8 ms·

It's funny that the tech industry is so insistent on side projects. I mean - would you hire a marketing person based on their 'side projects' or a corporate law

• TAForObvReasons 9y ago
  Side projects are for software what a portfolio is for other creative industries. You don't hire a designer sight unseen -- usually you ask for a sample. It makes perfect sense to expect the same of technology.
  • sidlls 9y ago
    Only if you believe software development is neither engineering nor science, and is purely creative. It isn't, though, and demanding a portfolio is almost as terrible a practice as Cracking the Coding Interview style interviews.
    • TAForObvReasons 9y ago
      In traditional engineering disciplines like civil engineering, organizing bodies and licensure communicate competency, applicability, and ethical awareness. Software development has no industry-wide equivalent. There are small certifications for Cisco et al but for the general practice there's no standard.
      • sidlls 9y ago
        This is true, and I regard that as a reflection of the immaturity of this industry.
        • Jach 9y ago
          I hear this a lot but I think it's deeper than that, such that letting the industry age isn't going to lead to the same end. The issue is the very one that is in this thread: programming is at a weird intersection between art, science, math, and engineering. Credentials and licensing matter a lot less than simple output. You can gain a ton of experience in the field even if you're stranded on an island with no internet and just a solar powered laptop capable of executing new code. Even without a computer you can still work like a mathematician and propose problems, even creative problems with no engineering applications, and then solve by coming up with and writing down algorithms for a computer you don't have. You can imagine arbitrary business details that get in the way of a clean program and force you to start thinking in architecture and system design. Demanding a portfolio isn't a great hiring strategy simply because a lot of people's best work isn't out in the open. Who would demand a portfolio from someone like Mike Acton? It'd be enough to know what he's worked on and talk to him. And at the same time requiring a licensing proxy is no help either, he never went to college AFAIK and that'd probably be a minimum requirement for most actual licensing proposals.
      • vonmoltke 9y ago
        This frequently comes up in discussions like this. Licensure is a joke with respect to demonstrating competency. Yes, the initial hurdle is high. However, once you are licensed it's hard to lose it. I would never rely on licensure as a measure of competency or currency. On top of that, many electrical and mechanical engineers are not licensed because they don't need to be. (Everybody likes to jump to the civils in these discussions and forget about us, since civils are basically required to be licensed.). EEs and MEs don't get put through the same bullshit that this industry puts developers through.
    • kodablah 9y ago
      > Only if you believe software development is neither engineering nor science, and is purely creative. I have to believe it "is neither engineering nor science, and is purely creative"? Only those extremes? I believe it is some of all 3 and I don't think requesting (i.e. not "demanding") a portfolio or prior work is any more unreasonable than not asking for it.
      • sidlls 9y ago
        Fine, then you must believe it's mostly creative. Far more than you think it's engineering or science. Otherwise a portfolio would simply be at best an interesting conversation piece and not at all indicative of ability.
        • detaro 9y ago
          Why do you think a portfolio can't tell you about someones engineering abilities? Can engineering not be judged by looking at source (and potentially surrounding documents)? What would be missing for you to do that?
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • web007 9y ago
      Software development is all of those things. You need the engineering experience to know what to do. You need the science to know ways to / not to do things. And you need the creativity to put them together. Is your "portfolio piece" spaghetti code or well-thought-out modules? Is it doing something recursively that shouldn't be? Do you have elegant code or brute-force solutions? Is it write-only? All of these can be seen in a portfolio or side project if you choose to look.
    • bad_user 9y ago
      Architecture isn't purely creative either, having overlap with engineering. You ask architects for a portfolio too.
      • sidlls 9y ago
        That's more like asking them for a resume. A portfolio of side projects isn't remotely the same thing.
    • vacri 9y ago
      Software development is a craft, not fully art and not fully engineering. It definitely is not science.
    • dozzie 9y ago
      > Only if you believe software development is neither engineering nor science, and is purely creative. It's certainly not a science, and it's very rarely engineering. About the creativity, it's a craft. There is some creativity baked in, but about the same amount as for mechanics or carpentry.
      • TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
        Maybe software development should be considered a trade?
        • dozzie 9y ago
          Certainly. And it should be taught like trades were for centuries: with apprenticeships.
  • hughes 9y ago
    What if we consider software candidates like tradespeople? How do electricians and welders demonstrate their ability in an interview?
    • TAForObvReasons 9y ago
      For electricians and welders, there are licenses / certification. Obtaining the license / certification demonstrates the baseline competency
      • ketzu 9y ago
        Isn't this like a college degree?
    • ztoben 9y ago
      Work history, references, general questions and maybe some whiteboarding. Honestly just a regular interview.
