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> Recruiters want people who do side projects [...] having side projects and doing open source is valued in hiring I think your premise is wrong and you're vas

> Recruiters want people who do side projects [...] having side projects and doing open source is valued in hiring I think your premise is wrong and you're vastly overestimating the value of work done outside of your job. - Having side projects: I was never asked past internship interviews. Even interviewing for my first job after graduation, I talked about what I did during my internship, not about side or school projects. - Meaningful yet small contributions to open source: I don't remember anyone noticing nor asking. - Major contributions to a big open source project: I assume these people get hired easily. Recruiters are not dumb. They know that most good candidates are either not allowed or not willing to work on meaningful projects on the side, outside of a few very specific cases. Don't waste your time with companies that have delusional hiring standards.

ThePadawan 5y ago
I want to second this a lot. Even if I (coincidentally) have a side project relevant to a job opening, I make a point to mention it in my cover letter, and most interviewers still say they haven't looked at it (if they've read the cover letter at all).
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cover letter from a candidate in over 25 years of interviewing. They’re maybe seen by HR, but long stripped before the interviewer in my experience.
  - ThePadawan 5y ago
    For me, it varied. In the beforetimes, sometimes I walked into the first onsite interview and the technical interviewer had printed it out!
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Depends if you go through HR or not.
  - Ensorceled 5y ago
    I can only think of a couple of times where HR decided the cover letter was worth including with the resume in a very similar time frame.
  - stevenwoo 5y ago
    I have seen every cover letter accompanying a job application in every company I have worked for but I have never worked for a company with more than 200 employees or so.
    - Ensorceled 5y ago
      Strange. I've worked in startups my entire career, hired over 100 developers and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of cover letters I've seen.
      - snarkypixel 5y ago
        Well cover letter has somewhat been replaced by an introduction email, no?
        Ensorceled 5y ago
        True. But there are still recommendations to email with a coverletter.pdf AND a resume.pdf. Maybe developers in Toronto don't follow those rules ...
captainmuon 5y ago
> I think your premise is wrong and you're vastly overestimating the value of work done outside of your job. For purposes of impressing the interviewer or getting the job, yes. For purposes of actually doing the job, I would say formal education and previous work experience are often overrated, and side-projects are underrated. Most of the skills relevant for my job I learned from tinkering, side-projects, and hobbies, whereas I rarely use the knowledge from my PhD (besides meta-stuff like how to organise and how to learn new skills). But the recruiters look at the PhD, not the hobbies. And I know many cases where it played out similar to this. (At lease that's my experience, mainly in Germany.)
- schwartzworld 5y ago
  > Most of the skills relevant for my job I learned from tinkering, side-projects, and hobbies I agree with this 100%. Learning to use tools beyond what you use at work makes you a better programmer, which in turn makes work easier.
- p0nce 5y ago
  > previous work experience In my experience it's underrated, people prefer to gloss over that in order to ask the all important Fizzbuzz questions.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > I would say formal education and previous work experience are often overrated, and side-projects are underrated As a hiring manager, I disagree. Nothing beats actual work experience delivering code in a real production environment to real customers from within a real team environment. The vast majority of side projects I see from applicants are one-off toy projects that have the luxury of starting from a blank slate, haven’t been built in a collaborative environment, aren’t hosted for significant traffic, and often aren’t user friendly enough to be used by anyone other than the author who knows all of the right commands and steps to get it to work. Side projects can be good for tinkering and playing with new skills, but someone having real-world experience deploying those skills within a team environment to real customers and experience real-world customer issues at scale will have significantly more experience.
wayoutthere 5y ago
> - Major contributions to a big open source project: I assume these people get hired easily. Nope; it depends on market demand for the project. I know a guy who was a major contributor to OpenStack for years. He’s an E5 at a telecom and is having a hard time finding a better job. Turns out there aren’t really that many places with huge OpenStack footprints. The one place it might matter is in consulting. And only because it’s a good way to signal to clients that you know what you’re doing. > Recruiters are not dumb. When it comes to hiring tech talent they kind of are. They usually have no idea what an engineer actually does, so they’re checking boxes off a list the hiring manager gave them.
- hocuspocus 5y ago
  That's a bit sad, but isn't it at least partially due to OpenStack's decline? And yes I've come across bad recruiters, but this is a self-solving issue: either external or internal, they'll quickly be unemployed if they don't realize what expectations are clearly unrealistic in a buyer's market.
  - wayoutthere 5y ago
    Yeah, I guess my point is that unless the open source project you contributed to is in high demand itself, your contributions don’t really mean much from a recruiting standpoint.

