
If you don’t have pet projects, I don’t think I want you - wccrawford
http://ayende.com/blog/90113/if-you-donrsquo-t-have-pet-projects-i-donrsquo-t-think-i-want-you
======
0x12
If you have a life, I don't want you.

If you have a family, I don't want you.

If you have enough energy to do your work but not enough energy that after
work you can work some more, I don't want you.

What is it that makes employers so enamored of people with 'pet projects'? Are
they easier to take advantage of? Do they work long hours without expecting
compensation? Does not having dependents mean that it's easier to pressure
then in to working harder?

Really, having or not having pet projects (and I have plenty, don't worry)
shouldn't matter even a little bit a the hiring time. You judge people on
their ability as good as you can and what they do in their free time is simply
none of your business.

So, if you ask me about my 'pet projects' I don't want you.

~~~
georgemcbay
The worst side-effect of this is actually "If you were really passionate about
your last job, I don't want you."

I have old pet projects from times when my work at previous jobs was
interesting but not all-consuming. The work I do for my current employer is so
interesting and fun to me in so many ways that when I have spare coding time
on non-work-hours, I'm still working on these work projects. My work projects
_are_ my pet projects.

Granted, someone like me is less likely to be in the market in the first place
because I love my job, but if I suddenly were in the market (there are many
very hypothetical reasons this could happen -- company runs out of runway,
company is acquired by company that shifts focus in ways I don't care for,
etc, etc) a filter like this would cut me out for all the wrong reasons.

Having said all of that, I think people hiring employees do need to employ
some arbitrary filters that could potentially filter out stellar employees as
a side effect, and I don't think that's a horrible thing.. it probably helps
more often than not and is thus worth the rare corner case situations where it
ends in a tragic mistake.

If I'm in the market looking for another job I have more than enough contacts
with people I've worked with in the past that such arbitrary filters are a
non-factor for me, so the take away is that if you're a great developer,
develop contacts and then you don't have to worry about things like this.

~~~
nkassis
I'm in the same boat as you, I got assigned to work on a project that keeps me
really interested and my side projects right now are basically research and
experimentation that might be useful for my main work project.

Looking at projects like Ruby on Rails, Node.js and others like it where the
creator created for work reason.

Or look at Linus, his side project was Git. It was something he needed for
work.

------
wccrawford
I always suspect these people are actually looking for developers who will
work long hours with little pay, because they are so driven. They aren't
looking for the best and brightest, just the most driven.

I think it's actually quite easy to 'care' without having a driving passion
that forces you to give your life over to programming. In fact, I did it for a
number of years. I did all my programming at work, and all my relaxing at
home. And I was happy, and loved both.

Testing for 1 thing because you want something related is a big mistake. You
can easily have both false positives and false negatives. And since you're
testing for the wrong thing, you won't know until it's too late. If you ever
do.

~~~
sunkencity
"Put simply, we are looking for a .NET developer and one of the most important
things that we look for is passion"

How much passion is there in the .NET scene anyway? It's very business
oriented, I'd expect developers to be more sort of corporate and better at
time reporting. It's not like you have to be a hipster to churn out
spreadsheet automation scripts.

~~~
hvs
It's sad that you associate "passion" with "hipster". I can't think of a more
inaccurate characterization of a highly motivated developer. I also didn't get
the impression that he was looking for a "hipster".

~~~
sunkencity
I am myself a passionate developer, that doesn't mean I have the time to make
massive open-source projects just to get a better resume, because I'm neck
deep in writing code for the company I have been running for the last 7 years.
Not all people have the luxury to figure out something worthwhile do do and
put on github.

I hate hiring people and putting a price tag on them, it's a cruel world but
not every job interview has to be like American Idol if you know what I mean.
Of course he should try to find people that _care_ but that doesn't mean that
the people that care has to write excellent code, or that they have to write
tons of open source code. They just need to deliver at work.

~~~
ctdonath
At risk of inspiring ire...

I'd have certain doubts of someone who does produce lots of open-source code,
insofar as that could be construed as they don't think highly enough of their
own code to sell it.

