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Thanks for your interest in Bueller and Co. accounting. We love to hire the most passionate accountant rock stars in the industry. In advance of the interview,

by cgore 9y ago

Thanks for your interest in Bueller and Co. accounting. We love to hire the most passionate accountant rock stars in the industry. In advance of the interview, please send us links to some of the side accounting projects you’ve done for fun in your spare time. But the difference is, good programmers actually LIKE to code. Even in our spare time. For fun. A better analogy is a graphic artist. "Show us some of your oil paintings/charcoal sketches/etc." They won't be doing any oil paintings at work, but they probably paint/sketch/etc. for fun. At least the good ones.

cratermoon 9y ago
No, no we don't. Not all of us. Generalizing like that is why software development hiring often goes off the rails. Every shop looks for beer & pizza loving, video game-playing, hobby-programming guys who dabble in maker projects and there's a whole world of people out there who are top-notch programmers but have families, non-technical hobbies, and just in general have lives different from the stereotypical brogrammer culture. Personally, I program a little bit for my own purposes, but nothing more complicated than simple custom script-like utilities to automate things I do all the time. Sometimes I'll put a little time into creating a toy project to learn a new technology, but otherwise I really like to go home and not think about programming for a while. I like to give my brain different things to do to keep it challenged but not bored. Step out of the bubble/box sometime, meet people different from yourself.
- hajderr 9y ago
  thank you, just so true
- cgore 9y ago
  Is this my only hobby? Nope. But, would you write code if you had a billion dollars? I would. Mind you, I wouldn't go into a big corporate shop Monday-Friday 9:00am-5:00pm and write random crap that some middle manager thinks he needs by the end of the month, but I'd gladly write code. At it's finest, it's an art. Let's use photographers as another example. Any good photographer would still spend a lot of their time in photography even if they had a billion dollars. They probably wouldn't take the exact same wedding photos every Weekend though. You really can't be a REALLY good programmer without side projects where you get to play around with new technologies, with no deadlines, no managers, no infrastructure, just exploration. I know there's lots of people who are flooding into this field now just because it pays well, which is understandable, and they might even do a good job and even take pride in their work, but if it's just a job then they aren't ever going to do as well as someone who actually wants to do this for fun. And working with people who are doing it as "just a job" kind of sucks the joy out of the work itself.
  - noxToken 9y ago
    > But, would you write code if you had a billion dollars? Probably. I enjoy writing code and the challenges associated with designing a solution. If I had unlimited money (meaning I didn't have to work), I would probably write code in my spare time. I do think that it is fun. > You really can't be a REALLY good programmer without side projects where you get to play around with new technologies, with no deadlines, no managers, no infrastructure, just exploration. Guess I'll never be one of those really good programmers for the rest of my life. I do like to program, but I have a laundry list of hobbies that doesn't consist of programming. I already do it for a living 40 hours a week.
    - bastijn 9y ago
      > You really can’t be a REALLY good company without innovation (side) projects where you play around with new technologies, with no expected results or deadlines, no managers, no infrastructure, just exploration. There, fixed it.
      - cgore 9y ago
        That's the way it would change. Some places are a lot more open to 'directionless' work and others are amazingly focused on deadlines and the like. If a place is cool with you spending X% of your time on open source work that may or may not be directly related to your 'real' work than that's a much nicer place to be.
  - blunte 9y ago
    Code is (can be) an art just as much as tax preparation can be an art. But at the end of the project, for most of the rest of the world, it's just a means to an end. I've written some very elegant code in my life that I later revisited and was very proud of. But as a life's achievement? No way. Most code you will ever write will be thrown away or not used. And of the percentage that is used, most of that could have been written less wonderfully by a more crude programmer and still met the requirements. Programming is not hard. Good programming is not hard. Good solutions can be difficult to achieve, but that is less about the difficulty in writing good code than it is about understanding the many different objectives and variables in a situation and reconciling that with the legacy or other constraints. Who am I to judge where someone finds their self worth. But at the end of a decade of doing something, maybe it's good to look around and as, "What is this worth to humanity - even some small subset of?" There are too many "photographers", but at least they can show their work to the general population and evoke some kind of emotional response (other than, "ooh, that looks sooo boring"). There are many, many exceptional musicians who will never make a living with their music, but at least they bring joy to listeners. Meanwhile, Github fills up with the latest Javascript version of something that's already been done a million times (and could probably have been done with Unix shell scripts).
- sushid 9y ago