    • weberc2 9y ago
      Software development is certainly more creative than electrical or welding work, and thus certifications are more meaningful. In software engineering, what certifications you have or what languages you're familiar with is a comparably poor predictor of your success on a given project.
  • ng12 9y ago
    I can take a 10 minute look at a designer's portfolio and get reasonably accurate insight into their style and abilities. Do you think a 10 minute scan of an arbitrary GitHub account is the same? I say decidedly not.
    • notzorbo3 9y ago
      Why not? Can you elaborate? Because 10 minutes with a Github account is enough for me to decide whether I'd hire someone or not.
      • ng12 9y ago
        I mean, what am I supposed to look at? Unless it's obviously poorly written (e.g. no consistent style) how do you judge it? Perhaps more tellingly I've interviewed people with seemingly impressive GitHub accounts who were just terrible. That experience leads me to believe it's easy to set up a GitHub that "looks good" without having the chops to back it up.
      • sotojuan 9y ago
        Why? A lot of people (if not most) treat their non-work GitHub as a place to host random experiments and projects. Unless one plans to publish projects for others to use, no one should be forced to have perfect code for a one off idea if they don't want to. There are a lot of great engineers with empty or "bad" Github profiles.
        • notzorbo3 9y ago
          When I look at a developer's Github profile I know that: 1. They care enough to have a Github profile 2. I can see their actual interests. 3. I know they're interested in random experiments 4. I can see if and how they treat their projects. Are they dedicated maintainers, or do they just fire off one-shot projects without ever deciding to maintain them? And a whole lot more. A person who maintains a single shell script project with diligence is worth more to me than a thousand developers with bullshit lisp and haskell repositories. Yes, there's a bunch of great engineers with empty or bad github profiles out there. But those engineers aren't showing me that they're great engineers. The ones with a single or few well-maintained projects do.
  • walshemj 9y ago
    But creatives are allowed to put work done for others on their show real this is not true for professional jobs
  • pjc50 9y ago
    Normally people's portfolio would include their actual commercial work; it's just the way copyright has turned out in software means we can't do that. Perhaps the best solution would be a unionized right to proper credit to developers like in the film industry.
  • pault 9y ago
    I agree, but the problem with this is that visual design is publicly available, and most professional code is locked behind IP and copyright laws. I can't bring my employer's code base to an interview with another company without risking a heap of legal trouble.
• kelnos 9y ago
  The next time I'm interviewing in front of a hiring manager who asks me about my side coding projects, I'm going to ask them about their side managing projects.
  • 2trill2spill 9y ago
    Then you will not get the job, which I thought was one of the points of job interviews.
    • kelnos 9y ago
      Maybe that's not a job I want, if the hiring manager is lazy enough to 'require' side projects to consider a candidate.
      • 2trill2spill 9y ago
        > Maybe that's not a job I want, if the hiring manager is lazy enough to 'require' side projects to consider a candidate. I understand that you might not want a job there and that part of a job interview is deciding if the company is a fit for you. But I wouldn't call a hiring manager lazy because they want to see examples of your work, in fact that's their job. How is a hiring manager suppose to make a thorough evaluation of a candidate if they don't show their work?
        • yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
          And how an I supposed to tell whether they're worth working for without seeing their work?
          • 2trill2spill 9y ago
            > And how an I supposed to tell whether they're worth working for without seeing their work? Ask questions, and do you really expect a hiring manager to have work relevant to your interview to show? But you can ask about policy, culture, etc.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• warcher 9y ago
  Computing is really noisy and chaotic. There are a lot of dudes out there that just can’t cut it, for whatever reason, and there’s no good way to figure out who’s who. Whiteboard stuff selects for a particular algorithmic dexterity that I just don’t need a lot of the time. And rejects some of the grungier virtues that make a big difference in moving units in production. Hiring folks for a couple weeks is fantastically expensive in management overhead. I gotta be highly confident you will work out to take that step. Just hiring a bunch of dudes and firing the duds is similarly expensive and I frankly don’t want to be that guy. I hate firing people just because I was lazy interviewing. This is my job and I take it seriously. And there are a whole lot of guys that just don’t ship. They show up. They commit code. They are prompt and attentive at meetings. But if you need to ship, they just can’t shit it out. So many organizations are rotten with these guys- you wonder how so many devs can produce so little product, this is the reason. (Also shitty management- mgmt is ten times noisier and a hundred times more expensive if you fuck up.)
