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It's easy to point out that this question will exclude some false negatives, good people that don't have side projects. I rarely hear anyone worried that it wil

It's easy to point out that this question will exclude some false negatives, good people that don't have side projects. I rarely hear anyone worried that it will produce false positives, crappy people that have a github profile bursting with interesting work. But here's the thing: If you think that this is a bad question to ask in an interview, I have a challenge for you: Describe a repeatable, objective process for interviewing developers. No hand-waving "I talk to them and decide if they're smart." Be specific: What questions do you ask? What constitutes a HIRE, what constitutes a NO HIRE? If you actually try to make a repeatable, objective process, you realize that there is no fair interview question. It's impossible to come up with a set of criteria that can't either be (a) gamed by false positives, or (b) overlooks good people as false negatives. For example, "Successful experience in a similar position" is an excellent criterium. But we all know it overlooks false negatives, people who have done good work in dissimilar positions but will adapt and thrive in this one. In the end, we must either 'fess up and admit that we make subjective decisions, or set our jaw and accept that some false negatives are a necessary and acceptable cost of trying to standardize our hiring process. (That doesn't mean we can't minimize the number of false negatives. One way to do that is to ask many questions and to incorporate all of the answers into your decision. If you're very conservative, you take any negative result as a NO HIRE, which leads to having more false negatives but a vanishingly small probability of a false positive. But you can go the other way and allow for some of the answers to be negative, which will create a vanishingly small possibility of a false negative overall but allow some acceptably small probability of a false positive.)

kenjackson 15y ago
I rarely hear anyone worried that it will produce false positives, crappy people that have a github profile bursting with interesting work. Actually I do worry about that, and have seen it -- and maybe not surprisingly could have predicted it. The symptoms are often a very active set of open source projects, often a maintainer, lack of enthusiasm about virtually anything they did in their day job. My theory is their day job at some point wasn't fulfilling and they moved to the side projects to compensate. But by the time they joined us, their side project consumed them. There's nothing worse than someone being consistently late or delivering poor quality, and looking and seeing they did 200 commits, some very non-trivial, to their side projects last week. As I said to one during the exit interview -- you should consider making the "side project" your day job, because that's your passion. Unfortunately it wasn't working here. Given a choice between someone who was enthusiastic about their day job, and has some good end results from it, and having no side projects, and one who has a lot of side proejects, but no enthusiasm or anything of interest to say about his last job -- I'll take the person with no side projects.
- raganwald 15y ago
  I think about it as well, which is why I follow the strategy outlined in the last paragraph: Asking multiple questions and integrating the responses. Such a strategy embraces the candidates who embrace side projects because they have boundless enthusiasm within and outside of their job, candidates who have enthusiasm for their job but are busy BASE jumping in their spare time, and so forth. I seriously doubt the author or anybody else espouses any single criterion as the only determinant in hiring. This happens to be the author's favorite question, just as my favorite happens to be about Monopoly. p.s. FWIW, the question along these lines that I like to ask is for the candidate to describe projects that they are most proud of and have learnt the most from (two separate answers are certainly applicable, although sometimes it's the same one). Some candidates describe a work project, some a side project. What I have discovered in my small, anecdotal experience is that people with side projects always have an answer to this question, while candidates without side projects sometimes have trouble explaining what they're most proud of and why. But the fact that some people without side projects have trouble articulating their pride does not suggest to me that a person who is justifiably proud of a work accomplishment is neccessarily a NO HIRE. I suspect we agree on this.
count 15y ago
Why should hiring anybody being fair and objective? Life isn't fair and objective, business isn't fair and objective. I want the best person I can get (for a very, very subjective definition of 'best') for the cheapest I can get and keep them (both employed and happy). That's not fair, that's life.
- raganwald 15y ago
  I don't recall saying anything about fair. As for objective, what I said was for those people who refute the question objectively on the basis of false negatives, I challenge them to come up with an alternative that has zero false negatives. This was simply an observation about the difficulty of being objective without excluding qualified applicants. In fact, I expclitly allowed for the possibility of saying that you choose your hires subjectively. Could we be in "violent agreement?"
  - count 15y ago
    I think so - I don't see any way for hiring to be objective, unless it was completely random (and does that even count?). So, lets go with violent agreement.
sixtofour 15y ago
Not to mention that every single person you interview is an individual, with potential to contribute to the organization in different and delightful ways.

kenjackson 15y ago

I rarely hear anyone worried that it will produce false positives, crappy people that have a github profile bursting with interesting work. Actually I do worry about that, and have seen it -- and maybe not surprisingly could have predicted it. The symptoms are often a very active set of open source projects, often a maintainer, lack of enthusiasm about virtually anything they did in their day job. My theory is their day job at some point wasn't fulfilling and they moved to the side projects to compensate. But by the time they joined us, their side project consumed them. There's nothing worse than someone being consistently late or delivering poor quality, and looking and seeing they did 200 commits, some very non-trivial, to their side projects last week. As I said to one during the exit interview -- you should consider making the "side project" your day job, because that's your passion. Unfortunately it wasn't working here. Given a choice between someone who was enthusiastic about their day job, and has some good end results from it, and having no side projects, and one who has a lot of side proejects, but no enthusiasm or anything of interest to say about his last job -- I'll take the person with no side projects.

raganwald 15y ago
I think about it as well, which is why I follow the strategy outlined in the last paragraph: Asking multiple questions and integrating the responses. Such a strategy embraces the candidates who embrace side projects because they have boundless enthusiasm within and outside of their job, candidates who have enthusiasm for their job but are busy BASE jumping in their spare time, and so forth. I seriously doubt the author or anybody else espouses any single criterion as the only determinant in hiring. This happens to be the author's favorite question, just as my favorite happens to be about Monopoly. p.s. FWIW, the question along these lines that I like to ask is for the candidate to describe projects that they are most proud of and have learnt the most from (two separate answers are certainly applicable, although sometimes it's the same one). Some candidates describe a work project, some a side project. What I have discovered in my small, anecdotal experience is that people with side projects always have an answer to this question, while candidates without side projects sometimes have trouble explaining what they're most proud of and why. But the fact that some people without side projects have trouble articulating their pride does not suggest to me that a person who is justifiably proud of a work accomplishment is neccessarily a NO HIRE. I suspect we agree on this.

count 15y ago

Why should hiring anybody being fair and objective? Life isn't fair and objective, business isn't fair and objective. I want the best person I can get (for a very, very subjective definition of 'best') for the cheapest I can get and keep them (both employed and happy). That's not fair, that's life.

raganwald 15y ago
I don't recall saying anything about fair. As for objective, what I said was for those people who refute the question objectively on the basis of false negatives, I challenge them to come up with an alternative that has zero false negatives. This was simply an observation about the difficulty of being objective without excluding qualified applicants. In fact, I expclitly allowed for the possibility of saying that you choose your hires subjectively. Could we be in "violent agreement?"
- count 15y ago
  I think so - I don't see any way for hiring to be objective, unless it was completely random (and does that even count?). So, lets go with violent agreement.

sixtofour 15y ago

Not to mention that every single person you interview is an individual, with potential to contribute to the organization in different and delightful ways.