
In defense of hiring based on side projects - barry-cotter
https://diff.substack.com/?r=4uveo
======
ErrantX
My take is; there is nothing wrong with looking for this stuff but relying on
it is short-sighted.

Personal experience of mine is; people who spend a lot of non-work time on
side projects and open source bring a specific energy to their work. What they
are usually _not_ good at is turning up for work, getting their head down and
diligently burning through some work. Instead they tend to be ideas people and
leaders.

All organisations need a balance of personality and experience to be
effective.

So get excited about Bob because he is an Open Source advocate and regular
conference speaker. But also get excited about Alice because her experience is
right and when she interviews she is dedicated and detail-oriented.

~~~
Lammy
I know Alice and Bob are mega-classic foo/bar-style example names, but I also
feel like it brings an unnecessary implication to use gendered names as
examples when talking about hiring.

~~~
shadowmore
I can't tell satire from reality anymore.

~~~
Lammy
I'm being very sincere. It feels out of place here for the masculine example
name to be the outgoing FOSS-contributing self-driven one ("ideas people and
leaders") and the feminine example name to be the one who is good at showing
up on time, keeping her head down, and being told what to do.

~~~
pluto9
If they were reversed, you could take offense to Alice being the head-in-the-
clouds, undisciplined, and unreliable one while Bob is focused, hard-working,
and gets the job done.

Of course that would be equally silly, because an example is just an example
and there's no reason to read this sort of thing into it.

~~~
mpweiher
"It's you who's drawing all those dirty pictures"

 _The Rorschach Test_

[http://bouldertherapist.com/html/humor/MentalHealthHumor/ror...](http://bouldertherapist.com/html/humor/MentalHealthHumor/rorschach.html)

------
shmel
I have started working for a big international company only recently and was
quite surprised to learn that the clause "we own all IP you produce at any
time including at home on your own equipment" is common in contracts. It is
present in my contract as well.

It affected my motivation to work on side projects a lot. How do other devs
deal with this? I'd like to write some code for fun at home at least
sometimes, but arguing with the legal department just to put it in github is
definitely not something I want to do in my free time.

~~~
s_gourichon
(I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, just a forum conversation where I
tell what I believe: "as far as I know", etc.)

What country is this? Here in France, your employer may only complain if they
can argue that your activity causes them harm. Side projects, even when
benefiting from your work experience, should, as far as I know, be okay.

~~~
shmel
It is the UK. I know that probably in some jurisdictions some of these clauses
are unenforceable. I just don't want to step in a legal mess. I know a friend
of mine (in France btw) had to argue with his company about this even though
he obtained a verbal agreement beforehand. It is just that he was about to
quit and the employer decided to fuck with him as much as possible.

~~~
cnity
Are you sure? The line "in the course of your employment" is often
misinterpreted to mean "while hired here". In fact it means something like
"while doing something that is specifically required to do your job
properly"[0]

[0]: Australian site, but relevant: [https://www.business.qld.gov.au/running-
business/protecting-...](https://www.business.qld.gov.au/running-
business/protecting-business/ip-kit/browse-ip-topics/ownership-of-
intellectual-property-created-by-your-employees-and-contractors-or-
consultants/ownership#:~:text=As%20a%20general%20rule%2C%20an,the%20employee%2C%20not%20the%20employer).

~~~
shmel
yes. My contract clarifies clearly "whether or not during working hours,
whether or not using company's equipment". It could be difficult to enforce,
but I wouldn't want to check.

~~~
cnity
Yes, but does it say "in the course of your employment"?

The "whether or not during working hours/using company's equipment" part just
covers the case where you are working late, etc. If your contract contains the
phrase "in the course of your employment", then you can still work on a hobby
project and it remains yours, because you didn't work on the hobby project "in
the course of your employment" (you were not asked to build the hobby project)

------
_raul
It took me years to notice a flaw in this approach: it's based in the premise
that everyone has time for side projects.

From that point I think about it as a bias. Nowadays I try to assess if the
candidates with no public activity on GH and no side projects have the passion
and interest I look for, but can't take it further outside of work due to
their specific circumstances.

~~~
moron4hire
Time-in-practice is still correlated with skill. If I'm getting someone with
"4 years of experience", a person who works on side projects could have 10,000
hours in-practice, vs only 5,000 for someone who doesn't.

I understand not exclusively focusing on people who work on their own to the
exclusion of everyone else, but I definitely don't understand this modern push
to ignore it as a signal completely. People who don't work side projects are
going to need more years of experience to have the same level of practice as
those who do.

And frankly, I've been involved in a lot of hiring, and I've yet to see these
people who A) don't work on side projects, but B) are actually skilled in
their jobs. We give them interviews and it becomes clear they hid in large,
ossified, megacorporate teams. They know the one way to do things that is the
one template of work they've ever been hired to do, because that is the only
experience they have.

If that's your environment, I guess you can have them. I don't have any space
for that.