(As I write I'm waiting for GCC to rebuild due to the need to fix a bug
therein. That such a bug exists at this late date in a product so widely used
as a foundational tool does not inspire confidence in OSS. I find such flaws
tend not to occur in "closed" software, where someone is paid to polish the
corners that nobody wants to.)

~~~
orangecat
_I'd have certain doubts of someone who does produce lots of open-source code,
insofar as that could be construed as they don't think highly enough of their
own code to sell it._

Also, people who do volunteer work are obviously unqualified.

 _I find such flaws tend not to occur in "closed" software, where someone is
paid to polish the corners that nobody wants to._

"A" bug in gcc proves that open source stinks? Have you used IE6?

------
loup-vaillant
Again, we see here the tension between the needs of the employers and those of
the applicants.

An applicant needs to be judged "fairly". More precisely, a false negative is
unacceptable. This is especially critical when he's just above the "hiring
bar".

An employer crumbles over CVs, and needs to judge _fast_. False _positives_
are unacceptable. False negatives are no big deal. This is especially _not_
critical when the applicant is just above the "hiring bar". There are others.

Hiring processes aren't designed to be fair to the applicants. They are
designed to work for the _employers_. It's like a spam filter, except with
tolerance reversed: no spam in, some ham out is cool. My gut tell me that it
definitely sucks, but my brain fails to come up with a solution.

------
dlevine
I have found that I usually start working on pet projects when I am
dissatisfied with my job.

At my last job, I found myself working on several different extracurricular
projects at once. I kind of realized that this meant it was time to leave (and
do my own startup).

If I found someone who was supremely happy with his job, I would expect that
any extra time would be spent at work, either making the product better or
developing something else related to that company's business.

With that said, there is nothing _wrong_ with working on a pet project, just
that it can indicate something bad rather than something good.

~~~
notahacker
I'd expect someone supremely happy with their standard salaried job wouldn't
be first out of the office every night, but I'd be _alarmed_ if they were
expected to dedicate their evenings and weekends to making their employers
richer.

------
sehugg
I used to think this too, but now my position is more nuanced. Certainly you
need to have shown you have a passion for technology that goes beyond the
norm, but there are other reasons you might not have lots of recent code
outside of work. Maybe you have a family. Or maybe you have such a fulfilling
current job that you don't feel the need to supplement it with extracurricular
activities. Maybe you are interested in developing non-technical skills that
would make you more useful in the future. Etc.

But some positions do require that Olympic athlete mindset. For other
positions it's a detriment.

~~~
wyclif
Maybe your employment contract states that anything you create is owned by
your company so there is no code "outside of work." The question then becomes
whether that is a contingency that has affected your passion or not.

~~~
mxavier
Maybe I'm misinterpreting. Are there really contracts that say that any code
you write, even if it is unrelated to your work and off-hours is the property
of the company you work for? If so, that sounds like a horrible arrangement.
That would be like a chef making a sandwich for himself at lunch and having to
give it to the restaurant where he works instead.

~~~
justincormack
Yes there are. Big companies mainly, eg the News Corp contracts say that.

------
petercooper
I make good money from job ads so this does me a disservice but.. stop
discriminating against people by getting them to send in their CVs. Headhunt!

I'm selfishly in support of preferring to hire people who show a strong out-
of-hours dedication and passion for their work but it's not a realistic
expectation for a regular job ad. Instead, hit GitHub, hit mailing lists, find
the top blogs on the topics you're hiring for, and approach the people who pop
up and seem to know what they're talking about.

You might have to let people work remotely, pay them more, or come up with
other ways to pique their interest, but if you _really_ want 24/7 passionate
programmers, you can get them, with enough resources.

It's amazing how few employers do this, even those who _do_ have the
resources. Grab the top talent in your areas and find them by their
byproducts. Why Google/MSFT/etc aren't trying to scrape up every seriously
prolific developer on GitHub at $250k+ a year or whatever is beyond me.

------
gte910h
I think you need to be sued for anti-family discrimination.

If you have young children, your chance of being able to do this sort of after
hours programming can be near zero if you're doing all the parenting you
should if you and your spouse both work.

Especially if you get in trouble for it at work (I know I've been places where
you had to do 4-10 hours of paperwork to do it even).

------
brosephius
sorry, but I think this is an arrogant and insulting attitude. I get the value
of side projects, but assuming that someone who doesn't have any is an
inferior candidate is bullshit. I know the blog post says "Not having pet
projects doesn’t mean that you are a bad developer" but dismissing such people
out of hand says otherwise.

you don't care about experience? so someone who writes ultra-high-performance
code for a trading firm is worth less to you than someone who writes a 50-line
rails app that lets you use the fabled "pomodoro technique"? good luck finding
great developers with that attitude. but hey, at least they'll have "passion",
right? because all salaried coding is generic and mindless, and anybody doing
it is a drone with no skills or ambition.

------
rickmb
In my experience, candidates with major pet projects, especially ones that
aren't related to their current job, fall into one or more of the following
categories:

* They don't have life, and are usually not the most pleasant people to work with, let alone communicate with non-programmers.

* For some reason cannot find a job that involves the passion/knowledge/skill they put into their pet project. The job market for programmers being what it is, that's a major red flag.

* They have a passion for programming, but aren't good enough to hack it in a professional environment. Often not so much a skills but discipline or team player issue, but yes, you can have a passion for something you are not particularly good at! Millions of amateur-[enter activity here] do it every day!

Having or not having a pet project is an good angle for an interview, but not
a meaningful qualification in itself.