  • ryandrake 9y ago
    > And there are a whole lot of guys that just don’t ship. They show up. They commit code. They are prompt and attentive at meetings. But if you need to ship, they just can’t shit it out. Inability to ship tends to be a project planning and scoping problem, not an engineering performance problem. If you can't ship, it's not because you have lazy developers but because you either bit off more scope than you could chew, or you don't actually have a plan that gets you from-here-to-shipping--one that is more detailed than "work harder, guys".
    • warcher 9y ago
      I'm kind of a slacker responding to HN stuff, but here's what I'll say: Yeah, you're right, if shit isn't shipping, it's my fault. But. There are a variety of psychological profiles in computing, and they have various pluses and minuses. I need folks with kind of a... move fast and break things attitude. That's what I select for. Furthermore, the 80/20 rule is a super real thing and the last 1% until a project ships hurts real, real, real bad. There are people who can push through that and there are people who can't. Yeah, it's my fault we're not sipping tea as we ship, but I've been doing this a long time and I'm pretty good at it, and I can't make that pain stop. I just can't. I've been on teams that shipped and suffered, and I've been on teams that didn't ship. If somebody's cracked this code for me, man, throw me a bone. But while I'm always trying to do better, I also kind of have given up. I'll make it up to you on the other side, I promise, but it's gonna hurt a little pushing it out.
• notzorbo3 9y ago
  You know what's universally hard? Finding people who are good at their jobs. References don't matter, experience doesn't matter, education doesn't matter. Why not? Because it doesn't say anything about actual skill. What does? Side projects, where you can actually see if a person has skills. > a corporate lawyer purely based on their pro-bono work? You hire a corporate lawyer based on their public reputation. For a programmer, that's their github portfolio. Business are in a unique position to actually judge programmers by their merit, not just hearsay or bullshit references or lies on a resume. Of course companies are going to factor that into their decision!
  • sahhhm 9y ago
    a lawyers public reputation is built through the day-to-day work. Not a programmers can put their body of work on public display
  • pjmlp 9y ago
    Some of us have NDAs as part of our job. Not everyone is happily doing FOSS projects.
    • nanodano 9y ago
      I think the big misconception is that a side project has to be a prolific open source project. As someone who has interviewed developers, someone who has _anything_ on a GitHub page stands out in the crowd. Even just a folder with a few batch scripts can go a long way.
      • tome 9y ago
        Or even just a webapp where you can say "I can't show you the code, but I made it [look, my name's at the bottom!]".
  • Consultant32452 9y ago
    Actually, the greatest predictor of employee success is their IQ, but that's illegal to test. That's why some employers substitute SAT, ACT, ASVAB, etc. scores, since those are abstractions to IQ tests.
• mitchdoogle 9y ago
  I think it's fair to consider how passionate a person is about improving their career skills. For programmers, that often consists of side projects. For other professions, it could include going to conferences, taking classes, reading trade publications, etc., all of which would be worth mentioning in an interview.
  • davidcbc 9y ago
    I don't think it is fair to imply that people who don't have side projects aren't passionate about improving their career skills. I don't have a lot of side projects, and the ones I do have were hastily hacked together out of boredom or convenience and aren't anywhere near the quality I'd want to show to a potential employer, but I do lots of other stuff to improve my skills, like reading books, listening to podcasts, attending conferences, etc. All of these things improve my career skills, but the improvement is primarily demonstrated at work not through a bunch of side projects.
• jasode 9y ago
  >Or what about other engineering disciplines? Does one really ask a Mechanical Engineer or a Civil Engineer about their side projects? Not civil engineers (because it's hard to build a 4-lane suspension bridge on a Saturday) but very often candidates in electronic and electrical engineering have side projects that can help them land a job. Are the electronics breadboard projects that you did in your garage absolutely required to get a job?!? No, but they help you stand out among the crowd. The reason that <computer programmer> is different from your analogies of marketers, lawyers, recruiters, etc is that the activity of programming is often a source of fun and play. Some children with curiosity start programming on their own and continue it into adulthood. (And hence, they might have some personal github projects.) In contrast, people typically do not do "lawyering" for recreational fun. Programming is enjoyable enough for some that side projects on github are mostly a voluntary and organic phenomenon. Some employers are taking advantage of that signal and prefer to hire those types of programmers.
  • vacri 9y ago
    > In contrast, people typically do not "lawyering" for recreational fun. Indeed, it's the opposite - industry bodies have to mandate pro bono work, which wouldn't get done otherwise.
• snarfy 9y ago
  Is software development a science or an art? Most artists have portfolios.
  • ionised 9y ago
    Most artists own their own work and are not under NDAs.
• marssaxman 9y ago
  In my experience the industry is not at all insistent on side projects; lots of people talk about having them, and the way people talk about them has become weirdly culty in the last five-ish years, but it is entirely one-sided; nobody who is doing the hiring cares at all.
