
What have you developed in your spare time? - matan_a
http://n0tw0rthy.wordpress.com/2011/06/15/what-have-you-developed-in-your-spare-time/
======
mrcharles
I take issue with this article because it would come across to me as a red
flag about work-life balance. That an employer would _expect_ you to be doing
something programming related in your spare time comes across as a bit self-
serving.

Instead, I would ask "What would you like to develop in your spare time, if
you had any?" That way they can answer the same as his question if they are
working on stuff, but can still show interest in programming otherwise.

Frankly, yeah, it can be hard to stay on top of things, and companies that
don't foster learning and expect you to do it all on your own time don't help.

~~~
trustfundbaby
I take issue with this article because it would come across to me as a red
flag about work-life balance. That an employer would expect you to be doing
something programming related in your spare time comes across as a bit self-
serving.

\---------------

I think you're reading too much into it ... I've been doing this for 7 years
(not that long) and _without fail_ all the really good developers I've ever
known or met have built something in their spare time ... just for kicks, a
webserver, a firefox addon, some game, a ruby gem, PHP script, a macro for
their favorite editor, some electronic gizmo ... something.

Not all developers do it, but the very best do ... so its not a disqualifying
question, but it sure does allow you zero in on the very best developers
rather easily.

As an aside ... you should always be looking at code, when you're hiring
developers. If they can't give you any examples, then make them write
something ... I'm continually shocked by how many companies make $70+k
investments in people they've never seen in action.

~~~
irahul
I know some very good developers who didn't do anything in their spare time.
One of them was co-inventor of gif format, another was a core contributor to
cygwin gdb and so on. But that was all before their day job. When they started
their day jobs, that's all they did.

Would you discard them as "not so good" because they don't do anything in
their spare time and they concentrate on task on hand? Some people have more
demanding jobs and/or prefer to work on their day job in their spare time -
not because someone is putting a gun on their head, but because they like
doing what they do.

Why would they bother with side projects when they already have real life
projects? Impressing the interviewer isn't on their agenda and all other
aspects viz. gratification, joy of creation are the same.

~~~
trustfundbaby
One of them was co-inventor of gif format, another was a cygwin to contributor
to cygwin gdb and so on. But that was all before their day job.

Would you discard them as "not so good" because they don't do anything in
their spare time?

\-----------------------------------

No, because their prior accomplishments speak for themselves.

You need to stop looking at it as some yardstick to get over and understand
that it is simply an informal measure of a developer's passion and drive, just
because you don't do it doesn't mean "you suck. NO HIRE!"

~~~
irahul
> No, because their prior accomplishments speak for themselves.

I just quoted examples where their prior accomplishments was public. There
were many whose prior accomplishments are not public and were for their
employers.

> simply an informal measure of a developer's passion and drive.

I don't have a problem with using side projects as informal projects as
informal measure of passion. I have a problem with your assertion that all
good developers have side projects. I have worked with quite a few and most of
them didn't.

~~~
trustfundbaby
what I said was

"all the really good developers _I've ever known or met_ have built something
in their spare time"

you took that to mean that I saying that ALL good developers have side
projects ... I'm not stating that as an empirical fact, and if you read the
comments I've left its clear that I understand that.

------
raganwald
It's easy to point out that this question will exclude some false negatives,
good people that don't have side projects. I rarely hear anyone worried that
it will produce false positives, crappy people that have a github profile
bursting with interesting work.

But here's the thing: If you think that this is a bad question to ask in an
interview, I have a challenge for you: Describe a repeatable, objective
process for interviewing developers. No hand-waving "I talk to them and decide
if they're smart." Be specific: What questions do you ask? What constitutes a
HIRE, what constitutes a NO HIRE?

If you actually try to make a repeatable, objective process, you realize that
there is no fair interview question. It's impossible to come up with a set of
criteria that can't either be (a) gamed by false positives, or (b) overlooks
good people as false negatives.

For example, "Successful experience in a similar position" is an excellent
criterium. But we all know it overlooks false negatives, people who have done
good work in dissimilar positions but will adapt and thrive in this one.

In the end, we must either 'fess up and admit that we make subjective
decisions, or set our jaw and accept that some false negatives are a necessary
and acceptable cost of trying to standardize our hiring process.

(That doesn't mean we can't _minimize_ the number of false negatives. One way
to do that is to ask many questions and to incorporate all of the answers into
your decision. If you're very conservative, you take any negative result as a
NO HIRE, which leads to having more false negatives but a vanishingly small
probability of a false positive. But you can go the other way and allow for
some of the answers to be negative, which will create a vanishingly small
possibility of a false negative overall but allow some acceptably small
probability of a false positive.)

