K.
What makes software engineering different from surgery is that when a surgeon learns something new, he does not have a live patient at his home to practice the new thing he has learnt, but as software engineers, most of the times we can immediately fire up an editor and write a PoC or a toy project to practice the new thing we have learnt.
Its strange that such natural and obvious curiosity and desire to try something out outside of work deserves the kind of criticism that it is receiving in the original article and some of the comments here.
The critic points out that it is no longer curiosity which drives you when people expect you to do it.
I do not get this obsession with putting everything out there. I have a huge local directory with my old test programs, PoCs, started but abandoned ideas, etc. I regularly try new stuff, new libraries, programming languages, what have you. But my github account is empty.
The internet needs less stuff on it, not more.
It's not obsession. It's just a matter of convenience. git add; git commit; git push; and all my experimental code is safe on someone else's server that is managed much better than I can manage my set of USB drives and hard disks.
> The internet needs less stuff on it, not more.
I disagree!
If you were looking for a drummer for a band, you would want to hear him play.
The latter one, sure. Makes me wonder if we should call interviews as auditions.
What I do after the office hours is really none of your business. I should be able to do whatever I please (write code, play guitar, etc.) after office hours without you raising concerns about it.
If you believe I do not bring my clear focused mind to the office, then that is a separate issue to be discussed separately without bringing in what I do after office hours into the discussion. It is my prerogative, not yours, to decide if I need to give up what I am doing after office hours in order to focus better at office.
I don't understand how you equate doing side code projects to not bringing clear focused mind to the office.
Would you also much rather bring a well rounded individual who does not take art classes after work? Do you think taking arts classes after work would affect one's ability to focus in the office?
Then why do you make similar assumptions about doing side code projects? For many of us, doing side code project is like taking art classes. It is art for us and it helps us learn new things about the art of software development that is not always easy to learn in the constraints of real world software business. Most importantly, it is a relaxing and enjoyable experience. It refreshes our soul and combined with a good night's sleep, it helps us to better focus next day at work, not the other way around.
Are you saying that you would much rather not hire people like us who care about the art of software development because from your high horse, we don't look like "well rounded" individuals? If you hold this kind of irrational conservative beliefs, I'd much rather not work for you.
Hair dressers don't have this problem, they are actually cutting hair 8 hours a day.
Carpenters have a more hands on education compared to compsci which is more maths than version control.
Doctors require 2 years of practice supervised by other doctors before they are certified.
I really like it when my specialist has a prominent public profile.
A recent case: tenure at a major university, had written or was quoted in many good journals and papers, and had a number of impressive accreditations (for example he was also head of his specialty's medical association for the country). This showed dedication and interest as well as some measure of intelligence.
I was accordingly confident he was on top of the latest developments in his field and would be able to deal with complications better than your run of the mill specialist. The care was great throughout.
Similarly, our lawyer has been quoted twice by the Supreme Court in Singapore, has written many articles in the Straits Times, and does great (and visible) pro bono work, all of which I could find off a quick Google for his name. Whilst I hired him based on a recommendation, it was comforting to see this public confirmation of his ability and interest in the field.
My reasoning is that if someone is very good in his line of work, some of that work starts to spill out to the public, either by research, teaching, articles, blog posts, etc.. If a person is not a pure introvert, working all by himself, and is quite good, invariably someone will notice it..
Some jobs are easier to do on the side than others. I'll bet the gardener has some side projects too.
Nice! Agree with that.
They are not that successful, a few dozens stars generally for the most serious ones. And also, there are not especially trendy (no fancy react app or js library, but stuff in python (lib, web ui), C, a puppet module, some shell scripts and little bit of perl).
With that, in 5 years, I was contacted only by 2 or 3 recruiters/contacts that emailed me because of my projects. For two of them, it was more a general look at which languages I used in my projects ("hey, this guy knows Python and Bash, he may be good for an SRE position").
The last one actually came across one of my project which is a little bit domain specific (an RFC 3161 timestamp server), not sure if it would have ended in a recruitment offer however.
I get more offers through my crappy linkedin profile.
Anecdote time! I had a potential employer ask me to do the tutorial for their framework before the interview. I submitted a pull request to fix errors in their documentation during the interview. I got the offer but didn't wind up taking it. I don't do those types of things anymore because it's more beneficial to them than it is to me. I could see the value in doing it if I was a junior dev trying to get my foot in the door though.
Later I moved that project to a github-organization, as it didn't need to be tied solely to me, and I wanted to allow others to commit, etc.
I'm not sure if the SPAM-mails went away because recruiters stopped scanning github for profiles, or because there was no obvious link between that particular project and my personal email.
I wrote most of the 'fizzbuzz' function but couldn't remember the "%" operator. Tests are annoying because it's not how developers work, at least I don't work that way, without any way to verify syntax or look anything up.
I recall an interview from years ago where I was asked to show the code behind my websites and step through it explaining what it did and why I did it. This is better than a test, because you're explaining how the code works and also showing off your work.
It's all good, it wasn't the role for me, I'm more creative dev than programmer and I didn't get a good impression of the company anyway. I've moved on.
Granted, this has been for gigs (or temp-to-perm) situations, not official, up-front fulltime roles. And some of these people ended up being flakey or sketchy (as spontaneous / whimsical people sometimes are). But nonetheless, hired (or substantially fast-tracked into their process, bypassing most of the usual interview crap) - pretty much on the basis of single demo or code sample (or in one case, literally on the basis of a single stats plot).
Because by this point, pretty much everyone knows how silly those live fizzbuzz sesions are anyway - including those administering them.
Github was used in this hiring process to reveal a fraud - a different 'success' story to others commenting here, but it definitely birthed 'a meaningful question' or two.
Another time I rejected due to side work was a candidate claimed to have written the "worlds fastest framework". Even if it was fast it's possible there's something out there faster, so it showed lack of touch with reality, ego, and lack of self awareness. Note I gave the candidate the chance to substantiate their claims and was met with profanity
feel like they'll fit right in with any number of startups out there! But good for you on calling them on it.
Good employers care. I care. Its not signaling. Its important.
Worst company I worked (work) for (but pays well) had me answer a few questions on a whiteboard. One of which was 'not even wrong' (the answer was: "HTML5 gave us the <strong> tag to replace <b>").
They were desperate for bodies after a bunch of people left. They also partake in the usual H1B/contractor games and wonder why they have shit code. Meh, my project is going well. If they have me work on their main .NET monstrosity though, I'll quit. Haha, jokes on them.
i bet the question was: "what has HTML5 done for us?"
I said, "CSS, but it doesn't have much to do with HTML5's features."
It's not important. There are plenty of good companies who don't do these things that manage to pay developers $100k salaries. They may assess in other ways, but it's not the only signal.
It's only important to you. You choose what you want to see in candidates. You need buy-in from the candidates that your process is conducive to a good environment, good code, and good delivery. In turn, you cultivate a team who share something in common, and the team gets along well and makes good code.
It's people finding like-minded people -- the same social movements that are in every other profession. There's nothing wrong with it, but there's currently no prevailing right or wrong way to do it, otherwise that would be the technical interview.
Practically, development is still in demand. So if I get rejected, I can go apply some place else. That's why it's not important.
Maybe your pay is slightly above those other companies, but is a marginal pay increase really worth all of the extra effort? That's up to the developer. But the employers that don't use this criteria are not non-good employers.
It's pretty useful for screening candidates, especially looking at code written <1 year ago. I do keep in mind that code written in free time might not have the same standards as production code, but often there are some red flags that carry over.
Besides, you are only using this as a negative ? So you'll actually hire people who don't put in extra effort over people who put slightly substandard free time code online ? That seems like a losing strategy.
I've always found that willingness to put in effort vastly outperforms ability. Not to an infinite extent, but quite a bit.
Yea, but why would someone bother in this case?
>Besides, you are only using this as a negative ? So you'll actually hire people who don't put in extra effort over people who put slightly substandard free time code online ? That seems like a losing strategy.
That's not what I said at all. It's potentially a positive or a negative, just like anything else on a resume. I've seen plenty of Github profiles that have files with 2000 lines of spaghetti code and no structure or testability. Just like I've seen profiles with neat projects and excellent code.
>I've always found that willingness to put in effort vastly outperforms ability. Not to an infinite extent, but quite a bit.
I agree with this in general too.
If someone knows that much git, I'd hire them regardless. I'm so sick of untangling other peoples failed merges or trying to explain what the "not a fast-forward" issue means when their push fails.
It is fair to expect a developer to invest sometime in learning their tools well but git is a different beast. I know it solves a very complex problem but the fact that it exposes a complex interface to the user to do so seems like a shortcoming of the tool to me.
Heck, we even have a comic for it that shows how sometimes just saving my work, deleting my clone, re-cloning the repo and applying the changes in my work is easier than understanding the Git error messages: https://xkcd.com/1597/.
The tooltip in the comic is also sound advice: If that doesn't fix it, git.txt contains the phone number of a friend of mine who understands git. Just wait through a few minutes of 'It's really pretty simple, just think of branches as...' and eventually you'll learn the commands that will fix everything.
Compared to something like Rails, iOS development, or React + Redux + Redux Saga, Git is just a couple of commands and basic concepts. Everything is listed here, and I don't think that's an unreasonable number of commands to know: https://git-scm.com/docs
Either Git has a complex user interface like I claim or I am beginning to grow old.
