17 ms·

I have no side code projects to show

184 points by rockdiesel 10y ago

shakna 10y ago
> When companies say they want "passionate developers" that are coding in their free time, when companies say they want "the best," I get nervous. It's a myopic approach to team building. It's a subtle way of requesting human machines. I take issue with this. I don't write code in my spare time for fun, I have a family. When I do write it, and when I do Open Source it, it's because it makes my life easier. It makes it easier to check my email, track what I still need to do on the house, and cut out half my work tomorrow, so I can take some leave and be with my family. I release it to the wild so that others might benefit, and I can pull it out when recruiters ask to see my code, even if they can't understand it, which is most of the time.
- bubblesocks 10y ago
  I've had a few companies ask me for my Github account, so they can see what code I've written. I never give it out, because I think the request is pointless to start with. A friend of mine, who works for a well-known technology giant, recently told me about a Linux guru they interviewed and hired. He was amazing in the interview, and they gave him an offer on the spot. When he started working, however, he constantly turned in sub-par work. A couple of months later, one of the members of the team who had interviewed this guy flew out to where he was working, and discovered that the guy sitting in the cube doing the work was not the guy they had interviewed. It was someone else. The guy went through quite an effort to cheat his way into a job, but when he was discovered, he was immediately fired. If cheating was my thing, and I really wanted to get a job via nefarious means, so I could worry about my job on a daily basis, how hard would it be to pay someone to write a bunch of Github code for me? Exactly, which is why the request is pretty dumb to start with, I think. For a bunch of smart people, we engineers sure have a hard time figuring out how to interview people and ascertain their skills.
  - logicallee 10y ago
    Hi, I was really interested in this story: >A couple of months later, one of the members of the team who had interviewed this guy flew out to where he was working, and discovered that the guy sitting in the cube doing the work was not the guy they had interviewed. It was someone else. This seems absolutely incredible to me (just in the slang sense, I don't mean that I'm incredulous). I mean it's way more than enough for the company to sue for fraud the (highly qualified) person who showed up to the interview, or to sue the person doing it. TBH if I were that company I would likely sue for damages. I mean it's just so blatant and goes so far. I've never heard of this. So I would be curious if you would reply with a somewhat more detailed write-up (maybe 1 or 2 paragraphs) of anything else you know about that case! But, maybe you've mentioned everything already. (You said a friend of yours told you about this case, so I realize we are reading this third-hand.) I would just be really interested if you could mention anything else you remember.
    - fencepost 10y ago
      There have been a few stories over the past few years of people outsourcing their own jobs, but I'm not sure whether any of them have actually been shown to be based in fact. That said, this could be the same kind of thing - did the guy in the cube hire the "guru" to interview, or did the "guru" interview then outsource to the guy in the cube?
      - logicallee 10y ago
        oh I didn't even think about that. fraud either way :) I think outsourcing is one thing - but being an employee who is on payroll and physically shows up to warm a butt in a seat, goes a lot farther. Regardless of whether the cube guy paid someone to do his interview, or the guru hired a body double after getting hired, it's pretty insane. do you have any links to anyplace you read about the same thing?
DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
I notice the article is from LinkedIn Pulse. I dislike Pulse because it's mandatory content on "my" LinkedIn page, which I find a bit obnoxious. So I avoid visiting Pulse stories in order to discourage that entire aspect of the site.
rabidrat 10y ago
I want to work in a group where they appreciate that I was basically born to code. That despite my youthful features, I have still been coding for over 30 years. That I can do many tasks in an hour, that other people would take days to do. That I will spend an extra 3 hours to put a cherry on top, just because I can. I may even do it on a Saturday, because code is what I like to do with my spare time too. So when the last company I interviewed at asked me "what is the difference between range and xrange in Python?" I just kind of rolled my eyes (on the inside). To me this is like asking a professional translator "what is the difference between 'si' and 'sí' in Spanish?" They were not interested in the thousands of lines of code I have on GitHub for my side projects, nor in a recent project that got me 15 seconds of fame. I ended that interview by saying "I don't think I'm a good match for this job". Different companies have different cultures. It's good to be able to identify the kind of culture you want to work in, and even better to be able to respectfully decline an opportunity because it doesn't work for you. Don't become bitter and think that all companies want you to be a coding robot, just because Google and Facebook do (or seem to; I'm not sure how many of my friends who work there actually have that many side projects either). There are plenty of jobs that will work for you that won't work for me, and vice versa.
- vigrante 10y ago
  That's a pretty elaborate story to rationalize the fact you didn't know the difference between range and xrange....
  - jonathankoren 10y ago
    The correct answer is of course, is that xrange doesn't exist.
    - logicallee 10y ago
      In short, it's the default behavior in Python 3; it doesn't exist anymore: http://pythoncentral.io/how-to-use-pythons-xrange-and-range/ http://pythoncentral.io/how-to-use-pythons-xrange-and-range/ From that article (buried near the end for some reason): >One more thing to add. In Python 3.x, the xrange function does not exist anymore. The range function now does what xrange does in Python 2.x, so to keep your code portable, you might want to stick to using range instead.
woodruffw 10y ago
As someone who does have a bunch of pet projects, I appreciate the author's sentiment. I often wonder whether my programming world presence (GitHub, HN, &c.) accurately reflects the kind of person I am (or perhaps want to be).
- gcb0 10y ago
  hint to the young: contribute anonymously. go to interviews and talk abou range vs xrange. it might never happen, but when one employer decides to go crazy and try to blame you for leaking code (that you may have written even before joining them) on open source projects, you are going to regret skipping the silly interviews by showing your open source persona to them. best thing you can do is keep it to yourself. then when you really need it, say for a research grant, then go public.