~~~
kenjackson
_I rarely hear anyone worried that it will produce false positives, crappy
people that have a github profile bursting with interesting work._

Actually I do worry about that, and have seen it -- and maybe not surprisingly
could have predicted it.

The symptoms are often a very active set of open source projects, often a
maintainer, lack of enthusiasm about virtually anything they did in their day
job.

My theory is their day job at some point wasn't fulfilling and they moved to
the side projects to compensate. But by the time they joined us, their side
project consumed them. There's nothing worse than someone being consistently
late or delivering poor quality, and looking and seeing they did 200 commits,
some very non-trivial, to their side projects last week. As I said to one
during the exit interview -- you should consider making the "side project"
your day job, because that's your passion. Unfortunately it wasn't working
here.

Given a choice between someone who was enthusiastic about their day job, and
has some good end results from it, and having no side projects, and one who
has a lot of side proejects, but no enthusiasm or anything of interest to say
about his last job -- I'll take the person with no side projects.

~~~
raganwald
I think about it as well, which is why I follow the strategy outlined in the
last paragraph: Asking multiple questions and integrating the responses. Such
a strategy embraces the candidates who embrace side projects because they have
boundless enthusiasm within and outside of their job, candidates who have
enthusiasm for their job but are busy BASE jumping in their spare time, and so
forth.

I seriously doubt the author or anybody else espouses any single criterion as
the only determinant in hiring. This happens to be the author's favorite
question, just as my favorite happens to be about Monopoly.

p.s. FWIW, the question along these lines that I like to ask is for the
candidate to describe projects that they are most proud of and have learnt the
most from (two separate answers are certainly applicable, although sometimes
it's the same one). Some candidates describe a work project, some a side
project.

What I have discovered in my small, anecdotal experience is that people with
side projects always have an answer to this question, while candidates without
side projects sometimes have trouble explaining what they're most proud of and
why. But the fact that some people without side projects have trouble
articulating their pride does not suggest to me that a person who is
justifiably proud of a work accomplishment is _neccessarily_ a NO HIRE. I
suspect we agree on this.

------
agentultra
My passion for programming ebbs and flows. For months at a time I may work all
day on one thing and come home and hack on an idea I had for serializing
continuations. At other times I will instead focus on art, music, or just
having fun.

However, everyone is different. I think having written and shared at least a
small utility or library is a good indicator to me, I wouldn't discount
someone because they had not written programs or libraries in their spare
time. Especially if they come recommended and have a good work history.

I find all too often that interviews are just about impressing the
interviewer. Everyone has their own idea of what makes a good programmer. When
they sit across the table from a candidate I think many interviewers are
looking for people that fit that mould.

 _edit: glaring spelling error_

------
scott_s
There is an implicit assumption here: that your day-to-day work does not
consume all of your programming cycles. As a graduate student this was true,
and now as a researcher in industry it is still true. The most interesting
thing I'm working on now, the thing that is most likely to make the biggest
impact _is my work_.

~~~
MrScruff
I think this 'spare time' thing seems to come up a lot with people who for
whatever reason, aren't getting enough out of their regular job to satisfy
them intellectually.

When I think about programming outside of work it tends to be about the work
project I'm consumed by at the time. The only time this doesn't happen is when
I'm working on something that doesn't motivate me.

------
nick_urban
I see this sort of advice a lot, and frankly, it bothers me. There's nothing
wrong with doing programming projects in your spare time, but it's hardly the
most impressive thing you can do.

For a variety of reasons, there are many one-dimensional programmers out there
-- people who seem to be only interested in computers and oblivious to
everything else. Come on people, the world is wide. Programming is not the
best way to become an enterprising, dynamic individual. Unless your company is
anti-risk and boring, don't you want to hire people who are different from
you? People who have taken crazy trips around the world and learned skills
that provide lateral insights rather than _just_ what you get out of sitting
at a computer writing code and reading Hacker News?

If someone could provide evidence of doing something daring, that would show
more initiative to me than a GitHub project.

------
jp007
I enjoy my side projects, but to be honest, I work with people who are better
engineers than me who never do engineering projects in their free time. I
think it's an interesting question, but not as valuable as the author
suggests.

------
BadassFractal
I truly dislike this question. If you enjoy reading, traveling, playing
musical instruments, learning new hobbies, spending time with loved ones and
so on, you will likely not have time to program another 2-3 hours a day after
an already long day at work as a software engineer (including the long hours
that come with the job).

