In defense of hiring based on side projects
diff.substack.com
diff.substack.com
Personal experience of mine is; people who spend a lot of non-work time on side projects and open source bring a specific energy to their work. What they are usually not good at is turning up for work, getting their head down and diligently burning through some work. Instead they tend to be ideas people and leaders.
All organisations need a balance of personality and experience to be effective.
So get excited about Bob because he is an Open Source advocate and regular conference speaker. But also get excited about Alice because her experience is right and when she interviews she is dedicated and detail-oriented.
I will agree with the balance issue, I do think they can tunnel vision, as I'm guilty of it. On trying to create features they feel they need. WTS, I feel strategic in my cause of prioritizing what me and my users could benefit from.
2. Did you find Alice was a negative gender stereotype in the post?
I actually had the opposite impression: Bob is a free spirit/idealist who can’t focus on his day job but Alice is a practical/good employee who gets stuff done. If the roles had been reversed I think it would have been more likely to raise a flag for me. I can how someone could have the opposite interpretation, that Bob is a thought leader and Alice is a simple worker bee. It seems to depend on the reader's interpretation.
Of course that would be equally silly, because an example is just an example and there's no reason to read this sort of thing into it.
The Rorschach Test
http://bouldertherapist.com/html/humor/MentalHealthHumor/ror...
It affected my motivation to work on side projects a lot. How do other devs deal with this? I'd like to write some code for fun at home at least sometimes, but arguing with the legal department just to put it in github is definitely not something I want to do in my free time.
I see a lot of people saying "it's fine" or they have a verbal agreement. 99% of the time that work's fine. Its unlikely anyone's side projects will be "valuable"[1] enough for your company to try and assert some control. Say 0.1% of the time you have the next million dollar idea.
No, the issue people will more likely face is: The Company effectively can stifle you. They wanted you for those side projects, but how about that performance review where your manager is talking about all that "distraction" and reminding you of this clause - ownership means control don't forget, and if the own the IP then technically they can shut you down....
I hate this clause because it is effectively a company asserting its right to your private life. The same as the clause stating they can change your working hours at any time for any reason (also negotiate this one to something reasonable; to something like 30 days written notice with justification).
Trendy companies spend a lot of time talking about work-life balance and such like then shove "standard" clauses like this into contracts...
1. I use the term valuable lightly, because everyone's work is valuable!
Clearly you haven't seen my code :)
Most people don't care, because the intersection of their personal projects and anything related to the business they work for is basically non-existent (your average corp won't care about your cool database of Marvel comics). That plus the difficulty in enforcement and the fact that European copyright laws tend to protect individuals (in the UK, for example, as long as you assert copyright you get moral rights that cannot be reassigned and are harder to waive), usually result in people not caring too much about that clause.
Smart employers will just use non-compete clauses to simply let you free to do what you want as long as it's not in their area of business. I argued for this with my current employer at hiring time and they had no big qualms with making a slight change to allow for that.
This said, if your personal and professional projects do in fact overlap significantly, then you should raise the issue with your employer during the hiring process, because that's much more of a minefield.
What country is this? Here in France, your employer may only complain if they can argue that your activity causes them harm. Side projects, even when benefiting from your work experience, should, as far as I know, be okay.
[0]: Australian site, but relevant: https://www.business.qld.gov.au/running-business/protecting-....
The "whether or not during working hours/using company's equipment" part just covers the case where you are working late, etc. If your contract contains the phrase "in the course of your employment", then you can still work on a hobby project and it remains yours, because you didn't work on the hobby project "in the course of your employment" (you were not asked to build the hobby project)
A lot of labour law is derived from "Master and Servant" Laws.
For example If you are an semipro musician and you wrote your countries Eurovision entry they would have no claim on that.
He's not big on side projects so he never gave it much thought, but I really wonder how enforceable this would be in court.
In France, from what I understand, there's a special court for employment issues. I'm not sure if you need a lawyer for those, but it's supposed to be easy to take your employer to this court.