  - woodruffw 10y ago
    I appreciate the advice, although with the jobs I've had so far I've been sure to tell my employer in advance about my open source work. Maybe I've just been lucky, but all have been either okay with it or actively supportive (even when concurrent with in-house development). That being said, I've been careful to avoid open-sourcing projects that I think come to close to hired work.
    - gcb0 10y ago
      what you describe is the common sense absolutely everyone have. but it means little when dealing with crazy.
nicolia 10y ago
I actually don't mind being a human machine. Not that I've had the chance yet. I'm still in college to get my CS degree and would fall into one of those people where "coding is a Craft". I genuinely love programming. I don't have a family, or really desire one. My weekend plans always consist of building another project of my own. A place that will let me code all day, give me a nap room, a shower, some salary, and food sounds like a dream. It's unfortunate that it costs so much money to get to the cities that promote this. I think the author is just realizing that this field isn't for them. Tech moves fast and to stay on top of it you have to move fast too. At least for modern tech. Maybe that author would be more comfortable being a COBOL programmer, or an embedded systems one.
- cmrdporcupine 10y ago
  “I'm too old to know everything” ― Oscar Wilde
  - nicolia 10y ago
    What is that supposed to mean? I'm not claiming to know everything.
    - Tempest1981 10y ago
      Phrased the opposite way: "when you're young, you think you know everything"
      - nicolia 10y ago
        But I don't think I know everything.
- nzubair 10y ago
  Just because the author has his priorities figured out doesn't mean that "this field isn't for them."
  - 10y ago
dvcrn 10y ago
Here's a little example what happened to me: I interviewed with a company. Naturally they asked for my side projects which I showed them. We talked about technical challenges, scaling, interesting bits of codes - all these kind of things. They were really excited. I passed the interviews and got the job. Fast forward a couple month, still working on my side projects, some of which started generating a couple hundred bucks a month. My boss started asking me to stop any side projects and put all my time thinking about the company instead. I refused and said that I am 100% there during my work hours but what I do in my private time is not related and even the reason why I got this job in the first place. My boss didn't like that at all and even tried to figure the exact times out when I would work on private stuff to hold it against me. I eventually quit. If your company wants to see side projects but dislikes the idea of you actually working on them after starting, you are doing something wrong.
- Tempest1981 10y ago
  Good point. Seems like the company's attitude is: "show us you're passionate and have side-projects, but of course, once you work for us, we want all of that passion focused strictly on us."
- wfunction 10y ago
  > If your company wants to see side projects but dislikes the idea of you actually working on them after starting, you are doing something wrong. My impression was they generally want to see side projects for newbies/recent graduates, i.e. stuff the applicant would have been working on during college or something. Not stuff the applicant was doing on the "side" during his/her previous years of employment. Am I totally wrong here?
  - dvcrn 10y ago
    > Not stuff the applicant was doing on the "side" during his/her previous years of employment. Am I totally wrong here? Hmm, the way I see it is that side projects usually demonstrate that you have a passion for code outside of your work as well. From a company perspective I would probably also hire someone who is using his free time to advance his knowledge since some of that stuff he is using/learning could also become useful for the company at some point. I personally don't mean any harm with my projects. I just really like coding, creating things and learning more (my way of learning also being to experiment/build something with technology X). The field is so broad and there are so many interesting things to learn about with new ones getting released almost weekly.
rpd23 10y ago
Wtf is a boutique app firm?
- fencepost 10y ago
  A boutique app firm is a small company that builds apps for clients. Generally those clients are going to be smallish businesses (probably mostly less than 1000 employees). Some examples from my area include a small grocery chain (5-6 stores) with their own app and a local credit union with their own online banking app with support for mobile deposits via photographs of checks.
egonschiele 10y ago
I totally agree with this. If you can do the job well, who cares what you do in your free time. I've been on the other side (the hiring side), so let me give my perspective. It's okay to not have side projects, or a presence on Github. It is perfectly okay to say "I don't have a very active Github account, but let me tell you what I enjoy about programming". "Show me your side projects" is a (poor) way of asking, "show me that you are passionate about your job". I'm not looking to hire the elite, but I am looking for someone who will be happy to come to work.
- sqeaky 10y ago
  I disagree with the article and the notion that asking for a portfolio is about passion. I guess it does add insight for that, but really only shows basic proficiency. I wouldn't hire an artist, writer or designer without seeing a portfolio of their work so why would I hire a software developer? I too have been on both sides of the hiring discussion. Because anyone can write anything on there resume, there are only two way to know if someone can code. They can write some code of they can show some code they have written. As both an interviewer and interviewer I would rather work with real world problems and discuss real world solutions. So the choice seems to be between stupid whiteboard processes or portfolios. I suspect there is a reason writers and painters don't have auditions and perhaps that same logic maps onto programming.
driverdan 10y ago
I am generally suspicious of someone who has no sample code to show. You can't take a few hours a week for a month to put a small project together as a demo of your abilities? Skip the novel writing for a month and instead create a 10 hour project that shows potential employers you know what you're talking about. You can use it for years so it's well worth the time investment. For most jobs you don't have to have a ton of active side projects or contribute to open source. You should have something to demo though.
- droithomme 10y ago
