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Comment by jonathankoren | Hacker News Reader

As a hiring manager, I never cared about side projects, or Stack Overflow or Kaggle scores. The most a side project github link would tell me if it was big or not. That’s it.

I’m not going to go through and read a bunch of random code by myself, when I can just ask a couple of questions, and get the same information quicker. They are just too many resumes to read.

Seriously, all side projects tell me is that you spend your free time coding, instead of hiking, or some other hobby.

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Going to throw a bit of shade here, but there's a lot of irony in thinking that "hiking" is some exciting hobby while denigrating people building stuff in their spare time.

It's not saying its exciting, its that its equally boring.

I don't think the parent poster is giving any judgement to how people spend their time, only qualifying how.

I don't think he is denigrating it. He probably phrased it badly, but he meant you did side projects like a hobby just as well you might have done hiking in that time.

Except that some side projects have value. The fact that you do the show useful traits- not all that you should consider hiring and not sufficient but useful. Not agreeing they have more value than hiking is wrong. I know several side projects which did have value and shown at least that their holders were interesting to hear.

I read it the same way. Hiking is a stereotypical hobby along with playing an instrument.

All hobbies are irrelevant.

I work at a company as a consultant. Devs here have been doing the same thing for 10 years. Webforms. Guess what? None of their hobbies include coding. Stuff like git is like fire to these cavemen.

My first question is what does migrating to a new system get you that the current system doesn’t? Is the new system even compatible with existing system? I ask, because you sound like you want to rewrite a stable system. Stop whining and make a business case.

The idea that you need hobbies that match your work is as dumb as expecting a funeral director to embalm cats on the weekend.

Not directly, for sure, but every decent company's screening process includes a segment roughly expressed as "tell me about something you built -- what technical challenges did you face, how did you overcome them." Sometimes, your side project is a more compelling answer than your day job. I've got some really compelling side projects haha.

I feel hiring managers enjoy talking about my side projects a lot more than about my boring day job.

What prevents someone from just BSin'g you in response to your questions? Code doesn't lie.

That’s what the coding screen is for.

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