~~~
odshoifsdhfs
You do know you can also repeat the same 10 hours 1000 times right?

Side projects usually don't have the oversight where you learn and improve so
much as when you work in a team. Is like learning to play football by yourself
by kicking a ball against your house wall everyday, or play in a team with
other players and a coach. You can kick the ball for 8 hours against the wall,
but I guarantee it that 1 hour a week in a team setting you will improve much
more.

~~~
moron4hire
And the athlete who plays on a team _and_ practices at home will out-perform
their peers who don't practice at home.

I can't believe I have to say this. This is _obvious_. Every coach knows this.

It's not an exclusive-OR problem.

~~~
odshoifsdhfs
ACtually, not really! Coaches and sports scientist are actually pushing back
on that as it leads to overtraining, and except for the very top of their
field, mistakes that need correcting.

Boxing for example (sport I did and helped coaching), unless you are top of
your field, isn't recommended to do a lot of 'at home' training as you develop
bad habits without supervision (dropping the defense, telegraphing your punch
a bit) as you don't have the feedback. Thes mistakes have to be then
'corrected'

~~~
iateanapple
> Boxing for example

Boxing isn’t a good example because it’s a combat sport which means there is
far more training than competing.

When I played football the ratio was close to 1:1 - games played to hours
trained and something like 150-200:1 for when I was boxing.

------
JohnBooty
When hiring, I am a big fan of side projects as a _substitute_ for strong work
experience. If you've been working as a barista but coding in your spare time,
cool! You might have a great career ahead of you in software engineering...
maybe you're right for the team. Your portfolio matters.

(The converse is true, too. If you're been coding at work all day but pursuing
your passion for coffee at night, maybe you'll make a great barista or
roaster! Go for it!)

But.

Holding a demanding engineering job _and doing a lot of engineering on the
side_ are nearly mutually exclusive.

I've done a big side project or two, but only when I was basically
underemployed at my day job. Slumming it, really.

I've had other jobs where it took _everything I had_ just to keep up with the
demands of the job and keep up with my talented coworkers. I sure didn't have
any engineering juice left over in me at the end of the day.

Especially not if I wanted to maintain healthy relationships with other human
beings and my family. There are only so many hours in a week.

So, if you demand your hires spent time outside of work on side projects?
You're going to have a strong bias that favors people who (a) have been
slacking or underemployed (b) are not really into the whole "human
relationships" thing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with living one's life
that way, but you are certainly excluding a lot of healthy and talented people
if you essentially insist upon _only_ hiring from that group.

------
cryptica
>> Hiring Based on Side Projects: Unfair, But Good For the World

I don't see how hiring based on side projects is unfair in any way. Ignoring
people's side projects is essentially a punishment for those who do invest a
lot of time in them. It's not like the side project built itself. We should
not punish people by ignoring their surplus efforts.

There are two ways to go about it:

1\. Reward people for building real stuff and improving their skills in an
area which is relevant to the position that they're applying for.

2\. Reward people for being good at taking whiteboard tests, social scheming,
rehearsing job interviews and solving pointless abstract puzzles that have
nothing to do with the position that they're applying for.

I can't imagine how anyone could justify #2 as being the better option. It's
disturbing that this article even needs to be written. Do people actually
think that the second option is even viable?

Now I understand why there are such huge social problems today. There is an
army of type 1 people who were badly hurt and who are still struggling and now
they're smarter and more determined than ever to make things right.

~~~
moron4hire
This. It's one thing to say "don't be biased against people who don't have
public GitHub profiles full of stuff they can show off". It's very clear that
there are a variety of reasons why that would be the case.

But it's an entirely different thing to say "side projects have no correlation
to job skill". Which is literally what a lot of people in the article's
referenced tweet are saying, and even what a few people here are saying.

The reality is, most of the resumes you're going to get for any particular job
posting are going to be garbage. Poor performers are over-represented in the
open job market, both because they stay in the job market a lot longer (can't
stay very long at one place) and because they need to apply to lots of places
in the hopes of playing the numbers.

