15 ms·

In defense of hiring based on side projects

49 points by barry-cotter 6y ago

barry-cotter 6y ago
> Barons of the Sky is a nice history of the early days of the aerospace industry, and it shows that in the early days, everyone was a hobbyist. Unlike other hobbies, like writing computer games for fun, this was a high-stakes pursuit. Good amateur plane designers made the front page when they set records, the bad ones made the obituary page instead. ... > And since the tweet mentioned rockets, it would be wrong to ignore one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jack Parsons, who helped invent modern rocketry, founded a cult, got expelled from Caltech for a bit of both, and died from a rocket explosion at his home lab. > Hedge funds do this, too. At a typical stock-picking hedge fund, the decisive interview questions are about what stocks you like and which ones you hate. Some anecdotes: > Lars Kroijer, a young MBA, scored an interview with a very good hedge fund in the 90s. He describes the interview in his memoir. The manager asked him for stock picks. He said the market was inefficient, so the manager asked him to leave. Ouch! Lars straightened himself out and went on to run a successful fund, then retired at the right time. At another fund I’ve heard about, the head of research liked to poll the interns and ask them if they thought the market was efficient. If the answer was yes, he said, they were fired effective immediately. Fortunately, in an efficient market it should be effortless to get an equally attractive job elsewhere. I’ve bombed at least one interview by not having any good trading pitches handy. (In fairness to me, it was a fund using a strategy I hadn’t ever worked on. In fairness to them, I knew this.) ... > As many people point out, the norm in favor of side projects is unfair to anyone with limited free time. What they don’t add is that this is a progressive tax: there’s a positive correlation between educational attainment and hours worked per week, as well as between income and hours worked per week. This was not always the case; “The idle rich” used to be a statistically accurate observation, but now the rich work longer hours and have less leisure time than average. But the average American watches four and a half hours of TV per day. If your work happens to be fun, you can devote that leisure time to side projects. If your work is boring, you probably shouldn’t complain that people who like their craft more than you and devote more effort to it are rewarded. > (As a friend put it a few years ago, when such pop culture references were relevant, “If you know what a ‘Khaleesi’ is, you had time for side projects.”)
- mech422 6y ago
  I think 'lack of time' generally has more to do with family, then T.V. I know I have a LOT more time for 'fun stuff' now my son is grown.
  - michaelt 6y ago
    If you're making a pro-side-projects argument, "work instead of watching TV" is probably more convincing than "work instead of spending time with your kids"
    - moron4hire 6y ago
      Every single person I've met who had kids and complains about spending time with them keeps them from their projects also watched a lot of TV or plays games or wastes time on social media after the kids go to bed. Every person I know who has kids and finds time for their projects are bringing their kids with them to meetups, getting the kids interested, and not spending time on consumptive pursuits. Spending time with your kids, being a good, engaged parent, has little to do with working on side projects.
      - odshoifsdhfs 6y ago
        Do you have kids? Not an attack just curious. Edit: I just saw in the post below you do, will leave it here anywhere Between 1 hour in the morning getting them ready for school, commute, work 8/9 hours, commute back and pick him from school/grandparents, cook dinner, play with them a bit, put them in bed, most people don't have energy to so a side project and just need some time to relax in front of tv or social media. If you want to be a good parent, it is tiresome and exhausting.
        moron4hire 6y ago
        Yes, it's tiring. I sometimes complain I don't have any time to play video games anymore. But that's it: I complain about not playing video games, not about not working on projects. I suck it up and open the code editor. And I want employees who have the fortitude to do the right thing rather than the easy thing. Edit: I want to also note, I don't just dump the kids on my wife. She has her own side projects she does. She writes sci-fi novels.
jimmySixDOF 6y ago
Nolan Bushnell Founder of Atari, inventor of Pong, & gave Steve Jobs a job : *I would hire somebody who would have a really passionate, tricky hobby before I hired somebody who had a PhD in the subject. Hobbies are more important in today’s world than degrees.*
- panelss 6y ago
  In practise, this is bullshit. Maybe back in the 70s, but now the tech industry machination is so robotic and massive that you will never even get to know your employer before they've already thrown you out for being under-qualified.
shmel 6y ago
I have started working for a big international company only recently and was quite surprised to learn that the clause "we own all IP you produce at any time including at home on your own equipment" is common in contracts. It is present in my contract as well. It affected my motivation to work on side projects a lot. How do other devs deal with this? I'd like to write some code for fun at home at least sometimes, but arguing with the legal department just to put it in github is definitely not something I want to do in my free time.
- s_gourichon 6y ago
  (I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, just a forum conversation where I tell what I believe: "as far as I know", etc.) What country is this? Here in France, your employer may only complain if they can argue that your activity causes them harm. Side projects, even when benefiting from your work experience, should, as far as I know, be okay.
  - shmel 6y ago
    It is the UK. I know that probably in some jurisdictions some of these clauses are unenforceable. I just don't want to step in a legal mess. I know a friend of mine (in France btw) had to argue with his company about this even though he obtained a verbal agreement beforehand. It is just that he was about to quit and the employer decided to fuck with him as much as possible.
    - cnity 6y ago
      Are you sure? The line "in the course of your employment" is often misinterpreted to mean "while hired here". In fact it means something like "while doing something that is specifically required to do your job properly"[0] [0]: Australian site, but relevant: https://www.business.qld.gov.au/running-business/protecting-business/ip-kit/browse-ip-topics/ownership-of-intellectual-property-created-by-your-employees-and-contractors-or-consultants/ownership#:~:text=As%20a%20general%20rule%2C%20an,the%20employee%2C%20not%20the%20employer https://www.business.qld.gov.au/running-business/protecting-....