  Most, but not all people who are employed have contracts which assign ownership of everything they do, including in their spare time at home on their own equipment, to their employer. And yes, a very small number of states consider such standard clauses to be unenforceable. Most candidates who show their previous code, either written for their employer, or from side projects that are still within the scope of their contract, are violating non disclosure clauses of their contracts. Someone who has sample code to show is likely an unreliable candidate who thinks nothing of violating his signed contracts. Such candidates should not be hired.
  - timdev2 10y ago
    Most employers who include such clauses and aren't open to negotiation are violating common decency. Any company so incredibly tone-deaf is likely an unpleasant employer that thinks nothing of treating their employees poorly. Such companies should not be serviced by professionals.
    - Thorncorona 10y ago
      That doesn't make his point moot though.
sidlls 10y ago
I'm not sure I like the tacit implication that folks who do lots of side projects are superior engineers or are very passionate about "coding". The assumption that "lots of side projects" is somehow a positive attribute (from an employer's perspective with regard to "types" of engineers) is very much a flawed one.
edpichler 10y ago
Once I was not accepted for a job because I had very good side projects. They said I was a risk to them, because I could stole ideas, contracts or be a competitor. Today I have my own business, if we compete, it's just in hiring talent.
WalterSear 10y ago
I've built a ton of side projects. No one has ever shown anything more than a nodding interest in them, as they lead me to a whiteboard and ask me to regurgitate a couple of pages from Crack the Coding Interview.
- reustle 10y ago
  Then it sounds like you're interviewing at the wrong kinds of companies
gravypod 10y ago
> I've made it a point to add to my resume and online profiles the other things about which I am passionate. The silly art project that I launched in Austin. My dog business. Running, painting, writing. It's important to me that these attributes be valued by my workplace Good luck mate, that's got nothing to do with software development. If you don't love software development then applying for a software job at a software firm probably isn't the best idea. Many small buisnesses need software people who are pasionate about other things. Many of these things include "Running, painting, writing" but a software shop writning software owned by people in the software industry populated entierly by people who absolutly love writing software probably isn't the place for that.
jstewartmobile 10y ago
When I started programming, I had side projects coming out of my ears. It was pure recreation. After getting a "real" programming job, where I had to deal with design-by-committee, power struggles, keeping up appearances, etc. I didn't dare jump back into recreational programming--I'd never go back to my actual job. Even now, working for myself, I have to be very disciplined when I crack open the "fun" code, because I know it will be very painful when it is time to go back to the code that pays the bills.
cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
I have worked at a prestigious tech company, and I know what OP is talking about. A lot of very talented people don't have side projects, and they don't do any coding outside of work. They don't go to hackathons. They don't bother to learn the newest reactive javascript framework. They go to yoga classes after work. They talk about TV shows they watched last night during lunch. But they EXCEL at what they do at work. I can say that this is really a subjective thing. When you make a judgment about these people, it actually tells more about yourself than the person being judged. When I saw these people who are super talented, but "waste away their lives" just climbing up the ladder I just couldn't sympathize. Also personally I like them but I would never think about starting a company with them. That's why I understand where OP is coming from, and he's right in a lot of cases, but also I think he should understand that not everyone will agree with you on how you view your life. People like me can't stand not working on my own project, but there are also super talented people who are perfectly fine with living a balanced and stable life. Talent and intelligence has nothing to do with how you live your life. So, I think no one should judge anyone else. The company who didn't hire this guy may have lost a talented person, but in many cases talent is not what companies need the most. For large companies like Amazon (which OP seems to work at) this type of employee is the ideal choice since they get the talent AND stability. But for startups, the concept of stability doesn't really make sense anyway so it's a different story. If I was doing a startup and had to pick the first employee, and was given a choice between a passionate, right out of the college guy, and an experienced and talented engineer who wants to live a balanced life, I would definitely choose the former. (Although the best case would be to find the third guy who's passionate AND talented)
- dasil003 10y ago
  Having spend the last decade living the startup life, and now searching for something more stable, I have to say you're setting up a false dichotomy between passionate and balance-seeking. They are completely orthogonal, you can be passionate and work widely varying hours; you can also be indifferent and work widely varying hours. On a tangent, I don't really like the word passion anyway. What makes me a good programmer is not my passion for it, it's my curiosity and motivation. My motivation is a primary factor in my performance, and that probably is 80% influenced by context, and 20% by the content of the task itself (at least for most things that fall within the standard purview of programming tasks). Finally, you don't mention talent for the new graduate. That is a huge factor. If the new grad is not extremely talented, they will never produce anything of value. If they are highly talented they can likely power through a lot of things, but they also need to make good decisions about what to work on since time allocation is the single hardest thing about getting early traction for a startup. Yes, all else being equal, take the guy that wants to work 16 hours a day and has no other distractions, but if the veteran who wants to work 30 hours a week has better business sense and a smarter idea of what to build and when, then that dwarfs the code quality consideration.
wheelerwj 10y ago
I stopped reading when the author referred to the amount of people living in cities as "a tiny puddle" of the larger population. That's not even a little bit accurate.[1] No, this is nothing more than pity-party because one person wants to fit in and be recognized for something they aren't. I am glad you think your dog business,and art, and running makes you equal to or better than someone who is passionate and dedicates themselves to their interests. You aren't that person. that's okay. but don't try and form the world to fit your views. You aren't the best developer, you don't want to be, move on. [1]http://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-33.html http://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-33.h...
