
I have no side code projects to show you - nnd
https://www.codementor.io/ezekielbuchheit/no-i-have-no-side-code-projects-to-show-you-cz1tyhgdz
======
warcher
I’m not mad at you, but as the dude on the other side of the desk, I have to
decide whether you can cut it and I’m fine saying no. I could make you do some
whiteboard problems, but I think whiteboard problems are pretty far removed
from your day to day development and I am uncomfortable relying on them as a
proxy for your ability to ship code.

I don’t really disagree with your philosophy of working while you’re working
and NOT working in your downtime. I think the same way.

But I have a whole pile of stuff I can show you that I’ve worked on. I don’t
ask anybody to take my word for it. In computing, you just can’t. The signal
to noise ratio is too bad, there are too many guys out there making
unmaintainable junk, if they actually ship anything at all. There are shops
out there that can afford to hire a bunch of maybes and just weed out the duds
when they wash out, but I don’t have that luxury. Nor am I going to go on some
weeks long hiring safari where I hire you for a week or two and see if you can
cut it. No time man. Sorry, don’t have it. I’m going to give you the job or
I’m not going to give you the job.

~~~
eropple
On the flip side? As somebody who has _plenty_ of open source projects--the
set of employers who actually looks at them is within epsilon of zero. I have
not once, not _once_ gotten a meaningful question from anything I have posted
on Github in any interview or client meeting even after suggesting up-front
that it's worth taking a look. And I used to interview on a monthly basis just
to keep in practice! No--instead you get dance-like-a-monkey "coding tests"
(unpaid, of course) that are nonportable from employer to employer.

Employers don't care. Employers _say_ they care, but it's signaling. If I
didn't write code on my own because I _like_ it, it would be a serious
negative to do so on the off chance that you run into the black-swan employer
who takes the question seriously.

~~~
ultrasaurus
Hiring manager here who reads Github profiles -- it just occurred to me that
I've almost never actually mentioned it to the interviewee. It's flavoured the
conversation for sure (except for the bootcamp grads who all have identical
Githubs) but I tend to talk more about your process than the actual code.

~~~
chrisco255
As a software engineer who does technical interviews, I also regularly review
GitHub contributions if mentioned on the resume. It's not a deal killer if
someone doesn't have these things...but if you're up against another candidate
who does (and their work is good)...then the other candidate is likely getting
the job.

~~~
nanodano
What % of candidates have side projects to show you? When I did interviews, I
saw probably less than 10% have any side projects to show.

~~~
pc86
I work in consulting, almost entirely for federal and state government. Here
that number is low single digits.

~~~
nanodano
This is what I think most people fail to understand. It's not a _requirement_.
The vast majority of people DON'T have side projects. Companies can't afford
to simply auto-reject everyone who doesn't have side projects. The point is
that if you do have any, it can help make you stand out dramatically.

------
shortsightedsid
It's funny that the tech industry is so insistent on side projects. I mean -
would you hire a marketing person based on their 'side projects' or a
corporate lawyer purely based on their pro-bono work? Likewise, who on earth
asks a building contractor if they have any side projects? You would ask for
references or find a contractor via someone you know. What about recruiters
themselves? How does one judge if a person is going to be good recruiter or
not? What about sales guys? Does anyone ask them - do you sell stuff on the
side - Y'know maybe you just do door-to-door selling as a hobby. Or what about
other engineering disciplines? Does one really ask a Mechanical Engineer or a
Civil Engineer about their side projects?

~~~
kelnos
The next time I'm interviewing in front of a hiring manager who asks me about
my side coding projects, I'm going to ask them about their side managing
projects.

~~~
ringaroundthetx
yeah and they are going to write in the slack channel how you were so
aggressive and extrapolate how bad of an employee you would be for the
company, challenging every little thing with abrasive non sequiturs

cute, but you'll adapt.

~~~
kelnos
I'm sure they'll do that, and I'm sure they'll be happy they didn't hire me...
and likewise, I'll be happy I'm not working for them.

~~~
tensor
You won't likely get hired anywhere without a work sample. Wether that be a
side project, code from previous employment, or a coding test, you'll have to
demonstrate you can do the work.

Many other professions also require work samples. Even salespeople are
required to produce metrics from past jobs on the number of sales they made,
and get put through practicals where they need to actually do a demo pitch for
something.

------
jasonswett
It's a very well-known fact that interviewers will often want to see some
code.

Because of this, I at one point spent maybe about 15 hours putting together a
small project specifically to use as a code sample. This code sample, which
again took maybe about 15 hours to put together, served its purpose for years.

To avoid this tiny amount of easy work that has such a high potential upside
is, to be frank, just dumb and lazy.

~~~
davidcbc
Counterpoint: In 10 years I have never had an employer ask to see a code
sample so that 15 hours was better spent by doing pretty much anything else.

~~~
mb_72
Nevertheless, 15 hours seems like good insurance for the time spent.

~~~
davidcbc
Maybe, but if I had spent 15 hours 10 years ago it is doubtful that it would
still be relevant or useful now. If I come to the point where I need some code
to show for a job that I really want I'll just spend the 15 hours then.

------
mixmastamyk
Meh, I agree in general and believe in work/life balance but you don’t need a
huge side project.

Just take a few scripts written already, write a readme, and an hour a year
per script tuning them up and adding tests. Maybe a code golf problem or two.

In short, if you can’t find four hours a _year_ to put into your career, maybe
you just aren’t interested. I think of it as page two of my resume.

~~~
crusso
Well said. These types of blog posts create the sense of a needless dichotomy
where you either code 24 hours a day or 5 hours a day and there's no in-
between.

I really don't have much of a github presence, but then again I'm not a day-
to-day coder at work. The presence I do have I created in just a couple of
hours and I could easily beef it up to something respectable by spending a
couple of hours a month on it.

------
glangdale
I sympathize with this guy. I think the "side projects" issue, like "write
some code on the whiteboard plz" is a symptom of the dysfunction in our
industry. Specifically, a startling proportion of people purportedly working
as programmers cannot in fact perform even basic tasks and don't feel shy
about pretending that they can.

A lot of my issues about the weird side project fetish come down to the fact
that this is an award for the misaligned. I spent pretty much the first decade
of my 'proper' career working on ideas that went into our regex matcher (now
at github.com/intel/hyperscan fwiw). During some of the more intense periods I
could barely take a shower or daydream without having to grab a notebook and
start writing ideas down, many of which went into the product. When I wasn't
doing that stuff, I really didn't have any energy left for building anything
else. Reading these discussions, I often wondered what would happen if the
associated startup (Sensory Networks) had tanked.

This isn't hating on people who do side projects; it's just to say that having
the time/energy to do side projects often feels like it results from
misalignment with your day job. I was happier than a pig in shit writing regex
and literal matcher code (or designing algorithms) at Sensory Networks and I'm
still that happy doing new software projects at Intel.

~~~
JamesFM
The main dysfunction I see with interviewing is that we’ve abstracted the
interview further and further from what you will be doing day to day.

Code on the white board? Why not on a computer? Why not work on some real code
for the project? Sign an NDA and work on an actual feature. Try to get closer
to what you expect the candidate to do on a daily basis.

------
JorgeGT
I think no one has said it yet, but I believe the diversity you bring with
your non-standard hobbies is a very valuable resource. Diversity being missed
by people looking "culture fits" of workers who like the same exact things.

For instance the fact that you write novels for fun suggests me you would be
able to write good, long documentation or manuals if required. I've known good
programmers absolutely incapable of communicating their ideas in writing to
other human beings.

Some, when told that they needed to prepare a detailed, well written technical
report on the software they are building for a client, looked like if they had
received a death sentence.

~~~
2T1Qka0rEiPr
Having a breadth of non-technical knowledge (dare I say, "soft skills") also
improves your value as a developer insofar as you may be better positioned to
discuss requirements with people, and to understand the reasons _why_ you're
developing the things you are (i.e. not "tech for techs sake")

~~~
JorgeGT
Also, people launching art projects, participating in active art communities,
etc. have generally better "people skills" that introverts who prefer to spend
the weekend at home doing technical side projects (like me!).

This is a highly valuable work skill for a technical worker if he/she has the
need to work with clients, present updates or discuss requirements, much more
than having a few small GitHub repos. By focusing in side projects you can be
filtering out these skills in your workforce.

------
sbov
I like to have side projects, but I still don't like to share them. People
love to find reasons to reject, and an 18, 11, or 7 year long side project
(the age of all my side projects) isn't really a fair representation of how I
code today.

Even as someone who enjoys side projects, the prospect of sharing a side
project, and being criticized by a potential employer about the contents of
it, turns it from "side project" to work.