_raul 6y ago
It took me years to notice a flaw in this approach: it's based in the premise that everyone has time for side projects. From that point I think about it as a bias. Nowadays I try to assess if the candidates with no public activity on GH and no side projects have the passion and interest I look for, but can't take it further outside of work due to their specific circumstances.
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  What's ironic to me is that oftentimes those same companies looking at side projects to judge how "passionate" one is are the ones that expect their employees to "give everything" while on the job, presumably going as far as neglecting their side projects.
- moron4hire 6y ago
  Time-in-practice is still correlated with skill. If I'm getting someone with "4 years of experience", a person who works on side projects could have 10,000 hours in-practice, vs only 5,000 for someone who doesn't. I understand not exclusively focusing on people who work on their own to the exclusion of everyone else, but I definitely don't understand this modern push to ignore it as a signal completely. People who don't work side projects are going to need more years of experience to have the same level of practice as those who do. And frankly, I've been involved in a lot of hiring, and I've yet to see these people who A) don't work on side projects, but B) are actually skilled in their jobs. We give them interviews and it becomes clear they hid in large, ossified, megacorporate teams. They know the one way to do things that is the one template of work they've ever been hired to do, because that is the only experience they have. If that's your environment, I guess you can have them. I don't have any space for that.
  - Nursie 6y ago
    Frankly I have yet to see people who A) spend a lot of time on side projects and B) significantly outshine their peers who don't. It's a good signal of interest and engagement, but it's far from the only one.
  - odshoifsdhfs 6y ago
ErrantX 6y ago
My take is; there is nothing wrong with looking for this stuff but relying on it is short-sighted. Personal experience of mine is; people who spend a lot of non-work time on side projects and open source bring a specific energy to their work. What they are usually not good at is turning up for work, getting their head down and diligently burning through some work. Instead they tend to be ideas people and leaders. All organisations need a balance of personality and experience to be effective. So get excited about Bob because he is an Open Source advocate and regular conference speaker. But also get excited about Alice because her experience is right and when she interviews she is dedicated and detail-oriented.
- Lammy 6y ago
  I know Alice and Bob are mega-classic foo/bar-style example names, but I also feel like it brings an unnecessary implication to use gendered names as examples when talking about hiring.
  - dpc_pw 6y ago
    Relax, Bob is transgender. You can't make assumptions like that without asking for pronouns first. Duh. :D
  - shadowmore 6y ago
    I can't tell satire from reality anymore.
    - Lammy 6y ago
      I'm being very sincere. It feels out of place here for the masculine example name to be the outgoing FOSS-contributing self-driven one ("ideas people and leaders") and the feminine example name to be the one who is good at showing up on time, keeping her head down, and being told what to do.
      - pluto9 6y ago
        If they were reversed, you could take offense to Alice being the head-in-the-clouds, undisciplined, and unreliable one while Bob is focused, hard-working, and gets the job done. Of course that would be equally silly, because an example is just an example and there's no reason to read this sort of thing into it.
Nursie 6y ago
This is just so much crap. I love what I do but doing it 40 hours a week is enough. I have side projects - doing up the house, cooking, exploring the world, spending lots of time with friends and family etc. I occasionally have a home tech project like building a security cam system or something, but it's not that much and not that often. In my experience the kinds of 'obsessives' he's talking about in this post are not only not the best at what they do, they're often pretty weird people too.
cryptica 6y ago
>> Hiring Based on Side Projects: Unfair, But Good For the World I don't see how hiring based on side projects is unfair in any way. Ignoring people's side projects is essentially a punishment for those who do invest a lot of time in them. It's not like the side project built itself. We should not punish people by ignoring their surplus efforts. There are two ways to go about it: 1. Reward people for building real stuff and improving their skills in an area which is relevant to the position that they're applying for. 2. Reward people for being good at taking whiteboard tests, social scheming, rehearsing job interviews and solving pointless abstract puzzles that have nothing to do with the position that they're applying for. I can't imagine how anyone could justify #2 as being the better option. It's disturbing that this article even needs to be written. Do people actually think that the second option is even viable? Now I understand why there are such huge social problems today. There is an army of type 1 people who were badly hurt and who are still struggling and now they're smarter and more determined than ever to make things right.
- JohnBooty 6y ago
  That's an awfully false dichotomy and I'm also not sure you checked out the linked article. I'm not a fan of whiteboard interview nonsense either. Probably for all the same reasons as you. Enough said there. I also really life to see folks' side projects. I think they are a good substitute for work experience - if somebody doesn't have relevant professional experience in a field, but they've been doing it in their own time, that's good & impressive and should be rewarded. I've been hired myself partly on the strength of a large side project I did. However, the linked article is about essentially demanding that hires have side projects, as a demonstration of their passion. Rejecting folks on the basis of a lack of side projects is going to be at least as disastrous (in terms of throwing away people who'd be great at the job) as rejecting candidates who flunk a whiteboard test or silly logic problem... and for some of the same reasons. Specifically, neither of those things is necessarily similar to the thing you're actually hiring them to do. There is an inverse correlation between "time a person has for side projects" and "the demands of their day job." The folks with the most time for side projects are the folks who are either underemployed or unemployed, or don't really do the whole "friends and family" thing outside of working hours. Also -- and keep in mind I'm saying this as a big fan of side projects and following one's passions -- the act of following one's passion in one's spare time is profoundly different from getting shit done at a 9-to-5. The purpose of a day job is directly or indirectly make money for one's employer. Often that means doing shit one does not want to do. It is a grind, even in "cool" jobs that overlap with one's passions to a large degree. In short, seems to me the gulf between "following your passions" and "actually getting shit done for your employer" is about as big as the gulf between "passing a whiteboard exam" and "actually getting shit done for your employer."