jeremywho 10y ago
Wait, I thought Amazon is NOT the place for work/life balance. Why is a guy that wants work/life balance working at Amazon?
- temp20160423 10y ago
  I worked for a remote office of AMZN's and found that the office I was at had great work/life balance. At any big company, work/life balance will be very team-dependent.
ajmurmann 10y ago
The entire drive to hire "passionate developers" makes me very nervous. It's a double edged sword and most people don't want to see it. Yes, passionate developers are more likely to stay up to date on technologies and are also more likely to put in extra time. However, they are also much more likely to use technology that isn't ready yet and overcomplicate things because of some misguided aesthetical sense or best case spend way too much time gold plating the wrong thing instead of providing business value. The cost of those things is generally much higher than someone going home sightly early or not knowing the very latest JS framework. Edit: phone auto correct shenanigans
donatj 10y ago
I feel like if you use open source libraries and are a decent developer you'll naturally end up submitting a PR to Github at some point. I find bugs in almost every open source library I use and have had so many PRs to fix them.
- stevekemp 10y ago
  It depends on the projects you're touching, of course. I've contributed bugfixes to GNU less, GNU screen, and GNU emacs, and GNU make. None of those would be easy to dig out references for, and none of them use github.
jwatte 10y ago
I am passionate about code. But, most of my github is little hacks to solve some particular need or scratch some particular itch, without any need for overarching design or maintainability. The good stuff (including libraries and frameworks) is all in my professional career.
peteretep 10y ago
> For every one of those > folks there are thousands > of amazing, solid > developers This does not match my experience. Also, for every genuine genius in the world, there are a whole bunch of pretty average people who think they're really smart.
highCs 10y ago
I agree with the author. You can't judge the passion of someone by his behaviour, that's silly. You can be as well a passionate programmer when you don't code home than when you do. However, coding home has one - big - perk: it's almost the only way for you to code something from scratch. Alone. You and your code. You and your progress rate. You and your bugs. You and your choices. You and your mess. Nobody to smooth any angle. I believe coding from scratch - alone - makes you a completely different kind of programmer indeed. But it has nothing to do with passion. Nothing at all. I think (I can be wrong, still trying to validate that) that "number of projects from scratch" is the metric that tells the ultimate level of a programmer. In other words, if you've almost never coded anything from scratch (below say 40-50 projects), I do believe you are not very good at programming. Conversely, I know from experience (my own) that coding from scratch can make you so good, that you would find Amazon SDEs complete novices (I know from my own experience at amazon) and this before your 30's. It can make you better than principal engineers before your 30's. It can make you so good that TDD, OOP and agile development sounds like novice exercises to you. It can make you a programming master and beyond. Could you be as good without coding from scratch really? Well, ultimately maybe but not as fast. Coding from scratch is so painful, so hard, so stressful, so frustrating that maintaining code or adding small to medium sized features is a baby step in comparison. Now of course, if you add something pretty big to an existing code base or make a god damn big refactor, you're doing the same thing as coding from scratch basically. The thing is that it's rare you 1) add that big a feature to an existing codebase 2) alone, in a big company. I'm pretty sure the author has passion for programming, probably as big as anyone else. And balanced life is good for skills as feeling great makes you more creative amongst other thing. It's just that coding home makes you write a type of code that is 100 times more difficult than the one you do in big companies. Paradoxically, I'm pretty sure interviewers don't, at least consciously, know that.
- kosma 10y ago
  This, a thousand times. I'm an excellent bug-fixer/chaos-manager/refactorer and this led me to believe I should be an excellent project-starter as well. It has bit me in the ass more times than I can count (although I'm getting better with each new project).
- 10y ago
bluepnume 10y ago
Part of the process for me has been to try to do as much of my job as possible in the open source world. Naturally, I can't open-source any private business code. But if I'm doing my job right, I'm building libraries and reusable code that isn't tightly coupled to business logic -- and there's no good reason to avoid throwing all of that on github, and have it be used by as many people as possible. Of course there are going to be companies that aren't onboard with the idea of open-source. It's taken a lot of places a lot of time to get to that stage. But are those the places you really want to work?
ap22213 10y ago
Just go work somewhere else. Luckily for many of us, demand has been outpacing supply for years. If the market was worse, then it wouldn't seem so strange. Lots of other professions require a portfolio of work.
palerdot 10y ago
I always go through an extreme opposite hiring experience. I'm not on linkedin by choice. Currently I use my SO developer profile as my online resume. But the lack of a linkedin profile and associated connections makes it look like I'm not a professional in the view of certain employers. I have a decent bunch of side projects, and a moderately active github profile and I have gotten all my jobs including my current one based on that. I don't regret not being on linkedin. I'm just happy showing my side projects for my coding knowledge as I cannot show code I have worked as a part of my employment. Also I believe when talking about code written as a part of employement, it all boils down how effectively one communicates/talks to the potential employer than how actually we did it. This is one of the reasons I try to maintain side projects independent of my day job. For me, the whole idea of proving oneself as professional by being on linkedin has been a biggest turn off. Coupled with this, when I look at some of the people's linkedin profile and the actual attitude and proficiency they demonstrate in their jobs makes linkedin look like a ridiculous circus.
- nicolia 10y ago
  > when I look at some of the people's linkedin profile and the actual attitude and proficiency they demonstrate in their jobs makes linkedin look like a ridiculous circus. Can you share some examples?