However, even so, except in case of something pretty extreme, I'd prefer not having to deal with that. But then I guess this could be used a signal that the company is into playing games and maybe look elsewhere. Especially when they're reassuring orally but wouldn't put any change in writing.
For example, I used to work at a pizza place. What's to stop me from taking what I learned there and starting a competitor?
I also have a friend who worked at a carpenter's shop. What's to stop him from doing the same there?
I had the clause reversed to explicitly give me ownership of personal projects and ideas.
Would you care if the company owned the copyright? That's an interesting way around it. I was able to explore some very cool projects at a previous company simply because I enjoyed the job and I had a lot of respect for the business. I would rather they had the IP and could actually do something useful with it.
Other ways around it - STEM and outreach, summer-of-code type things? Most companies are happy for employees to do that kind of work. Lots of technical employees write books as well.
Else you go the legal route and hope that your project is orthogonal enough that you can get it approved. Or you declare it all on your IP declaration prior to starting, and accept you might need to wait until you leave to start working on it.
I guess you could call it portfolio building, but I personally don't see my GH as portfolio.
If this is purely within the context of job applications - I would ask, does it actually matter? Any sane hiring manager will understand the constraints that you're under with your current employer. At the end of the day if they refuse to look at your application because you don't have repositories on GitHub (and they don't appeal to reason), then there isn't anything you can do about it. Job requirements are usually flexible and you'll probably find that a reputable company on your CV, a solid cover letter and references goes a long way. Usually you can persuade your way around things like not having an active Github profile.
Within the context of doing projects for their own sake (i.e. fun and learning), having this restriction is a trade-off of working at a large organisation. I suggested a number of ways which you could explore that scratches both itches.
I declined to apply, partly because of this side project issue. My side projects don't even get users. I just can't bear to be forbidden from doing something I enjoy (writing code), just because I also do that same thing I enjoy for someone else several hours a day.
To me, it seems like an overly attached girlfriend/boyfriend. The lack of trust just puts a damper on the relationship.
Worst case I've had a potential employer walk away from interviewing after I mentioned my side projects.
From that point I think about it as a bias. Nowadays I try to assess if the candidates with no public activity on GH and no side projects have the passion and interest I look for, but can't take it further outside of work due to their specific circumstances.
I understand not exclusively focusing on people who work on their own to the exclusion of everyone else, but I definitely don't understand this modern push to ignore it as a signal completely. People who don't work side projects are going to need more years of experience to have the same level of practice as those who do.
And frankly, I've been involved in a lot of hiring, and I've yet to see these people who A) don't work on side projects, but B) are actually skilled in their jobs. We give them interviews and it becomes clear they hid in large, ossified, megacorporate teams. They know the one way to do things that is the one template of work they've ever been hired to do, because that is the only experience they have.
If that's your environment, I guess you can have them. I don't have any space for that.
Side projects usually don't have the oversight where you learn and improve so much as when you work in a team. Is like learning to play football by yourself by kicking a ball against your house wall everyday, or play in a team with other players and a coach. You can kick the ball for 8 hours against the wall, but I guarantee it that 1 hour a week in a team setting you will improve much more.
I can't believe I have to say this. This is obvious. Every coach knows this.
It's not an exclusive-OR problem.
Boxing for example (sport I did and helped coaching), unless you are top of your field, isn't recommended to do a lot of 'at home' training as you develop bad habits without supervision (dropping the defense, telegraphing your punch a bit) as you don't have the feedback. Thes mistakes have to be then 'corrected'
Boxing isn’t a good example because it’s a combat sport which means there is far more training than competing.
When I played football the ratio was close to 1:1 - games played to hours trained and something like 150-200:1 for when I was boxing.
What’s the likelihood that someone takes their same 10-hour drudgery cycle and doubles down on it by doing the exact same thing in their side project and why does that likelihood round to zero?