JohnBooty 6y ago
When hiring, I am a big fan of side projects as a substitute for strong work experience. If you've been working as a barista but coding in your spare time, cool! You might have a great career ahead of you in software engineering... maybe you're right for the team. Your portfolio matters. (The converse is true, too. If you're been coding at work all day but pursuing your passion for coffee at night, maybe you'll make a great barista or roaster! Go for it!) But. Holding a demanding engineering job and doing a lot of engineering on the side are nearly mutually exclusive. I've done a big side project or two, but only when I was basically underemployed at my day job. Slumming it, really. I've had other jobs where it took everything I had just to keep up with the demands of the job and keep up with my talented coworkers. I sure didn't have any engineering juice left over in me at the end of the day. Especially not if I wanted to maintain healthy relationships with other human beings and my family. There are only so many hours in a week. So, if you demand your hires spent time outside of work on side projects? You're going to have a strong bias that favors people who (a) have been slacking or underemployed (b) are not really into the whole "human relationships" thing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with living one's life that way, but you are certainly excluding a lot of healthy and talented people if you essentially insist upon only hiring from that group.
davidg109 6y ago
Side projects are icing. People live under different circumstances. One person may wish to spend their free time socializing when they’re done work. Another person may wish to spend that time doing these side projects. If this made the difference between being hired by a company or not, this wouldn’t be the company I would choose to work for. I could only imagine the 24/7, always-on culture they’d have.
- mahaganapati 6y ago
  The kind of company that says they hire 'rockstars' and 'ninjas'
- sokoloff 6y ago
  One athlete might choose to spend their free time socializing while another works out. One med or engineering student might socialize while another hits the books or lab. Do we believe that the outcomes will be equal over 100s of such trials? If we believe the outcomes will be different, why should we not consider that among other signals we get in interviewing?
  - milesvp 6y ago
    You should look at the work of Richard Hamming. Socializing is very important in staying relavant in a field. Similarly there’s a belief that the social dinners of the academics in cape cod post WWII had an overwhemling effect on that regions academic contributions. Personally I’d bet on the socializer over the person putting in tons of extra hours in isolation anyday.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      True, though I would count significant socializing within your field or with a distinctly academic bent quite differently from "crushing Bud Light cans around a campfire". Not to say that the latter isn't also a perfectly valid way to spend time, but it's quite different from a social dinner of academics, IMO.
  - Daishiman 6y ago
moron4hire 6y ago
I get that people are reacting to companies that are saying they only consider people with side-project portfolios. Yes, that's terrible. But the pendulum-swing reaction to say "side project shouldn't matter" is just as bad, maybe even worse. People who talk about "side projects shouldn't be a consideration" don't know what they are asking for. They have either forgotten or never experienced the history of why side projects are considered in the interviewing process today. To ask for side projects to not be a part of the hiring decision process is to ask to set back hiring by at least 15 years. Do you think the tech industry was more equitable 15 years ago? Considering side projects came about when people like me got our turn at being hiring managers. When we were first entering the industry, we got told explicitly that our side projects didn't matter, that the only experience that mattered was professional experience. We could prove we could do the job and we still were being told we would not be considered for the job. We started considering side projects specifically to be more equitable in hiring. I grew up in a rural town. I went to a local, state college. I graduated in the top of my class in Computer Science and I still couldn't get a job in programming out of college. I didn't have a dad at Microsoft to get me a prestigious internship. I didn't have a prestigious school behind my name and our school "only" did Java and the local companies "only" did .NET. I had been programming in .NET for 2 years by that point, but it wasn't going to be considered because it wasn't professional experience. The only job I could get was entry-level QA. You didn't even need a degree to get the job. I had to beg to get commit access to the repo to prove I could fix the bugs that I identified. That was the only way I was able to get into programming back then. I spent 10 years doing web and database development at consulting companies. I hated it. Consulting might be fine for some, but I can't stand it. I tried for years to get out of it, only to be told that my experience in consulting didn't matter, I had never worked in product development and it was supposedly "soooo different" that nobody could take a chance on me. The only way I was able to get out of it was... to start a side project. I built a VR project that got me a small amount of internet fame. Now, 5 years later, with 15 years of professional programming experience, and 20 years of side-project experience, I'm the head of VR at a company. When you say that side projects shouldn't be a consideration, you're not asking for more people to get interviews. You're asking for fewer. The only people who are going to get interviews in that scenario are folks who went to prestigious schools. All the people drawing up barista-cum-coding-bootcamp-grads-who-don't-have-the-time-to-feed-themselves-and-work-side-projects-at-the-same-time archetypes: those people aren't going to get interviews. The only chance they have is to dig deep, build a portfolio, and hope they run into a company that is progressive enough to look past the lack of credentials.