184 points by rockdiesel 10y ago

> When companies say they want "passionate developers" that are coding in their free time, when companies say they want "the best," I get nervous. It's a myopic approach to team building. It's a subtle way of requesting human machines. I take issue with this. I don't write code in my spare time for fun, I have a family. When I do write it, and when I do Open Source it, it's because it makes my life easier. It makes it easier to check my email, track what I still need to do on the house, and cut out half my work tomorrow, so I can take some leave and be with my family. I release it to the wild so that others might benefit, and I can pull it out when recruiters ask to see my code, even if they can't understand it, which is most of the time.

bubblesocks 10y ago
I've had a few companies ask me for my Github account, so they can see what code I've written. I never give it out, because I think the request is pointless to start with. A friend of mine, who works for a well-known technology giant, recently told me about a Linux guru they interviewed and hired. He was amazing in the interview, and they gave him an offer on the spot. When he started working, however, he constantly turned in sub-par work. A couple of months later, one of the members of the team who had interviewed this guy flew out to where he was working, and discovered that the guy sitting in the cube doing the work was not the guy they had interviewed. It was someone else. The guy went through quite an effort to cheat his way into a job, but when he was discovered, he was immediately fired. If cheating was my thing, and I really wanted to get a job via nefarious means, so I could worry about my job on a daily basis, how hard would it be to pay someone to write a bunch of Github code for me? Exactly, which is why the request is pretty dumb to start with, I think. For a bunch of smart people, we engineers sure have a hard time figuring out how to interview people and ascertain their skills.
- logicallee 10y ago
  Hi, I was really interested in this story: >A couple of months later, one of the members of the team who had interviewed this guy flew out to where he was working, and discovered that the guy sitting in the cube doing the work was not the guy they had interviewed. It was someone else. This seems absolutely incredible to me (just in the slang sense, I don't mean that I'm incredulous). I mean it's way more than enough for the company to sue for fraud the (highly qualified) person who showed up to the interview, or to sue the person doing it. TBH if I were that company I would likely sue for damages. I mean it's just so blatant and goes so far. I've never heard of this. So I would be curious if you would reply with a somewhat more detailed write-up (maybe 1 or 2 paragraphs) of anything else you know about that case! But, maybe you've mentioned everything already. (You said a friend of yours told you about this case, so I realize we are reading this third-hand.) I would just be really interested if you could mention anything else you remember.
  - fencepost 10y ago
    There have been a few stories over the past few years of people outsourcing their own jobs, but I'm not sure whether any of them have actually been shown to be based in fact. That said, this could be the same kind of thing - did the guy in the cube hire the "guru" to interview, or did the "guru" interview then outsource to the guy in the cube?
    - logicallee 10y ago
      oh I didn't even think about that. fraud either way :) I think outsourcing is one thing - but being an employee who is on payroll and physically shows up to warm a butt in a seat, goes a lot farther. Regardless of whether the cube guy paid someone to do his interview, or the guru hired a body double after getting hired, it's pretty insane. do you have any links to anyplace you read about the same thing?

DoofusOfDeath 10y ago

I notice the article is from LinkedIn Pulse. I dislike Pulse because it's mandatory content on "my" LinkedIn page, which I find a bit obnoxious. So I avoid visiting Pulse stories in order to discourage that entire aspect of the site.

rabidrat 10y ago

I want to work in a group where they appreciate that I was basically born to code. That despite my youthful features, I have still been coding for over 30 years. That I can do many tasks in an hour, that other people would take days to do. That I will spend an extra 3 hours to put a cherry on top, just because I can. I may even do it on a Saturday, because code is what I like to do with my spare time too. So when the last company I interviewed at asked me "what is the difference between range and xrange in Python?" I just kind of rolled my eyes (on the inside). To me this is like asking a professional translator "what is the difference between 'si' and 'sí' in Spanish?" They were not interested in the thousands of lines of code I have on GitHub for my side projects, nor in a recent project that got me 15 seconds of fame. I ended that interview by saying "I don't think I'm a good match for this job". Different companies have different cultures. It's good to be able to identify the kind of culture you want to work in, and even better to be able to respectfully decline an opportunity because it doesn't work for you. Don't become bitter and think that all companies want you to be a coding robot, just because Google and Facebook do (or seem to; I'm not sure how many of my friends who work there actually have that many side projects either). There are plenty of jobs that will work for you that won't work for me, and vice versa.

vigrante 10y ago
That's a pretty elaborate story to rationalize the fact you didn't know the difference between range and xrange....
- jonathankoren 10y ago
  The correct answer is of course, is that xrange doesn't exist.
  - logicallee 10y ago
    In short, it's the default behavior in Python 3; it doesn't exist anymore: http://pythoncentral.io/how-to-use-pythons-xrange-and-range/ http://pythoncentral.io/how-to-use-pythons-xrange-and-range/ From that article (buried near the end for some reason): >One more thing to add. In Python 3.x, the xrange function does not exist anymore. The range function now does what xrange does in Python 2.x, so to keep your code portable, you might want to stick to using range instead.

woodruffw 10y ago

As someone who does have a bunch of pet projects, I appreciate the author's sentiment. I often wonder whether my programming world presence (GitHub, HN, &c.) accurately reflects the kind of person I am (or perhaps want to be).