~~~
2trill2spill
> Even as someone who enjoys side projects, the prospect of sharing a side
> project, and being criticized by a potential employer about the contents of
> it, turns it from "side project" to work.

You should be able to take constructive criticism of your work regardless if
it's a side project or not.

~~~
km3k
Even if they dive into a corner of your side project from 10 years ago that
works, but you realize isn't ideal, and you don't have the time to improve
that part of the code?

~~~
Xylakant
I, as an employer would like to have a conversation about that and I’d
absolutely take “I know this could be better, but it was written years ago and
it works” as a perfectly good answer. Software can always be better,
requirements change and so do capabilities and styles of the people writing
the code. But we cannot rewrite all parts of all our software all the time for
the sake of molding it to fit our current vision of perfect. Time is limited.
Finding the line between “this is not perfect, but it does the job” and “this
really holds us back and needs change” is in my opinion one of the most
valuable skills a seasoned programmer can acquire.

------
zamalek
> I ran 50+ miles a week. I pushed myself to excel. To excel within the
> boundaries of the time and life-balance I had set for myself.

Part of excelling at your job is learning new stuff - something that I am
absolutely certain you do all the time, even if you only do it during work
hours. Maybe this week you are starting a new project and need to learn Vue.

Publish those 100 lines of code to GitHub. Just like that you've demonstrated
that:

* You are willing to learn new things.

* You know how to use a little Vue.

* You know how to use a little Git.

Make it clear that it's a learning project - call it "Learning Vue," "Learning
C#," "Learning Node" etc. When a hiring manager looks at your profile they
will see dozens of technologies that you have at least some experience with.

Edit: if they turn around and demand side projects; you would be completely
correct to ask about how many office hours they allocate to side projects.
Interviews are a two-way process and the more you stick your neck out, the
more you get noticed.

~~~
TylerE
Better check your employment agreement. My company owns what I write on
company time, I don't have the rights to just "put it on GitHub", and yes, I
take that seriously.

~~~
dmoy
Ditto. At my current place my employment agreement doesn't allow me to
publicly post code I write in spare time.

My previous employer was a defense contractor, so... yea.

I don't have any side projects that I can share. Sucks, but that's the
reality. If I get fired/quit and can't find a job without side projects, I
have a list of things in my head to build in ~months if that's what becomes
necessary.

------
kodablah
Sounds like you weren't a fit for that company asking you for some code. And
that might be a blessing in disguise for you. If you are a decent developer in
Austin, you probably have lots of opportunities, so no need working for a
company with those kind of requirements.

Just know that as a company in Austin, they have lots of employees to choose
from probably too and this is their narrowing approach. No biggie, y'all
aren't a fit. Just know that this becomes circular, because many of the types
of companies that ask for this also allow you to open source some of your
work-hour code which helps that visible resume.

Also, if you are in demand and have leverage, consider trying to work at
places that encourage making at least some of your work visible to the world.
Many other professions benefit from this. If you don't have leverage, I'm
afraid you may be stuck in an endless loop of invisible, hard work you leave
behind.

~~~
appleiigs
Yeah, I agree with you. Many job seekers go to a job interview with the
approach that getting the job is the only good result.

Finding out they require more coding hours than you want to put in is also a
good result from an interview.

------
Haijal
I really enjoyed this post. I feel the same way, I do love coding and working
on software projects doesn't feel like work to me. I spent my high school
years and college years(and I graduated years after I should have from taking
two years off after freshmen year) working fast food and grocery stores. I
know what work feels like.

However, I don't and won't spend every waking hour I have doing one thing.
This life has so much to offer and experience, I do not have a drive to spend
80 hours, nights and weekends like that. However, if the project calls for it
every once in a while, fine, it's not a big deal until the company comes to
expect that.

~~~
nanodano
> However, I don't and won't spend every waking hour I have doing one thing

Why does everyone think that it requires every spare second you have to write
a couple programs and post them on GitHub? Can you spare 1 hour per week? Why
would it require every waking hour you have to write a couple scripts and
throw them in GitHub?

~~~
sombremesa
Some "programmers" are just not good at programming. Actually, that is a vast
majority of them. This is why they think it's so hard to have a side project,
and it's the same reason companies that actually care about who they hire have
to do 20 interviews to find 1 viable candidate.

There are plenty of new people entering the workforce, too. I can't remember
the last time I took an Uber/Lyft where the driver wasn't in a coding
bootcamp. It scares me just to think about having to be the engineer
"training" the new hire at a company that didn't make its interviews hard
enough.

(As a corollary, this means that if the engineering interview at a company is
objectively easy, that's a RED FLAG, and you should not work there.)

------
barbs
I often feel like there's a silent expectation that you _should_ enjoy certain
things if you're a good software developer. Here are some of these things that
I definitely _don 't_ enjoy:

\- Side projects

\- Developer conferences

\- Meetups

\- Hackathons/hack-days

\- Tech podcasts

\- T-shirts/stickers for frameworks and technologies

I do enjoy software development though, and from what people tell me I'm
pretty good at it, so I don't think it's necessary to enjoy these things to
get a decent job. It does concern me when I feel like I'm the only one who
didn't stay up late to watch the Google I/O streams live (I'm based in
Australia)

------
derekp7
How would you go about putting a personal side project up on github if you are
stuck with an employment contract that says your employer owns all your
intellectual output, even that which you produce on your own time? Yes, I
realize that stipulation is there for general protection of the employer and
not typically intended to be used in a draconian way, however it still leaves
the door open for you to get sued into oblivion for posting proprietary code
that "belongs to your employer" (even if they've never seen the code before).

~~~
city41
I had a side project that I wanted to make into a side business. I worked with
my employer to write up a doc that said they'd have no claim on it and would
let me own it. My employer did have the "we own everything you make" in my
contract.

~~~
dude01
I know someone who tried that - the company fired him, plus the company fought
paying him unemployment. You gotta watch out!

~~~
orangecat
They fired him for just asking? Then they're horrible, and he's better off far
away from them. Most employers are not actually cartoon villains and will be
reasonable.

~~~
derekp7
He may be better off in the long term, but short term unexpected unemployment
hurts. Can hurt long term too, since you will have to take whatever job you
can get as soon as possible (unless you have enough savings). And that job you
get may not be at the same point as you were in your career progression, since
many employers prefer to hire someone who is already working.

~~~
dude01
Yes, pretty much what you say -- it took him a while to find another
comparable job, and that had negative consequences in his personal life.

It was a small company doing the firing, they definitely "took it personally".
Bigger companies are more likely to have uncaring bureaucrats I think.

------
erobbins
I identify pretty strongly with this. I am good at what I do, but it's not my
passion or my life. It's what I do so that I can have a life.

~~~
ams6110
Agree. I've been in tech as a developer, dba, sysadmin, architect, all of the
above, etc. for more than two decades, and I don't even have a personal github
account. I don't write code at home.

------
austincheney
My open source projects have gotten me all but 1 of my last 4 jobs. Hands
down.

Yes, I still had to pass the interview, but when you can claim that your NPM
package ballooned to a million monthly downloads suddenly the conversation
changes from writing code to architecture, product management, and leadership.

Essentially you are telling the guy on the other side of the desk that I can
solve problems nobody else in the world is capable of solving (or willing to
try) and here is my proof. The clear response from that guy on the other side
of the desk is to refocus on the things involved with that level of
effort/output.

I have never had to worry about competition from other candidates. It has
nothing to do with what I think of myself (ego or arrogance) and everything to
do with how they perceive the potential I could deliver back to the company.

Second and third order consequences of this, that nobody but the interviewer
sees, is that you won't need your hands held like a child. You don't need all
the popular abstractions, frameworks, and mountains of tooling that other
candidates cannot live without. The reason for this bias, and it took me a
while to see it, is that you are spending all that extra time outside the
office solving many of the same problems as people at the office except that
you are doing it without a financial incentive, greater time constraints,
fewer resources, and often in a more portable way.

\---

Now let's look at the candidate who only works at the office and has no open
source projects to demonstrate and they are competing against somebody like me
who would rather be working on open source for free than doing the job they
are (well) paid to perform. What does the interview have to ask that guy to
assess their skills?

It isn't about the code that is on Github. Nobody has time to scrutinize that.
It is about the product, product quality, market penetration, the kinds of
problems you have solved. It is about how you achieve popularity where other
people did not and with a budget of 0 (maybe spending on a web server). But
since you don't write open source and don't do work outside the office this
conversation never arrises. The interviewer is limited to asking you about how
to write code like you are a newb.