sys_64738 6y ago
You have time to do side projects outside FT employment? Does that mean you either have no life, or were not working hard enough for your current employer. That's how it's interpreted.
bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
It boils down to this for me: > in the early days [of rocketry], everyone was a hobbyist The more your company resembles "the early days of rocketry" the more it might make sense to select for hobbyist energy, and substantive side projects are a good signal of that. But: Not all companies resemble or need to resemble the early days of rocketry. They ought to design their own filters based on their needs. Read some Hayek. A monoculture in hiring is undesirable and completely removing bias across all possible dimensions is impossible. For all the talk of "diversity" (read: heterogeneity) in tech, there seems to be a strong cultural bias among engineers toward uniformity and cargo-culting (e.g. the doctrinaire obsession with best practices over first-principles thinking you see in some corners) and little appetite for actual heterogeneity. The inefficiencies emerge when every tiny startup mimics FAANG or every mid-sized company mimics tiny startups, etc.
jcahill 6y ago
The author is essentially hoping to usher in an end-times world divided solely into middle managers and sapient jumping beans. This is a far from sensible goal. >I don’t mean to pick on this person; there’s no reason to be familiar with the history of the US aerospace and rocketry industry (unless, of course, you’re going to make an argument that hinges on claims about the industry). Failing to grasp the broadly satirical nature of copypasta like this, then doubling down on an i-know-more-than-you literal interpretation of the text, is not a situation in which the author should be concerned that readers will worry the other guy is getting roasted too hard. >Barons of the Sky is a nice history of the early days of the aerospace industry, and it shows that in the early days, everyone was a hobbyist. Acutely pursued hobbies with upside potential become professions! I am shocked. This is my shocked face. :o >At another fund I’ve heard about, the head of research liked to poll the interns and ask them if they thought the market was efficient. If the answer was yes, he said, they were fired effective immediately. This example is just an nth-hand anecdote about an empirically incorrect manager on a workplace power trip. Less shark, more dipshit. Parroting the desired response to some manager's arbitrary psychodrama isn't relevant to making money on money for a living. Does the manager need a date to prom, too? >(As a friend put it a few years ago, when such pop culture references were relevant, “If you know what a ‘Khaleesi’ is, you had time for side projects.”) Consider the following: humans experience the same number of hours per day. If you know what a ‘number’ is, you have time to appease me. Reexamine your life to spend more of it appeasing me. It's a good argument, because humans experience the same number of hours per day. Not enough of them are spent appeasing me! >In a field with a low marginal cost of scaling results and tournament-like economics (for example: investing, software, writing, some kinds of hardware), there’s a moral component as well. The better you think you are, the more it’s your responsibility to work extra hard, since the results will be distributed so widely. Just try to say "there is a moral component to scaling IoT toasters" with a straight face among people you respect. Note: The author reads HN[1] and likely crafted this blurb as bait. He should come away from this thread more insulted by the inanity of his own writing than grateful for the attention. Promotion of workified mediocrity like the kind on display here is unnecessary in an era that has already caricatured this worldview past the point of no return with such literary works as the Student Athlete copypasta[2]. You do not need to tamper with your inner life in the vague hope that an interviewer, somewhere down the line, will grade you on your hobbies like all code is a take-home test regardless of its genesis. Stagnant real wages in the author's home country (US) further reduce the blogpost's relevance. As do OECD data[3][4] showing no positive correlation between average hours worked and stereotypical innovation rate at the country-level. [1]: https://twitter.com/ByrneHobart/status/1278782161559138304 https://twitter.com/ByrneHobart/status/1278782161559138304 [2]: https://files.catbox.moe/2srmab.png https://files.catbox.moe/2srmab.png [3]: https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm [4]: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS
grogers 6y ago
All the examples of extremely dedicated people with airplane building side projects were founders. If you are looking for a founder then sure, side projects likely have value. Not all of the employees you hire need an outrageous energy to spend day and night doing work and more work on the side.
realtalk_sp 6y ago
Something I find odd is this presumption that most software engineering roles necessitate practice in the form of side projects. That hasn't been my experience. Modern-day software seems to take the form of mostly being fairly repetitive (CRUD, front-end framework, RDBMS, AMQ, in-memory cache, object modeling, testing, CI/CD, etc) and only quite rarely involving unique knowledge specific to the task at hand. Once you've dealt with the fundamentals enough times, there are rapidly diminishing marginal returns to hours spent coding, for most practical software engineering roles. At that point, a person's time would be much better spent developing other tangential faculties like communication, project management, and critical thinking or simply on personal wellbeing (happy workers are more productive workers). So, in my opinion, unless you're trying to do something quite innovative, you're making a mistake by selecting for coders who burn the candle at both ends. You should instead select for smart people who can get the job done well without having to spend an excessive amount of time on side projects and who optimize their lives outside of work in a way that leaves them happy and energized when they come to work.