gcb0 10y ago
hint to the young: contribute anonymously. go to interviews and talk abou range vs xrange. it might never happen, but when one employer decides to go crazy and try to blame you for leaking code (that you may have written even before joining them) on open source projects, you are going to regret skipping the silly interviews by showing your open source persona to them. best thing you can do is keep it to yourself. then when you really need it, say for a research grant, then go public.
- woodruffw 10y ago
  I appreciate the advice, although with the jobs I've had so far I've been sure to tell my employer in advance about my open source work. Maybe I've just been lucky, but all have been either okay with it or actively supportive (even when concurrent with in-house development). That being said, I've been careful to avoid open-sourcing projects that I think come to close to hired work.
  - gcb0 10y ago
    what you describe is the common sense absolutely everyone have. but it means little when dealing with crazy.

nicolia 10y ago

I actually don't mind being a human machine. Not that I've had the chance yet. I'm still in college to get my CS degree and would fall into one of those people where "coding is a Craft". I genuinely love programming. I don't have a family, or really desire one. My weekend plans always consist of building another project of my own. A place that will let me code all day, give me a nap room, a shower, some salary, and food sounds like a dream. It's unfortunate that it costs so much money to get to the cities that promote this. I think the author is just realizing that this field isn't for them. Tech moves fast and to stay on top of it you have to move fast too. At least for modern tech. Maybe that author would be more comfortable being a COBOL programmer, or an embedded systems one.

cmrdporcupine 10y ago
“I'm too old to know everything” ― Oscar Wilde
- nicolia 10y ago
  What is that supposed to mean? I'm not claiming to know everything.
  - Tempest1981 10y ago
    Phrased the opposite way: "when you're young, you think you know everything"
    - nicolia 10y ago
      But I don't think I know everything.
nzubair 10y ago
Just because the author has his priorities figured out doesn't mean that "this field isn't for them."
- 10y ago

dvcrn 10y ago

Here's a little example what happened to me: I interviewed with a company. Naturally they asked for my side projects which I showed them. We talked about technical challenges, scaling, interesting bits of codes - all these kind of things. They were really excited. I passed the interviews and got the job. Fast forward a couple month, still working on my side projects, some of which started generating a couple hundred bucks a month. My boss started asking me to stop any side projects and put all my time thinking about the company instead. I refused and said that I am 100% there during my work hours but what I do in my private time is not related and even the reason why I got this job in the first place. My boss didn't like that at all and even tried to figure the exact times out when I would work on private stuff to hold it against me. I eventually quit. If your company wants to see side projects but dislikes the idea of you actually working on them after starting, you are doing something wrong.

Tempest1981 10y ago
Good point. Seems like the company's attitude is: "show us you're passionate and have side-projects, but of course, once you work for us, we want all of that passion focused strictly on us."
wfunction 10y ago
> If your company wants to see side projects but dislikes the idea of you actually working on them after starting, you are doing something wrong. My impression was they generally want to see side projects for newbies/recent graduates, i.e. stuff the applicant would have been working on during college or something. Not stuff the applicant was doing on the "side" during his/her previous years of employment. Am I totally wrong here?
- dvcrn 10y ago
  > Not stuff the applicant was doing on the "side" during his/her previous years of employment. Am I totally wrong here? Hmm, the way I see it is that side projects usually demonstrate that you have a passion for code outside of your work as well. From a company perspective I would probably also hire someone who is using his free time to advance his knowledge since some of that stuff he is using/learning could also become useful for the company at some point. I personally don't mean any harm with my projects. I just really like coding, creating things and learning more (my way of learning also being to experiment/build something with technology X). The field is so broad and there are so many interesting things to learn about with new ones getting released almost weekly.

rpd23 10y ago

Wtf is a boutique app firm?

fencepost 10y ago
A boutique app firm is a small company that builds apps for clients. Generally those clients are going to be smallish businesses (probably mostly less than 1000 employees). Some examples from my area include a small grocery chain (5-6 stores) with their own app and a local credit union with their own online banking app with support for mobile deposits via photographs of checks.

egonschiele 10y ago

I totally agree with this. If you can do the job well, who cares what you do in your free time. I've been on the other side (the hiring side), so let me give my perspective. It's okay to not have side projects, or a presence on Github. It is perfectly okay to say "I don't have a very active Github account, but let me tell you what I enjoy about programming". "Show me your side projects" is a (poor) way of asking, "show me that you are passionate about your job". I'm not looking to hire the elite, but I am looking for someone who will be happy to come to work.

sqeaky 10y ago
I disagree with the article and the notion that asking for a portfolio is about passion. I guess it does add insight for that, but really only shows basic proficiency. I wouldn't hire an artist, writer or designer without seeing a portfolio of their work so why would I hire a software developer? I too have been on both sides of the hiring discussion. Because anyone can write anything on there resume, there are only two way to know if someone can code. They can write some code of they can show some code they have written. As both an interviewer and interviewer I would rather work with real world problems and discuss real world solutions. So the choice seems to be between stupid whiteboard processes or portfolios. I suspect there is a reason writers and painters don't have auditions and perhaps that same logic maps onto programming.

driverdan 10y ago

I am generally suspicious of someone who has no sample code to show. You can't take a few hours a week for a month to put a small project together as a demo of your abilities? Skip the novel writing for a month and instead create a 10 hour project that shows potential employers you know what you're talking about. You can use it for years so it's well worth the time investment. For most jobs you don't have to have a ton of active side projects or contribute to open source. You should have something to demo though.