~~~
patientplatypus
This comment really rubs me the wrong way. Realistically there are maybe,
what, a couple hundred "million plus" downloaded npm packages, that are useful
per language. That would almost seem generous. Now compare that to the number
of programmers.

What you are essentially saying is that it would be a reasonable expectation
to only get a job as a software engineer if you are the absolutely in the top
.0001% of programmers in the world. Which, sure, I'm glad you're successful,
that's nice. And as advice for one individual it's good - showing good work is
a positive indicator for an employer. But in the aggregate we can't ALL be the
best.

I went to school because I had thought that my chances of making a stable
living were higher than playing basketball and praying that I would make it
into the NBA.

~~~
austincheney
You are correct that everybody can't get a first place trophy, or else it
isn't really a first place trophy. We cannot all be the best.

That doesn't really matter though. In most cases you aren't competing with the
rest of the world for a job. Typically you are competing against other
applicants. In this more common scenario you just have to be better than the
applicant pool, which is far less lofty (not that it matters). If there are 30
people that applied for an open position we can probably assume that between a
third to a half are probably less qualified than the interviewers hoped for,
so then you are realistically just competing against the remaining candidates
that which is a lower number still.

In my original comment I mentioned my open source projects got me all but 1 of
my last four jobs. The first of those occurred well before my software was
popular and the company didn't even realize they were using it until it went
up broken to NPM and broke their build. That madness didn't happen until after
they interviewed me. During the interview I showed off my open source software
just to demonstrate where I put my interests and how I am making effort to
increase my personal productivity and solve original problems.

The software only became super popular during the prior employment.

\---

On a different note I don't consider myself something special like a
0.0000000000001% programmer or anything like that. The popularity of open
source software projects is a unique spiral death trap. Keep in mind you are
doing this on borrowed time at personal expense and for years people will
ignore you (or tell you that your software is garbage and that you are
completely wrong) and use inferior products that have a more familiar brand
name.

Your software becomes popular if you can solve original problems and refocus
continual effort on product quality. It took me years of effort and lots of
people telling me I was wrong. I just did my own thing anyways and kept doing
it because it was a personal project that worked well for me. And eventually
it works for a couple of other people. It is extremely rare, but there are
people who like to experiment using unknown software just for the hell of it
(or simply because it is free). Those people create word of mouth
recommendations. Rain drops become a trickle and if the rain never stops on a
long enough timeline it becomes a flood.

It is a death cycle because as more people use it the demands upon the product
greatly increase. Your available time does not scale proportionately. You
prioritize and do what you can. You can mitigate some of this, though, if you
are able to close defects at the speed of light and can get to a point where
maintenance and improvements are faster enough to allow deeper engagement with
your users.

The attention is nice and the idea of breaking promises or letting people down
crushes my soul. That is how I feel about unfulfilled enhancement requests
even though it is completely irrational. Completing those efforts are what
made the software popular, so you feel a need to not let people down and to
continue to complete the requests.

------
rootlocus
Seriously now, how many hours does it take to start a simple project in a
technology you're familiar with? I get it, you want time for your hobbies and
programming might not be one of them. However if getting a job is important to
you, is it so hard to spend some hours writing a piece of software that's
maybe related to your hobbies?

> The silly art project that I launched in Austin. My dog business. Running,
> painting, writing.

Take any of these hobbies and write a small application related to it. Don't
do it because "code speaks to you", do it because it's important to get a job.
Do one application, spend some hours on it, and be done with it.

> It's important to me that these attributes be valued by my workplace.

I don't think that's reasonable. I have many great people at my workplace,
some of them have become good friends. But really nobody gives a damn I do 3D
modeling in my spare time and I don't see how that would make things better.
People know I enjoy designing visual stuff, and they always come to me for
advice on colors and UIs, but that's about it. And my design hobby is valued
because it brings value to the team and the project.

Interviewing is a contest. Some people prepare more than others. Some learn
body language, some study the company before interviewing, others prepare side
projects to show. If you're unwilling to do anything that puts you one step
ahead of the crowd, don't complain about the interviewing process. It's a
game. Within reason optimize for success. Don't just complain about how unfair
it is.

~~~
nanodano
This is basically the sentiment that I share. If you aren't willing to put in
a couple hours on one Saturday of your life to putting up one script in an
effort to help your career, you probably don't care enough about the job you
are applying for.

~~~
rootlocus
> you probably don't care enough about the job you are applying for.

It's not even about th particular job you're applying for. Is having a job in
general. If it's important for you to have a any job, then surely you can do
something to help yourself.

------
city41
Getting hired is a game. People that have side projects usually have a leg up
in that game. Whether they actually should is debatable. It's probably bad to
correlate side projects with better employees. But since this is the game we
have to deal with, it can help to have a side project and maybe a blog.

------
bad_user
When it comes to open source on GitHub, what most people miss is that you
don't necessarily need to do it in your _free time_. This is in general a
misconception.

There are actually two scenarios which don't involve coding in your free time:

1\. As software developers we are generating by-products all the time. And the
trained eye can recognize reusable scripts that can be packaged and placed on
GitHub. If you don't have a GitHub account with such by-products, then you
probably have rotting folders on your hard drive with reusable stuff that will
eventually wither away.

Good companies encourage or at least tolerate employees that do this, because
it leads to higher quality code (by putting it out there, preparing it for the
scrutiny of others), because it's good marketing for reaching job candidates
and because once in a while such a projects ends up having other users, which
end up contributing feedback, bug fixes or even features, aka work for free.

2\. We end up using a lot of open-source libraries and tools and we don't have
the resources to pay for support for all of them, plus if we are honest about
it, we are cheap bastards in terms of wanting to pay other people money for
the tools we depend on.

Open-source is a about having control. Does it have a bug, or a feature
missing? You can code it yourself and send a PR. Which in many cases is quite
easy if you've been working with the library or tool in question for a longer
time — all it takes is for you to know what's needed.

As a software developer, you might work in an industry that doesn't benefit
much from open-source, or in a company that doesn't allow such contributions.

Which is fine, but know that in many companies the people that have public
projects to show the world will get picked over those that don't. It's simple
market economics really — in absence of open source contributions, all you
have to show for your work at that cool startup is a nice story of how it died
or went sour. And some ranty blog posts.

------
viperscape
Good for you, I’m jealous I guess. I am constantly developing and learning on
my free time, and it’s a problem really. It consumes me often, tires me out
over time. What do I have to show for it? Not much of real essence. I should
probably focus on projects non computer related. If I only had all the time in
the world

------
m-i-l
From what I have seen, most developers aren't working on anything particularly
interesting in their day jobs. At best they are developing a new CRUD
application using the latest framework, but at worst they are maintaining
legacy codebases, battling management incompetence etc. It can be very hard to
sound passionate about these things in an interview. In my view this is where
side projects come in - they're the chance to do something actually
interesting, which can be a great talking point in an interview.

------
spiderfarmer
I wouldn’t hire a sales guy that sells comparable products in his own time.
Why would that be different for programmers?

You should only do sideprojects if it’s your passion or if you think it will
help your career. If you’re passionate about other things: do that instead.
There’s more to life than work.

------
addicted
There are a lot of things being conflated in this post. Side projects
Geography Running a side business

1) I agree side projects do not define a good developer (frankly, I don’t have
any outside toy ones). But given 2 equally good choices, I can’t blame an
employer who chooses a Dev with side projects as opposed to one without (since
they can see their code). That being said, a better interview process would
involve real coding which would eliminate this situation altogether.

2) I’m not sure where the rant about geography fits in. If you are limiting
yourself to Austin you’re limiting yourself to an even smaller pool of
developers than the Bay Area, NYC is Seattle. And there are many families with
dogs living in all these areas.

3) Is suspect the fact that the author is running a side business may be a
bigger concern. The author’s specific business may not, but as an employer,
I’d imagine there is no way my job could compete with your side business since
you actually have money invested in. I wouldn’t be surprised if this would,
more than the lack of side projects, affect someone’s employment
opportunities.

Just the way the author has setup the discussion it seems they basically left
the company with no code to see at all.

I can’t show you the coding I have done, because it’s at work. I can’t show
you any other coding I have done because I have not done anything outside
work. But I did start an art project once.

I think a far more useful tack (which I have used in the past) is to ask the
company to provide you with a task, and give you a week to solve it. This
allows them to actually see that I can code and solve a problem.

------
nathan_long
Honest question: do you use open source at work? Do you contribute to open
source _while at work_? If not, why not?

A couple days ago I spent several hours puzzling through how to use an open
source library. When I figured it out, I made a PR for documentation. Our
closed-source app will benefit from having its dependencies better documented.

I do very little coding outside of work anymore, but I still have public
contributions to show.