49 points by barry-cotter 6y ago

> Barons of the Sky is a nice history of the early days of the aerospace industry, and it shows that in the early days, everyone was a hobbyist. Unlike other hobbies, like writing computer games for fun, this was a high-stakes pursuit. Good amateur plane designers made the front page when they set records, the bad ones made the obituary page instead. ... > And since the tweet mentioned rockets, it would be wrong to ignore one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jack Parsons, who helped invent modern rocketry, founded a cult, got expelled from Caltech for a bit of both, and died from a rocket explosion at his home lab. > Hedge funds do this, too. At a typical stock-picking hedge fund, the decisive interview questions are about what stocks you like and which ones you hate. Some anecdotes: > Lars Kroijer, a young MBA, scored an interview with a very good hedge fund in the 90s. He describes the interview in his memoir. The manager asked him for stock picks. He said the market was inefficient, so the manager asked him to leave. Ouch! Lars straightened himself out and went on to run a successful fund, then retired at the right time. At another fund I’ve heard about, the head of research liked to poll the interns and ask them if they thought the market was efficient. If the answer was yes, he said, they were fired effective immediately. Fortunately, in an efficient market it should be effortless to get an equally attractive job elsewhere. I’ve bombed at least one interview by not having any good trading pitches handy. (In fairness to me, it was a fund using a strategy I hadn’t ever worked on. In fairness to them, I knew this.) ... > As many people point out, the norm in favor of side projects is unfair to anyone with limited free time. What they don’t add is that this is a progressive tax: there’s a positive correlation between educational attainment and hours worked per week, as well as between income and hours worked per week. This was not always the case; “The idle rich” used to be a statistically accurate observation, but now the rich work longer hours and have less leisure time than average. But the average American watches four and a half hours of TV per day. If your work happens to be fun, you can devote that leisure time to side projects. If your work is boring, you probably shouldn’t complain that people who like their craft more than you and devote more effort to it are rewarded. > (As a friend put it a few years ago, when such pop culture references were relevant, “If you know what a ‘Khaleesi’ is, you had time for side projects.”)

mech422 6y ago
I think 'lack of time' generally has more to do with family, then T.V. I know I have a LOT more time for 'fun stuff' now my son is grown.
- michaelt 6y ago
  If you're making a pro-side-projects argument, "work instead of watching TV" is probably more convincing than "work instead of spending time with your kids"
  - moron4hire 6y ago
    Every single person I've met who had kids and complains about spending time with them keeps them from their projects also watched a lot of TV or plays games or wastes time on social media after the kids go to bed. Every person I know who has kids and finds time for their projects are bringing their kids with them to meetups, getting the kids interested, and not spending time on consumptive pursuits. Spending time with your kids, being a good, engaged parent, has little to do with working on side projects.
    - odshoifsdhfs 6y ago
      Do you have kids? Not an attack just curious. Edit: I just saw in the post below you do, will leave it here anywhere Between 1 hour in the morning getting them ready for school, commute, work 8/9 hours, commute back and pick him from school/grandparents, cook dinner, play with them a bit, put them in bed, most people don't have energy to so a side project and just need some time to relax in front of tv or social media. If you want to be a good parent, it is tiresome and exhausting.
      - moron4hire 6y ago
        Yes, it's tiring. I sometimes complain I don't have any time to play video games anymore. But that's it: I complain about not playing video games, not about not working on projects. I suck it up and open the code editor. And I want employees who have the fortitude to do the right thing rather than the easy thing. Edit: I want to also note, I don't just dump the kids on my wife. She has her own side projects she does. She writes sci-fi novels.

jimmySixDOF 6y ago

Nolan Bushnell Founder of Atari, inventor of Pong, & gave Steve Jobs a job : *I would hire somebody who would have a really passionate, tricky hobby before I hired somebody who had a PhD in the subject. Hobbies are more important in today’s world than degrees.*

panelss 6y ago
In practise, this is bullshit. Maybe back in the 70s, but now the tech industry machination is so robotic and massive that you will never even get to know your employer before they've already thrown you out for being under-qualified.

shmel 6y ago

I have started working for a big international company only recently and was quite surprised to learn that the clause "we own all IP you produce at any time including at home on your own equipment" is common in contracts. It is present in my contract as well. It affected my motivation to work on side projects a lot. How do other devs deal with this? I'd like to write some code for fun at home at least sometimes, but arguing with the legal department just to put it in github is definitely not something I want to do in my free time.

s_gourichon 6y ago
(I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, just a forum conversation where I tell what I believe: "as far as I know", etc.) What country is this? Here in France, your employer may only complain if they can argue that your activity causes them harm. Side projects, even when benefiting from your work experience, should, as far as I know, be okay.
- shmel 6y ago
  It is the UK. I know that probably in some jurisdictions some of these clauses are unenforceable. I just don't want to step in a legal mess. I know a friend of mine (in France btw) had to argue with his company about this even though he obtained a verbal agreement beforehand. It is just that he was about to quit and the employer decided to fuck with him as much as possible.
  - cnity 6y ago
    Are you sure? The line "in the course of your employment" is often misinterpreted to mean "while hired here". In fact it means something like "while doing something that is specifically required to do your job properly"[0] [0]: Australian site, but relevant: https://www.business.qld.gov.au/running-business/protecting-business/ip-kit/browse-ip-topics/ownership-of-intellectual-property-created-by-your-employees-and-contractors-or-consultants/ownership#:~:text=As%20a%20general%20rule%2C%20an,the%20employee%2C%20not%20the%20employer https://www.business.qld.gov.au/running-business/protecting-....