I disagree. Like everyone, I've experienced a failed merge that turns into a diff nightmare. However, when it has happened I've figured out how to solve it myself instead of wasting someone else's time with it, and it hasn't happened in years now leading me to believe it is directly correlated with git skill-level.
Same for regular expressions. Once you know the syntax, they're pretty easy to understand. It just takes practice.
I would guess the environment candidates are selected from influences these numbers significantly.
And you're right, I'd understand that in some of these environments, OSS isn't necessarily considered fun or relevant.
Then again it's all speculation.
Because I myself feel that this is such a good and reasonable way of hiring people, I wouldn't want to work for an employer that wouldn't let me do open source work.
I mean, it's also because I consider open source to be the public sphere, and I really do believe in software freedom. Maybe my professional metaphor would be the coder as a writer. Of course I want to see your published work.
Out of curiosity, what do you mean by this? What sorts of things do they all have in common?
Regardless, I actually think this paradigm works for entry level jobs at most companies. You don't have to know anything for your first year in most cases. You just have to be able to show up and follow instructions.
show me freebsd or linux kernel contribution on github, for example
I do understand what you're saying though but I don't think people are going to just search Github for your name on the off-chance that you're on there, I suspect that what most people do is look at the things that you've specifically mentioned in your CV.
I've hired plenty of great engineers who didn't have side projects on github. I have never specifically been looking for people that don't have a life outside the field, and unlike GP I have found that there are other ways to evaluate people that can identify great engineers with very few mistakes.
But that doesn't mean I wouldn't see your high quality or impressive open source code as a huge plus. Quantity doesn't matter -- if anything if you're super prolific I might wonder if you have much energy for your day job -- but I'm not going to pass up a chance to see what kind of work you do.
And because quantity doesn't matter, I think that writing a little bit of code "for your resume" (every once in a while, to reflect your continuing development as an engineer) is a pretty reasonable investment even if you don't happen to want to spend your whole life outside work programming. It's not required, but it might get you a really great position some day, even if like the OP you're up front about having a life outside of software engineering.
One question I have for the grandparent post: what would a meaningful question be? Is the description I mention above seem like a meaningful way to discuss the work you took the time to share with me?
This - the non-portable aspect - is what irks me the most.
Especially for enterprise developers. Since most of the software we develop is under NDA, we cannot put any of it online to showcase our skills.
I've had to do 3 different take-home "coding exercises" over the last 10 days. 1 was for a Hedge Fund, another for a Real Estate company and a 3rd for an Accounting SaaS company.
I'm in the process of publishing these coding exercise solutions after polishing it up a bit more onto my github profile. Still, I feel like this will also be a waste, because like OP says, most companies have their own specific "Coding tests" and wouldn't take an already coded solution to accept skills and experience of the candidate.
I've had too many "tests" that were a giant waste of my time to ask it of others.
Would you expect a musician to practice their instrument in their free time or only play their instrument during paid gigs?
As for why I don't take Github profiles too seriously, we had plenty of applicants who did have projects on their Github profiles who tripped all over themselves on our simple coding test. Maybe we would have found out something similar by digging into their commit history, but that would be an even greater time investment than the hiring process already was.
It's still useful to have material for non tech people, though. That's why, additionally to my github profile, I maintain an angelList profile on which I document the why's and how's of my projects from a non developer perspective.
But of course, the single most important thing you can do in an interview with a non tech guy is to show them you understand their business, what they're trying to achieve, and that you find it exciting (provided it's true, obviously). From having been on the hiring side, I've learned that the worst thing to say is : "yeah, actually it doesn't really matter what we will do, I'm mostly interested in coding".
At my last gig I spent a few days writing and troubleshooting a script that would perform automated tasks for setting up servers for DBAs given their specs and demands. Easily one of my most shining examples of making bash work for me. It's back with the employer since it's their property.
But if you didn’t, for whatever reason, and you happen to have an illegal copy of some production CRUD app hanging around so I can look at how you organize your thoughts, nobody I’ve interviewed has ever gotten even a whiff of heat for letting me look over their shoulder and see how they wrote their schema. I don’t want a digital copy and I could give a shit about your illegally retained IP (and there’s a whole lot of it floating around). I want to know what you name your variables.
The best way forward is absolutely some open source code, folks clean up better in public and you don’t have to make apologies for things that weren’t your fault.
But this smells like folks just wanting me to take their word, and it ain’t gonna happen. I’m flexible, but when in doubt I choose ‘no’. If the next guy can prove it and you can’t, hey, plenty of fish in the sea.
Believe it or not, there’s next to nothing I’ve ever seen that was the remotest bit interesting on an industrial espionage level. Just regular old business logic that was either cleanly done, or not.
I honestly could not recall any of the crap from the interviews I’ve done beyond a sense of how people thought.
Anyways, you wanna do some interviews your way, be my guest. I will happily send the guys who don’t want to do show and tell to you. I’m not trying to be all things to all people. No open source, no closed source, no side projects? We can play API bingo or code a b-tree, but prob not a culture fit.
It's a matter of "if you want to know how they'll treat you, look at how they're treating their ex".
thats insane
Any candidate who plays fast and loose with their previous employers' code is going to play fast and loose with _your_ code. Or your corporate secrets. Or lifting GPL code. Or pretty anything else they think they can make off with. Such employees are a lawsuit waiting to happen and are best avoided, as are employers who tolerate such employees.
It's much less stressful and takes much less time to give me a basic to intermediate coding problem to solve on my own with a pre-set number of days/hours to work on it.
Also, if you give the same assignment to multiple candidates, you'll get a better sense of how people use different approaches to solving a problem. You can still use discussions around side-projects to complement the process, but having a standard approach for all candidates is helpful.
Except it never means this. It's always "and" and not "instead of". Many companies do these irritating programming challenges now, and then when you pass them, will still bring you in for the standard Whiteboard Hazing sessions.
But if you ask them to do a 30-minute coding task, that suddenly becomes a total disrespect of their time.
If the HR isn't able to evaluate my skills from my references and the projects I helped my employers and customers to earn, there are also lots of companies to apply for.
Just like employees, companies aren't special snowflakes.
Besides most of my github stuff is useless for my type of work, because I am forbidden by contracts to publish anything related to our projects.
I look at what people do outside of work that isn't writing code. Having something means you are probably healthier, less likely to be burned out and more likely to have experiences that let you better understand what solves real customer/client/user problems. I don't want to hire someone who only writes code, they aren't as good at solving problems.
Now I have to know if you can actually code. The best way to do that is to look at some code you've written. That's basically the extent of it. I'll do some extra work to come up with a take home project if I have to but if there is a great candidate already, and they have a github with good code in it ... I have to manage my time and I'm often chasing them when hiring, not the other way around.
Open sourced code on Github is just the most common way to do that, and it does get bonus points for having examples of dealing with actual users in issues and involves giving back to the open source community that you almost certainly take from.
But honestly, I really just want to see some actual working useful code you wrote.
I didn't learn to write code until my late twenties. I have a fine arts degree. My early and mid twenties were focused on activities unrelated to technology. I have a reasonably large amount of life experience unrelated to programming. I haven't found that this experience gives me an edge in solving problems in my job as a programmer. Can you provide concrete examples that demonstrate this idea that people who code less outside of work are more effective problem solvers? I've seen this truism floating around quite a bit lately but have yet to see it demonstrated.
If nothing else, you might be more interesting to work with, have a clearer communication style, better taste in evaluating what "looks good", etc. etc.
These aren't a substitute for skill, but past a certain skill threshold other things start play more significant roles.
Edit: I really don't understand this pattern of down voting comments without offering a rebuttal of any kind. What exactly about this comment was against HN guidelines? Last time I checked, disagreeing with a comment wasn't grounds for down voting.
As to how that helps: it doesn't help you solve implementation problems, it helps in designing the software to do what the client wants in a way they will like.
It is hard to put yourself in the shoes of a different person to design something for them if you only hang out with people like you and only use software built for people like you.
As a concrete example: what would a piece of software for artists be like if your only-engineering coworkers designed it vs. you having some input? By the way, it would definitely be either a portfolio hosting service or some kind of art database software. What problem do artists have that could use some software help that they aren't even aware exists?
So WHAT weeks long safari do you go on for your company? Product management? Raising fund? Sales?
It’s much more cost effective to invest in your existing people. That’s one thing I never skimp on.
Isn't that what pretty much every side project is anyway? Unless you're an active OSS developer the chances of any of your projects being worthy of judgment is pretty slim.
I've got 10-12 repos on github I can show you...they're all half baked weekend projects that I did just to tinker with some new technology or idea I had. None of them are production quality, and most of them I'm appalled at anytime I go back and look.
Honestly the code review isn’t for the obvious rock stars. Anybody can pick them out. It’s for the sleepers who might not get a fair shake but who can deliver.
neither does that 1 wk coding exercise you made me do unpaid which I'm pretty resentful of.
If you have an open source project and want me to fix a couple bugs and do some reviews to see what kind of work I do, thats pretty fair (Rethink asked me to do this, I couldn't afford the time, but I thought it was a good plan)
Otherwise, I really don't know what you expect to learn
When I get home I play video games and watch tv and play with my dog. sometimes I'll screw around with a new language or something else. I don't post stuff on github and keep a blog or anything else like that.
I think your view is pretty myopic. Ask me to talk for 30 minutes about one of my projects and force me to answer some tough questions about it. whiteboard some designs.
Maybe I should just hire some guys off a freelance site to write me some side projects.