~~~
flyosity
Hmm, seems I don't fall into any of these categories.

I design and build web software during the day, then at night and on the
weekends I work on my own iOS and Mac apps. I've been offered full-time iOS &
Mac design/development jobs but I don't take them for a few reasons, most
importantly that I really like my current "real" job and the hardcore web work
keeps my skills sharp.

So I'm not the first category because I'm married and do have a life outside
work, I'm not the second one because I can easily find a different full-time
job but choose to stay in the position I have, and the third just isn't
applicable.

I don't really have a position on the pet-projects-as-interview-question
topic, but just thought I'd put in my two cents.

------
jim_h
I think when you're young with free time AND passionate about something, you
should dive into it and learn as much as possible.

When you're older and if you have children, PLEASE PLEASE spend the
appropriate time being a GOOD parent. It seems like the world is more work
focused than ever and parents are not spending as much time with their kids as
they should. We want good programmers, but we NEED good parents even more. Our
future will eventually rely on the next generation of adults and not just good
software..

------
tzs
The obvious question: if I take a job with you, will you guarantee that work
will not take up too much of my time, nor demand too much of my creative
energy, so that I can continue to have my pet projects?

~~~
kkowalczyk
He can't. But I can guarantee this: an employer can't force you to work more
than you're willing to work. They can try but you're not their slave.

Employment is a two-way street.

If the employer isn't happy with your work, for whatever reason, they can fire
you.

If you're not happy with your employer, for whatever reason, you can quit.

If an employer is making unreasonable demands on your time, you quit. And to
be clear: there is no universal of what's reasonable, so I'm talking about
your personal standard.

Employment is a risk for both parties. You risk that the job will be boring,
or demanding more time than you're willing to give but you're not the only one
taking the risk. Employer risks that you'll be unable to do the work or slack
off etc.

~~~
notJim
What you say is true, but it's important to realize that the nature of the
risk is disproportionate. The programmer quitting his job has a lot more at
stake than the company firing the programmer. For the programmer, it means a
stressful job search, likely financial stress (even if s/he saved up a lot of
money, it's not fun to be living on a finite supply), and all the feelings
that go along with losing a job (wounded pride, fear of judgement from others,
etc.)

For the employer, it means what? They now have payroll that's significantly
lighter, and true, they're down a person, but realistically that just means
they have to pressure their other employees to pick up the slack while they
find someone new, and those programmers, not wanting to lose their jobs,
probably do it.

Now, of course the important thing as a programmer is to have an attitude like
yours, which mitigates the downsides of leaving a job. But not everyone has
that attitude.

------
ChuckMcM
I find its a scale, from people who would rather do nothing when not at work
to people where their work suffers from all the other stuff they are doing. My
ideal candidates are somewhere in the middle of that scale.

There are two interesting things you can learn about people this way, one is
where their passions lay and the other is what their time management skills
are like. Someone who works feverishly on 20 things and gets nothing done, or
folks who consistently pop out one or two things a month, month after month,
in their 'spare' time.