_raul 6y ago

It took me years to notice a flaw in this approach: it's based in the premise that everyone has time for side projects. From that point I think about it as a bias. Nowadays I try to assess if the candidates with no public activity on GH and no side projects have the passion and interest I look for, but can't take it further outside of work due to their specific circumstances.

vladvasiliu 6y ago
What's ironic to me is that oftentimes those same companies looking at side projects to judge how "passionate" one is are the ones that expect their employees to "give everything" while on the job, presumably going as far as neglecting their side projects.
moron4hire 6y ago
Time-in-practice is still correlated with skill. If I'm getting someone with "4 years of experience", a person who works on side projects could have 10,000 hours in-practice, vs only 5,000 for someone who doesn't. I understand not exclusively focusing on people who work on their own to the exclusion of everyone else, but I definitely don't understand this modern push to ignore it as a signal completely. People who don't work side projects are going to need more years of experience to have the same level of practice as those who do. And frankly, I've been involved in a lot of hiring, and I've yet to see these people who A) don't work on side projects, but B) are actually skilled in their jobs. We give them interviews and it becomes clear they hid in large, ossified, megacorporate teams. They know the one way to do things that is the one template of work they've ever been hired to do, because that is the only experience they have. If that's your environment, I guess you can have them. I don't have any space for that.
- Nursie 6y ago
  Frankly I have yet to see people who A) spend a lot of time on side projects and B) significantly outshine their peers who don't. It's a good signal of interest and engagement, but it's far from the only one.
- odshoifsdhfs 6y ago

ErrantX 6y ago

My take is; there is nothing wrong with looking for this stuff but relying on it is short-sighted. Personal experience of mine is; people who spend a lot of non-work time on side projects and open source bring a specific energy to their work. What they are usually not good at is turning up for work, getting their head down and diligently burning through some work. Instead they tend to be ideas people and leaders. All organisations need a balance of personality and experience to be effective. So get excited about Bob because he is an Open Source advocate and regular conference speaker. But also get excited about Alice because her experience is right and when she interviews she is dedicated and detail-oriented.

Lammy 6y ago
I know Alice and Bob are mega-classic foo/bar-style example names, but I also feel like it brings an unnecessary implication to use gendered names as examples when talking about hiring.
- dpc_pw 6y ago
  Relax, Bob is transgender. You can't make assumptions like that without asking for pronouns first. Duh. :D
- shadowmore 6y ago
  I can't tell satire from reality anymore.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    I'm being very sincere. It feels out of place here for the masculine example name to be the outgoing FOSS-contributing self-driven one ("ideas people and leaders") and the feminine example name to be the one who is good at showing up on time, keeping her head down, and being told what to do.
    - pluto9 6y ago
      If they were reversed, you could take offense to Alice being the head-in-the-clouds, undisciplined, and unreliable one while Bob is focused, hard-working, and gets the job done. Of course that would be equally silly, because an example is just an example and there's no reason to read this sort of thing into it.

Nursie 6y ago

This is just so much crap. I love what I do but doing it 40 hours a week is enough. I have side projects - doing up the house, cooking, exploring the world, spending lots of time with friends and family etc. I occasionally have a home tech project like building a security cam system or something, but it's not that much and not that often. In my experience the kinds of 'obsessives' he's talking about in this post are not only not the best at what they do, they're often pretty weird people too.

cryptica 6y ago

>> Hiring Based on Side Projects: Unfair, But Good For the World I don't see how hiring based on side projects is unfair in any way. Ignoring people's side projects is essentially a punishment for those who do invest a lot of time in them. It's not like the side project built itself. We should not punish people by ignoring their surplus efforts. There are two ways to go about it: 1. Reward people for building real stuff and improving their skills in an area which is relevant to the position that they're applying for. 2. Reward people for being good at taking whiteboard tests, social scheming, rehearsing job interviews and solving pointless abstract puzzles that have nothing to do with the position that they're applying for. I can't imagine how anyone could justify #2 as being the better option. It's disturbing that this article even needs to be written. Do people actually think that the second option is even viable? Now I understand why there are such huge social problems today. There is an army of type 1 people who were badly hurt and who are still struggling and now they're smarter and more determined than ever to make things right.