ThePadawan 5y ago

I want to second this a lot. Even if I (coincidentally) have a side project relevant to a job opening, I make a point to mention it in my cover letter, and most interviewers still say they haven't looked at it (if they've read the cover letter at all).

sokoloff 5y ago
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cover letter from a candidate in over 25 years of interviewing. They’re maybe seen by HR, but long stripped before the interviewer in my experience.
- ThePadawan 5y ago
  For me, it varied. In the beforetimes, sometimes I walked into the first onsite interview and the technical interviewer had printed it out!
- ghaff 5y ago
  Depends if you go through HR or not.
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  I can only think of a couple of times where HR decided the cover letter was worth including with the resume in a very similar time frame.
- stevenwoo 5y ago
  I have seen every cover letter accompanying a job application in every company I have worked for but I have never worked for a company with more than 200 employees or so.
  - Ensorceled 5y ago
    Strange. I've worked in startups my entire career, hired over 100 developers and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of cover letters I've seen.
    - snarkypixel 5y ago
      Well cover letter has somewhat been replaced by an introduction email, no?
      - Ensorceled 5y ago
        True. But there are still recommendations to email with a coverletter.pdf AND a resume.pdf. Maybe developers in Toronto don't follow those rules ...

captainmuon 5y ago

> I think your premise is wrong and you're vastly overestimating the value of work done outside of your job. For purposes of impressing the interviewer or getting the job, yes. For purposes of actually doing the job, I would say formal education and previous work experience are often overrated, and side-projects are underrated. Most of the skills relevant for my job I learned from tinkering, side-projects, and hobbies, whereas I rarely use the knowledge from my PhD (besides meta-stuff like how to organise and how to learn new skills). But the recruiters look at the PhD, not the hobbies. And I know many cases where it played out similar to this. (At lease that's my experience, mainly in Germany.)

schwartzworld 5y ago
> Most of the skills relevant for my job I learned from tinkering, side-projects, and hobbies I agree with this 100%. Learning to use tools beyond what you use at work makes you a better programmer, which in turn makes work easier.
p0nce 5y ago
> previous work experience In my experience it's underrated, people prefer to gloss over that in order to ask the all important Fizzbuzz questions.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> I would say formal education and previous work experience are often overrated, and side-projects are underrated As a hiring manager, I disagree. Nothing beats actual work experience delivering code in a real production environment to real customers from within a real team environment. The vast majority of side projects I see from applicants are one-off toy projects that have the luxury of starting from a blank slate, haven’t been built in a collaborative environment, aren’t hosted for significant traffic, and often aren’t user friendly enough to be used by anyone other than the author who knows all of the right commands and steps to get it to work. Side projects can be good for tinkering and playing with new skills, but someone having real-world experience deploying those skills within a team environment to real customers and experience real-world customer issues at scale will have significantly more experience.

wayoutthere 5y ago

> - Major contributions to a big open source project: I assume these people get hired easily. Nope; it depends on market demand for the project. I know a guy who was a major contributor to OpenStack for years. He’s an E5 at a telecom and is having a hard time finding a better job. Turns out there aren’t really that many places with huge OpenStack footprints. The one place it might matter is in consulting. And only because it’s a good way to signal to clients that you know what you’re doing. > Recruiters are not dumb. When it comes to hiring tech talent they kind of are. They usually have no idea what an engineer actually does, so they’re checking boxes off a list the hiring manager gave them.

hocuspocus 5y ago
That's a bit sad, but isn't it at least partially due to OpenStack's decline? And yes I've come across bad recruiters, but this is a self-solving issue: either external or internal, they'll quickly be unemployed if they don't realize what expectations are clearly unrealistic in a buyer's market.
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  Yeah, I guess my point is that unless the open source project you contributed to is in high demand itself, your contributions don’t really mean much from a recruiting standpoint.