~~~
jonas21
Many employers take the stance that they own all the code you write while at
work, and therefore you don't have the right to release it under an open-
source license.

~~~
nathan_long
Proper response: "OK, so I found a problem with one of the open source tools
we use and I know how to fix it. Do you want me to 1) not fix it, in which
case our code is broken, 2) put a workaround in our codebase, which you'll
have to maintain forever 3) create a fork of the codebase which you'll have to
maintain forever, including merging upstream changes, or else forego future
bugfixes and improvements or 4) contribute the fix back to the original
project on company time, which means you'll never have to pay to maintain that
code?"

------
watwut
"And when I said I have no side projects to show, what they heard - what
interviewers hear - is: I am not the best. I am not a passionate developer. I
don't spend the necessary time to keep on top of my education and skills. That
development is "just a job." "

Are you sure you are not just projecting your own insecurities and opinions
into interviewers? Majority of developers don't have side projects. According
to FOSS survey, owerwhelming majority of linux (especially) and open source
contributions is paid work. Sometimes it is that they work so much in day job,
most of the time they work normally (which is enough) and do other things in
out of work time (exercise, care about children, read books, socialize -
social skill matters, craft). If you are coding 6 hours a day (generous 2
hours for meetings and chatting and organizing), then you should code plenty.

You could have loose that interview due to many other reasons, you could have
run into that one company that does not hire without outside code.

But if you really worry about this one, maybe create an account with sample
project and be open about that project purpose (e.g. dont be afraid to say
that you created this project to show how I code, because previous
interviewers asked for that). If it is really about code sample, then
something you create withing two days should suffice.

And if they demand real contributions to real open source projects, ask them
whether their company gives employees time to do such a thing on the clock.
After all, they expect your previous employers to be so generous with time, so
they should put money where their mouths are. If you dont hire me without
having full public profile, it is only fair to demand that being employed by
you makes continuing that work possible.

------
SliderUp
This really resonated with me. I am passionate, or at least I think so. But
all my subprojects are for work. I work at a place where the problems are
interesting, and we are encouraged to randomly skunk works things in the
background. So I do.

None of those things are things that I can give out or show to anyone at all.
I'm really interested in the field my company works in, and all my side
projects are related to it, at least elliptically.

The only thing I can show you after 35 years are things like abandon shareware
products from the late 80s and some really awful code written for no purpose
long ago. Nothing that relates it all to what I've done for the last 20 years.

I also work in one of those companies that asks applicants to do some code
problems and turn them in. On the other hand we really don't care how you
solve them or even if you solve them. What we want to do is get in a group
setting with the applicant and the code and four or five of us and talk
through the code. The problems tend to be simple, the interesting part is
talking to to a candidate and getting a sense of how they code/think.

------
nanodano
The bottom line is, each developer is responsible for showcasing their own
skill. One of the best ways to do that is through sharing programs you've
written on GitHub. If you don't want to do that, you better find some other
way to show off to an employer.

If you are unwilling or don't have time to create a public code repo or your
own blog/website, you should be willing to take a skill assessment test from
the employer. If you aren't willing to do any of that, I don't know how you
can expect an employer to gauge your skill. You can't just provide a reference
and expect them to hire you just because someone vouches for you.

You may think it's unfair that you have to go out of your way to make yourself
look good to an employer but...that's the way the world works. I think the
misconception is that people think 'having a side project' means writing a
prolific open source project. You can spend 1 hour per week on coding small
programs and have a great GitHub profile.

------
busterarm
What if you work 16 hours a day because your current employer is highly
dysfunctional and you are constantly putting in hail mary efforts to save them
from themselves?

How is one supposed to have time for side projects then?

~~~
rublev
By quitting. 16 hours? What the fuck.

~~~
busterarm
Most sane folks would like to find another job to quit into rather than just
leave their job, but if you have a great financial cushion to rest on, sure,
go ahead.

Having been poor most of my life and worked full-time since I was 15 years old
(with an odd break or two), I can tell you that that is a luxury most people
do not have.

~~~
richardwhiuk
Work the hours in your contract. No more, no less. If you aren't being
compensated, why work longer?

~~~
busterarm
It's not happening to me, but it happens in plenty of places.

crunch time is very real.

~~~
kelnos
Crunch time is real, and I don't object to it. Working 16 hour days as a
matter of course is not "crunch time", and no employee should tolerate it.

------
foxfired
OK. That's fine. I have friends that will spend a month committing code on
github everyday for the sole purpose to having greens on the page. It does
help to get an interview because most often then not, all the employer sees is
the green. No one is gonna go ahead and read the code. And if they do, what
are they going to get out of it?

I've seen people fake it, adding trivial changes everyday, uploading public
tutorials they followed, or just formatting.

I never ask for a github page myself because I don't know what to do with the
information. But I do ask for a side project, and answering yes or no is not
what makes or breaks a candidate. Instead it leads to a conversation about
their coding and work philosophy.

If you don't have a side project to show for, well you must have something to
talk about in our field that can convince someone that you are a good
candidate.

If you do have one, well it has to be something that can convince someone that
you are a good candidate.

------
ThomPete
My way of getting better was always to read about things around the subject I
wanted to learn or understand. In my case Design.

I always look for how things are the same compared to the subject matter I am
interested in.

What has given me the most ever is learning to play music and compose music.
Once you understand how music work you understand how/why rhythm works,
proportion, harmony, consistency etc.

But both music and design informed my cooking. When you boil things down (no
pun intended) the underlying principles are all the same it's only the
execution of those principles that's different. Philosophy is also something I
have found ways to incorporate into something tangible in my life.

I also have side projects some of them do really well but i try to do as many
different things in my life while still being involved with design and music.
You need to have some strongholds.

There are no rules.

------
colomon
What strikes me as weird about this is the assumption that it's an either/or
proposition.

I am passionate about playing traditional dance music. And I have supported
this by writing a program to generate high quality sheet music from ABC
scores; scripts to download collections of scores or MP3s off the web; scripts
to handle tagging/naming my MP3 files; etc.

I am passionate about RPGs. Back in the day I supported this with a script to
convert a simple text markup to LaTeX to generate print quality copies of my
RPG stories. (This was about a decade before Markdown.)

Etc. The idea that a programmer could have an entire second business and not
write any interesting code in the process strikes me as really odd. There are
NO tasks for the company that could be usefully automated?

~~~
wvenable
A lot of code you can't just toss up on Github. Is that your _best_ code? It
better be because that's all the code the interviewer is going to see!

~~~
always_good
Code quality is overrated in a side project. As developers we love to inflate
this fantasy that someone else is actually judging our line-to-line code.

Unless you're incompetent and making glaring mistakes, someone reviewing your
code would have to credentialize in your codebase to identify things like bad
architecture. Nobody is doing that.

I'd put your energy into polishing a quality README. That's actually something
that someone else will see, and I'd assert that it's the most important part
of a project for someone flipping through.

In fact, in the hiring position, when I see someone with projects but not a
single README, I have to wonder if it's a bad signal. Sure, they could do the
easy part of slapping code against the wall, but they stopped before the hard
part of documenting/introducing it. Something to think about when you're
competing with other applicants for a job.

------
stephengillie
Passion is a code word for free labor.

~~~
maerF0x0
I often laugh at people who use passionate not realizing the root of the word
more or less means suffering. You want me to suffer for your company? No
thanks, thats beyond the bounds of employment imo.

~~~
Karunamon
Given the choice between someone who's just doing the job to get paid, vs
someone who's doing the job because it's what they enjoy doing, I'll pick the
second guy every time.

