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Comment by MS90 | Hacker News Reader

It's just frustrating because not everyone wants to spend 24/7 working at a computer, some of us have other hobbies and prefer to keep a good work/life balance. I already get paid to code 8 hours a day, the last thing I want to do is go home and do it for free.

Would an architect get denied employment because they didn't have a "pet project" skyscraper in their backyard to show off?

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I get the idea but I don't think people expect you to do this all the time. It's more to back up a resume that's weak in other areas. (no name companies, no name University, etc. And this is all relevant to the area you're applying, what is no name somewhere is a name known elsewhere)

I found having some open source contributions was a positive for my resume. People knew I could ship something then. They could literally go online and check to see what I did.

I've done most of mine when I didn't have a job or knew I needed something to get the next job. So, it was not much different than investing time in interview prep.

Couldn't tell ya if I prefer leetcode or open source contributions. As for the last five years, I've mainly had to do leetcode every year cause no one gave much care to my contributions after a point. (leetcode is #1 in sv)

Like I said before - I graduated from a no name college and a no name company and my average turn around time from looking to having at least two reasonable offers is less than three weeks - in 20 years.

I haven’t done any side projects since 1994.

You graduated - what - 30 years ago? You presumably have more than 20 years of experience. Do you really think you're the person who needs to pad their resume out with open source contributions to make a strong resume as an IC? I'm gonna guess no.

Hiring the trendiest is also a bit of an SV thing. I don't know if you're in SV or not but if your job searching doesn't involve any leetcode prep then I presume you're not in SV. (Less than 3 weeks on leetcode prep seems crazy to get a job in SV unless you practice regularly)

I graduated 22 years ago. I did my last non work related side project as a sophomore in high school.

I will do “side projects” at work - low or no priority projects using new to me technology or voluntary to work on feature that would take me extra time because the underlying technology is new for me.

That has the advantage of getting feedback from coworkers, being able to work with a large infrastructure, and of course its “real world experience”.

I’m nowhere near SV, the last time I did anything approaching a LeetCode interview was my second job out of college and they really were doing some low level C coding so it was relevant for them.

Lastly, if I do jump through hoops, it won’t be for a job that just pays the median market salary that I could get anywhere. Now that I am moving toward working for consulting companies, yeah I will have to do the leetCode equivalent.

I literally can't code in the evening if I've been doing it all day. I have to be creative in other ways (sketching, blacksmithing, leatherwork, bookbinding, even minecraft has worked for this).

All my side projects have been done between gigs when freelancing, or while working in management roles where I can code as a creative outlet in the evenings because I haven't been coding all day.

I'm always slightly suspicious of people who claim to work a regular job coding and then put in similar hours on hobby projects. It's almost like "but if you can code in the evenings, what were you doing all day?"

This isn't a popular sentiment on HN but a lot of software jobs (even at trendy fast-moving startups) are a form of busywork. Once you get to a certain number of devs, accountability slides and it's entirely possible you'll have nothing to work on. Meetings are dominated by more senior-level devs whose work is important, and so management quotas are the only reason you're even still around.

How you react to this depends on your personality I think -- some people I know love this and are happy to sit in a corner desk and watch youtube videos for a paycheck. That won't work for me so I'll usually scratch and claw for something to do (establishing my reputation as a whiny non-team-player in the process), be given some task which often is a weird platform-specific bug that nobody else wanted, and I'll spend my time hunting that down, become emotionally drained in the process of trying to get anyone else to care about it, and then I'll spend my free time coding in order to make sure I'm growing as an engineer.

I figure this is kinda what life is like until you're a little more advanced in your career and from asking around other people at my level feel the same across many different organizations.

I think you might be right. I've been in those positions, too. And yeah, I could code in the evenings then, because I'd basically done all my actual work by about midday (and then spent 5 hours twiddling my thumbs and looking busy while wondering why I was wasting my life on this shit). But I never lasted long in those positions, I was too obviously unhappy.

It's not about denying you employment. It's about hiring someone who can ship software. If someone has publicly shipped software and you can see that, they make for a good candidate. It seems reasonable to me that people who really love writing software and do it a lot would get jobs and be successful in the industry. I wouldn't judge them on their work/life balance, some people really do enjoy programming that much.

If you can't glean that devs with 15+ years of experience on their resume know how to ship software, then maybe the real problem is your ability to evaluate talent.

I've hired tons of developers with 15+ years of experience! A lot of them have amazing OSS contributions. Some don't but all can talk in depth about projects they've delivered.

Hiring based on open source contribution isn't the only signal one can look at, it's just a very strong one (the strongest in my experience).

I'll add that not all developers with 15+ years of experience can ship software. Many have let their skills deteriorate or never pushed themselves to learn new things. It's yet another reason a strong personal portfolio is a good signal.

I am one of those with 15+ years of experience and have shipped many different projects. I've also interviewed many people with impressive resumes only to realize that resumes don't translate to performance. The ability to ship quality software has more to do with personality than it does resumes. I see nothing wrong with counting open source contributions as a big plus. I wouldn't use the lack of it as a hard filter though.

There is a huge difference between “shipping software” and doing a git push.....

I’ve actually “shipped software” that got put on production servers and people paid money for.

That's the beauty of it being published on Github. I can look at the project and see if it was just a `git push` of something meaningless or if it's actually well thought out and demonstrates ability.

That may show an ability to write software. But shipping and putting them on production servers is still different v

Shipping is different than deploying server-side code. Going from concept to execution is shipping, and it's what I look for in a candidate. Again, this has worked out very well for me. An added bonus is if you hire OSS contributors, they tend to attract more OSS contributors.

I find it strange to associate OSS contributions with 'shipping software'. I've shipped plenty of software. I've dealt with drop dead release dates, 5 nines HA requirements, production war rooms, and a product paid for and used by millions of people.

Is 'shipping software' the same when there are no angry customers who can burn up the support line demanding refunds and threatening to leave 1 star reviews on amazon?

Being able to produce a solution to a problem where one didn't exist before is "shipping". I've never regretted hiring someone who has multiple projects they've created from scratch.

I think the key is this is a differentiator, not a requirement. If you're willing to pay top $$ you can be picky and get the most passionate people.

Would a doctor, a lawyer, or yes, an architect, be denied work if they did not keep up with continuing education requirements?

Yes.

(https://www.aia.org/pages/2696-continuing-education-aia-and-...)

That's a red herring. Continuing education requirements for professionals are a joke compared to what is expected of software engineers by some people in this industry. Had I actually pursued PE licensure after I graduated, I could have fulfilled my CE requirements with 4-5 weekend seminars a year, probably paid for by my employer. I don't think a couple small weekend projects are going to satisfy the people who are expecting open source code to look at.

Not the same thing at all. Any medical group or law/architecture/accounting firm will pay for your continuing education requirements. The OP is talking about requiring extra unpaid work in your own free time. Presumably they enjoy working with single 24-year-olds with no outside interests.

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