droithomme 10y ago
Most, but not all people who are employed have contracts which assign ownership of everything they do, including in their spare time at home on their own equipment, to their employer. And yes, a very small number of states consider such standard clauses to be unenforceable. Most candidates who show their previous code, either written for their employer, or from side projects that are still within the scope of their contract, are violating non disclosure clauses of their contracts. Someone who has sample code to show is likely an unreliable candidate who thinks nothing of violating his signed contracts. Such candidates should not be hired.
- timdev2 10y ago
  Most employers who include such clauses and aren't open to negotiation are violating common decency. Any company so incredibly tone-deaf is likely an unpleasant employer that thinks nothing of treating their employees poorly. Such companies should not be serviced by professionals.
  - Thorncorona 10y ago
    That doesn't make his point moot though.

sidlls 10y ago

I'm not sure I like the tacit implication that folks who do lots of side projects are superior engineers or are very passionate about "coding". The assumption that "lots of side projects" is somehow a positive attribute (from an employer's perspective with regard to "types" of engineers) is very much a flawed one.

edpichler 10y ago

Once I was not accepted for a job because I had very good side projects. They said I was a risk to them, because I could stole ideas, contracts or be a competitor. Today I have my own business, if we compete, it's just in hiring talent.

WalterSear 10y ago

I've built a ton of side projects. No one has ever shown anything more than a nodding interest in them, as they lead me to a whiteboard and ask me to regurgitate a couple of pages from Crack the Coding Interview.

reustle 10y ago
Then it sounds like you're interviewing at the wrong kinds of companies

gravypod 10y ago

> I've made it a point to add to my resume and online profiles the other things about which I am passionate. The silly art project that I launched in Austin. My dog business. Running, painting, writing. It's important to me that these attributes be valued by my workplace Good luck mate, that's got nothing to do with software development. If you don't love software development then applying for a software job at a software firm probably isn't the best idea. Many small buisnesses need software people who are pasionate about other things. Many of these things include "Running, painting, writing" but a software shop writning software owned by people in the software industry populated entierly by people who absolutly love writing software probably isn't the place for that.

jstewartmobile 10y ago

When I started programming, I had side projects coming out of my ears. It was pure recreation. After getting a "real" programming job, where I had to deal with design-by-committee, power struggles, keeping up appearances, etc. I didn't dare jump back into recreational programming--I'd never go back to my actual job. Even now, working for myself, I have to be very disciplined when I crack open the "fun" code, because I know it will be very painful when it is time to go back to the code that pays the bills.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago

I have worked at a prestigious tech company, and I know what OP is talking about. A lot of very talented people don't have side projects, and they don't do any coding outside of work. They don't go to hackathons. They don't bother to learn the newest reactive javascript framework. They go to yoga classes after work. They talk about TV shows they watched last night during lunch. But they EXCEL at what they do at work. I can say that this is really a subjective thing. When you make a judgment about these people, it actually tells more about yourself than the person being judged. When I saw these people who are super talented, but "waste away their lives" just climbing up the ladder I just couldn't sympathize. Also personally I like them but I would never think about starting a company with them. That's why I understand where OP is coming from, and he's right in a lot of cases, but also I think he should understand that not everyone will agree with you on how you view your life. People like me can't stand not working on my own project, but there are also super talented people who are perfectly fine with living a balanced and stable life. Talent and intelligence has nothing to do with how you live your life. So, I think no one should judge anyone else. The company who didn't hire this guy may have lost a talented person, but in many cases talent is not what companies need the most. For large companies like Amazon (which OP seems to work at) this type of employee is the ideal choice since they get the talent AND stability. But for startups, the concept of stability doesn't really make sense anyway so it's a different story. If I was doing a startup and had to pick the first employee, and was given a choice between a passionate, right out of the college guy, and an experienced and talented engineer who wants to live a balanced life, I would definitely choose the former. (Although the best case would be to find the third guy who's passionate AND talented)

dasil003 10y ago
Having spend the last decade living the startup life, and now searching for something more stable, I have to say you're setting up a false dichotomy between passionate and balance-seeking. They are completely orthogonal, you can be passionate and work widely varying hours; you can also be indifferent and work widely varying hours. On a tangent, I don't really like the word passion anyway. What makes me a good programmer is not my passion for it, it's my curiosity and motivation. My motivation is a primary factor in my performance, and that probably is 80% influenced by context, and 20% by the content of the task itself (at least for most things that fall within the standard purview of programming tasks). Finally, you don't mention talent for the new graduate. That is a huge factor. If the new grad is not extremely talented, they will never produce anything of value. If they are highly talented they can likely power through a lot of things, but they also need to make good decisions about what to work on since time allocation is the single hardest thing about getting early traction for a startup. Yes, all else being equal, take the guy that wants to work 16 hours a day and has no other distractions, but if the veteran who wants to work 30 hours a week has better business sense and a smarter idea of what to build and when, then that dwarfs the code quality consideration.

wheelerwj 10y ago

I stopped reading when the author referred to the amount of people living in cities as "a tiny puddle" of the larger population. That's not even a little bit accurate.[1] No, this is nothing more than pity-party because one person wants to fit in and be recognized for something they aren't. I am glad you think your dog business,and art, and running makes you equal to or better than someone who is passionate and dedicates themselves to their interests. You aren't that person. that's okay. but don't try and form the world to fit your views. You aren't the best developer, you don't want to be, move on. [1]http://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-33.html http://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-33.h...