In both hiring, and working with.

~~~
maerF0x0
> it's what they enjoy doing

Sure.

But, passion ~= "suffering". "suffering" IMO is mutually exclusive with
"enjoy" (unless that's your sort of thing)

------
tahw
I've found that the companies that insist on a thriving github portfolio are
also the companies that expect you to work 16 hours a day on their code.

Normal places with normal expectations on work/life balance don't expect you
to be pumping out code every second of the day.

------
foo101
I like to write side code projects. You might think I do not have a life
outside coding, but I do. I do not spend more than 3 to 4 hours per week on
side projects. I play the guitar and saxophone. I go out in the weekends. I
love mountain climbing. Like the author, "I loathe hackathons" too. But unlike
the author, I do have side projects.

As someone who has been doing personal as well as public side projects for
possibly 20 years now, I think I can share some insights about why I (and
perhaps people like me) work on side projects.

I grew up in a time when we had computers with 3 MB of memory and 300 MB of
hard disk were considered powerful machines in my school. The students would
get only 30 minutes of computer time per week. These were times when you boot
your computer, type GWBASIC, press <ENTER>, and start coding. This was one of
the very few ways to use a computer meaningfully. Writing code in GW-BASIC
became like a mindsport for some of us. I would write tiny games, draw
diagrams or solve math equations with code. It became a hobby.

I guess everyone has hobbies. I have some too. Coding is one of them. It's not
the only one.

About 10 years later, I learnt that this hobby could become a career and I
chose programming and developing software as my career. Is it fair to now be
considered a "human machine" who "work 80 hour weeks" and have "absolutely no
evening or weekend plans" just because my career also happens to be one of my
hobbies?!

------
nanodano
Here are the sentiments that I took away from this article, even if it was not
the intention.

\- “If I don’t have the time to be THE BEST, I won’t bother even trying to be
great.” \- “I am okay, even proud to be a mediocre developer. I don’t want to
commit lots of time to programming.” \- “I would rather have an employer who
accepts me for being mediocre because I have interesting things going on in my
life.” \- “I’d rather work on a team full of mediocre devs as long as the
company had a great culture”

I’m not saying it is an “incorrect” attitude. Someone may want to put together
a team of developers who don’t really care about their craft, as long as they
like to hang out together. I feel very differently though. I would much rather
hire a developer who is mediocre but wants to get better than a mediocre
developer who has the attitude of ‘I don’t want to put in all that time to be
good at my craft. Did I mention I had a dog business though?’

As someone who has interviewed developers, I can tell you that most candidates
do not have side projects. If you have side projects, it is a huge bonus. Not
having side projects is not a big deal. Plenty of people get hired who don’t
have side projects.

But, if a candidate said no they don’t have any side projects, and then
followed it up with something like ‘Yeah, I’m not one of those people who
really likes coding enough to do any in my free time, plus I care more about
my dog business that I run’ that says to me 'I don’t really care about this
job."

------
dm03514
I'm personally in line with the OP where I don't have any fully formed side
projects that I would feel very comfortable as a reflection of my current
ability. I really like stackoverflow for this exact issue. Spending time with
family is just more important than coding, but I'm able to easily/quickly
contribute to stack overflow during work or in the off time. If someone is
interested in seeing examples of how I think, help or code I can say, look at
the 1000 answers on stackoverflow :p

------
pnathan
I always prefer being able to look at someone's work. I'm an adult - I don't
expect to see that for someone coming out of defense or certain other
industries. But, I will be clear: I want to see your work, and whiteboarding
is kind of awful. So is coderpad. Take home projects are nasty because of time
commitments and time pressures. How do I solve this problem?

For my sake as an interviewer, I need as much information about you as
possible, as realistic as possible, as fast as possible.

For my sake as an interviewEE, github gives me the ability to do good work, on
time of my choosing, and present it in the manner I see fit.

As a _social awareness_ question, I prefer to work with people that have the
social awareness of the broader software community to go, "yeah, this is how
the community is rolling, I can play the game a bit". Whether that's github,
or Haskell, or Rust, or assembly, or retro Pascal. I sort of don't care. The
social cues matter a lot in The Work.

At the end of the day, passing on someone with no portfolio and a preference
for doing art over spending time learning a bit more about a topic and doing a
quick demo project is an easy pass.

(Personal note: if you're gonna just throw your novels out, maybe write code
instead? worst case is you learn something fun)

------
michaelbuckbee
I feel conflicted about the side projects thing. Yes, you shouldn't absolutely
have to have some to be considered for a job.

But on the other hand, I look at my wife (who is a special ed teacher). She
makes a fraction of what I do but to keep her certificate, she has to take for
credit college classes, submit them to the state, etc.

This is ostensibly to prove that she can still do what her degree says she can
do.

Most other lines of professional work have some form of continuing education
requirement.

And that's what I look at side projects like: some form of public effort at
trying to improve your skills, show that you can do what you say, etc.

Comparatively, side projects [1] feel incredibly egalitarian. They don't care
what school you went to, they don't require much in the way of cash payouts to
get going. They author seems to disdain Github, but they'll give you a free
account and let you push code to it.

1 - I think we'd need to collectively define what this term means. But I think
of it as bit size projects that scratch a particular itch. The author likes
dogs? Great spend $1 and use AWS Rekognition to do image search over a bunch
of dogs. They have kids? Work with them to put together a little project you
do together. You like working at the art collective - GREAT! - do an awesome
online art thing.

------
cocktailpeanuts
This is simple. It's Economics 101: Supply and Demand.

1\. You work hard to improve yourself and gain more skills that people will
want to hire you for.

2\. More people will want to hire you

3\. Demand goes up, while supply (yourself) is fixed.

4\. Your price goes up.

On the other hand, if you care so much about your "life quality" and put
absolutely 0 effort to improve yourself outside of work,

1\. You don't have much to show other than what you did at current work

2\. You are making yourself completely dependent on the company

3\. When the company fires you, you have NOTHING to show to others. It's not
like you can show people the code you wrote while you were at the previous
company (the company owns the code and you're not supposed to share it outside
publicly)

4\. Since you have nothing to share, less people will get your value and less
people will want to hire you

5\. Demand goes down, supply fixed.

6\. Your price goes down.

You can keep bitching about how the world is unfair and harsh and write some
blog post that sounds almost like a beautiful piece of poetry, but that won't
change anything, because that's how the world works.

It's not about companies "exploiting" employees by telling the m to work on
something during the weekends. It's actually for yourself. If you don't
believe that, that's fine, but you will stay a shitty developer and the law of
supply and demand will kick in.

~~~
gfodor
Yep, pretty much this. If the interviewer didn't think a person who had side
projects was waiting in line behind you for the next interview slot, they
wouldn't have passed.

I tend to be skeptical of most forms of software engineering interview
tactics, but work samples is not one of them. Strong side projects is a strong
indicator of skill. FWIW, for those who do not have projects like the OP, its
important IMHO to offer a take-home variety. If you do not have side projects,
and are not willing to do a few hours of take home work, then I usually screen
you out since there are plenty of other candidates that fit in either bucket
and will be easier to make an informed hiring decision about.

A strong work sample is an unnecessary but largely sufficient condition for
assessing hands-on-keyboard coding skills (a subset of the skills needed to be
a good software engineer), so screening out people who don't have them, when
there is a glut of supply of skilled labor, as it might be in Austin, is a
rational strategy.

------
wbillingsley
Hmm, I suspect I'd have the opposite problem if I were to go interviewing
again. As I teach students, there's an awful lot of whipped-together-in-an-
hour demos on there from answering student questions by writing tiny non-
meticulous examples.

To be honest, though, I've tended to find interviews go well when the
interviewer goes off-piste. Probably because you've both decided your each
reasonably smart, and are letting the conversation go where it leads.

------
makecheck
You have to look at side projects as helping to build you up in ways that are
not explicitly paid for. This isn’t limited to software. Consider physical
labor; if it’s someone’s job to do lots of work that requires massive strength
and endurance, is there _ANY_ employer that will pay you extra for the time
you’d be spending at the gym to meet the required strength? No; they’ll simply
ignore the person demanding that investment, and hire the person that already
fits their needs. School is another example of something you work hard on
without really being paid.