  Maybe they're trying to hire people with some intersection between work and passion. If I had two similarly qualified candidates but one has a huge interest in coding on the side, I'd be inclined to pick her over the other one if I were a hiring manager. And to be fair, I've had many ask me for side projects and whatnot (with me providing nothing) and have still received offers from them after an interview. Sometimes, these things are just nice to haves. From a recruiter's perspective, why not ask? No one said anything about a brogramming culture but you seem very incensed. Step down from the soap box and take a breath or two.
  - deadmetheny 9y ago
    He should be mad. The idea that what you are professionally capable of needs to be proven or accentuated with spare-time projects is nonsense and needs to die. What someone does with their personal time should have no bearing on their professional life - if all of that spare-time coding sharpens their skills, that should be self-evident during the interviewing process and give them an advantage anyway.
  - UncleMeat 9y ago
    One can be passionate at work without enjoying coding on their free time.
    - roberto 9y ago
      Exactly! I used to be a climate scientist, and wrote open source libraries on my free time. I now work as a software engineer, and I love my job. But on my free time I now make music.
    - sushid 9y ago
      That's fair, but a hiring manager might be more easily able to see this overlap if you have some recent side projects. And again, I'm not even the type to code for fun at home (at least not since my first two years out of college). My significant other never codes for fun but is probably one of the most talented programmers I know. I'm just stating some reasons why one might ask this as an interviewer. The absence of side projects doesn't indicate a lack of passion but the opposite of this is mostly true.
JasonFruit 9y ago
I see your point, and I think it may in general be true. But are you sure there aren't passionate accountants who have, on their own time, tried out innovative ideas to make accounting practices easier to understand, faster, or more accurate? If you could find them, and see their work, you might really want to hire them.
- cgore 9y ago
  I've met people who are passionate about finance, usually they are traders though. I've never met a truly passionate accountant. But then I don't know many. I don't know how you would do accounting in your spare time. Maybe volunteer work?
  - mywittyname 9y ago
    I know a few people that do accounting on the side. And lots of accountants own their own businesses.
    - blunte 9y ago
      For pay or for obligation, but not because it's just fun. You cannot tell me that finding someone else's financial records online and then applying your approach to accounting on them, just for kicks, is happening. Maybe if you're a finance researcher... but no, not even then. Doing side programming because you get paid, or because you have an idea that you think could be useful or marketable later, yeah that happens. Doing side projects because you want to learn a new language or tool, hoping it will make you more able to do your work better in the future, sure. That's a great reason. There are actually a lot of good reasons to do side programming. But making that a big part of a hiring process is unnecessarily focusing on a behavior that is arguably not going to separate a good candidate from an average candidate. I'm sure there's a lot of really garbage side project code out there.
  - kbenson 9y ago
    I know someone (an old friend of my wife) who went to school for accounting, and did indeed donate time at local libraries to help people with taxes. I'm not sure if that was because they liked accounting, or liked helping people and had skills in accounting. I could see "side projects" being interesting ways to interpret different tax laws with each other. As a "game" with a very large set of rules and formulas that occasionally changes in small but fundamental ways, I could see a certain type of person reveling in their ability to find interesting rule combinations ("loopholes").
dizzystar 9y ago
The analogy is horrible because there is nothing about graphics art that precludes one to be a fine artist. I really wish people would stop with this hobby project bs. No one looks at your github, no one looks at your websites, and no one reads your blog posts about using Arduino boards to build a non-GMO farm in your living room.
- blunte 9y ago
  Hey! I actually like the organic home non-gmo automated farming. I look at those :) I don't look at the Nth iteration of TodoMVC written in brainfuck, however.
Karrot_Kream 9y ago
> But the difference is, good programmers actually LIKE to code. Even in our spare time. I have no idea what you are talking about. Working on my side projects is very very different than working for a company. As your child comment says, programming can indeed be an art. I often compare it to the musician who passionately plays their instrument at home, but makes shitty cookie-cutter jingles for advertisements. Or, a pejorative analogy that seems to be more prevalent in popular Western culture, a philosophy major intimately familiar with Cartesian duality and Berkeleian idealism who writes clickbait articles for a living. You can bet your horses that unless the company I work for creates a product that's very important to me, that I'm putting in no more than my requisite 8 hours. This ignores the host of incidental skills (mathematics, systems design, etc.) that I think a good programmer should study that "side projects" does nothing for.
austincheney 9y ago
Weak. Some doctors actually LIKE to practice medicine. Some of these doctors will travel to third world countries or join the military to get additional practice time at less pay. The difference, is that you still need to be licensed and certified to practice medicine.

