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Comment by synnik | Hacker News Reader

It is always dangerous to assume what answers are desired by an interviewer. Interviews are not just to get the job - it is to determine whether or not you would even want the job in the first place.

So in this particular case, I would answer something about how I have taught my kids multiple languages, taught them kung fu, helped them to develop their own hobbies and become their own people, while at the same time working with local non-profits on renewable energy technologies.

If they do not like that answer and would have preferred a list of open source/weekend projects, it is probably not a place I would have fit in anyway.

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A question : are you in the Computer Science field?

While I think that the way you would answer may work beautifully in other fields, we also have to think about the employer's best interest and the field we're talking about here.

Employer's best interest, across most if not all fields, is primarily to hire people that have skills that will be useful in creating advantage of the company as a whole. In the case of Computer Science field, then, having an employee that answers that particular interview question with how he/she has contributed to open source and/or created side projects will have higher probability to create more value for the company than an employee that answers with how he/she is a great parent or how he/she's working in a non-profit of unrelated field.

Most people writing here are not generally practicing computer science, but rather focusing on software development. For me, good communication skills, an ability to understand project requirements and a focused and responsible attitude are often worth more in an employee than an exhaustive knowledge of design patterns.

I am a software developer in the energy industry. So whether or not that is Computer Science is up for debate. I do need to have my skills up on the technology in use, and I most definitely need to have a solid understanding of technology. But I do not need to know the latest and greatest flavors of it.

And as the grandparent post mentioned, he would probably not be interested in working at companies that focused so much on what their employees did in their free time.

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