On the flipside, I do hope that employers are good at actually _understanding_
open-source project pages. For instance, GitHub is terrible about letting
people create profiles with prominently-displayed forks of dozens of projects
_as if they’re contributing_ when those people may actually have done
_nothing_ on _any_ of the projects they’ve displayed. Similarly, having a
single project should not be an indication that you’re worse than someone with
10 projects; there are some legitimately huge problems and “one project” might
be a full-time job in itself.

------
throwaway2016a
Some of the best most useful skills I've learned I've learned making side
projects using technology that I wouldn't dare try to introduce at work. (too
new / bleeding edge / untested)

With that said, I don't make any of those projects public since they embarrass
me. No unit tests typically, poor documentation, etc.

With that said as a hiring manager I would never penalize someone for not
having open source projects.

------
timtas
Having recently endured a few horrific interview processes, I considered
writing an article titled, “No, I Won’t Run Your Fake Work Gauntlet.”

Take home assignments, coding as performance art, timed puzzle solving,
obscure technical questions, full day interview gauntlets—these are what I had
been through. These processes are designed primarily to avoid false positives.
False negatives are okay. This is unfair to the candidate, but the company
gets to pick the tune. Rather the candidate _lets_ the company pick the tune.

About a month ago I landed a job. The interview process consisted of two
steps: an hour phone screen with the CTO followed by an on-site show-and-tell
of a side project of my choice. (Coincidentally, the company is in downtown
Austin, but is definitely not the company mentioned in the article.)

The process was a joy to me. I have side projects to show. In fact, I showed
two. The audience was approximately 10 developers. My impression is that the
CTO was looking for a lot of thumb to go up.

Here’s what I liked about it. First, it was not a time suck. Second, it made
me the driver, allowing me to draw attention to the best parts, not just of my
code, but of how I think about problems. It was downright relaxing.

To be sure, this is just a different way to prevent false positives at the
cost of false negatives. If you don’t have side projects but consider yourself
a great developer I can understand why you would consider this process unfair.
It sucks to be a false negative. But for me, it’s way better than the
alternative.

Not every company needs to draw from every talent pool. I’ve happily taken
myself out of the pool of companies which use those other methods. I’m glad
there are some which use a method that suits me.

------
fusiongyro
I agree that it shouldn't cost you a job if you don't have side projects. It
shouldn't guarantee you a job if you do—like any other demonstration of who
you are, it should cut both ways. I always ask to see them if someone has
them, and it's hurt in about as many cases as it has helped. If you can't
program but have some side projects up on github anyway, I will be able to
tell.

------
justin_vanw
It's not that you _must_ do side projects or else there is no possible way you
are a great software developer. It's that lots of people are just as good as
you are and also do side projects. Given the choice, why would you choose
someone who is equally skilled but is less interested in the field?

When you are hiring people, you really have insufficient information to know
how good they are. You can't see any larger projects they have done or get a
feel for how they solve problems that aren't toy scenarios by a whiteboard.
Having side projects too look at dramatically reduces the uncertainty in your
estimation of their skill level.

So there you go, all else being equal of course you want someone who is 'more
into' their field, and all else being equal side projects dramatically improve
your confidence in their skill level. So to a competent hiring manager the
author of this looks like he has less passion than his competition, and even
his skill level is very poorly understood in comparison.

------
mertnesvat
I'll take a look from both sides. But let me first explain the motivation and
drives for some people to push them what they do, why they do etc.

We all have secret reward mechanism which triggers our dopamine receptors.
Time to time randomly or intentionally we create those circuits in our brain.
For example, for some people, it's really important to talk about baseball
teams some likes football.

That's being said, we need to be in the flow also to self-transcendence
(remember Maslow's pyramid last step ;)

Some people their motivations are not clear and they find themselves very in
the middle of everything and it can be more then one specific skill like the
guy's example in the blog post, he likes tracking, drawing, spending time with
family etc.

After having a motivation towards one subject for long time you develop flow
and being in the zone for this occupation that's why managers tend to see
person with enthusiasm for coding and being in front of computers all the
time.

It's exactly how it supposed to be! I recommend being stoic about it.

------
pnw_hazor
Is there a marketplace where one could buy a side project and post it on
github?

See a job add for a Go programmer, buy a Go side project...and so on.

~~~
pjmlp
As a teacher of mine used to say, you got there a business idea.

------
navalsaini
I had a difficulty getting an appropriate role because I am bad at answering
Q&A format of questions. I have a decent github profile and side-projects (the
recent one is halfchess.com). So I am coming from the opposite camp but I can
relate to the author very well.

I think the problem is with the interviewers. It is a difficult task to
interview and when everyone is allowed to lead an interview, it just leads to
very random outcomes.

Companies don't really focus on developing interviewing skills for the people
who are inside. Maybe they are just too scared to do that - pulling people
away from their gut feel and not having an even distribution of people who can
interview properly (across teams). It probably feels much safer to say a bunch
of No's and then say Yes.

The lesser experienced and the hard-headed experienced ones are worst
interviewers. They probably are looking more for people like us.

------
mv4
I enjoyed reading this.

You do have side projects, just not ones that require coding.

------
jorblumesea
Am I the only one who likes side projects? I'm addicted to the idea of
starting new projects in new languages. How many of them ever get completed or
push into an environment is a different story... It's fresh, clean and filled
with possibility. An existing code base is usually filled with hacks etc.

~~~
wvenable
Some of my side projects exist only long enough to understand/solve the deep
technical challenge required to make it work. Completing the project after
that is just unfun _work_.

------
ravibhatt
Interesting discussion here. Excellent post.

If coding is such an art and so important to the industry, why are all people
at the top do not have a git hub account to show? They must still be
"passionate" about coding, no? Or is it a function of how much money you have?

Facebook worked not because of some guy wrote great, highly maintainable code.
It worked because of the idea. Same with others great companies.

If there were these unicorn people who did not write "unmaintainable junk"
there would be no security bugs, hacks, leaks etc.

All big companies have recruited "the best" for forever. Can any one of them
guarantee a bug free software. They can't. Suddenly, all these passionate
people with their github account do not look sexy.

Insisting on a side project is similar to people insisting on TDD and i am
sure TDD does not solve the problem of bugs in code.

