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Privilege shmivilege. It’s your duty as a human being to make yourself useful to the world. It is good that teaching yourself new stuff, or just playing with

Privilege shmivilege. It’s your duty as a human being to make yourself useful to the world. It is good that teaching yourself new stuff, or just playing with it because it’s fun, is justly rewarded in your career, if it helps you make useful stuff for other people. When recruiting you should recruit for people that you think would be most useful to you, and by extension your customers. If information about side-projects helps then you should take that into account. Side projects are most helpful for people that don’t have college degrees and that lets them bypass an expensive credential. Basically anybody else doesn’t need to have side projects on their resume anyway — they’ve got a job history.

geofft 9y ago
> When recruiting you should recruit for people that you think would be most useful to you, and by extension your customers. If information about side-projects helps then you should take that into account. I don't think the author disagrees with any of that. The question is whether a lack of side projects is a reliable negative signal. If you pre-filter for who has side projects to show at all, and then look at who's good at them, you're basically doing the same thing as the person who throws away half the resumes to get rid of the unlucky candidates. Your job as someone doing hiring is to find the best candidate, not the best candidate within some arbitrary subset that just happens to be easier to evaluate. > Side projects are most helpful for people that don’t have college degrees and that lets them bypass an expensive credential. Basically anybody else doesn’t need to have side projects on their resume anyway — they’ve got a job history. This is not my experience. My resume shows a degree and teaching experience from MIT and multiple serious jobs, and I still get asked "So, what's on your GitHub" at interviews.
- SamReidHughes 9y ago
  But you did get to interviews. They still have to gather information about whether you’d be good or not — there are still some bozos graduating with EE/CS from MIT, or even better schools such as Caltech. Pre-filtering based on how easy somebody is to evaluate has actual utility — it reduces hiring costs. If it’s useful, do it [0]. As for the author’s intentions, it’s clear some notion that you should be sympathetic to the candidate and thereby waste your time is encoded right into the title. Edit: [0] Just to head off an unnecessary argument, I don’t think it’s useful to have a hard-edge like that — it’s one piece of information that can be useful.
- extra88 9y ago
  Having a set of questions that are posed to every interviewee, regardless of their background, can be helpful when comparing candidates and in reducing unconscious bias (and the appearance of it, in case of lawsuit). Of course asking about GitHub specifically could be a signal of an ageism problem but I would hope your thoughtful answer would compensate in their minds for an absent or sparse GitHub account. It's reasonable for employers to seek people who are life-long learners. It's probably better for interviewers to ask a candidate about learning and growth rather than specifically something like GitHub but a savvy interviewee can recognize why such specific questions are asked and respond with other ways in which they've learned and grown, on company time or not.
- scarface74 9y ago
  I don't think the author disagrees with any of that. The question is whether a lack of side projects is a reliable negative signal. I have no side projects. I read a lot and work at companies that allow me to keep my skill set up. Over the last 10 years that has meant changing jobs every two years. 10 years before that I stayed at one company too long and paid the price. When I’m looking for a job, I go after jobs that will hire me based on my skill set but also give me the opportunity to ramp up on skills I don’t have. That usually means spending the first six months doing 60 hours a week to get 40 hours of productive work. Complaining about “fairness” in corporate America is like complaining that it’s not fair that the lion didn’t eat you because you didn’t eat it.
perpetualcrayon 9y ago
The most "useful" people to me are the ones who have broken homes and feel coming to work is a "safe place", and work for slave wages. Taking your beliefs to their logical conclusion means businesses should actively work to blackmail their employees, and make their lives away from work as miserable as possible. EDIT: For those who don't understand the sarcasm, I'm merely arguing that it's not solely the responsibility of the individual, who spends their life as a cog in the wheel of someone else's legacy, to make themselves useful to that "wheel".

geofft 9y ago

> When recruiting you should recruit for people that you think would be most useful to you, and by extension your customers. If information about side-projects helps then you should take that into account. I don't think the author disagrees with any of that. The question is whether a lack of side projects is a reliable negative signal. If you pre-filter for who has side projects to show at all, and then look at who's good at them, you're basically doing the same thing as the person who throws away half the resumes to get rid of the unlucky candidates. Your job as someone doing hiring is to find the best candidate, not the best candidate within some arbitrary subset that just happens to be easier to evaluate. > Side projects are most helpful for people that don’t have college degrees and that lets them bypass an expensive credential. Basically anybody else doesn’t need to have side projects on their resume anyway — they’ve got a job history. This is not my experience. My resume shows a degree and teaching experience from MIT and multiple serious jobs, and I still get asked "So, what's on your GitHub" at interviews.

SamReidHughes 9y ago
But you did get to interviews. They still have to gather information about whether you’d be good or not — there are still some bozos graduating with EE/CS from MIT, or even better schools such as Caltech. Pre-filtering based on how easy somebody is to evaluate has actual utility — it reduces hiring costs. If it’s useful, do it [0]. As for the author’s intentions, it’s clear some notion that you should be sympathetic to the candidate and thereby waste your time is encoded right into the title. Edit: [0] Just to head off an unnecessary argument, I don’t think it’s useful to have a hard-edge like that — it’s one piece of information that can be useful.
extra88 9y ago
Having a set of questions that are posed to every interviewee, regardless of their background, can be helpful when comparing candidates and in reducing unconscious bias (and the appearance of it, in case of lawsuit). Of course asking about GitHub specifically could be a signal of an ageism problem but I would hope your thoughtful answer would compensate in their minds for an absent or sparse GitHub account. It's reasonable for employers to seek people who are life-long learners. It's probably better for interviewers to ask a candidate about learning and growth rather than specifically something like GitHub but a savvy interviewee can recognize why such specific questions are asked and respond with other ways in which they've learned and grown, on company time or not.
scarface74 9y ago
I don't think the author disagrees with any of that. The question is whether a lack of side projects is a reliable negative signal. I have no side projects. I read a lot and work at companies that allow me to keep my skill set up. Over the last 10 years that has meant changing jobs every two years. 10 years before that I stayed at one company too long and paid the price. When I’m looking for a job, I go after jobs that will hire me based on my skill set but also give me the opportunity to ramp up on skills I don’t have. That usually means spending the first six months doing 60 hours a week to get 40 hours of productive work. Complaining about “fairness” in corporate America is like complaining that it’s not fair that the lion didn’t eat you because you didn’t eat it.

perpetualcrayon 9y ago

The most "useful" people to me are the ones who have broken homes and feel coming to work is a "safe place", and work for slave wages. Taking your beliefs to their logical conclusion means businesses should actively work to blackmail their employees, and make their lives away from work as miserable as possible. EDIT: For those who don't understand the sarcasm, I'm merely arguing that it's not solely the responsibility of the individual, who spends their life as a cog in the wheel of someone else's legacy, to make themselves useful to that "wheel".