There are hordes of false negatives in any hiring process, anyplace. My process is more accurate IMHO but it’s indisputably more work and it does not scale at all. Ultimately everybody is going to beef with any criteria they don’t align well with and I have to remain flexible enough to not throw the baby out with the bath water. I don’t mind getting drug a little on HN— I have a good team, and their open source contributions might not be as impressive as you assume.
Presumably you also don't think people should stop thinking side projects and public code is important in hiring. You've made a choice to not have these things and asking the world to change one of the few sane things in hiring because you just don't fit the mold is a whole other story than just accepting that this is something you lack that could potentially sway an employer.
As another comment said: You can't win 'em all.
By chance, I happened to have a pretty productive few years on GitHub and having no degree I still managed to land the first job I went to interview for, in part because of my GitHub profile. Am I "for" the current situation because it benefited me at the time? No, because I think it's a clearer indicator that a colleague won't be a nightmare to work with than a degree or if he can implement the correct data structure on a whiteboard.
The issue is I'm usually given a bunch of CVs, and I need to fit this in to whatever other work I've got going on (probably too much already which is why we are hiring). I can arrange interviews, but that probably means I'll need to stay after hours (a lot of people can't just take an hour off in the afternoon to go for an interview), so it's in my best interests to filter down that list. Plus arranging interviews won't just happen the next day - although we need someone yesterday, just deciding who we want to hire is going to take another few weeks.
If I can see that you've got some open source projects or a blog or anything to show how you work, it really helps to make you stand out from everyone else, because most people don't have anything to show. If I had a candidate that looked good, I wouldn't throw them away because they didn't have any side-projects, but if I've got two candidates who both look good on paper, that probably would be the deciding factor.
So yes, hiring someone to build some side-projects for you might be beneficial. At the very least you could use it as a management side-project :D
Another place I worked at gave a small programming assignment (build something to import a CSV into a database). It was pretty simple, and would take you no more than two hours, but it was rather good to see how people work and whether they could follow instructions (>50% of candidates ignored the "write tests" line). This was used to screen people for an interview, during which we would ask them questions about it.
You do not get to see people who get stuff done- you get to see people who optimized their "work"-life for the impression of getting stuff done.
Not beeing ready to pour unreasonable hours in- actually is a good sign. Such a person values his/her time- and thus will think on there own, for example when handed ridiculous feature requests. Such a person will stand up to me, and ask questions that might save month of development time sunk into unnecessary work.
Sorry, but we are not building the pyramids here. We are making software- and for that a lazy-loading brain with a clever work-avoidance Algorithm, in a un-passionate mercenary can be very effective as a development tool.
Sounds like a boogeyman.
Since you can see right there in Github's UI that something is a fork and that they are not the main contributor to the project, the dishonest applicant would have to go through some trouble to fake it as a sideproject.
The same dishonest person can also just lie about their work history.
If an employer passes on candidate for the wrong reason then the employer is hurt as well. A good hiring process shouldn't rule out people for reasons that aren't related to their capability to do what they'll need to do in the job, and very few jobs require a good github profile. It's a useful proxy for development ability and passion, but that's all. You can be an awesome developer and never touch Github.
Isn't the point that if you want the job, you do whatever it takes?
Why are we not celebrating the fact that we work in a kind of meritocracy where it really is possible to showcase your skills without any credentials or reference to your past?
All of this bloviating about "wasted time" in the context of demonstrating skills reeks of bitterness from lost opportunities to me.
But I'm bewildered that this person has zero line of code to show. The only case I could think of where that makes sense to me is that the developer is still in college. Imo even recent grads generally have something to show off for what it's worth.
You don't even need to be hacking every night and week-end for that to happen. If you're a minimum into what you do, chances are you put at least a night or week-end aside to hack together something.
Personally, I'm far from behind a great developer, but you can find loads of "unmaintainable junk" in my GitHub (github.com/hery). And as many pointed out, when you're prolific, you tend to accidentally produce valuable things, and I do have some decent projects in there that I explicitly pointed out in the process of interviews, which helped me skip technical challenges or interviews straight to offers. A bit extreme huh?
Most developers have a life and hobbies outside of coding, and I believe it holds even truer for the best developers. But with decent priorities, it's easy to invest some time in hacking side-projects. Otherwise it feels like you're putting 99% into other hobbies, and 1% into coding, i.e. you're just doing it to make money. Balance is key.
So, are architects and engineers expected to have built side-houses, and side-bridges, and side-cars?
Artists have portfolios. Why shouldn't software engineers?
Really now, the fact that you can't showcase what you've done for your previous company is an implementation detail. Using a portfolio to judge a candidate is perfectly valid and works great with other industries. The reasons why you don't have one are your own concern.
Like I said in other comments, interviewing is (for better or worse) a game / competition. You need to optimize for success.
Yeah, if you work for GNU or for countries were NDA is not a notion </sarcasm>.
It isn't, though, and demanding a portfolio is almost as terrible a practice as Cracking the Coding Interview style interviews.
I have to believe it "is neither engineering nor science, and is purely creative"? Only those extremes? I believe it is some of all 3 and I don't think requesting (i.e. not "demanding") a portfolio or prior work is any more unreasonable than not asking for it.
Demanding a portfolio isn't a great hiring strategy simply because a lot of people's best work isn't out in the open. Who would demand a portfolio from someone like Mike Acton? It'd be enough to know what he's worked on and talk to him. And at the same time requiring a licensing proxy is no help either, he never went to college AFAIK and that'd probably be a minimum requirement for most actual licensing proposals.
On top of that, many electrical and mechanical engineers are not licensed because they don't need to be. (Everybody likes to jump to the civils in these discussions and forget about us, since civils are basically required to be licensed.). EEs and MEs don't get put through the same bullshit that this industry puts developers through.
Is your "portfolio piece" spaghetti code or well-thought-out modules? Is it doing something recursively that shouldn't be? Do you have elegant code or brute-force solutions? Is it write-only?
All of these can be seen in a portfolio or side project if you choose to look.
It's certainly not a science, and it's very rarely engineering. About the creativity, it's a craft. There is some creativity baked in, but about the same amount as for mechanics or carpentry.
Do you think a 10 minute scan of an arbitrary GitHub account is the same? I say decidedly not.
Perhaps more tellingly I've interviewed people with seemingly impressive GitHub accounts who were just terrible. That experience leads me to believe it's easy to set up a GitHub that "looks good" without having the chops to back it up.
There are a lot of great engineers with empty or "bad" Github profiles.
1. They care enough to have a Github profile
2. I can see their actual interests.
3. I know they're interested in random experiments
4. I can see if and how they treat their projects. Are they dedicated maintainers, or do they just fire off one-shot projects without ever deciding to maintain them?
And a whole lot more. A person who maintains a single shell script project with diligence is worth more to me than a thousand developers with bullshit lisp and haskell repositories.
Yes, there's a bunch of great engineers with empty or bad github profiles out there. But those engineers aren't showing me that they're great engineers. The ones with a single or few well-maintained projects do.
I just know a lot of people find side projects fun because they can let loose a bit and try out random stuff that may not be their "best" code.
This is still a huge asset. It's important for a person to want to grow and learn new stuff. When it comes to hiring a person, there's a whole lot of stuff that's important. Maintaining a long lasting project is one of them. Having an interested in fun side projects, also. It doesn't have to be good code. In fact, I have my fair share of "this project is not maintained and should not be used in production code" repositories. That's just shorthand for "this code sucks".
Many people have their favored hiring "hacks", and they almost never actually signal for the things they purport to. It's way too easy to fall into confirmation bias or overstate one's ability to judge others.
For example, an applicant that goes through the trouble of writing a thoughtful, reasonable README for every one of their projects signals a positive quality.
When comparing two candidates, that's certainly something to consider.
You can't because design isn't about style, it's not art. It's about solving problems and increasing your employers profit.
Perhaps the best solution would be a unionized right to proper credit to developers like in the film industry.
I understand that you might not want a job there and that part of a job interview is deciding if the company is a fit for you. But I wouldn't call a hiring manager lazy because they want to see examples of your work, in fact that's their job. How is a hiring manager suppose to make a thorough evaluation of a candidate if they don't show their work?
Ask questions, and do you really expect a hiring manager to have work relevant to your interview to show? But you can ask about policy, culture, etc.
First of all thanks for being so disingenuous with your responses. But a programmer is actually creating things ie, code and programs which can be shown. A manager is talking to people, going to meetings, emailing people, ie not much work to show, because their work boils down to talking to people. So basically different jobs have different job interview processes, you wouldn't hire a designer or architect without seeing their previous work.
cute, but you'll adapt.
Many other professions also require work samples. Even salespeople are required to produce metrics from past jobs on the number of sales they made, and get put through practicals where they need to actually do a demo pitch for something.
My life drastically improved when I limited who i gave a fuck about. People who don't hire me don't make the list.
I highly recommend not giving a shit to anybody else.
Whiteboard stuff selects for a particular algorithmic dexterity that I just don’t need a lot of the time. And rejects some of the grungier virtues that make a big difference in moving units in production.
Hiring folks for a couple weeks is fantastically expensive in management overhead. I gotta be highly confident you will work out to take that step.
Just hiring a bunch of dudes and firing the duds is similarly expensive and I frankly don’t want to be that guy. I hate firing people just because I was lazy interviewing. This is my job and I take it seriously.