Interestingly a bias that perhaps the OP recognizes shows up in this blarticle
(what do you call one entry in a blog anyway). What if the candidate sent a
picture of a 6 piece mahogany dining room set (because they spent all their
spare time wood working) or an MP3 of their latest composition ? Its not OSS,
its not 'tech' per se, but its an outlet for their creative drive.

------
josephturnip
Additionally, the author of the article is potentially weeding out the exact
people his company is looking for. Some (myself, as an example) are passionate
about what they do for their job, to the point where they do development on
work projects in their spare time. Presumably that person is better than the
aspiring OSS developer who grinds their job for 8 hours only to go home and
work on their pet project.

------
quinedstatement
I consider myself very passionate about programming. I do a lot of research
and learn about programming in my spare time, but have hardly any personal
programming projects to show. After work, instead of grinding away coding like
I do every day, I'm learning how to draw, and paint, and play music. Does this
mean I'm not qualified for this .NET position?

~~~
noidi
> I do a lot of research and learn about programming in my spare time, but
> have hardly any personal programming projects to show.

I think this point is not stressed enough whenever this subject comes up. A
person who spends all his free time reading CS research papers and
experimenting with different solutions to problems he encounters in his field
is not passionate by this standard if he doesn't have a pet _project_ to show
at the interview.

~~~
shabble
In that case, you could probably knock together a quick page or two summary of
what you've been reading and playing about with. It might take a little time,
but it's easily transferable to any other job applications, and you might even
find something interesting to add to your cover letter.

I'd treat that at least as well as a pet project, and possibly more so.

------
cmorrisrsg
I actually reject people without pet projects for an entirely different
reason. I can find out much more about how you behave as a developer and
whether or not you'd fit in with our company by reading your code than I can
from any kind of interview or whiteboard challenge. Ideally you'd actually
hire the prospective developer for a short contract project before hiring, but
that has significant challenges and costs as well.

Think of a carpenter that claimed to be amazing at producing furniture, but
had none to show you. Would you trust them on how well he could BS you in an
interview? It's not about passion or dedication. If you, producer of code, can
show me code you've produce, I'm taking a much lower risk on hiring you. And
fortunately, there are enough people around with code to show that rejecting
others is a pretty easy filtering decision to make.

~~~
factotvm
Then give them a coding problem that takes a short amount of time but allows
you to evaluate their skills. I relish these opportunities and respect the
companies that ask me to do them.

To keep with your metaphor, ask the carpenter to make you a cabinet door.

Again, I agree with others here... if you're passionate about the startup
you're working at (and you should be), that _is_ your side project. I distrust
people who work at startups that have side projects.

~~~
eropple
A coding problem is less illustrative than a decent--LOC is always suspect,
but let's say 10,000 LOC--corpus of work. Something to show much more than a
toy problem.

Better still, however, is collaboration with open source projects--you can see
individual communication between people as well as the developer's ability to
enter a foreign codebase and be productive, (hopefully) without introducing
bugs due to ill-advised changes without understanding what's being changed.

(We don't look at side projects or open source at my current employer. I wish
we did.)

------
lcargill99
Free time is not equivalent to passion. Basing relationships on the internal
emotional state of other people is pretty risky The passionately wrong are
usually harder to deal with.

It's hit or miss, but a Great Deal of Robin Hanson's blog is about social
signalling and the biases inherent thereof. Worthwhile effort, that.