The resume is completely broken. But it's all we get from "open" job
positions. If the resume is all I have to go on, most of the ones I get I have
to throw away because they have nearly zero match for the posted position. Of
the few that are left, the ones that somehow show they aren't a hot-potato are
going to the top of the stack.

If all you have is enterprise Java experience and you're applying to my VR
project in C#, and you have nothing to show, not even side projects, that you
have any experience writing C# or game code, I'm not going to even give you a
call. And _that_ sort of thing is the majority of resumes you'll receive.

If you want a particular job, you need to be able to show some kind of ability
to do it. If that's your actual, professional experience, that's the best. But
if you're trying to change industries, you gotta have something that
correlates. So what is it going to be, if it isn't a side project?

The better way of evaluating candidates is to start from referrals, but that
has its own issues of gatekeeping, either conscious or unconscious.

If we're talking about open job listings, getting nothing but a cover letter
and a resume (and you're lucky to even get a cover letter), how else are you
supposed to do it? You can't interview everyone. There _are_ people who will
be a complete waste of time.

------
jimmySixDOF
Nolan Bushnell Founder of Atari, inventor of Pong, & gave Steve Jobs a job :

    
    
       *I would hire somebody who would have a really passionate, tricky hobby before I hired somebody who had a PhD in the subject. Hobbies are more important in today’s world than degrees.*

~~~
panelss
In practise, this is bullshit. Maybe back in the 70s, but now the tech
industry machination is so robotic and massive that you will never even get to
know your employer before they've already thrown you out for being under-
qualified.

------
bJGVygG7MQVF8c
It boils down to this for me:

> in the early days [of rocketry], everyone was a hobbyist

The more your company resembles "the early days of rocketry" the more it might
make sense to select for hobbyist energy, and substantive side projects are a
good signal of that.

But: Not all companies resemble or need to resemble the early days of
rocketry. They ought to design their own filters based on their needs. Read
some Hayek. A monoculture in hiring is undesirable and completely removing
bias across all possible dimensions is impossible.

For all the talk of "diversity" (read: heterogeneity) in tech, there seems to
be a strong cultural bias among engineers toward uniformity and cargo-culting
(e.g. the doctrinaire obsession with best practices over first-principles
thinking you see in some corners) and little appetite for actual
heterogeneity.

The inefficiencies emerge when every tiny startup mimics FAANG or every mid-
sized company mimics tiny startups, etc.

------
davidg109
Side projects are icing. People live under different circumstances. One person
may wish to spend their free time socializing when they’re done work. Another
person may wish to spend that time doing these side projects.

If this made the difference between being hired by a company or not, this
wouldn’t be the company I would choose to work for. I could only imagine the
24/7, always-on culture they’d have.

~~~
sokoloff
One athlete might choose to spend their free time socializing while another
works out. One med or engineering student might socialize while another hits
the books or lab.

Do we believe that the outcomes will be equal over 100s of such trials? If we
believe the outcomes will be different, why should we not consider that among
other signals we get in interviewing?

~~~
milesvp
You should look at the work of Richard Hamming. Socializing is very important
in staying relavant in a field. Similarly there’s a belief that the social
dinners of the academics in cape cod post WWII had an overwhemling effect on
that regions academic contributions.

Personally I’d bet on the socializer over the person putting in tons of extra
hours in isolation anyday.

~~~
sokoloff
True, though I would count significant socializing within your field or with a
distinctly academic bent quite differently from "crushing Bud Light cans
around a campfire". Not to say that the latter isn't also a perfectly valid
way to spend time, but it's quite different from a social dinner of academics,
IMO.

------
barry-cotter
> Barons of the Sky is a nice history of the early days of the aerospace
> industry, and it shows that in the early days, everyone was a hobbyist.
> Unlike other hobbies, like writing computer games for fun, this was a high-
> stakes pursuit. Good amateur plane designers made the front page when they
> set records, the bad ones made the obituary page instead.

...

> And since the tweet mentioned rockets, it would be wrong to ignore one of
> the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jack Parsons, who helped
> invent modern rocketry, founded a cult, got expelled from Caltech for a bit
> of both, and died from a rocket explosion at his home lab.

> Hedge funds do this, too. At a typical stock-picking hedge fund, the
> decisive interview questions are about what stocks you like and which ones
> you hate. Some anecdotes:

> Lars Kroijer, a young MBA, scored an interview with a very good hedge fund
> in the 90s. He describes the interview in his memoir. The manager asked him
> for stock picks. He said the market was inefficient, so the manager asked
> him to leave. Ouch! Lars straightened himself out and went on to run a
> successful fund, then retired at the right time. At another fund I’ve heard
> about, the head of research liked to poll the interns and ask them if they
> thought the market was efficient. If the answer was yes, he said, they were
> fired effective immediately. Fortunately, in an efficient market it should
> be effortless to get an equally attractive job elsewhere. I’ve bombed at
> least one interview by not having any good trading pitches handy. (In
> fairness to me, it was a fund using a strategy I hadn’t ever worked on. In
> fairness to them, I knew this.)