And there are a whole lot of guys that just don’t ship. They show up. They commit code. They are prompt and attentive at meetings. But if you need to ship, they just can’t shit it out. So many organizations are rotten with these guys- you wonder how so many devs can produce so little product, this is the reason. (Also shitty management- mgmt is ten times noisier and a hundred times more expensive if you fuck up.)
Inability to ship tends to be a project planning and scoping problem, not an engineering performance problem. If you can't ship, it's not because you have lazy developers but because you either bit off more scope than you could chew, or you don't actually have a plan that gets you from-here-to-shipping--one that is more detailed than "work harder, guys".
Yeah, you're right, if shit isn't shipping, it's my fault.
But.
There are a variety of psychological profiles in computing, and they have various pluses and minuses. I need folks with kind of a... move fast and break things attitude. That's what I select for.
Furthermore, the 80/20 rule is a super real thing and the last 1% until a project ships hurts real, real, real bad. There are people who can push through that and there are people who can't. Yeah, it's my fault we're not sipping tea as we ship, but I've been doing this a long time and I'm pretty good at it, and I can't make that pain stop. I just can't. I've been on teams that shipped and suffered, and I've been on teams that didn't ship.
If somebody's cracked this code for me, man, throw me a bone. But while I'm always trying to do better, I also kind of have given up. I'll make it up to you on the other side, I promise, but it's gonna hurt a little pushing it out.
> a corporate lawyer purely based on their pro-bono work?
You hire a corporate lawyer based on their public reputation. For a programmer, that's their github portfolio.
Business are in a unique position to actually judge programmers by their merit, not just hearsay or bullshit references or lies on a resume. Of course companies are going to factor that into their decision!
Not everyone is happily doing FOSS projects.
>A growing body of research suggests general cognitive ability may be the best predictor of job performance.
Side projects are a strong signal the candidate enjoys this line of work, and ideally I'd want them working on things they would enjoy.
I would also prefer if I did not had to worry about readme or css projecting this or that image.
But that reputation comes from his actual daily work. I as a developper don't get paid to improve my github portfolio all day long...
Not civil engineers (because it's hard to build a 4-lane suspension bridge on a Saturday) but very often candidates in electronic and electrical engineering have side projects that can help them land a job. Are the electronics breadboard projects that you did in your garage absolutely required to get a job?!? No, but they help you stand out among the crowd.
The reason that <computer programmer> is different from your analogies of marketers, lawyers, recruiters, etc is that the activity of programming is often a source of fun and play. Some children with curiosity start programming on their own and continue it into adulthood. (And hence, they might have some personal github projects.) In contrast, people typically do not do "lawyering" for recreational fun.
Programming is enjoyable enough for some that side projects on github are mostly a voluntary and organic phenomenon. Some employers are taking advantage of that signal and prefer to hire those types of programmers.
Indeed, it's the opposite - industry bodies have to mandate pro bono work, which wouldn't get done otherwise.
My work is my work, and my play is my play, and I question the wisdom of judging the play in the decision to hire someone to work for you. Even when I do code at home, away from the office, I do it differently. It might be in a different language, for a different target platform, for instance. I might write more automated tests, because I can't hand it off to a tester that isn't also me. I might write something with a command-line console interface instead of a GUI, because my user base is probably just me, and I know that person is not a helpless idiot who can't read a man page--a man page that I probably will never write in the first place.
Real work is reading the crap code written by your predecessor, understanding it just enough to change something without breaking everything else, and moving on to the next thing as quickly as possible. No interview has ever tested my ability to read existing code or to alter existing code for a specific goal.
Whiteboard this: "This third-party data grid inexplicably causes all text typed into this column to come out backwards. You have 60 minutes to fix the problem, because code freeze is in four days, test needs at least a week to bang on a release candidate build, we ship at the end of the month, and you have 15 more equally-stupid issues waiting for you." And then you are judged on the quality of your horrendous kludge. Those companies that look for perfect people that write perfect code at work, then go home and keep doing it, are living in Cloudcuckooland.
Right now, my side project is getting the last two achievements in Fallout 4. After that, it will be banging out an entire novel in November. Or maybe it will be making furniture to hold DVDs, with a built-in system to deliver a painful shock whenever someone puts them back out of the correct order (which is sorted first by genre, then alphabetical by series name or title). Or maybe it will be working out a plan to terraform Venus using wormholes. When I leave work, I do whatever I want. I don't want to endlessly prep for an unending parade of stupid tech interviews.
I guess our field is so enjoyable that many people have side projects. Apparently, some recruiters think it's a good indicator of future success. I wonder if it's the case though. I teach CS and usually, passionate students (those who work on their own projects) are indeed better and spend much more time working on their assignments. But it's not the end of the story. For example, some are only motivated in things that involve coding, are stubborn, or are bad team players! Conversely, there are students who aren't hobbyist programmers but are smart, learn fast and are a joy to work with.
Yes, sometimes. I'm a mechanical engineer, and frequently interviewers would ask what sorts of projects or engineering related hobbies I have. They're not necessarily looking for me to have brought a mass-produced consumer product to market in my spare time... most mechanical engineers I've met seem to be excited enough if you talk about working on cars or bikes.
I can see how software engineering may be similar. They may not be expecting you to be working on some hugely popular app, they may just be trying to get a gauge on what you're really passionate about. I don't like to wrench on cars in my spare time, but I've still gotten job offers after it comes up. In the end it's just a matter of finding the team that has similar values to you.
Are they? I've yet to be asked about it. It might be different for new grads, but what people seem to care about most is if you've worked for a major firm, or in the case of the video game industry, a "AAA title".
Different things are different.
Would you hire a musicians who didn't have recordings of their work and wasn't willing to perform an audition? Would you want to hire a musician who didn't practice new things?
The development landscape changes rapidly. Frameworks come and go. If you want to keep up in the industry, you will most likely have to learn a new language or learn a new framework at some point along the way. If you only code during your 9-5 you are forever stuck with your current skill set and will end up like the people in 2017 who only know COBOL and can't do anything else. Your job options will shrivel and you will not be very marketable.
Because of this, I at one point spent maybe about 15 hours putting together a small project specifically to use as a code sample. This code sample, which again took maybe about 15 hours to put together, served its purpose for years.
To avoid this tiny amount of easy work that has such a high potential upside is, to be frank, just dumb and lazy.
I think this is a good piece of advice here, no need to call other people dumb and lazy.
I just have to know that you can write decent code. I don't want to waste my time or yours if your code in the language we need is not up to a minimum standard. When I have to train a new candidate on a million line code base, I cannot afford to spend time also training them to be competent in the native language of that code base.
This is not about "coding passion" or notches on some Github post...this is about whether you can do the job. Although one advantage to a Github profile is I can look at your repos and see whether you understand the basics of using git as well (yet another requirement of the position).
I, for one, think your 15 hours was well-invested.
Inventing a project interesting enough to focus on for 15 hours can be difficult. Just like learning SQL without a dataset.
Inventing a project also isn't likely what you want to be hired for, so it's reasonable to have that low on your priority list.
Free software is constantly filling the gaps that I would want to create a "side-project" to fill. I'm not saying it's particularly difficult to find something to work on, but it certainly isn't trivial.
Just take a few scripts written already, write a readme, and an hour a year per script tuning them up and adding tests. Maybe a code golf problem or two.
In short, if you can’t find four hours a year to put into your career, maybe you just aren’t interested. I think of it as page two of my resume.
I really don't have much of a github presence, but then again I'm not a day-to-day coder at work. The presence I do have I created in just a couple of hours and I could easily beef it up to something respectable by spending a couple of hours a month on it.
A lot of my issues about the weird side project fetish come down to the fact that this is an award for the misaligned. I spent pretty much the first decade of my 'proper' career working on ideas that went into our regex matcher (now at github.com/intel/hyperscan fwiw). During some of the more intense periods I could barely take a shower or daydream without having to grab a notebook and start writing ideas down, many of which went into the product. When I wasn't doing that stuff, I really didn't have any energy left for building anything else. Reading these discussions, I often wondered what would happen if the associated startup (Sensory Networks) had tanked.
This isn't hating on people who do side projects; it's just to say that having the time/energy to do side projects often feels like it results from misalignment with your day job. I was happier than a pig in shit writing regex and literal matcher code (or designing algorithms) at Sensory Networks and I'm still that happy doing new software projects at Intel.
Code on the white board? Why not on a computer? Why not work on some real code for the project? Sign an NDA and work on an actual feature. Try to get closer to what you expect the candidate to do on a daily basis.
For instance the fact that you write novels for fun suggests me you would be able to write good, long documentation or manuals if required. I've known good programmers absolutely incapable of communicating their ideas in writing to other human beings.
Some, when told that they needed to prepare a detailed, well written technical report on the software they are building for a client, looked like if they had received a death sentence.
This is a highly valuable work skill for a technical worker if he/she has the need to work with clients, present updates or discuss requirements, much more than having a few small GitHub repos. By focusing in side projects you can be filtering out these skills in your workforce.
Possibly the author is better off this position.
This is becoming more and more important as science/technology keeps getting compartmentalized. Not to go as far as the medical doctor who rediscovered numerical integration [1], but I have the certainty that in my research I'm doing many things in a horribly inefficient way, out of ignorance. Just the other day I learned about k-d trees and sped up a piece of software in my lab by an order of magnitude...
To that end, I quite like writing documentation, especially after finishing a large milestone. It's a good break from just coding, while also being very helpful for the team as a whole.