------
chc
The assumption that pet projects cannot be related to our work is weird to me.
My full-time job title right now is "Newspaper Editor" — so you know the
programming I do is not "work assignments" — but I have a whole host of tools
I've written to automate the less-interesting parts of the job (from simple
things like "calculate how many inches this will take" to more complicated
things like "generate the files needed for this week's paper with these
parameters and the ads placed in a configuration that will be both cost-
effective and pleasing to our advertisers"). These are unquestionably work-
related, but they're also unquestionably things I wrote just because I had an
itch to scratch. I wanted them, so I made them. Why would my pet projects
_not_ be related to what I do?

~~~
jisaacstone
This is the first thing I thought as well. Good programmers can have a wide
selection of choice when it comes to their work, so I think they will often
choose work they enjoy and can even get paid to work on 'pet projects'

At the moment the stuff I enjoyed writing the most I also got paid for. Does
that indicate a lack of 'passion'?

------
coolswan
Meh, he probably needs to de-generalize this thought and take it case-by-case.
I didn't work on side projects for two years because I was obsessed with the
project at the startup I worked at. He would've heard an earful from me if he
said I wasn't "passionate"

------
scott_s
I've said this before on related submissions: I enjoy my work, and it consumes
all of my cycles allocated towards programming.

------
3pt14159
The HN response here is crazy.

Obviously 40 year olds are going to have less side projects, and obviously
there are devs out there that treat development as a job, not a passion. I
know a very good python dev that fits that description.

But seriously, _no_ free time for side projects? Really? Absolutely _no_ time?

It takes 30 mins to whip up something sorta kinda neat. That's an episode of
Entourage. Give me a break with all this kids talk, eight year olds go to bed
early, and teenagers don't need all that much attention _every single day_.
Sure, help 'em with homework, etc. But lets face some facts, there are plenty
of unpaid OSS developers that happen to be parents and they don't whine about
not having enough time.

~~~
r00fus
Travel 50-100% for current job. Having a kid with special needs. Having
multiple children. Owning a home. Aging parents with disabilities.
Outdoors/Travel nut (you or spouse). Civic/political/community involvement.

Any of these personal situations can eat into your "personal" time
considerably. Add up 2 or more, and your remaining personal time is what you
carve out of your sleep hours.

I'm lucky that I don't have to work two jobs like of the less fortunate, and I
don't fall into all (or even most) of the categories above, but I don't watch
TV and I don't have a github page.

------
ido
I used to have pet projects, until one of them became my full time job.

------
mirkules
First off, some of us have lives and families. Some of us work more than just
9-5 and commute for more than one hour each way.

Secondly, none of my pet projects are OSS. I have a lot of pet projects, some
in their infant stages, some pretty far along. And they are not for public
viewing, but for my pleasure, which is why they are not OSS. [edit: and some
are a collaboration with other people who would prefer that code stays closed]

Thirdly, is there such a thing as a passionate .NET programmer!? (half-joking)

~~~
chokolad
> Thirdly, is there such a thing as a passionate .NET programmer!? (half-
> joking)

Blog author is definitely the one. He is one of the core NHibernate
committers, prolific blogger with a lot of very interesting posts, developed
Rhino Mocks mocking library, created RavenDB <http://www.ravendb.net/> and did
a lot of other neat things. So yes, there is such a thing.

------
biot
See also "I don't program in my spare time. Does that make me a bad
developer?" <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2664243>

My thoughts on spare-time projects in relation to other professions:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2664358>

------
datruth
haha, I'm the opposite. I will only hire someone who has NO time to implement
their awesome personal projects. I ask them about their personal projects, and
this stuff is awesome. Too bad that they're spending all their passion on
their current employer.... that's okay, I don't mind, if you would just
scootch over here into our office instead :)

------
bootload
_"... we are looking for a .NET developer ..."_

can't think of a better reason for having pet projects.

------
strathmeyer
All I got from this was that the interviewer had no idea how to judge the
interviewee and needed someone to blame it on. I wish there was a part of
career development that dealt with dealing with the idiots we want to hire us.

------
nasmorn
Also consider that you are looking for a .NET developer. While I guess it is a
technically completely respectable language and stack it is not the OSS
hotbed.

------
computerslol
If you don't eat breakfast, I don't want you.

------
mx2323
this is completely silly. what about all the developers that devote all of
their time on the product at hand...? i guess... your heuristic says that you
dont want them? and you'd rather take the guy that goes home at 5 and gets
distracted with pet projects that sap engineering time and focus?

simply put, you are thinking it wrong.

------
pnathan
I keep a portfolio of minor source code for these questions.

Other than that, I'm finishing my Master's in my 'free time'.

------
dannieb
the author is just trying to build a company culture reflective of himself.
simple as that...

------
georgieporgie
More voodoo, selection bias, hiring B.S. Why hire on the basis of ability,
when you can make up arbitrary criteria? Everyone is exactly like me, right?

------
NY_Entrepreneur
And if that causes you not to want someone, then I don't want you!