Basically the question can be translated to: "Is programming the only thing
you care about in life, if so we're more likely to hire you because we need a
machine rather than a human being". As an employer, I can probably see that
being a better bang for your buck. In fact if you could have a codemonkey work
12 hours a day without burning out for years for the same pay as a guy who
works 8 hour days, would you really turn that guy down?

------
rokhayakebe
My friend just got a job at Intel. During his interview, he tells me, they
were more interested in his side projects then what he did at his previous
job.

~~~
ivanbernat
Same here (though not Intel), recently most people I've worked for hired me
because of my side projects.

~~~
count
Nobody works on a side project for a paycheck (in general). They do it because
they love it and are interested by it. If you can get someone who's
loves/interests align with what you want them to work on, you stand a decent
chance of making them happier while giving you a better output - it makes
plenty of sense.

------
sydlawrence
Personally I believe often it is the only time you can truly learn. Often you
are being paid to do a job, and in my experience (agency work) that job has
been the same thing day in, day out, rarely properly learning new cool stuff
to play with.

I wrote an article on this recently.

What’s the most important thing to know as a developer?
<http://sydl.me/1thingtoknow>

I want to keep learning new stuff... the only way to learn is by playing with
it. So I create stupid little sites quite often <http://instac.at>
<http://isitherapture.com> <http://obamasmessagetoamerica.com>

The list goes on...

------
raarky
I love building stuff at home. It lets you test out all these new technologies
i keep hearing about on HN :P

I built <http://www.snowboardfinder.com> a little while ago using ASP.Net MVC.
Now i'm using it to learn more about mongodb and even creating a duplicate
version in django just because I love python

coding should be fun and putting your mind to a personal project lets you
explore

------
michaelcampbell
My brain. My family.

------
dstein
In my spare time I let my subconsciousness work through the problems that my
conscious-self couldn't figure out. I find music, entertainment, social
activities, and natural surroundings the best way to enable this process.

------
dsmith_hacker
I think there is a difference between hiring students and hiring
professionals. From my experience (currently in school), my peers that have
side projects (including myself) enjoy programming for the challenges and
would be, IMHO, better employees. The students that don't have side projects
tend to be in school to JUST GET A JOB. They don't experiment with code and
generally don't have a passion for it.

In the end, I think the author is correct when it comes to students (however,
the author doesn't address the difference between students and pros)... Maybe
not such a good idea for the in-the-field professional.

~~~
dsmith_hacker
Not a valid opinion? Isn't there a difference between hiring a newly-graduated
student vs an experienced programmer?

~~~
brlewis
Perfectly valid opinion and interesting to read. HN downvoting has become very
random.

------
vain
Some of them are here <http://twitterex.com> <http://reduce.li>
<http://twitexplode.com>

And am building a facebook application: <http://namesucker.com>

One pattern in all these, I lose interest and they fizzle out. So, if i could
pose a question here, how do you keep yourself motivated?

~~~
wisty
Do you have customers? Co-developers? Or are you just working on your own?

Are you struggling to get traction? If so, use analytics (AB testing?) to
figure out how to get more customers.

If you are just setting stuff up to satisfy your own curiosity (be honest),
then it's quite rational to lose interest once the problem is solved.

~~~
vain
i start off with enthusiasm and lose it at some point. For atleast one of the
projects, I do think something worthwhile can come of it, that's
twitterex.com. i am not sure how to go about doing AB testing on a simple site
like that

------
capdiz
Its more liking asking a football player what he does in his spare time. I
wouldnt expect him to say i play football. Its his passion and its only right
he gets paid for it. Since i already have fun doing it, i would consider going
out for a bottle of beer something i do in my spare time. The contribution to
open soure answer shows more less of a passion for what one does. More of need
to see continuity in ones field.

------
dvfer
I don't what else to do in my spare time beside developing stuff... outdoor is
hot...

------
bxr
Everyone I know who was able to turn their passion into a profession have
found themselves with diminished drive to work on their pet projects in that
field. If someone is satisfied with their work, it gives them time for other
hobbies. It is an unbelievable good thing if people can find time for multiple
passions in their life.

Aside from the fact I think this line of reasoning is useless there is another
-- more important -- issue. I don't care what people do in their off time.
That's theirs, not mine. It is the same reason that I don't drug test.

------
leon_
Oh gosh, I have a problem with too many spare time projects. My GitHub account
has over 60 public repos full with spare time projects. And I have to force
myself to get away from the computer for at least a few hours.

I guess this extreme isn't too good either but there's always something to be
done :)