If you have an interview process that doesn’t allow you to discern my skillset and I am able to clearly demonstrate my skills without doing a side project, that says a lot about your interview process.
It amazes me when I see companies that aren’t paying at the level of big tech think their company is a special snowflake. I am [1] an average journeyman enterprise developer/architect and sometimes team lead. Pre-Covid, I could just make a few phone calls to my network and have a couple of job offers within a couple of weeks. This is true for most experienced developers who have kept their skills in sync with the market and live in any major city in the US - outside of the west coast.
I have spent my entire 25 year career working at small companies except for my brief stint at a large non tech company 8 years ago and my current job at Big Tech.
It's a good signal of interest and engagement, but it's far from the only one.
Yes. In many plausible scenarios hiring based on side projects will discriminate against people who don't have much free time: people with responsibilities to look after young children or otherwise care for family, people who never had a job that pays enough to only work 40 hour weeks & who have to work multiple low paid jobs, etc.
Maybe that's the entire purpose. You don't want to hire people with small kids, because they won't do much of an overtime. But asking people at an interview whether they have kids, and firing them after they say yes, that's legally dangerous. So instead you ask them if they spend a lot of time doing their hobbies, and fire them if they say no. Perfectly legal.
More cynically, if this becomes the norm, even the people who don't enjoy programming in their free time will start coding their "hobby" projects for github, just to be able to get a job. Is that a bad thing (for the employer)? No, that's actually a good thing: it demonstrates willingness to spend your free time doing what the employer requires of you, even before they start paying you. Now that's a model employee!
(The converse is true, too. If you're been coding at work all day but pursuing your passion for coffee at night, maybe you'll make a great barista or roaster! Go for it!)
But.
Holding a demanding engineering job and doing a lot of engineering on the side are nearly mutually exclusive.
I've done a big side project or two, but only when I was basically underemployed at my day job. Slumming it, really.
I've had other jobs where it took everything I had just to keep up with the demands of the job and keep up with my talented coworkers. I sure didn't have any engineering juice left over in me at the end of the day.
Especially not if I wanted to maintain healthy relationships with other human beings and my family. There are only so many hours in a week.
So, if you demand your hires spent time outside of work on side projects? You're going to have a strong bias that favors people who (a) have been slacking or underemployed (b) are not really into the whole "human relationships" thing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with living one's life that way, but you are certainly excluding a lot of healthy and talented people if you essentially insist upon only hiring from that group.
I don't see how hiring based on side projects is unfair in any way. Ignoring people's side projects is essentially a punishment for those who do invest a lot of time in them. It's not like the side project built itself. We should not punish people by ignoring their surplus efforts.
There are two ways to go about it:
1. Reward people for building real stuff and improving their skills in an area which is relevant to the position that they're applying for.
2. Reward people for being good at taking whiteboard tests, social scheming, rehearsing job interviews and solving pointless abstract puzzles that have nothing to do with the position that they're applying for.
I can't imagine how anyone could justify #2 as being the better option. It's disturbing that this article even needs to be written. Do people actually think that the second option is even viable?
Now I understand why there are such huge social problems today. There is an army of type 1 people who were badly hurt and who are still struggling and now they're smarter and more determined than ever to make things right.
But it's an entirely different thing to say "side projects have no correlation to job skill". Which is literally what a lot of people in the article's referenced tweet are saying, and even what a few people here are saying.
The reality is, most of the resumes you're going to get for any particular job posting are going to be garbage. Poor performers are over-represented in the open job market, both because they stay in the job market a lot longer (can't stay very long at one place) and because they need to apply to lots of places in the hopes of playing the numbers.
The resume is completely broken. But it's all we get from "open" job positions. If the resume is all I have to go on, most of the ones I get I have to throw away because they have nearly zero match for the posted position. Of the few that are left, the ones that somehow show they aren't a hot-potato are going to the top of the stack.
If all you have is enterprise Java experience and you're applying to my VR project in C#, and you have nothing to show, not even side projects, that you have any experience writing C# or game code, I'm not going to even give you a call. And that sort of thing is the majority of resumes you'll receive.
