4 ms·
No. Some of us have interesting resumes.
by aaronblohowiak 17y ago
No.
Some of us have interesting resumes.
- Rabidgremlin 17y agoAre you saying if you have lots of pet projects you don't do any real work ???
- MikeMacMan 17y agoI think s/he was trying to say that some people completely devote themselves to their work instead of side projects.
- aaronblohowiak 17y agoThis, and I don't consider exploratory throw-away code a "pet project" (probably because most of those explorations are evaluating techniques for work.) Further, if I am interested in doing X then I find a way to do that professionally.
- sophacles 17y agoI have found it is easier to do it the other way -- I'm interested in X. I'll start doing it. Money will follow. And more interesting job offers.
- Rabidgremlin 17y agoInteresting. I would say that the tools, concepts, techniques, solutions, etc that I learnt whilst working on my side projects improved the quality of my "work" by orders of magnitude and have been invaluable to my career. In fact with some teams I have worked with, if we interviewed a tech person who did not have any side projects we often viewed them with suspicion.
- aaronblohowiak 17y agoI have seen a similar pattern where learning new ancillary skills have increased the quality of my core competency. I think side-projects are a decent proxy for curiosity and industriousness, which I try very hard to evaluate when interviewing candidates. However, my line of questioning for this has to do with what complaints people have with their tools and what they have done to overcome them -- this shows a similar desire to have internally-motivated programming tasks and a desire for understanding more than simple project requirements.
- aaronblohowiak 17y agoI suppose I should clarify: I don't maintain a list of mostly abandoned or "prototype" code. It'd get something new every few days. I also don't publish a lot of blog posts or open-source software. Instead, I try to find interesting clients, take on interesting projects at work, or experiment with new methodology there.. and maintain my "trophy case" on my resume. Does ~/scratchpad contain a crap-ton of half-baked or throw-away code? Sure, but I'm not about to spend time making a list or putting it on the internet.
- Rabidgremlin 17y agoGotcha...
- sophacles 17y agoYou seem to be opposing open source software to "interesting work" -- which in some feilds such an opposition holds truth. In others all the interesting work is open source. As for the post -- the question asked if everyone had a such a large list of pet projects. Your answer seems to be yes too. Sure you dont publish it, but you try to do new projects and methods at work -- pet projects are pet projects, whether at work or home. Also, keeping around "throwaway" code has helped me more than not -- I can find some half remembered example and be using the concept way quicker than trying to come up with it again.
- aaronblohowiak 17y agoIn my individual case, working on open-source software would be opposed to paid work (with interesting as an orthogonal concern,) but I am trying to remedy that aspect.