...

> As many people point out, the norm in favor of side projects is unfair to
> anyone with limited free time. What they don’t add is that this is a
> progressive tax: there’s a positive correlation between educational
> attainment and hours worked per week, as well as between income and hours
> worked per week. This was not always the case; “The idle rich” used to be a
> statistically accurate observation, but now the rich work longer hours and
> have less leisure time than average. But the average American watches four
> and a half hours of TV per day. If your work happens to be fun, you can
> devote that leisure time to side projects. If your work is boring, you
> probably shouldn’t complain that people who like their craft more than you
> and devote more effort to it are rewarded.

> (As a friend put it a few years ago, when such pop culture references were
> relevant, “If you know what a ‘Khaleesi’ is, you had time for side
> projects.”)

~~~
pizza234
> But the average American watches four and a half hours of TV per day

This is something that always perplexed me. I don't doubt it's true, but could
somebody show me a schedule where one puts so much television in the context
of an adult, independent, life?

I have barely 3 hours free every workday, and I need to be extremely well
organized and lean, in addition to working (full time) from home.

~~~
balfirevic
> I don't doubt it's true, but could somebody show me a schedule where one
> puts so much television in the context of an adult, independent, life?

Without more information on the methodology, it might very well not be true in
a sense that they just sit and watch TV. Those four and a half hours could be
including the time people do stuff around the house while the TV is on.

If anyone has more information about how this is commonly measured please
share.

------
realtalk_sp
Something I find odd is this presumption that most software engineering roles
necessitate practice in the form of side projects. That hasn't been my
experience.

Modern-day software seems to take the form of mostly being fairly repetitive
(CRUD, front-end framework, RDBMS, AMQ, in-memory cache, object modeling,
testing, CI/CD, etc) and only quite rarely involving unique knowledge specific
to the task at hand. Once you've dealt with the fundamentals enough times,
there are rapidly diminishing marginal returns to hours spent coding, for most
practical software engineering roles.

At that point, a person's time would be _much_ better spent developing other
tangential faculties like communication, project management, and critical
thinking or simply on personal wellbeing (happy workers are more productive
workers).

So, in my opinion, unless you're trying to do something quite innovative,
you're making a mistake by selecting for coders who burn the candle at both
ends. You should instead select for smart people who can get the job done well
_without_ having to spend an excessive amount of time on side projects and who
optimize their lives outside of work in a way that leaves them happy and
energized when they come to work.

------
Nursie
This is just so much crap.

I love what I do but doing it 40 hours a week is enough. I have side projects
- doing up the house, cooking, exploring the world, spending lots of time with
friends and family etc. I occasionally have a home tech project like building
a security cam system or something, but it's not that much and not that often.

In my experience the kinds of 'obsessives' he's talking about in this post are
not only not the best at what they do, they're often pretty weird people too.

------
grogers
All the examples of extremely dedicated people with airplane building side
projects were founders. If you are looking for a founder then sure, side
projects likely have value. Not all of the employees you hire need an
outrageous energy to spend day and night doing work and more work on the side.

------
moron4hire
I get that people are reacting to companies that are saying they only consider
people with side-project portfolios. Yes, that's terrible. But the pendulum-
swing reaction to say "side project shouldn't matter" is just as bad, maybe
even worse. People who talk about "side projects shouldn't be a consideration"
don't know what they are asking for. They have either forgotten or never
experienced the history of _why_ side projects are considered in the
interviewing process today. To ask for side projects to not be a part of the
hiring decision process is to ask to set back hiring by at least 15 years. Do
you think the tech industry was _more_ equitable 15 years ago?

Considering side projects came about when people like me got our turn at being
hiring managers. When we were first entering the industry, we got told
_explicitly_ that our side projects didn't matter, that the only experience
that mattered was professional experience. We could _prove_ we could do the
job and we still were being told we would not be considered for the job. We
started considering side projects _specifically_ to be more equitable in
hiring.

I grew up in a rural town. I went to a local, state college. I graduated in
the top of my class in Computer Science and I still couldn't get a job in
programming out of college. I didn't have a dad at Microsoft to get me a
prestigious internship. I didn't have a prestigious school behind my name and
our school "only" did Java and the local companies "only" did .NET. I had been
programming in .NET for 2 years by that point, but it wasn't going to be
considered because it wasn't professional experience.