JohnBooty 6y ago
That's an awfully false dichotomy and I'm also not sure you checked out the linked article. I'm not a fan of whiteboard interview nonsense either. Probably for all the same reasons as you. Enough said there. I also really life to see folks' side projects. I think they are a good substitute for work experience - if somebody doesn't have relevant professional experience in a field, but they've been doing it in their own time, that's good & impressive and should be rewarded. I've been hired myself partly on the strength of a large side project I did. However, the linked article is about essentially demanding that hires have side projects, as a demonstration of their passion. Rejecting folks on the basis of a lack of side projects is going to be at least as disastrous (in terms of throwing away people who'd be great at the job) as rejecting candidates who flunk a whiteboard test or silly logic problem... and for some of the same reasons. Specifically, neither of those things is necessarily similar to the thing you're actually hiring them to do. There is an inverse correlation between "time a person has for side projects" and "the demands of their day job." The folks with the most time for side projects are the folks who are either underemployed or unemployed, or don't really do the whole "friends and family" thing outside of working hours. Also -- and keep in mind I'm saying this as a big fan of side projects and following one's passions -- the act of following one's passion in one's spare time is profoundly different from getting shit done at a 9-to-5. The purpose of a day job is directly or indirectly make money for one's employer. Often that means doing shit one does not want to do. It is a grind, even in "cool" jobs that overlap with one's passions to a large degree. In short, seems to me the gulf between "following your passions" and "actually getting shit done for your employer" is about as big as the gulf between "passing a whiteboard exam" and "actually getting shit done for your employer."

JohnBooty 6y ago

When hiring, I am a big fan of side projects as a substitute for strong work experience. If you've been working as a barista but coding in your spare time, cool! You might have a great career ahead of you in software engineering... maybe you're right for the team. Your portfolio matters. (The converse is true, too. If you're been coding at work all day but pursuing your passion for coffee at night, maybe you'll make a great barista or roaster! Go for it!) But. Holding a demanding engineering job and doing a lot of engineering on the side are nearly mutually exclusive. I've done a big side project or two, but only when I was basically underemployed at my day job. Slumming it, really. I've had other jobs where it took everything I had just to keep up with the demands of the job and keep up with my talented coworkers. I sure didn't have any engineering juice left over in me at the end of the day. Especially not if I wanted to maintain healthy relationships with other human beings and my family. There are only so many hours in a week. So, if you demand your hires spent time outside of work on side projects? You're going to have a strong bias that favors people who (a) have been slacking or underemployed (b) are not really into the whole "human relationships" thing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with living one's life that way, but you are certainly excluding a lot of healthy and talented people if you essentially insist upon only hiring from that group.

davidg109 6y ago

Side projects are icing. People live under different circumstances. One person may wish to spend their free time socializing when they’re done work. Another person may wish to spend that time doing these side projects. If this made the difference between being hired by a company or not, this wouldn’t be the company I would choose to work for. I could only imagine the 24/7, always-on culture they’d have.

mahaganapati 6y ago
The kind of company that says they hire 'rockstars' and 'ninjas'
sokoloff 6y ago
One athlete might choose to spend their free time socializing while another works out. One med or engineering student might socialize while another hits the books or lab. Do we believe that the outcomes will be equal over 100s of such trials? If we believe the outcomes will be different, why should we not consider that among other signals we get in interviewing?
- milesvp 6y ago
  You should look at the work of Richard Hamming. Socializing is very important in staying relavant in a field. Similarly there’s a belief that the social dinners of the academics in cape cod post WWII had an overwhemling effect on that regions academic contributions. Personally I’d bet on the socializer over the person putting in tons of extra hours in isolation anyday.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    True, though I would count significant socializing within your field or with a distinctly academic bent quite differently from "crushing Bud Light cans around a campfire". Not to say that the latter isn't also a perfectly valid way to spend time, but it's quite different from a social dinner of academics, IMO.
- Daishiman 6y ago

moron4hire 6y ago

I get that people are reacting to companies that are saying they only consider people with side-project portfolios. Yes, that's terrible. But the pendulum-swing reaction to say "side project shouldn't matter" is just as bad, maybe even worse. People who talk about "side projects shouldn't be a consideration" don't know what they are asking for. They have either forgotten or never experienced the history of why side projects are considered in the interviewing process today. To ask for side projects to not be a part of the hiring decision process is to ask to set back hiring by at least 15 years. Do you think the tech industry was more equitable 15 years ago? Considering side projects came about when people like me got our turn at being hiring managers. When we were first entering the industry, we got told explicitly that our side projects didn't matter, that the only experience that mattered was professional experience. We could prove we could do the job and we still were being told we would not be considered for the job. We started considering side projects specifically to be more equitable in hiring. I grew up in a rural town. I went to a local, state college. I graduated in the top of my class in Computer Science and I still couldn't get a job in programming out of college. I didn't have a dad at Microsoft to get me a prestigious internship. I didn't have a prestigious school behind my name and our school "only" did Java and the local companies "only" did .NET. I had been programming in .NET for 2 years by that point, but it wasn't going to be considered because it wasn't professional experience. The only job I could get was entry-level QA. You didn't even need a degree to get the job. I had to beg to get commit access to the repo to prove I could fix the bugs that I identified. That was the only way I was able to get into programming back then. I spent 10 years doing web and database development at consulting companies. I hated it. Consulting might be fine for some, but I can't stand it. I tried for years to get out of it, only to be told that my experience in consulting didn't matter, I had never worked in product development and it was supposedly "soooo different" that nobody could take a chance on me. The only way I was able to get out of it was... to start a side project. I built a VR project that got me a small amount of internet fame. Now, 5 years later, with 15 years of professional programming experience, and 20 years of side-project experience, I'm the head of VR at a company. When you say that side projects shouldn't be a consideration, you're not asking for more people to get interviews. You're asking for fewer. The only people who are going to get interviews in that scenario are folks who went to prestigious schools. All the people drawing up barista-cum-coding-bootcamp-grads-who-don't-have-the-time-to-feed-themselves-and-work-side-projects-at-the-same-time archetypes: those people aren't going to get interviews. The only chance they have is to dig deep, build a portfolio, and hope they run into a company that is progressive enough to look past the lack of credentials.