If you want a particular job, you need to be able to show some kind of ability to do it. If that's your actual, professional experience, that's the best. But if you're trying to change industries, you gotta have something that correlates. So what is it going to be, if it isn't a side project?
The better way of evaluating candidates is to start from referrals, but that has its own issues of gatekeeping, either conscious or unconscious.
If we're talking about open job listings, getting nothing but a cover letter and a resume (and you're lucky to even get a cover letter), how else are you supposed to do it? You can't interview everyone. There are people who will be a complete waste of time.
I'm not a fan of whiteboard interview nonsense either. Probably for all the same reasons as you. Enough said there.
I also really life to see folks' side projects. I think they are a good substitute for work experience - if somebody doesn't have relevant professional experience in a field, but they've been doing it in their own time, that's good & impressive and should be rewarded. I've been hired myself partly on the strength of a large side project I did.
However, the linked article is about essentially demanding that hires have side projects, as a demonstration of their passion.
Rejecting folks on the basis of a lack of side projects is going to be at least as disastrous (in terms of throwing away people who'd be great at the job) as rejecting candidates who flunk a whiteboard test or silly logic problem... and for some of the same reasons. Specifically, neither of those things is necessarily similar to the thing you're actually hiring them to do.
There is an inverse correlation between "time a person has for side projects" and "the demands of their day job." The folks with the most time for side projects are the folks who are either underemployed or unemployed, or don't really do the whole "friends and family" thing outside of working hours.
Also -- and keep in mind I'm saying this as a big fan of side projects and following one's passions -- the act of following one's passion in one's spare time is profoundly different from getting shit done at a 9-to-5. The purpose of a day job is directly or indirectly make money for one's employer. Often that means doing shit one does not want to do. It is a grind, even in "cool" jobs that overlap with one's passions to a large degree.
In short, seems to me the gulf between "following your passions" and "actually getting shit done for your employer" is about as big as the gulf between "passing a whiteboard exam" and "actually getting shit done for your employer."
*I would hire somebody who would have a really passionate, tricky hobby before I hired somebody who had a PhD in the subject. Hobbies are more important in today’s world than degrees.*> in the early days [of rocketry], everyone was a hobbyist
The more your company resembles "the early days of rocketry" the more it might make sense to select for hobbyist energy, and substantive side projects are a good signal of that.
But: Not all companies resemble or need to resemble the early days of rocketry. They ought to design their own filters based on their needs. Read some Hayek. A monoculture in hiring is undesirable and completely removing bias across all possible dimensions is impossible.
For all the talk of "diversity" (read: heterogeneity) in tech, there seems to be a strong cultural bias among engineers toward uniformity and cargo-culting (e.g. the doctrinaire obsession with best practices over first-principles thinking you see in some corners) and little appetite for actual heterogeneity.
The inefficiencies emerge when every tiny startup mimics FAANG or every mid-sized company mimics tiny startups, etc.
If this made the difference between being hired by a company or not, this wouldn’t be the company I would choose to work for. I could only imagine the 24/7, always-on culture they’d have.
Do we believe that the outcomes will be equal over 100s of such trials? If we believe the outcomes will be different, why should we not consider that among other signals we get in interviewing?
Personally I’d bet on the socializer over the person putting in tons of extra hours in isolation anyday.
The Chinese weightlifting team (probably the most insanely competitive and selective team in the sport, and not a culture known for liking laziness), trains a total of 4-5 hours daily, at most. And the vast majority of that training is in sub-maximal loads and technical training that does not require tremendous efforts, just persistence.
They spend most of their time resting (weightlifters sleep between 10-12 hours daily) and eating, and not doing much related to weightlifting in between, saving their energy for the effective training under the supervision of experts, when it really matters.
This is a common theme among athletes and a lot of the highest performers in the world.
> trains a total of 4-5 hours daily, at most
You are making the parents point for them.
