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Anecdotally, as someone who has been involved in hiring and (sort of) cares about side projects, it's not actually the technical implementation I care about, th
by indigochill 9y ago
Anecdotally, as someone who has been involved in hiring and (sort of) cares about side projects, it's not actually the technical implementation I care about, that's true. It's about the applicant signalling "I care about this stuff". But it's far from the only indicator and shouldn't be given too much weight. I'd gladly hire someone who had no side projects but passed our technical test/interview and soft skills interview.
As for why I don't take Github profiles too seriously, we had plenty of applicants who did have projects on their Github profiles who tripped all over themselves on our simple coding test. Maybe we would have found out something similar by digging into their commit history, but that would be an even greater time investment than the hiring process already was.
- SandwichTeeth 9y agoI think that coding tests and challenges apply a sort of artificial pressure and requirement to have things memorized that aren't there in the real world. I think it would be a mistake to discount a candidate who has good code on their github when they had time to sit, think through problems without being under a magnifying glass, but trips up during a technical interview challenge/puzzle/whiteboard or whatever. Maybe in those candidates you could actually walk through their projects with them and try to determine if they have a deep understanding of what they wrote. To me, that seems a better indicator of how they would perform on a team with real problems, rather than having to puke up a pseudocode merge-sort from memory.