by cgore 9y ago

cratermoon 9y ago

No, no we don't. Not all of us. Generalizing like that is why software development hiring often goes off the rails. Every shop looks for beer & pizza loving, video game-playing, hobby-programming guys who dabble in maker projects and there's a whole world of people out there who are top-notch programmers but have families, non-technical hobbies, and just in general have lives different from the stereotypical brogrammer culture. Personally, I program a little bit for my own purposes, but nothing more complicated than simple custom script-like utilities to automate things I do all the time. Sometimes I'll put a little time into creating a toy project to learn a new technology, but otherwise I really like to go home and not think about programming for a while. I like to give my brain different things to do to keep it challenged but not bored. Step out of the bubble/box sometime, meet people different from yourself.

hajderr 9y ago
thank you, just so true
cgore 9y ago
Is this my only hobby? Nope. But, would you write code if you had a billion dollars? I would. Mind you, I wouldn't go into a big corporate shop Monday-Friday 9:00am-5:00pm and write random crap that some middle manager thinks he needs by the end of the month, but I'd gladly write code. At it's finest, it's an art. Let's use photographers as another example. Any good photographer would still spend a lot of their time in photography even if they had a billion dollars. They probably wouldn't take the exact same wedding photos every Weekend though. You really can't be a REALLY good programmer without side projects where you get to play around with new technologies, with no deadlines, no managers, no infrastructure, just exploration. I know there's lots of people who are flooding into this field now just because it pays well, which is understandable, and they might even do a good job and even take pride in their work, but if it's just a job then they aren't ever going to do as well as someone who actually wants to do this for fun. And working with people who are doing it as "just a job" kind of sucks the joy out of the work itself.
- noxToken 9y ago
  > But, would you write code if you had a billion dollars? Probably. I enjoy writing code and the challenges associated with designing a solution. If I had unlimited money (meaning I didn't have to work), I would probably write code in my spare time. I do think that it is fun. > You really can't be a REALLY good programmer without side projects where you get to play around with new technologies, with no deadlines, no managers, no infrastructure, just exploration. Guess I'll never be one of those really good programmers for the rest of my life. I do like to program, but I have a laundry list of hobbies that doesn't consist of programming. I already do it for a living 40 hours a week.
  - bastijn 9y ago
    > You really can’t be a REALLY good company without innovation (side) projects where you play around with new technologies, with no expected results or deadlines, no managers, no infrastructure, just exploration. There, fixed it.
    - cgore 9y ago
      That's the way it would change. Some places are a lot more open to 'directionless' work and others are amazingly focused on deadlines and the like. If a place is cool with you spending X% of your time on open source work that may or may not be directly related to your 'real' work than that's a much nicer place to be.
- blunte 9y ago
  Code is (can be) an art just as much as tax preparation can be an art. But at the end of the project, for most of the rest of the world, it's just a means to an end. I've written some very elegant code in my life that I later revisited and was very proud of. But as a life's achievement? No way. Most code you will ever write will be thrown away or not used. And of the percentage that is used, most of that could have been written less wonderfully by a more crude programmer and still met the requirements. Programming is not hard. Good programming is not hard. Good solutions can be difficult to achieve, but that is less about the difficulty in writing good code than it is about understanding the many different objectives and variables in a situation and reconciling that with the legacy or other constraints. Who am I to judge where someone finds their self worth. But at the end of a decade of doing something, maybe it's good to look around and as, "What is this worth to humanity - even some small subset of?" There are too many "photographers", but at least they can show their work to the general population and evoke some kind of emotional response (other than, "ooh, that looks sooo boring"). There are many, many exceptional musicians who will never make a living with their music, but at least they bring joy to listeners. Meanwhile, Github fills up with the latest Javascript version of something that's already been done a million times (and could probably have been done with Unix shell scripts).
sushid 9y ago
Maybe they're trying to hire people with some intersection between work and passion. If I had two similarly qualified candidates but one has a huge interest in coding on the side, I'd be inclined to pick her over the other one if I were a hiring manager. And to be fair, I've had many ask me for side projects and whatnot (with me providing nothing) and have still received offers from them after an interview. Sometimes, these things are just nice to haves. From a recruiter's perspective, why not ask? No one said anything about a brogramming culture but you seem very incensed. Step down from the soap box and take a breath or two.
- deadmetheny 9y ago
  He should be mad. The idea that what you are professionally capable of needs to be proven or accentuated with spare-time projects is nonsense and needs to die. What someone does with their personal time should have no bearing on their professional life - if all of that spare-time coding sharpens their skills, that should be self-evident during the interviewing process and give them an advantage anyway.
- UncleMeat 9y ago
  One can be passionate at work without enjoying coding on their free time.
  - roberto 9y ago
    Exactly! I used to be a climate scientist, and wrote open source libraries on my free time. I now work as a software engineer, and I love my job. But on my free time I now make music.
  - sushid 9y ago
    That's fair, but a hiring manager might be more easily able to see this overlap if you have some recent side projects. And again, I'm not even the type to code for fun at home (at least not since my first two years out of college). My significant other never codes for fun but is probably one of the most talented programmers I know. I'm just stating some reasons why one might ask this as an interviewer. The absence of side projects doesn't indicate a lack of passion but the opposite of this is mostly true.