sys_64738 6y ago

You have time to do side projects outside FT employment? Does that mean you either have no life, or were not working hard enough for your current employer. That's how it's interpreted.

bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago

It boils down to this for me: > in the early days [of rocketry], everyone was a hobbyist The more your company resembles "the early days of rocketry" the more it might make sense to select for hobbyist energy, and substantive side projects are a good signal of that. But: Not all companies resemble or need to resemble the early days of rocketry. They ought to design their own filters based on their needs. Read some Hayek. A monoculture in hiring is undesirable and completely removing bias across all possible dimensions is impossible. For all the talk of "diversity" (read: heterogeneity) in tech, there seems to be a strong cultural bias among engineers toward uniformity and cargo-culting (e.g. the doctrinaire obsession with best practices over first-principles thinking you see in some corners) and little appetite for actual heterogeneity. The inefficiencies emerge when every tiny startup mimics FAANG or every mid-sized company mimics tiny startups, etc.

jcahill 6y ago

The author is essentially hoping to usher in an end-times world divided solely into middle managers and sapient jumping beans. This is a far from sensible goal. >I don’t mean to pick on this person; there’s no reason to be familiar with the history of the US aerospace and rocketry industry (unless, of course, you’re going to make an argument that hinges on claims about the industry). Failing to grasp the broadly satirical nature of copypasta like this, then doubling down on an i-know-more-than-you literal interpretation of the text, is not a situation in which the author should be concerned that readers will worry the other guy is getting roasted too hard. >Barons of the Sky is a nice history of the early days of the aerospace industry, and it shows that in the early days, everyone was a hobbyist. Acutely pursued hobbies with upside potential become professions! I am shocked. This is my shocked face. :o >At another fund I’ve heard about, the head of research liked to poll the interns and ask them if they thought the market was efficient. If the answer was yes, he said, they were fired effective immediately. This example is just an nth-hand anecdote about an empirically incorrect manager on a workplace power trip. Less shark, more dipshit. Parroting the desired response to some manager's arbitrary psychodrama isn't relevant to making money on money for a living. Does the manager need a date to prom, too? >(As a friend put it a few years ago, when such pop culture references were relevant, “If you know what a ‘Khaleesi’ is, you had time for side projects.”) Consider the following: humans experience the same number of hours per day. If you know what a ‘number’ is, you have time to appease me. Reexamine your life to spend more of it appeasing me. It's a good argument, because humans experience the same number of hours per day. Not enough of them are spent appeasing me! >In a field with a low marginal cost of scaling results and tournament-like economics (for example: investing, software, writing, some kinds of hardware), there’s a moral component as well. The better you think you are, the more it’s your responsibility to work extra hard, since the results will be distributed so widely. Just try to say "there is a moral component to scaling IoT toasters" with a straight face among people you respect. Note: The author reads HN[1] and likely crafted this blurb as bait. He should come away from this thread more insulted by the inanity of his own writing than grateful for the attention. Promotion of workified mediocrity like the kind on display here is unnecessary in an era that has already caricatured this worldview past the point of no return with such literary works as the Student Athlete copypasta[2]. You do not need to tamper with your inner life in the vague hope that an interviewer, somewhere down the line, will grade you on your hobbies like all code is a take-home test regardless of its genesis. Stagnant real wages in the author's home country (US) further reduce the blogpost's relevance. As do OECD data[3][4] showing no positive correlation between average hours worked and stereotypical innovation rate at the country-level. [1]: https://twitter.com/ByrneHobart/status/1278782161559138304 https://twitter.com/ByrneHobart/status/1278782161559138304 [2]: https://files.catbox.moe/2srmab.png https://files.catbox.moe/2srmab.png [3]: https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm [4]: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS

grogers 6y ago

All the examples of extremely dedicated people with airplane building side projects were founders. If you are looking for a founder then sure, side projects likely have value. Not all of the employees you hire need an outrageous energy to spend day and night doing work and more work on the side.

realtalk_sp 6y ago

Something I find odd is this presumption that most software engineering roles necessitate practice in the form of side projects. That hasn't been my experience. Modern-day software seems to take the form of mostly being fairly repetitive (CRUD, front-end framework, RDBMS, AMQ, in-memory cache, object modeling, testing, CI/CD, etc) and only quite rarely involving unique knowledge specific to the task at hand. Once you've dealt with the fundamentals enough times, there are rapidly diminishing marginal returns to hours spent coding, for most practical software engineering roles. At that point, a person's time would be much better spent developing other tangential faculties like communication, project management, and critical thinking or simply on personal wellbeing (happy workers are more productive workers). So, in my opinion, unless you're trying to do something quite innovative, you're making a mistake by selecting for coders who burn the candle at both ends. You should instead select for smart people who can get the job done well without having to spend an excessive amount of time on side projects and who optimize their lives outside of work in a way that leaves them happy and energized when they come to work.