Ha ha, good point. I agree, seen it happen more than once. Some people don't feel comfortable with anyone who is in some way different, even regarding likes about (often trivial) things such as tastes in food or music or sports, etc. Insecurity, I call it. Linus (of Charlie Brown / Peanuts comic fame, not Linux) and his security blanket come to mind. Images:
https://www.google.co.in/search?q=charlie+brown+linus+charac...
Even as someone who enjoys side projects, the prospect of sharing a side project, and being criticized by a potential employer about the contents of it, turns it from "side project" to work.
You should be able to take constructive criticism of your work regardless if it's a side project or not.
Yes, you basically answered the question your self. Tell the interviewer that you wrote that code ten years ago and while it works it's less then ideal, then explain why its not ideal and what a better solution would be.
Because they'll then try to make every part of the code perfect and with complete documentation for everything, probably spending more time trying to present it rather than working on it.
Almost all of the side projects would have undocumented constraints and requirements on which the design/engineering decisions were based. And I doubt the interviewer would take time to ask for design constraints beforehand and then go through the code enough to understand its design/architecture and have interesting criticisms that would bring something positive for the side project in the future.
You can't criticize design decisions without context. I would not be welcoming to someone criticizing my side projects without first asking for context/design constraints the work was based on.
I would not lash out or whatever. But I would not take the criticism without some sense of other person's care for the side project in question.
From my experiences on both sides of the hiring game, side projects aren't really criticized in an interview but are rather used as a starting point for a conversation to explore the ways of thinking of the potential employee. "What was on of the most challenging parts about your project?" is probably one of the most common questions there, and I'd guess that long-running side projects (even if they have a lot of inactivity in them) contain challenges like any other project, maybe even more so.
If the applicant has side projects, it's often easier to talk about them instead of day-job code, since they usually are more passionate about that, and they can talk about it more freely because they don't have to be afraid to (accidentally) spill company secrets. Side projects are not a must and I've had good conversations with applicants about their work projects, though more confidence to talk about them is something that comes with seniority in my experience.
Nowadays you can share anything online (git or other) without fear of rejection, because unless you choose point select individuals to it, in today's deep oceans of "everyone sharing every random little bone they spewed up" it'll immediately drown and stay there forever undetected and unnoticed. Doubly so if you don't fill out repo description or tags.
(There's must be gazillions of solo hackers dumping their sources of the coolest little projects and experiments without any attention, simply because they don't go and spend the day yapping on about it everywhere --- they Just Keep On Hacking.)
The upside of doing so? If a code file that's way below your current skills is indeed many years old, this becomes clearly visible in the repo and there's no need to explain yourself --- if choosing to indeed point someone to your personal for-fun code-bases.
As an example, check the source on my homepage: http://jjcm.org
If nothing else, that was an entertaining read.
Glad you found it entertaining!
Part of excelling at your job is learning new stuff - something that I am absolutely certain you do all the time, even if you only do it during work hours. Maybe this week you are starting a new project and need to learn Vue.
Publish those 100 lines of code to GitHub. Just like that you've demonstrated that:
* You are willing to learn new things.
* You know how to use a little Vue.
* You know how to use a little Git.
Make it clear that it's a learning project - call it "Learning Vue," "Learning C#," "Learning Node" etc. When a hiring manager looks at your profile they will see dozens of technologies that you have at least some experience with.
Edit: if they turn around and demand side projects; you would be completely correct to ask about how many office hours they allocate to side projects. Interviews are a two-way process and the more you stick your neck out, the more you get noticed.
^^^^ This
My previous employer was a defense contractor, so... yea.
I don't have any side projects that I can share. Sucks, but that's the reality. If I get fired/quit and can't find a job without side projects, I have a list of things in my head to build in ~months if that's what becomes necessary.
Architects should have side projects they can show.
Mechanical engineers should have side projects they can show (e.g. modifying cars, robotics, etc).
And so on.
Having "dozens of technologies" at this level of experience is often a bad sign. Very frequently candidates who mention lots of technologies like this on their resume or github can't answer the simplest questions about them, even "why should I use this, what problem does it solve". Source: Years of interviewing people with a laundry list of technologies on their resumes.
Should people be expected to remember everything about all tools they've ever used? No! Is trivial experience with something useful? Probably not.
Then again, I don't claim to be an expert in these skills, and don't put them on my resume, which seems to be more what you are referring to.
Just know that as a company in Austin, they have lots of employees to choose from probably too and this is their narrowing approach. No biggie, y'all aren't a fit. Just know that this becomes circular, because many of the types of companies that ask for this also allow you to open source some of your work-hour code which helps that visible resume.
Also, if you are in demand and have leverage, consider trying to work at places that encourage making at least some of your work visible to the world. Many other professions benefit from this. If you don't have leverage, I'm afraid you may be stuck in an endless loop of invisible, hard work you leave behind.
Finding out they require more coding hours than you want to put in is also a good result from an interview.
However, I don't and won't spend every waking hour I have doing one thing. This life has so much to offer and experience, I do not have a drive to spend 80 hours, nights and weekends like that. However, if the project calls for it every once in a while, fine, it's not a big deal until the company comes to expect that.
Why does everyone think that it requires every spare second you have to write a couple programs and post them on GitHub? Can you spare 1 hour per week? Why would it require every waking hour you have to write a couple scripts and throw them in GitHub?
There are plenty of new people entering the workforce, too. I can't remember the last time I took an Uber/Lyft where the driver wasn't in a coding bootcamp. It scares me just to think about having to be the engineer "training" the new hire at a company that didn't make its interviews hard enough.
(As a corollary, this means that if the engineering interview at a company is objectively easy, that's a RED FLAG, and you should not work there.)
- Side projects
- Developer conferences
- Meetups
- Hackathons/hack-days
- Tech podcasts
- T-shirts/stickers for frameworks and technologies
I do enjoy software development though, and from what people tell me I'm pretty good at it, so I don't think it's necessary to enjoy these things to get a decent job. It does concern me when I feel like I'm the only one who didn't stay up late to watch the Google I/O streams live (I'm based in Australia)
I wonder how most employers would react to a request to have an attorney look it over, and use the excuse that you want to make sure it doesn't interfere with any non-profit volunteer work you do.
It was a small company doing the firing, they definitely "took it personally". Bigger companies are more likely to have uncaring bureaucrats I think.
Holy shit, I had no idea this was legal [furiously reviews contract]
Any inventions, innovations, or ideas, conceived solely by you or jointly with others, whether or not using any company resources, at any time during the course of your employment, will be owned by the company.
Yes, I still had to pass the interview, but when you can claim that your NPM package ballooned to a million monthly downloads suddenly the conversation changes from writing code to architecture, product management, and leadership.
Essentially you are telling the guy on the other side of the desk that I can solve problems nobody else in the world is capable of solving (or willing to try) and here is my proof. The clear response from that guy on the other side of the desk is to refocus on the things involved with that level of effort/output.
I have never had to worry about competition from other candidates. It has nothing to do with what I think of myself (ego or arrogance) and everything to do with how they perceive the potential I could deliver back to the company.
Second and third order consequences of this, that nobody but the interviewer sees, is that you won't need your hands held like a child. You don't need all the popular abstractions, frameworks, and mountains of tooling that other candidates cannot live without. The reason for this bias, and it took me a while to see it, is that you are spending all that extra time outside the office solving many of the same problems as people at the office except that you are doing it without a financial incentive, greater time constraints, fewer resources, and often in a more portable way.
---
Now let's look at the candidate who only works at the office and has no open source projects to demonstrate and they are competing against somebody like me who would rather be working on open source for free than doing the job they are (well) paid to perform. What does the interview have to ask that guy to assess their skills?
It isn't about the code that is on Github. Nobody has time to scrutinize that. It is about the product, product quality, market penetration, the kinds of problems you have solved. It is about how you achieve popularity where other people did not and with a budget of 0 (maybe spending on a web server). But since you don't write open source and don't do work outside the office this conversation never arrises. The interviewer is limited to asking you about how to write code like you are a newb.
What you are essentially saying is that it would be a reasonable expectation to only get a job as a software engineer if you are the absolutely in the top .0001% of programmers in the world. Which, sure, I'm glad you're successful, that's nice. And as advice for one individual it's good - showing good work is a positive indicator for an employer. But in the aggregate we can't ALL be the best.
I went to school because I had thought that my chances of making a stable living were higher than playing basketball and praying that I would make it into the NBA.
That doesn't really matter though. In most cases you aren't competing with the rest of the world for a job. Typically you are competing against other applicants. In this more common scenario you just have to be better than the applicant pool, which is far less lofty (not that it matters). If there are 30 people that applied for an open position we can probably assume that between a third to a half are probably less qualified than the interviewers hoped for, so then you are realistically just competing against the remaining candidates that which is a lower number still.
In my original comment I mentioned my open source projects got me all but 1 of my last four jobs. The first of those occurred well before my software was popular and the company didn't even realize they were using it until it went up broken to NPM and broke their build. That madness didn't happen until after they interviewed me. During the interview I showed off my open source software just to demonstrate where I put my interests and how I am making effort to increase my personal productivity and solve original problems.
The software only became super popular during the prior employment.
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On a different note I don't consider myself something special like a 0.0000000000001% programmer or anything like that. The popularity of open source software projects is a unique spiral death trap. Keep in mind you are doing this on borrowed time at personal expense and for years people will ignore you (or tell you that your software is garbage and that you are completely wrong) and use inferior products that have a more familiar brand name.