jeremywho 10y ago

Wait, I thought Amazon is NOT the place for work/life balance. Why is a guy that wants work/life balance working at Amazon?

temp20160423 10y ago
I worked for a remote office of AMZN's and found that the office I was at had great work/life balance. At any big company, work/life balance will be very team-dependent.

ajmurmann 10y ago

The entire drive to hire "passionate developers" makes me very nervous. It's a double edged sword and most people don't want to see it. Yes, passionate developers are more likely to stay up to date on technologies and are also more likely to put in extra time. However, they are also much more likely to use technology that isn't ready yet and overcomplicate things because of some misguided aesthetical sense or best case spend way too much time gold plating the wrong thing instead of providing business value. The cost of those things is generally much higher than someone going home sightly early or not knowing the very latest JS framework. Edit: phone auto correct shenanigans

donatj 10y ago

I feel like if you use open source libraries and are a decent developer you'll naturally end up submitting a PR to Github at some point. I find bugs in almost every open source library I use and have had so many PRs to fix them.

stevekemp 10y ago
It depends on the projects you're touching, of course. I've contributed bugfixes to GNU less, GNU screen, and GNU emacs, and GNU make. None of those would be easy to dig out references for, and none of them use github.

jwatte 10y ago

I am passionate about code. But, most of my github is little hacks to solve some particular need or scratch some particular itch, without any need for overarching design or maintainability. The good stuff (including libraries and frameworks) is all in my professional career.

peteretep 10y ago

> For every one of those > folks there are thousands > of amazing, solid > developers This does not match my experience. Also, for every genuine genius in the world, there are a whole bunch of pretty average people who think they're really smart.

highCs 10y ago

I agree with the author. You can't judge the passion of someone by his behaviour, that's silly. You can be as well a passionate programmer when you don't code home than when you do. However, coding home has one - big - perk: it's almost the only way for you to code something from scratch. Alone. You and your code. You and your progress rate. You and your bugs. You and your choices. You and your mess. Nobody to smooth any angle. I believe coding from scratch - alone - makes you a completely different kind of programmer indeed. But it has nothing to do with passion. Nothing at all. I think (I can be wrong, still trying to validate that) that "number of projects from scratch" is the metric that tells the ultimate level of a programmer. In other words, if you've almost never coded anything from scratch (below say 40-50 projects), I do believe you are not very good at programming. Conversely, I know from experience (my own) that coding from scratch can make you so good, that you would find Amazon SDEs complete novices (I know from my own experience at amazon) and this before your 30's. It can make you better than principal engineers before your 30's. It can make you so good that TDD, OOP and agile development sounds like novice exercises to you. It can make you a programming master and beyond. Could you be as good without coding from scratch really? Well, ultimately maybe but not as fast. Coding from scratch is so painful, so hard, so stressful, so frustrating that maintaining code or adding small to medium sized features is a baby step in comparison. Now of course, if you add something pretty big to an existing code base or make a god damn big refactor, you're doing the same thing as coding from scratch basically. The thing is that it's rare you 1) add that big a feature to an existing codebase 2) alone, in a big company. I'm pretty sure the author has passion for programming, probably as big as anyone else. And balanced life is good for skills as feeling great makes you more creative amongst other thing. It's just that coding home makes you write a type of code that is 100 times more difficult than the one you do in big companies. Paradoxically, I'm pretty sure interviewers don't, at least consciously, know that.

kosma 10y ago
This, a thousand times. I'm an excellent bug-fixer/chaos-manager/refactorer and this led me to believe I should be an excellent project-starter as well. It has bit me in the ass more times than I can count (although I'm getting better with each new project).
10y ago

bluepnume 10y ago

Part of the process for me has been to try to do as much of my job as possible in the open source world. Naturally, I can't open-source any private business code. But if I'm doing my job right, I'm building libraries and reusable code that isn't tightly coupled to business logic -- and there's no good reason to avoid throwing all of that on github, and have it be used by as many people as possible. Of course there are going to be companies that aren't onboard with the idea of open-source. It's taken a lot of places a lot of time to get to that stage. But are those the places you really want to work?

ap22213 10y ago

Just go work somewhere else. Luckily for many of us, demand has been outpacing supply for years. If the market was worse, then it wouldn't seem so strange. Lots of other professions require a portfolio of work.

palerdot 10y ago

I always go through an extreme opposite hiring experience. I'm not on linkedin by choice. Currently I use my SO developer profile as my online resume. But the lack of a linkedin profile and associated connections makes it look like I'm not a professional in the view of certain employers. I have a decent bunch of side projects, and a moderately active github profile and I have gotten all my jobs including my current one based on that. I don't regret not being on linkedin. I'm just happy showing my side projects for my coding knowledge as I cannot show code I have worked as a part of my employment. Also I believe when talking about code written as a part of employement, it all boils down how effectively one communicates/talks to the potential employer than how actually we did it. This is one of the reasons I try to maintain side projects independent of my day job. For me, the whole idea of proving oneself as professional by being on linkedin has been a biggest turn off. Coupled with this, when I look at some of the people's linkedin profile and the actual attitude and proficiency they demonstrate in their jobs makes linkedin look like a ridiculous circus.

nicolia 10y ago
> when I look at some of the people's linkedin profile and the actual attitude and proficiency they demonstrate in their jobs makes linkedin look like a ridiculous circus. Can you share some examples?