JasonFruit 9y ago

I see your point, and I think it may in general be true. But are you sure there aren't passionate accountants who have, on their own time, tried out innovative ideas to make accounting practices easier to understand, faster, or more accurate? If you could find them, and see their work, you might really want to hire them.

cgore 9y ago
I've met people who are passionate about finance, usually they are traders though. I've never met a truly passionate accountant. But then I don't know many. I don't know how you would do accounting in your spare time. Maybe volunteer work?
- mywittyname 9y ago
  I know a few people that do accounting on the side. And lots of accountants own their own businesses.
  - blunte 9y ago
    For pay or for obligation, but not because it's just fun. You cannot tell me that finding someone else's financial records online and then applying your approach to accounting on them, just for kicks, is happening. Maybe if you're a finance researcher... but no, not even then. Doing side programming because you get paid, or because you have an idea that you think could be useful or marketable later, yeah that happens. Doing side projects because you want to learn a new language or tool, hoping it will make you more able to do your work better in the future, sure. That's a great reason. There are actually a lot of good reasons to do side programming. But making that a big part of a hiring process is unnecessarily focusing on a behavior that is arguably not going to separate a good candidate from an average candidate. I'm sure there's a lot of really garbage side project code out there.
- kbenson 9y ago
  I know someone (an old friend of my wife) who went to school for accounting, and did indeed donate time at local libraries to help people with taxes. I'm not sure if that was because they liked accounting, or liked helping people and had skills in accounting. I could see "side projects" being interesting ways to interpret different tax laws with each other. As a "game" with a very large set of rules and formulas that occasionally changes in small but fundamental ways, I could see a certain type of person reveling in their ability to find interesting rule combinations ("loopholes").

dizzystar 9y ago

The analogy is horrible because there is nothing about graphics art that precludes one to be a fine artist. I really wish people would stop with this hobby project bs. No one looks at your github, no one looks at your websites, and no one reads your blog posts about using Arduino boards to build a non-GMO farm in your living room.

blunte 9y ago
Hey! I actually like the organic home non-gmo automated farming. I look at those :) I don't look at the Nth iteration of TodoMVC written in brainfuck, however.

Karrot_Kream 9y ago

> But the difference is, good programmers actually LIKE to code. Even in our spare time. I have no idea what you are talking about. Working on my side projects is very very different than working for a company. As your child comment says, programming can indeed be an art. I often compare it to the musician who passionately plays their instrument at home, but makes shitty cookie-cutter jingles for advertisements. Or, a pejorative analogy that seems to be more prevalent in popular Western culture, a philosophy major intimately familiar with Cartesian duality and Berkeleian idealism who writes clickbait articles for a living. You can bet your horses that unless the company I work for creates a product that's very important to me, that I'm putting in no more than my requisite 8 hours. This ignores the host of incidental skills (mathematics, systems design, etc.) that I think a good programmer should study that "side projects" does nothing for.

austincheney 9y ago

Weak. Some doctors actually LIKE to practice medicine. Some of these doctors will travel to third world countries or join the military to get additional practice time at less pay. The difference, is that you still need to be licensed and certified to practice medicine.