Your software becomes popular if you can solve original problems and refocus continual effort on product quality. It took me years of effort and lots of people telling me I was wrong. I just did my own thing anyways and kept doing it because it was a personal project that worked well for me. And eventually it works for a couple of other people. It is extremely rare, but there are people who like to experiment using unknown software just for the hell of it (or simply because it is free). Those people create word of mouth recommendations. Rain drops become a trickle and if the rain never stops on a long enough timeline it becomes a flood.
It is a death cycle because as more people use it the demands upon the product greatly increase. Your available time does not scale proportionately. You prioritize and do what you can. You can mitigate some of this, though, if you are able to close defects at the speed of light and can get to a point where maintenance and improvements are faster enough to allow deeper engagement with your users.
The attention is nice and the idea of breaking promises or letting people down crushes my soul. That is how I feel about unfulfilled enhancement requests even though it is completely irrational. Completing those efforts are what made the software popular, so you feel a need to not let people down and to continue to complete the requests.
> You don't need all the popular abstractions, frameworks, and mountains of tooling that other candidates cannot live without.
I would like to hear more about the problems with popular abstractions, frameworks, and tooling. That's a very strange thing to say.
> The silly art project that I launched in Austin. My dog business. Running, painting, writing.
Take any of these hobbies and write a small application related to it. Don't do it because "code speaks to you", do it because it's important to get a job. Do one application, spend some hours on it, and be done with it.
> It's important to me that these attributes be valued by my workplace.
I don't think that's reasonable. I have many great people at my workplace, some of them have become good friends. But really nobody gives a damn I do 3D modeling in my spare time and I don't see how that would make things better. People know I enjoy designing visual stuff, and they always come to me for advice on colors and UIs, but that's about it. And my design hobby is valued because it brings value to the team and the project.
Interviewing is a contest. Some people prepare more than others. Some learn body language, some study the company before interviewing, others prepare side projects to show. If you're unwilling to do anything that puts you one step ahead of the crowd, don't complain about the interviewing process. It's a game. Within reason optimize for success. Don't just complain about how unfair it is.
It's not even about th particular job you're applying for. Is having a job in general. If it's important for you to have a any job, then surely you can do something to help yourself.
There are actually two scenarios which don't involve coding in your free time:
1. As software developers we are generating by-products all the time. And the trained eye can recognize reusable scripts that can be packaged and placed on GitHub. If you don't have a GitHub account with such by-products, then you probably have rotting folders on your hard drive with reusable stuff that will eventually wither away.
Good companies encourage or at least tolerate employees that do this, because it leads to higher quality code (by putting it out there, preparing it for the scrutiny of others), because it's good marketing for reaching job candidates and because once in a while such a projects ends up having other users, which end up contributing feedback, bug fixes or even features, aka work for free.
2. We end up using a lot of open-source libraries and tools and we don't have the resources to pay for support for all of them, plus if we are honest about it, we are cheap bastards in terms of wanting to pay other people money for the tools we depend on.
Open-source is a about having control. Does it have a bug, or a feature missing? You can code it yourself and send a PR. Which in many cases is quite easy if you've been working with the library or tool in question for a longer time — all it takes is for you to know what's needed.
As a software developer, you might work in an industry that doesn't benefit much from open-source, or in a company that doesn't allow such contributions.
Which is fine, but know that in many companies the people that have public projects to show the world will get picked over those that don't. It's simple market economics really — in absence of open source contributions, all you have to show for your work at that cool startup is a nice story of how it died or went sour. And some ranty blog posts.
You should only do sideprojects if it’s your passion or if you think it will help your career. If you’re passionate about other things: do that instead. There’s more to life than work.
1) I agree side projects do not define a good developer (frankly, I don’t have any outside toy ones). But given 2 equally good choices, I can’t blame an employer who chooses a Dev with side projects as opposed to one without (since they can see their code). That being said, a better interview process would involve real coding which would eliminate this situation altogether.
2) I’m not sure where the rant about geography fits in. If you are limiting yourself to Austin you’re limiting yourself to an even smaller pool of developers than the Bay Area, NYC is Seattle. And there are many families with dogs living in all these areas.
3) Is suspect the fact that the author is running a side business may be a bigger concern. The author’s specific business may not, but as an employer, I’d imagine there is no way my job could compete with your side business since you actually have money invested in. I wouldn’t be surprised if this would, more than the lack of side projects, affect someone’s employment opportunities.
Just the way the author has setup the discussion it seems they basically left the company with no code to see at all.
I can’t show you the coding I have done, because it’s at work. I can’t show you any other coding I have done because I have not done anything outside work. But I did start an art project once.
I think a far more useful tack (which I have used in the past) is to ask the company to provide you with a task, and give you a week to solve it. This allows them to actually see that I can code and solve a problem.
A couple days ago I spent several hours puzzling through how to use an open source library. When I figured it out, I made a PR for documentation. Our closed-source app will benefit from having its dependencies better documented.
I do very little coding outside of work anymore, but I still have public contributions to show.
Are you sure you are not just projecting your own insecurities and opinions into interviewers? Majority of developers don't have side projects. According to FOSS survey, owerwhelming majority of linux (especially) and open source contributions is paid work. Sometimes it is that they work so much in day job, most of the time they work normally (which is enough) and do other things in out of work time (exercise, care about children, read books, socialize - social skill matters, craft). If you are coding 6 hours a day (generous 2 hours for meetings and chatting and organizing), then you should code plenty.
You could have loose that interview due to many other reasons, you could have run into that one company that does not hire without outside code.
But if you really worry about this one, maybe create an account with sample project and be open about that project purpose (e.g. dont be afraid to say that you created this project to show how I code, because previous interviewers asked for that). If it is really about code sample, then something you create withing two days should suffice.
And if they demand real contributions to real open source projects, ask them whether their company gives employees time to do such a thing on the clock. After all, they expect your previous employers to be so generous with time, so they should put money where their mouths are. If you dont hire me without having full public profile, it is only fair to demand that being employed by you makes continuing that work possible.
None of those things are things that I can give out or show to anyone at all. I'm really interested in the field my company works in, and all my side projects are related to it, at least elliptically.
The only thing I can show you after 35 years are things like abandon shareware products from the late 80s and some really awful code written for no purpose long ago. Nothing that relates it all to what I've done for the last 20 years.
I also work in one of those companies that asks applicants to do some code problems and turn them in. On the other hand we really don't care how you solve them or even if you solve them. What we want to do is get in a group setting with the applicant and the code and four or five of us and talk through the code. The problems tend to be simple, the interesting part is talking to to a candidate and getting a sense of how they code/think.
If you are unwilling or don't have time to create a public code repo or your own blog/website, you should be willing to take a skill assessment test from the employer. If you aren't willing to do any of that, I don't know how you can expect an employer to gauge your skill. You can't just provide a reference and expect them to hire you just because someone vouches for you.
You may think it's unfair that you have to go out of your way to make yourself look good to an employer but...that's the way the world works. I think the misconception is that people think 'having a side project' means writing a prolific open source project. You can spend 1 hour per week on coding small programs and have a great GitHub profile.
How is one supposed to have time for side projects then?
Having been poor most of my life and worked full-time since I was 15 years old (with an odd break or two), I can tell you that that is a luxury most people do not have.
crunch time is very real.
Have you heard the expression work smarter not harder? You're working 16 hour days likely for the income of a regular 8 hour day -- so you're literally making half the salary you think you are. That's not smart.
Some crunch time is normal and if you're lucky, compensated for. If I'm working all out weekends to finish a project (might happen this month for me) then damn straight I'm taking some days off in lieu for that when things calm down. If it never ends, that's not crunch time.
I've seen people fake it, adding trivial changes everyday, uploading public tutorials they followed, or just formatting.
I never ask for a github page myself because I don't know what to do with the information. But I do ask for a side project, and answering yes or no is not what makes or breaks a candidate. Instead it leads to a conversation about their coding and work philosophy.
If you don't have a side project to show for, well you must have something to talk about in our field that can convince someone that you are a good candidate.
If you do have one, well it has to be something that can convince someone that you are a good candidate.
I always look for how things are the same compared to the subject matter I am interested in.
What has given me the most ever is learning to play music and compose music. Once you understand how music work you understand how/why rhythm works, proportion, harmony, consistency etc.
But both music and design informed my cooking. When you boil things down (no pun intended) the underlying principles are all the same it's only the execution of those principles that's different. Philosophy is also something I have found ways to incorporate into something tangible in my life.
I also have side projects some of them do really well but i try to do as many different things in my life while still being involved with design and music. You need to have some strongholds.
There are no rules.
I am passionate about playing traditional dance music. And I have supported this by writing a program to generate high quality sheet music from ABC scores; scripts to download collections of scores or MP3s off the web; scripts to handle tagging/naming my MP3 files; etc.
I am passionate about RPGs. Back in the day I supported this with a script to convert a simple text markup to LaTeX to generate print quality copies of my RPG stories. (This was about a decade before Markdown.)
Etc. The idea that a programmer could have an entire second business and not write any interesting code in the process strikes me as really odd. There are NO tasks for the company that could be usefully automated?
Unless you're incompetent and making glaring mistakes, someone reviewing your code would have to credentialize in your codebase to identify things like bad architecture. Nobody is doing that.
I'd put your energy into polishing a quality README. That's actually something that someone else will see, and I'd assert that it's the most important part of a project for someone flipping through.
