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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

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.

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.