• logfromblammo 9y ago
  Asking for side projects is essentially saying that you think the resume is a pack of lies from back to front. My work is my work, and my play is my play, and I question the wisdom of judging the play in the decision to hire someone to work for you. Even when I do code at home, away from the office, I do it differently. It might be in a different language, for a different target platform, for instance. I might write more automated tests, because I can't hand it off to a tester that isn't also me. I might write something with a command-line console interface instead of a GUI, because my user base is probably just me, and I know that person is not a helpless idiot who can't read a man page--a man page that I probably will never write in the first place. Real work is reading the crap code written by your predecessor, understanding it just enough to change something without breaking everything else, and moving on to the next thing as quickly as possible. No interview has ever tested my ability to read existing code or to alter existing code for a specific goal. Whiteboard this: "This third-party data grid inexplicably causes all text typed into this column to come out backwards. You have 60 minutes to fix the problem, because code freeze is in four days, test needs at least a week to bang on a release candidate build, we ship at the end of the month, and you have 15 more equally-stupid issues waiting for you." And then you are judged on the quality of your horrendous kludge. Those companies that look for perfect people that write perfect code at work, then go home and keep doing it, are living in Cloudcuckooland. Right now, my side project is getting the last two achievements in Fallout 4. After that, it will be banging out an entire novel in November. Or maybe it will be making furniture to hold DVDs, with a built-in system to deliver a painful shock whenever someone puts them back out of the correct order (which is sorted first by genre, then alphabetical by series name or title). Or maybe it will be working out a plan to terraform Venus using wormholes. When I leave work, I do whatever I want. I don't want to endlessly prep for an unending parade of stupid tech interviews.
  • pault 9y ago
    This is a great idea! I would love to have an interview where I was presented with some terrible code and asked how I would refactor. That would be so much more relevant to actual work experience than solving technical puzzles.
• yodsanklai 9y ago
  > It's funny that the tech industry is so insistent on side projects. I mean - would you hire a marketing person based on their 'side projects' or a corporate lawyer purely based on their pro-bono work? I guess our field is so enjoyable that many people have side projects. Apparently, some recruiters think it's a good indicator of future success. I wonder if it's the case though. I teach CS and usually, passionate students (those who work on their own projects) are indeed better and spend much more time working on their assignments. But it's not the end of the story. For example, some are only motivated in things that involve coding, are stubborn, or are bad team players! Conversely, there are students who aren't hobbyist programmers but are smart, learn fast and are a joy to work with.
• my_username_is_ 9y ago
  >Does one really ask a Mechanical Engineer or a Civil Engineer about their side projects? Yes, sometimes. I'm a mechanical engineer, and frequently interviewers would ask what sorts of projects or engineering related hobbies I have. They're not necessarily looking for me to have brought a mass-produced consumer product to market in my spare time... most mechanical engineers I've met seem to be excited enough if you talk about working on cars or bikes. I can see how software engineering may be similar. They may not be expecting you to be working on some hugely popular app, they may just be trying to get a gauge on what you're really passionate about. I don't like to wrench on cars in my spare time, but I've still gotten job offers after it comes up. In the end it's just a matter of finding the team that has similar values to you.
• nitwit005 9y ago
  > It's funny that the tech industry is so insistent on side projects. Are they? I've yet to be asked about it. It might be different for new grads, but what people seem to care about most is if you've worked for a major firm, or in the case of the video game industry, a "AAA title".
• maxhallinan 9y ago
  This is like a doctor saying "It's funny the medical industry is so insistent on medical licenses. I mean - would you hire a software engineer based on their 'license'...". Different things are different.
• nanodano 9y ago
  Developers are more akin to musicians or artists than a marketing person. Yes, I do expect musicians to practice their instrument and learn new material in their free time, at least a little bit. A musician who _only_ played during paid gigs and never practiced 1 hour outside of the paid jobs, would never learn anything new. They would forever be stuck with their existing repertoire. Would you hire a musicians who didn't have recordings of their work and wasn't willing to perform an audition? Would you want to hire a musician who didn't practice new things? The development landscape changes rapidly. Frameworks come and go. If you want to keep up in the industry, you will most likely have to learn a new language or learn a new framework at some point along the way. If you only code during your 9-5 you are forever stuck with your current skill set and will end up like the people in 2017 who only know COBOL and can't do anything else. Your job options will shrivel and you will not be very marketable.
• h8hn4 9y ago
  Graphic Designers, Copywriters and Art Directors ARE all supposed to have side projects AKA a portfolio.