------
qq66
The "side project" culture is a by-product of not having a standardized
approach to professional development in software engineering. Doctors,
teachers, and pilots are all expected to refresh their skills, and their time
to do this is baked into their salary. Software engineers need to do the same,
but it's not baked into their salary, so they have to do it independently. You
wouldn't pay a tax preparer for his time spent learning this year's tax laws,
but you also wouldn't hire him if he didn't. So his hourly rate has to include
the time that he will spend off-the-clock learning about the new laws that
year. Software engineers should do the same, and treat their on-the-clock time
as only one of the components of maintaining their professional readiness.

~~~
stickydink
An independent tax preparer, sure. A tax preparer that works for a firm would
almost certainly be allowed to spend their paid working hours learning this
year’s tax code.

------
falcolas
Why do hiring managers believe that github code was actually written by the
applicant?

People lie incessantly about their ability to code; that’s why he industry
considers things like fizbuz to be valuable. Why assign so much value to a
public github account if you don’t trust their word in the first place?

------
vortico
Getting a job is a competition. There is no absolute criteria for whether you
should get a job or not. So why should an employer prefer you over someone who
loves programming and problem solving _so much_ that they do it as a hobby? If
your excuse is that your previous jobs were so invigorating that you had no
free time for personal software projects, then your reward is the higher pay
you've received at those jobs compared to other easier ones you could have
taken. If you decide to hike and paint instead of work on software for fun,
that is perfectly fine, but those activities are simply less valuable to an
employer. To me, this article is a textbook case of the "I do less work than
my peers but should receive the same opportunities" complaint.

------
jxramos
I'd like to point out two aspects to this outside of workhours vs online
profile/portfolio of work. Sometimes you can contribute to online tools during
work hours. I've collaborated with Python folks to fix bugs or upgrade to new
frameworks, or to Python 3, things that my work and libraries depended on.
This was on the company's dime because I needed to get things done and didn't
consider them ultimate obstacles. These are one off a few days investment sort
of tasks, nothing super long term, but it's worth mentioning these are not
mutually exclusive efforts.

Another detraction to working at home on side projects right now is just
physical. I need to really take a break from the monitors to keep my eye
strain budget reserved for work when I need it.

------
zhenekas
Just make a whatever tiny commit in your own public github repo. Its just the
way interviews work these days,in a sense its like lying on your resume, its
there and only 1 out of a 1000 will check it. I get you are pissed at the
concept but as i said just work around it.

------
avenoir
Since there is no standard definition of "engineering" in software, it is
mostly driven by individual employers. If a potential employer wants to see
you constantly programming in your spare time and have a GitHub account than
that's how they view their "engineering" practice. You don't necessarily have
to agree. But put yourself in an employer's shoes for a minute. If you, as a
candidate, are not a certified engineer who practices what essentially amounts
to a form of pseudo-engineering and works in a field where a large number of
people don't even have a relevant degree yet claim to be "engineers" how else
is one supposed to make a decision about your technical chops?

------
nathan_f77
I'm curious about the companies where the author has worked, because they must
be using a lot of open source libraries internally. If the author's GitHub
profile is completely bare, then it means they've never forked a library to
fix a bug, or added a new feature and submitted a pull request.

I don't care if you don't do that in your spare time. I don't know what
languages or frameworks the author uses, but I probably won't hire a Rails or
React developer if they'v never contributed to any open source projects. If
they've never come across a single gem or npm package that needs a bug fix or
a new feature, then they probably don't have enough experience.

------
aaronbrethorst

        And when I said I have no side projects
        to show, what they heard - what
        interviewers hear - is: I am not the
        best. I am not a passionate developer.
        I don't spend the necessary time to
        keep on top of my education and skills.
        That development is "just a job." 
    

This isn't how I interpret it at all. Gauging how you write code, structure
commits, and talk about your work cannot be done solely through face to face
interviews. When I talk with someone who cannot show me any code, I feel like
I'm lacking a signal for determining how well they'll be able to produce. It's
not a deal-breaker by any means, just a complication.

------
catchmeifyoucan
I have a decent amount of side-projects and I build projects for fun (I even
blog about them), but that doesn't land me any offers or opportunities. My
Github has a decent number of samples that I've built. However, I get rejected
more often than not because of my online coding interviews. Being a new grad,
I don't have many other options but to oblige. We live in a world where nobody
will talk to you unless you pass their coding challenge first. So I'm not
fully in agreement with this article. If there are companies out there who
truly want passionate developers, I'd love to know! Clearly, the big 4 aren't
the right places to apply to.

------
mychael
I like to work with engineers who are passionate about software not someone
looking for a 9-5 job – so I would pass on him as a candidate.

In my experience people who are passionate about software have something to
show for it, even something small.

------
ld00d
Funny because I'm on the other side. I do side projects. I enjoy it. I also
think of them as resume builders. However, not one company I've interviewed
with cared about them. They wanted to know what I got paid to do.

------
pawelkomarnicki
I have this cooking website I started some time ago
([http://cookarr.com](http://cookarr.com)), and apart from that I have some
smaller projects, but I also say "No, I don't have side projects except of
these, I don't have to do open source, I just... don't". It never did sabotage
my interview though, because I am a specific kind of full-stack developer
(good at prototyping and whipping up complete "MVP production apps" in a short
time), and it's somehow valuable to many startups.

------
ttyphns
I went through majority of the comments here and it seems to me that for many
programmers, their life revolves around side projects and they consider that
other programmers should also do the same. There is more to life than just
programming. It was not even a job until 100 years ago. Richard Feynman did
not only do physics all his life. He learned how to paint, how to play music
etc. Why restrict yourself to the programming bubble? The OP seems to me a
sane person in this world of overworked zombies with fat bellies who call
themselves passionate programmers.

~~~
nanodano
I think you missed a lot of the comments saying, you don't have to live, eat,
and breath code in order to have some code you've written up on GitHub. You
don't have to spend every waking breath coding in order to write a script that
will order you a pizza or something. You're life doesn't have to revolve
around programming to find one weekend out of the year to write a program or
spend 1 hour per week working on something.

I am a developer and I like to do plenty of things outside of programming. I
ride motorcycles, read books (and writing a book!), play guitar/violin/piano,
learn Russian, digital paint, make 3d art models, play video games, go out to
eat, karaoke, go to meetups, blog, etc, etc. Most developers I know have
plenty of hobbies outside of programming, but still manage to squeeze in some
time for side projects. It does not have to consume your life...

------
itomato
This again?

Hello, I'm your peer. You're showing _me_.

Not HR, not the Engineering Manager, not some mythical burn-down chart, but
your _partner in crime_.

What sort of jobs have you pulled? I don't care about the minutiae, but about
the overall scene.

Code smell is a factor, like it or not. Same story for by-catch and "gore" in
the form of spaghetti, inheritance and commentary.

If you can't be bothered, I get it. Punt, shift blame, cross your arms and dig
your heels in.

I don't care, because without a portfolio, I don't have an opportunity to
appreciate the qualities of your work, good or bad.

------
jammycakes
Pet projects need not take up all of your time. All you need is a few hours
every so often — an evening or so once every couple of months, or one weekend
a year would set you head and shoulders above a lot of people. The whole thing
of dark matter developers with no pet projects at all, versus "passionate
programmers" who eat, sleep and breathe code, is a completely false dichotomy.

All employers are looking for is some publicly available evidence that you
actually have the skills that you claim to have listed on your CV.

------
ravenstine
I agree that it shouldn't cost you being able to have a job that you like.
That being said, I don't see why you shouldn't have a couple of side projects
on Github or even a personal site. The side projects I've shown to employers
were not gargantuan MVPs but simple applications that did one nifty thing
well. It's fine if you don't want to do any of that; I personally would want
to do things that give me an advantage with a company that values interest in
coding and innovation.

------
funnelsgun
I have this bad habit where I don’t do side projects for me, but for work. I
get excited about ideas I have to improve our product/infrastructure at work
(I’m an SRE) and given that I am more or less autonomous I work on those
instead of some personal GitHub project.

This means that I write a lot of software out of hours that makes it to
production, is well tested and maintained, but I could never show it off in an
interview. I need to break the habit, but I just don’t get the time during the
week to work on this stuff.

------
foo101
> That "the best" is happy to drink into the Earth every Friday and has
> absolutely no evening or weekend plans.

This looks very much like deflecting the disappointment experienced at the
boutique app firm to all people like us who do love to code in spare time. I
believe it is unfair to paint all of us with the same brush. I know plenty of
people (myself included) who love to code in their spare time and still have
weekend plans that have nothing to do with computers.

------
bm1362
Unrelated to the topic:

I'm super excited about this guy, looking at his background we had to have
worked in the same computer science lab at Texas State. We're the underdogs in
Texas and it's cool to see people that were successful in the typical ivy-
league environments. Incidentally enough, I'm now getting into mobile app
performance and worked at Amazon around the same time.

Related:

I find that interviews are mostly a crapshoot. I'm currently looking for a new
job in SF, so I have a few experiences from this last week that stood out:

* Onsite with a ~100 person startup last week where the guy asked about my past experience ("Wow me with a past project") and then I caught him looking out the window as I explained a particularly gnarly problem we solved at Amazon. I was asked 5 coding questions (that I more-or-less solved), never spoke to a manager and then got a canned rejection.

* Onsite with a ~2000-10000 person tech company and met my would-be team, my manager and his manager. We discussed the projects I'd work on, did coding and architecture problems and I left super excited to work with them in the future. I received an offer from them within a few days, having already built a relationship with my team and management, that makes me feel much better about the opportunity.

* I'm currently going through an interview with a really great company (~60 engineers). I spent an hour talking to my maybe-future manager and we left both excited to work together. The follow up was a realistic technical project and pair programming with my future teammates- all of whom were awesome to work with. I'm still awaiting next steps, but I've really enjoyed getting to speak to my future team.

A litmus test I've found: Does the technical hiring manager talk to you before
you phone screen? Do they seem engaged and ask follow up questions? If your
only point of contacts prior to the onsite is a random engineer interview and
a recruiter whom repeats a script, your past work is not going to be a major
factor. Most likely your hobbies outside work won't be considered (I'd suspect
for legal bias reasons?) unless it's a small startup that's looking for a
friend-as-a-coworker fit. I experienced this at my last startup, we went from
5 engineers to 50, and the values started to shift.

------
jackschultz
Why doesn't he mention what he thinks interviews should be about? Does he
think that asking a bunch of dry-erase-board-questions about algorithms is
better? What about just a company going with their gut?

It's tough to agree with a post that doesn't offer an alternative. All I get
from this is that he wants to talk about how his life is more balanced and
hobbies are better than ours, and that alone should be enough proof that he
deserves every job he wants.