The only job I could get was entry-level QA. You didn't even need a degree to
get the job. I had to beg to get commit access to the repo to prove I could
fix the bugs that I identified. That was the only way I was able to get into
programming back then.

I spent 10 years doing web and database development at consulting companies. I
hated it. Consulting might be fine for some, but I can't stand it. I tried for
years to get out of it, only to be told that my experience in consulting
didn't matter, I had never worked in product development and it was supposedly
"soooo different" that nobody could take a chance on me. The _only_ way I was
able to get out of it was... to start a side project. I built a VR project
that got me a small amount of internet fame. Now, 5 years later, with 15 years
of professional programming experience, and 20 years of side-project
experience, I'm the head of VR at a company.

When you say that side projects shouldn't be a consideration, you're not
asking for more people to get interviews. You're asking for fewer. The only
people who are going to get interviews in that scenario are folks who went to
prestigious schools. All the people drawing up barista-cum-coding-bootcamp-
grads-who-don't-have-the-time-to-feed-themselves-and-work-side-projects-at-
the-same-time archetypes: those people aren't going to get interviews. The
only chance they have is to dig deep, build a portfolio, and hope they run
into a company that is progressive enough to look past the lack of
credentials.

------
sys_64738
You have time to do side projects outside FT employment? Does that mean you
either have no life, or were not working hard enough for your current
employer. That's how it's interpreted.

------
jcahill
The author is essentially hoping to usher in an end-times world divided solely
into middle managers and sapient jumping beans. This is a far from sensible
goal.

>I don’t mean to pick on this person; there’s no reason to be familiar with
the history of the US aerospace and rocketry industry (unless, of course,
you’re going to make an argument that hinges on claims about the industry).

Failing to grasp the broadly satirical nature of copypasta like this, then
doubling down on an i-know-more-than-you literal interpretation of the text,
is not a situation in which the author should be concerned that readers will
worry _the other guy_ is getting roasted too hard.

>Barons of the Sky is a nice history of the early days of the aerospace
industry, and it shows that in the early days, everyone was a hobbyist.

Acutely pursued hobbies with upside potential become professions! I am
shocked. This is my shocked face. :o

>At another fund I’ve heard about, the head of research liked to poll the
interns and ask them if they thought the market was efficient. If the answer
was yes, he said, they were fired effective immediately.

This example is just an nth-hand anecdote about an empirically incorrect
manager on a workplace power trip. Less shark, more dipshit. Parroting the
desired response to some manager's arbitrary psychodrama isn't relevant to
making money on money for a living. Does the manager need a date to prom, too?

>(As a friend put it a few years ago, when such pop culture references were
relevant, “If you know what a ‘Khaleesi’ is, you had time for side projects.”)

Consider the following: humans experience the same number of hours per day.

If you know what a ‘number’ is, you have time to appease me. Reexamine your
life to spend more of it appeasing me.

It's a good argument, because humans experience the same number of hours per
day. Not enough of them are spent appeasing me!

>In a field with a low marginal cost of scaling results and tournament-like
economics (for example: investing, software, writing, some kinds of hardware),
there’s a moral component as well. The better you think you are, the more it’s
your _responsibility_ to work extra hard, since the results will be
distributed so widely.

Just try to say "there is a moral component to scaling IoT toasters" with a
straight face among people you respect.

Note: The author reads HN[1] and likely crafted this blurb as bait. He should
come away from this thread more insulted by the inanity of his own writing
than grateful for the attention.

Promotion of workified mediocrity like the kind on display here is unnecessary
in an era that has already caricatured this worldview past the point of no
return with such literary works as the Student Athlete copypasta[2]. You do
not need to tamper with your inner life in the vague hope that an interviewer,
somewhere down the line, will grade you on your hobbies like all code is a
take-home test regardless of its genesis.

Stagnant real wages in the author's home country (US) further reduce the
blogpost's relevance. As do OECD data[3][4] showing no positive correlation
between average hours worked and stereotypical innovation rate at the country-
level.

[1]:
[https://twitter.com/ByrneHobart/status/1278782161559138304](https://twitter.com/ByrneHobart/status/1278782161559138304)

[2]:
[https://files.catbox.moe/2srmab.png](https://files.catbox.moe/2srmab.png)

[3]: [https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-
worked.htm](https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm)

[4]:
[https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS](https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS)