In fact, in the hiring position, when I see someone with projects but not a single README, I have to wonder if it's a bad signal. Sure, they could do the easy part of slapping code against the wall, but they stopped before the hard part of documenting/introducing it. Something to think about when you're competing with other applicants for a job.
Like a PM I knew at BT who had a side gig as a violinist - one year his band had a residency during the Edinburgh festival (at the balmoral no less ) - if it had been a job related to huis day job no way would have he been allowed
He runs a dog business. Probably best using pen and paper... or microsoft office... definitely not custom code.
In both hiring, and working with.
Sure.
But, passion ~= "suffering". "suffering" IMO is mutually exclusive with "enjoy" (unless that's your sort of thing)
The other worrisome thing about the passionate is that they're more likely to burn out.
What's wrong in our industry about being non-passionate? I don't get it.
Normal places with normal expectations on work/life balance don't expect you to be pumping out code every second of the day.
As someone who has been doing personal as well as public side projects for possibly 20 years now, I think I can share some insights about why I (and perhaps people like me) work on side projects.
I grew up in a time when we had computers with 3 MB of memory and 300 MB of hard disk were considered powerful machines in my school. The students would get only 30 minutes of computer time per week. These were times when you boot your computer, type GWBASIC, press <ENTER>, and start coding. This was one of the very few ways to use a computer meaningfully. Writing code in GW-BASIC became like a mindsport for some of us. I would write tiny games, draw diagrams or solve math equations with code. It became a hobby.
I guess everyone has hobbies. I have some too. Coding is one of them. It's not the only one.
About 10 years later, I learnt that this hobby could become a career and I chose programming and developing software as my career. Is it fair to now be considered a "human machine" who "work 80 hour weeks" and have "absolutely no evening or weekend plans" just because my career also happens to be one of my hobbies?!
- “If I don’t have the time to be THE BEST, I won’t bother even trying to be great.” - “I am okay, even proud to be a mediocre developer. I don’t want to commit lots of time to programming.” - “I would rather have an employer who accepts me for being mediocre because I have interesting things going on in my life.” - “I’d rather work on a team full of mediocre devs as long as the company had a great culture”
I’m not saying it is an “incorrect” attitude. Someone may want to put together a team of developers who don’t really care about their craft, as long as they like to hang out together. I feel very differently though. I would much rather hire a developer who is mediocre but wants to get better than a mediocre developer who has the attitude of ‘I don’t want to put in all that time to be good at my craft. Did I mention I had a dog business though?’
As someone who has interviewed developers, I can tell you that most candidates do not have side projects. If you have side projects, it is a huge bonus. Not having side projects is not a big deal. Plenty of people get hired who don’t have side projects.
But, if a candidate said no they don’t have any side projects, and then followed it up with something like ‘Yeah, I’m not one of those people who really likes coding enough to do any in my free time, plus I care more about my dog business that I run’ that says to me 'I don’t really care about this job."
For my sake as an interviewer, I need as much information about you as possible, as realistic as possible, as fast as possible.
For my sake as an interviewEE, github gives me the ability to do good work, on time of my choosing, and present it in the manner I see fit.
As a social awareness question, I prefer to work with people that have the social awareness of the broader software community to go, "yeah, this is how the community is rolling, I can play the game a bit". Whether that's github, or Haskell, or Rust, or assembly, or retro Pascal. I sort of don't care. The social cues matter a lot in The Work.
At the end of the day, passing on someone with no portfolio and a preference for doing art over spending time learning a bit more about a topic and doing a quick demo project is an easy pass.
(Personal note: if you're gonna just throw your novels out, maybe write code instead? worst case is you learn something fun)
But on the other hand, I look at my wife (who is a special ed teacher). She makes a fraction of what I do but to keep her certificate, she has to take for credit college classes, submit them to the state, etc.
This is ostensibly to prove that she can still do what her degree says she can do.
Most other lines of professional work have some form of continuing education requirement.
And that's what I look at side projects like: some form of public effort at trying to improve your skills, show that you can do what you say, etc.
Comparatively, side projects [1] feel incredibly egalitarian. They don't care what school you went to, they don't require much in the way of cash payouts to get going. They author seems to disdain Github, but they'll give you a free account and let you push code to it.
1 - I think we'd need to collectively define what this term means. But I think of it as bit size projects that scratch a particular itch. The author likes dogs? Great spend $1 and use AWS Rekognition to do image search over a bunch of dogs. They have kids? Work with them to put together a little project you do together. You like working at the art collective - GREAT! - do an awesome online art thing.
1. You work hard to improve yourself and gain more skills that people will want to hire you for.
2. More people will want to hire you
3. Demand goes up, while supply (yourself) is fixed.
4. Your price goes up.
On the other hand, if you care so much about your "life quality" and put absolutely 0 effort to improve yourself outside of work,
1. You don't have much to show other than what you did at current work
2. You are making yourself completely dependent on the company
3. When the company fires you, you have NOTHING to show to others. It's not like you can show people the code you wrote while you were at the previous company (the company owns the code and you're not supposed to share it outside publicly)
4. Since you have nothing to share, less people will get your value and less people will want to hire you
5. Demand goes down, supply fixed.
6. Your price goes down.
You can keep bitching about how the world is unfair and harsh and write some blog post that sounds almost like a beautiful piece of poetry, but that won't change anything, because that's how the world works.
It's not about companies "exploiting" employees by telling the m to work on something during the weekends. It's actually for yourself. If you don't believe that, that's fine, but you will stay a shitty developer and the law of supply and demand will kick in.
I tend to be skeptical of most forms of software engineering interview tactics, but work samples is not one of them. Strong side projects is a strong indicator of skill. FWIW, for those who do not have projects like the OP, its important IMHO to offer a take-home variety. If you do not have side projects, and are not willing to do a few hours of take home work, then I usually screen you out since there are plenty of other candidates that fit in either bucket and will be easier to make an informed hiring decision about.
A strong work sample is an unnecessary but largely sufficient condition for assessing hands-on-keyboard coding skills (a subset of the skills needed to be a good software engineer), so screening out people who don't have them, when there is a glut of supply of skilled labor, as it might be in Austin, is a rational strategy.
To be honest, though, I've tended to find interviews go well when the interviewer goes off-piste. Probably because you've both decided your each reasonably smart, and are letting the conversation go where it leads.
On the flipside, I do hope that employers are good at actually understanding open-source project pages. For instance, GitHub is terrible about letting people create profiles with prominently-displayed forks of dozens of projects as if they’re contributing when those people may actually have done nothing on any of the projects they’ve displayed. Similarly, having a single project should not be an indication that you’re worse than someone with 10 projects; there are some legitimately huge problems and “one project” might be a full-time job in itself.
With that said, I don't make any of those projects public since they embarrass me. No unit tests typically, poor documentation, etc.
With that said as a hiring manager I would never penalize someone for not having open source projects.
Take home assignments, coding as performance art, timed puzzle solving, obscure technical questions, full day interview gauntlets—these are what I had been through. These processes are designed primarily to avoid false positives. False negatives are okay. This is unfair to the candidate, but the company gets to pick the tune. Rather the candidate _lets_ the company pick the tune.
About a month ago I landed a job. The interview process consisted of two steps: an hour phone screen with the CTO followed by an on-site show-and-tell of a side project of my choice. (Coincidentally, the company is in downtown Austin, but is definitely not the company mentioned in the article.)
The process was a joy to me. I have side projects to show. In fact, I showed two. The audience was approximately 10 developers. My impression is that the CTO was looking for a lot of thumb to go up.
Here’s what I liked about it. First, it was not a time suck. Second, it made me the driver, allowing me to draw attention to the best parts, not just of my code, but of how I think about problems. It was downright relaxing.
To be sure, this is just a different way to prevent false positives at the cost of false negatives. If you don’t have side projects but consider yourself a great developer I can understand why you would consider this process unfair. It sucks to be a false negative. But for me, it’s way better than the alternative.
Not every company needs to draw from every talent pool. I’ve happily taken myself out of the pool of companies which use those other methods. I’m glad there are some which use a method that suits me.
When you are hiring people, you really have insufficient information to know how good they are. You can't see any larger projects they have done or get a feel for how they solve problems that aren't toy scenarios by a whiteboard. Having side projects too look at dramatically reduces the uncertainty in your estimation of their skill level.
So there you go, all else being equal of course you want someone who is 'more into' their field, and all else being equal side projects dramatically improve your confidence in their skill level. So to a competent hiring manager the author of this looks like he has less passion than his competition, and even his skill level is very poorly understood in comparison.
We all have secret reward mechanism which triggers our dopamine receptors. Time to time randomly or intentionally we create those circuits in our brain. For example, for some people, it's really important to talk about baseball teams some likes football.
That's being said, we need to be in the flow also to self-transcendence (remember Maslow's pyramid last step ;)
Some people their motivations are not clear and they find themselves very in the middle of everything and it can be more then one specific skill like the guy's example in the blog post, he likes tracking, drawing, spending time with family etc.
After having a motivation towards one subject for long time you develop flow and being in the zone for this occupation that's why managers tend to see person with enthusiasm for coding and being in front of computers all the time.
It's exactly how it supposed to be! I recommend being stoic about it.
See a job add for a Go programmer, buy a Go side project...and so on.
I think the problem is with the interviewers. It is a difficult task to interview and when everyone is allowed to lead an interview, it just leads to very random outcomes.