The average software developer would get closer to 2-3 hours a week of their work time dedicated to improving their skills.
Practice:Performance is highly skewed towards performance for work.
Athletes spend 99% of their time training. Software engineers in very competitive roles might spend 6 hours a day coding if all things go well. I have never seen a coding role where you don't spend substantial time reading docs, doing code reviews, or performing various tasks that comprise of similar practice.
Practice and performance are not the same thing. The mindset is entirely different.
Imagine a world where devs are told by their managers to stop working on a task when it’s clear that the task is not improving their skills.
It doesn’t happen because as a software dev every day is game day.
Instead they will get asked to solve the same kind of problem umpteenth times.
I’ve had to leave top tech companies just to get an opportunity to improve.
...
> And since the tweet mentioned rockets, it would be wrong to ignore one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jack Parsons, who helped invent modern rocketry, founded a cult, got expelled from Caltech for a bit of both, and died from a rocket explosion at his home lab.
> Hedge funds do this, too. At a typical stock-picking hedge fund, the decisive interview questions are about what stocks you like and which ones you hate. Some anecdotes:
> Lars Kroijer, a young MBA, scored an interview with a very good hedge fund in the 90s. He describes the interview in his memoir. The manager asked him for stock picks. He said the market was inefficient, so the manager asked him to leave. Ouch! Lars straightened himself out and went on to run a successful fund, then retired at the right time. At another fund I’ve heard about, the head of research liked to poll the interns and ask them if they thought the market was efficient. If the answer was yes, he said, they were fired effective immediately. Fortunately, in an efficient market it should be effortless to get an equally attractive job elsewhere. I’ve bombed at least one interview by not having any good trading pitches handy. (In fairness to me, it was a fund using a strategy I hadn’t ever worked on. In fairness to them, I knew this.)
...
> As many people point out, the norm in favor of side projects is unfair to anyone with limited free time. What they don’t add is that this is a progressive tax: there’s a positive correlation between educational attainment and hours worked per week, as well as between income and hours worked per week. This was not always the case; “The idle rich” used to be a statistically accurate observation, but now the rich work longer hours and have less leisure time than average. But the average American watches four and a half hours of TV per day. If your work happens to be fun, you can devote that leisure time to side projects. If your work is boring, you probably shouldn’t complain that people who like their craft more than you and devote more effort to it are rewarded.
> (As a friend put it a few years ago, when such pop culture references were relevant, “If you know what a ‘Khaleesi’ is, you had time for side projects.”)
I know I have a LOT more time for 'fun stuff' now my son is grown.
Every person I know who has kids and finds time for their projects are bringing their kids with them to meetups, getting the kids interested, and not spending time on consumptive pursuits.
Spending time with your kids, being a good, engaged parent, has little to do with working on side projects.
Edit: I just saw in the post below you do, will leave it here anywhere
Between 1 hour in the morning getting them ready for school, commute, work 8/9 hours, commute back and pick him from school/grandparents, cook dinner, play with them a bit, put them in bed, most people don't have energy to so a side project and just need some time to relax in front of tv or social media.
If you want to be a good parent, it is tiresome and exhausting.
And I want employees who have the fortitude to do the right thing rather than the easy thing.
Edit: I want to also note, I don't just dump the kids on my wife. She has her own side projects she does. She writes sci-fi novels.
I don't watch tv/play video games, but also don't do side projects. Even if I wanted I couldn't stand staring at a monitor at 10 in the evening to write code. (but to be fair, I also value other things in my life more than my job/money, so I probably 'waste' my time on other things, but I still don't agree with side project hiring. I did a lot of hiring, and I prefer employees that have a balanced life and way of living)
(ps: if your hobby is to write code at night, all power to you, but I don't think you should discriminate against people that prefer to watch a show, go surfing or to the gym or just have a beer with friends. A side project doesn't mean anything in terms of your performance at work to be honest)
That's as ridiculous as only hiring people who work side projects.