------
throw2016
It doesn't make sense to volunteer extra information that could be potentially
used against you.

Unless you have done your time consuming best to ensure its 'perfect'. And
this directly leads to a culture of resume driven development.

For those who are actually active on projects most interviews do not provide
the context to absorb the information of your contributions; coding style,
tradeoffs, constraints of these projects etc. They will all end up sounding
like excuses.

------
juzerali
I too don't have any side projects primarily because I find creating projects
is a slower way of learning. The fastest is reading documentation, books etc.
Creating side projects doesn't guarantee that you will learn anything more
than what you already know. Looking at codebases of high quality
frameworks/libraries, reading books about best practices, taking online
courses are some of the faster ways of learning.

------
echlebek
There's nothing wrong with spending a bit of time developing a portfolio for
yourself. It doesn't have to be a full time job that you do for free.

------
JustSomeNobody
In the free time that I can set aside to code, I don’t use it to write
complete programs. I poke at stuff that’s intellectually interesting to me.
It’s not good code. It’s not structured well, the variable names suck, it’s
buggy. But none of that was the point of the exercis. I don’t put that stuff
on GitHub because I don’t want some hiring manager thinking it is my best
code. My best code is my professional code.

------
pbreit
It seems to me there is an enormous chasm between "lives to code" and "can
show a side project".

------
nunez
If someone posts a link to their GitHub on their resume or makes mention of it
during the interview process, I take that as "you are giving me free range to
look at your code and potentially make a hiring/advancement decision based on
what I see," and I definitely peruse and ask questions.

------
psergeant
I wrote something about this:

“How to write about your open source experience when you have none”

[https://codeformore.com/how-to-write-up-open-source-
experien...](https://codeformore.com/how-to-write-up-open-source-experience-
when-you-dont-have-any/)

------
sqldba
I feel quite mixed on the article.

Mostly I’m on the side of - sure and if we go for the same job and have the
same skills I should win out because I have tonnes of code to show.

If you’re fine with that then meh.

My other thought was that you sound too busy to be on the on call roster which
is another black mark.

------
ECkce
I'm also in this boat. Most of the places I worked did not allow open source
contributions because of the NDAs I needed to sign.

The boutique place in Austin failed you. At the very least they could have
assigned you a small project and given you some time to complete it.

------
djhworld
My motivation for (and lack of ideas for) side projects has dwindled over the
years.

Most of my "side projects" are throwaway pieces of code or scripts that do
silly things, or ironically are solutions to "cracking the coding interview"
style problems.

------
zwerdlds
Additional reading:
[https://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen...](https://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen99.aspx)

------
andrew_wc_brown
I wish companies cared about side-projects as qualifications for hiring. I
send full projects and they never seem to peer into them when I query. I want
them to look so we can have a discussion around them.

In the last 10 years I've built 40 web-apps and that doesn't include ~20
codebases of my own

I don't understand how you can be a programmer without having side-projects or
at least contributions in open-source.

I end up contributing open source or creating my own libraries via work, so
I'd still have things to show outside the scope of standard hours.

I can get not wanting to do CS algorithm puzzles in interviews since thats a
specialized discipline rarely applicable to web-app development but this I
can't get behind.

------
mooreds
I've definitely had my blog mentioned in interviews. My github is rather
sparse. I'd rather do a coding interview in person, or better yet find a job
through a referral.

------
booblik
It is hard to believe they would waste your time or theirs with an onsite
interview, if they decided apriori a candidate with no side/opensource
projects is unfit for them.

~~~
nanodano
This was my hangup too. The author implies that it was simply because they
didn't have any side projects that they were rejected. I find that hard to
believe though because why would they bother bringing them in for an interview
if they didn't have any side projects? Plus, 90% of the applicants I ever saw
didn't have side projects, so they'd have to auto-reject 90% of their
applicants. Why bother bringing in one of the 90% auto-rejects for an
interview?

------
bdcravens
> I lost the job for a boutique app firm in downtown Austin

Towns awash in startups and those types of developers have a different
cultural expectation than say Dallas or Houston.

------
azr79
Emotions aside and logic in place, it would be easier to say no to someone
like this, you're just making it easier for recruiters to filter you out.

------
dboreham
Honestly when hiring I think the exact opposite : I would only look to side or
open source projects for an inexperienced candidate who would have no other
way to demonstrate competence and a track record. In the case of a candidate
with more experience, their having a body of work outside of their paid
employment would be perhaps interesting and something to drive a discussion
with them but it would also make me wonder if they were engaged in their day
job.

------
linsomniac
Sounds like you've found a good weed-out criteria for a hiring company that
isn't a good match for you!

------
failrate
I don't understand you could get a job at a boutique app developer without a
portfolio of work to show off.

------
b0rsuk
I don't like the implicit assumption that only a person who's passionate about
programming (and [nothing:little+1] else) can be a very good programmer.

I own the book "Pragmatic Programmer", a widely respected book about general
programming principles. The bit about its authors:

"Andy Hunt is an avid woodworker and musician, but, curiously, he is more in
demand as a consultant. He has worked in telecommunications, banking,
financial services, and utilities, as well as in more exotic fields, such as
medical imaging, graphic arts, and Internet services. (...)"

"Dave Thomas likes to fly single-engine airplanes and pays for his habit by
finding elegant solutions to difficult problems, consulting in areas as
diverse as aerospace, banking, financial services, telecommunications, travel
and transport, and the Internet.(...)"

Isn't tunnel vision focus on programming a bit limiting ? What about a
different perspective provided by different experiences and skills ?

 _A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing_ \- attributed
to Archilochus

"(Isaiah) Berlin expands upon this idea to divide writers and thinkers into
two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single
defining idea (examples given include Plato, Lucretius, Dante Alighieri,
Blaise Pascal, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich
Nietzsche, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust and Fernand Braudel), and foxes, who
draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled
down to a single idea (examples given include Herodotus, Aristotle, Desiderius
Erasmus, William Shakespeare, Michel de Montaigne, Molière, Johann Wolfgang
Goethe, Aleksandr Pushkin, Honoré de Balzac, James Joyce and Philip Warren
Anderson" (Wikipedia)

I think modern society and job market places too big an emphasis on hedgehogs.
While backend programming is my profession, I feel more of a fox than a
hedgehog. It works well for hobbies, but not really for jobs as currently
available. For example ladies tend to compliment me I have a nice voice. I
also like books, fantasy and science fiction, and prefer short stories to
novels. So I can connect the dots and... record some audio books. I look for
old short stories no longer covered by copyright, and intend to record them as
"audiobooks". For instance about a village fool who became a werewolf. Another
example: I like animals, I'm precise, patient and have an analytical mind.
Anwer: Origami. Another example: I can't draw much (I really tried with Gimp
and some hand drawing... admittedly, without a good teacher), but I'm somehow
attracted to visual arts. As mentioned, I'm analytical, and I'm not too bad at
math. Answer: Vector graphics, .svg, Inkscape, writing images in vim. It takes
some introspection and observation, but you can figure out what new hobby
would give you satisfaction. If you have many interests, try to think what
they have in common, or how you could possibly connect them.

------
wellboy
Yes, that's why he'll get a job at a large and average software company, but
not at a modern, small software company that still has to make a name for
itself and has to rely on people living for code, having work life in their
top 3 priorities being able to pull out the company out of closing down if
needed.

Each their own.

------
ztratar
It's great you're a passionate person, but this article's tone and implication
is saying that's enough, and that projects shouldn't be viewed as a just ask.

As a career professional and founder of a career related company, I have some
news for you: you clearly have the time and passion to create, but _at nearly
every chance_ when you have additional time, you're not putting it into
programming.

Yes, you've found a job. That's great, but you would be experiencing more pay
and a more accelerated career if you were spending 1/5th your free time on
coding as well. If you want to blow glass, or draw, or write -- fantastic. But
it's not wrong for a company to give the job to someone else, and...

BUILDING SIDE PROJECTS DOES NOT REQUIRE YOU TO BE IN THE TOP 1%.

More often than not, side projects are just a requirement. You don't have to
love code like it's your calling to create a side project.

I recommend this to all software engineers: build side projects, and don't
listen to this post as a calling to infer them as unjust.

Statistically speaking, building side projects is one of the best things you
can do for your career.

~~~
dang
Please don't use uppercase for emphasis:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