Companies don't really focus on developing interviewing skills for the people who are inside. Maybe they are just too scared to do that - pulling people away from their gut feel and not having an even distribution of people who can interview properly (across teams). It probably feels much safer to say a bunch of No's and then say Yes.
The lesser experienced and the hard-headed experienced ones are worst interviewers. They probably are looking more for people like us.
You do have side projects, just not ones that require coding.
Unless you believe "has no interests[1] outside of work aside from writing more code" gives you the best candidates, which I don't agree with.
[1] Yes, I'm being hyperbolic; no need to be a pedant.
If coding is such an art and so important to the industry, why are all people at the top do not have a git hub account to show? They must still be "passionate" about coding, no? Or is it a function of how much money you have?
Facebook worked not because of some guy wrote great, highly maintainable code. It worked because of the idea. Same with others great companies.
If there were these unicorn people who did not write "unmaintainable junk" there would be no security bugs, hacks, leaks etc.
All big companies have recruited "the best" for forever. Can any one of them guarantee a bug free software. They can't. Suddenly, all these passionate people with their github account do not look sexy.
Insisting on a side project is similar to people insisting on TDD and i am sure TDD does not solve the problem of bugs in code.
People lie incessantly about their ability to code; that’s why he industry considers things like fizbuz to be valuable. Why assign so much value to a public github account if you don’t trust their word in the first place?
Another detraction to working at home on side projects right now is just physical. I need to really take a break from the monitors to keep my eye strain budget reserved for work when I need it.
I don't care if you don't do that in your spare time. I don't know what languages or frameworks the author uses, but I probably won't hire a Rails or React developer if they'v never contributed to any open source projects. If they've never come across a single gem or npm package that needs a bug fix or a new feature, then they probably don't have enough experience.
And when I said I have no side projects
to show, what they heard - what
interviewers hear - is: I am not the
best. I am not a passionate developer.
I don't spend the necessary time to
keep on top of my education and skills.
That development is "just a job."
In my experience people who are passionate about software have something to show for it, even something small.
I am a developer and I like to do plenty of things outside of programming. I ride motorcycles, read books (and writing a book!), play guitar/violin/piano, learn Russian, digital paint, make 3d art models, play video games, go out to eat, karaoke, go to meetups, blog, etc, etc. Most developers I know have plenty of hobbies outside of programming, but still manage to squeeze in some time for side projects. It does not have to consume your life...
Hello, I'm your peer. You're showing me.
Not HR, not the Engineering Manager, not some mythical burn-down chart, but your partner in crime.
What sort of jobs have you pulled? I don't care about the minutiae, but about the overall scene.
Code smell is a factor, like it or not. Same story for by-catch and "gore" in the form of spaghetti, inheritance and commentary.
If you can't be bothered, I get it. Punt, shift blame, cross your arms and dig your heels in.
I don't care, because without a portfolio, I don't have an opportunity to appreciate the qualities of your work, good or bad.
All employers are looking for is some publicly available evidence that you actually have the skills that you claim to have listed on your CV.
This means that I write a lot of software out of hours that makes it to production, is well tested and maintained, but I could never show it off in an interview. I need to break the habit, but I just don’t get the time during the week to work on this stuff.
This looks very much like deflecting the disappointment experienced at the boutique app firm to all people like us who do love to code in spare time. I believe it is unfair to paint all of us with the same brush. I know plenty of people (myself included) who love to code in their spare time and still have weekend plans that have nothing to do with computers.
I'm super excited about this guy, looking at his background we had to have worked in the same computer science lab at Texas State. We're the underdogs in Texas and it's cool to see people that were successful in the typical ivy-league environments. Incidentally enough, I'm now getting into mobile app performance and worked at Amazon around the same time.
Related:
I find that interviews are mostly a crapshoot. I'm currently looking for a new job in SF, so I have a few experiences from this last week that stood out:
* Onsite with a ~100 person startup last week where the guy asked about my past experience ("Wow me with a past project") and then I caught him looking out the window as I explained a particularly gnarly problem we solved at Amazon. I was asked 5 coding questions (that I more-or-less solved), never spoke to a manager and then got a canned rejection.
* Onsite with a ~2000-10000 person tech company and met my would-be team, my manager and his manager. We discussed the projects I'd work on, did coding and architecture problems and I left super excited to work with them in the future. I received an offer from them within a few days, having already built a relationship with my team and management, that makes me feel much better about the opportunity.
* I'm currently going through an interview with a really great company (~60 engineers). I spent an hour talking to my maybe-future manager and we left both excited to work together. The follow up was a realistic technical project and pair programming with my future teammates- all of whom were awesome to work with. I'm still awaiting next steps, but I've really enjoyed getting to speak to my future team.
A litmus test I've found: Does the technical hiring manager talk to you before you phone screen? Do they seem engaged and ask follow up questions? If your only point of contacts prior to the onsite is a random engineer interview and a recruiter whom repeats a script, your past work is not going to be a major factor. Most likely your hobbies outside work won't be considered (I'd suspect for legal bias reasons?) unless it's a small startup that's looking for a friend-as-a-coworker fit. I experienced this at my last startup, we went from 5 engineers to 50, and the values started to shift.
It's tough to agree with a post that doesn't offer an alternative. All I get from this is that he wants to talk about how his life is more balanced and hobbies are better than ours, and that alone should be enough proof that he deserves every job he wants.
Unless you have done your time consuming best to ensure its 'perfect'. And this directly leads to a culture of resume driven development.
For those who are actually active on projects most interviews do not provide the context to absorb the information of your contributions; coding style, tradeoffs, constraints of these projects etc. They will all end up sounding like excuses.
“How to write about your open source experience when you have none”
https://codeformore.com/how-to-write-up-open-source-experien...
Mostly I’m on the side of - sure and if we go for the same job and have the same skills I should win out because I have tonnes of code to show.
If you’re fine with that then meh.
My other thought was that you sound too busy to be on the on call roster which is another black mark.
The boutique place in Austin failed you. At the very least they could have assigned you a small project and given you some time to complete it.
Most of my "side projects" are throwaway pieces of code or scripts that do silly things, or ironically are solutions to "cracking the coding interview" style problems.
In the last 10 years I've built 40 web-apps and that doesn't include ~20 codebases of my own
I don't understand how you can be a programmer without having side-projects or at least contributions in open-source.
I end up contributing open source or creating my own libraries via work, so I'd still have things to show outside the scope of standard hours.
I can get not wanting to do CS algorithm puzzles in interviews since thats a specialized discipline rarely applicable to web-app development but this I can't get behind.
Towns awash in startups and those types of developers have a different cultural expectation than say Dallas or Houston.
I own the book "Pragmatic Programmer", a widely respected book about general programming principles. The bit about its authors:
"Andy Hunt is an avid woodworker and musician, but, curiously, he is more in demand as a consultant. He has worked in telecommunications, banking, financial services, and utilities, as well as in more exotic fields, such as medical imaging, graphic arts, and Internet services. (...)"
"Dave Thomas likes to fly single-engine airplanes and pays for his habit by finding elegant solutions to difficult problems, consulting in areas as diverse as aerospace, banking, financial services, telecommunications, travel and transport, and the Internet.(...)"
Isn't tunnel vision focus on programming a bit limiting ? What about a different perspective provided by different experiences and skills ?
A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing - attributed to Archilochus
"(Isaiah) Berlin expands upon this idea to divide writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include Plato, Lucretius, Dante Alighieri, Blaise Pascal, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust and Fernand Braudel), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Herodotus, Aristotle, Desiderius Erasmus, William Shakespeare, Michel de Montaigne, Molière, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Aleksandr Pushkin, Honoré de Balzac, James Joyce and Philip Warren Anderson" (Wikipedia)
I think modern society and job market places too big an emphasis on hedgehogs. While backend programming is my profession, I feel more of a fox than a hedgehog. It works well for hobbies, but not really for jobs as currently available. For example ladies tend to compliment me I have a nice voice. I also like books, fantasy and science fiction, and prefer short stories to novels. So I can connect the dots and... record some audio books. I look for old short stories no longer covered by copyright, and intend to record them as "audiobooks". For instance about a village fool who became a werewolf. Another example: I like animals, I'm precise, patient and have an analytical mind. Anwer: Origami. Another example: I can't draw much (I really tried with Gimp and some hand drawing... admittedly, without a good teacher), but I'm somehow attracted to visual arts. As mentioned, I'm analytical, and I'm not too bad at math. Answer: Vector graphics, .svg, Inkscape, writing images in vim. It takes some introspection and observation, but you can figure out what new hobby would give you satisfaction. If you have many interests, try to think what they have in common, or how you could possibly connect them.
Each their own.
As a career professional and founder of a career related company, I have some news for you: you clearly have the time and passion to create, but at nearly every chance when you have additional time, you're not putting it into programming.
Yes, you've found a job. That's great, but you would be experiencing more pay and a more accelerated career if you were spending 1/5th your free time on coding as well. If you want to blow glass, or draw, or write -- fantastic. But it's not wrong for a company to give the job to someone else, and...
BUILDING SIDE PROJECTS DOES NOT REQUIRE YOU TO BE IN THE TOP 1%.
More often than not, side projects are just a requirement. You don't have to love code like it's your calling to create a side project.
I recommend this to all software engineers: build side projects, and don't listen to this post as a calling to infer them as unjust.
Statistically speaking, building side projects is one of the best things you can do for your career.