And this way you get employees burning out I’m a few years. But you know, you can suck that up too.
Some of the best coders I've worked with are people that totally unplug off the clock, but I wouldn't try to generalize that...
I just hired a person at work where part of her resume that stood out to me was that she knits and had designed and sells a knitting loom that a person can use one-handed, after she broke her wrist some years ago. She had kids and volunteers at her local fire department, too.
I think many people are more constrained by their energy than by literally not having time. And this isn't something that's always under person's control - different people need different amount of sleep, have different quality of sleep, different mental endurance, might have various mental and physical health issues (not even necessarily perceiving themselves as unwell in any way - just enough that they can't muster energy to do that hour of coding that they would like to do each day).
I love my boy to death, but there hasn't been anyone, from family members to his teachers that has said he was 'easy'. He is polite and nice, but sucks your energy with all the 'whys?' and curiosity. Is amazing to read deep space science books to your 5 year old, is exhausting to try and find answers for 3 hours for every little question he has (one afternoon, we went from talking about atoms in rocks/minerals and ended up with questions about the Big Bang, it is amazing, but it tiresome as hell)
This is something that always perplexed me. I don't doubt it's true, but could somebody show me a schedule where one puts so much television in the context of an adult, independent, life?
I have barely 3 hours free every workday, and I need to be extremely well organized and lean, in addition to working (full time) from home.
Without more information on the methodology, it might very well not be true in a sense that they just sit and watch TV. Those four and a half hours could be including the time people do stuff around the house while the TV is on.
If anyone has more information about how this is commonly measured please share.
People watch a lot of TV, it's the default entertainment. I recently (before lockdown) casually asked a colleague, someone I like and admire in their professional life, "Hey, what do you like to do when you're not at work?" After looking mildly anguished for a few moments, he eventually allowed that he enjoys watching the Formula 1 races. (i.e. a few hours at weekends, not every weekend) He was noticeably cool with me since - I'm worried the question, or rather the realisation that he couldn't answer it, offended him. I can't prove my colleague has the TV on for hours a day, but I'm pretty certain he does. If he was reading novels or doing crosswords or walking the dog, it would be a hobby. Putting the TV on until you're sleepy isn't.
Any stay-at-home parents may well have the TV on 12+ hours a day - not necessarily just watching it, but even just listening to it while doing the laundry, vacuuming the house, etc. I know my mom did when I was in school.
Modern-day software seems to take the form of mostly being fairly repetitive (CRUD, front-end framework, RDBMS, AMQ, in-memory cache, object modeling, testing, CI/CD, etc) and only quite rarely involving unique knowledge specific to the task at hand. Once you've dealt with the fundamentals enough times, there are rapidly diminishing marginal returns to hours spent coding, for most practical software engineering roles.
At that point, a person's time would be much better spent developing other tangential faculties like communication, project management, and critical thinking or simply on personal wellbeing (happy workers are more productive workers).
So, in my opinion, unless you're trying to do something quite innovative, you're making a mistake by selecting for coders who burn the candle at both ends. You should instead select for smart people who can get the job done well without having to spend an excessive amount of time on side projects and who optimize their lives outside of work in a way that leaves them happy and energized when they come to work.
I love what I do but doing it 40 hours a week is enough. I have side projects - doing up the house, cooking, exploring the world, spending lots of time with friends and family etc. I occasionally have a home tech project like building a security cam system or something, but it's not that much and not that often.
In my experience the kinds of 'obsessives' he's talking about in this post are not only not the best at what they do, they're often pretty weird people too.
Considering side projects came about when people like me got our turn at being hiring managers. When we were first entering the industry, we got told explicitly that our side projects didn't matter, that the only experience that mattered was professional experience. We could prove we could do the job and we still were being told we would not be considered for the job. We started considering side projects specifically to be more equitable in hiring.
I grew up in a rural town. I went to a local, state college. I graduated in the top of my class in Computer Science and I still couldn't get a job in programming out of college. I didn't have a dad at Microsoft to get me a prestigious internship. I didn't have a prestigious school behind my name and our school "only" did Java and the local companies "only" did .NET. I had been programming in .NET for 2 years by that point, but it wasn't going to be considered because it wasn't professional experience.
The only job I could get was entry-level QA. You didn't even need a degree to get the job. I had to beg to get commit access to the repo to prove I could fix the bugs that I identified. That was the only way I was able to get into programming back then.
I spent 10 years doing web and database development at consulting companies. I hated it. Consulting might be fine for some, but I can't stand it. I tried for years to get out of it, only to be told that my experience in consulting didn't matter, I had never worked in product development and it was supposedly "soooo different" that nobody could take a chance on me. The only way I was able to get out of it was... to start a side project. I built a VR project that got me a small amount of internet fame. Now, 5 years later, with 15 years of professional programming experience, and 20 years of side-project experience, I'm the head of VR at a company.
When you say that side projects shouldn't be a consideration, you're not asking for more people to get interviews. You're asking for fewer. The only people who are going to get interviews in that scenario are folks who went to prestigious schools. All the people drawing up barista-cum-coding-bootcamp-grads-who-don't-have-the-time-to-feed-themselves-and-work-side-projects-at-the-same-time archetypes: those people aren't going to get interviews. The only chance they have is to dig deep, build a portfolio, and hope they run into a company that is progressive enough to look past the lack of credentials.
>I don’t mean to pick on this person; there’s no reason to be familiar with the history of the US aerospace and rocketry industry (unless, of course, you’re going to make an argument that hinges on claims about the industry).
Failing to grasp the broadly satirical nature of copypasta like this, then doubling down on an i-know-more-than-you literal interpretation of the text, is not a situation in which the author should be concerned that readers will worry the other guy is getting roasted too hard.
>Barons of the Sky is a nice history of the early days of the aerospace industry, and it shows that in the early days, everyone was a hobbyist.
Acutely pursued hobbies with upside potential become professions! I am shocked. This is my shocked face. :o
>At another fund I’ve heard about, the head of research liked to poll the interns and ask them if they thought the market was efficient. If the answer was yes, he said, they were fired effective immediately.
This example is just an nth-hand anecdote about an empirically incorrect manager on a workplace power trip. Less shark, more dipshit. Parroting the desired response to some manager's arbitrary psychodrama isn't relevant to making money on money for a living. Does the manager need a date to prom, too?
>(As a friend put it a few years ago, when such pop culture references were relevant, “If you know what a ‘Khaleesi’ is, you had time for side projects.”)
Consider the following: humans experience the same number of hours per day.
If you know what a ‘number’ is, you have time to appease me. Reexamine your life to spend more of it appeasing me.
It's a good argument, because humans experience the same number of hours per day. Not enough of them are spent appeasing me!
>In a field with a low marginal cost of scaling results and tournament-like economics (for example: investing, software, writing, some kinds of hardware), there’s a moral component as well. The better you think you are, the more it’s your responsibility to work extra hard, since the results will be distributed so widely.
Just try to say "there is a moral component to scaling IoT toasters" with a straight face among people you respect.
Note: The author reads HN[1] and likely crafted this blurb as bait. He should come away from this thread more insulted by the inanity of his own writing than grateful for the attention.
Promotion of workified mediocrity like the kind on display here is unnecessary in an era that has already caricatured this worldview past the point of no return with such literary works as the Student Athlete copypasta[2]. You do not need to tamper with your inner life in the vague hope that an interviewer, somewhere down the line, will grade you on your hobbies like all code is a take-home test regardless of its genesis.
Stagnant real wages in the author's home country (US) further reduce the blogpost's relevance. As do OECD data[3][4] showing no positive correlation between average hours worked and stereotypical innovation rate at the country-level.
[1]: https://twitter.com/ByrneHobart/status/1278782161559138304
[2]: https://files.catbox.moe/2srmab.png