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> It's been frustrating me for a long time that most companies when hiring are looking for people who do lots of side projects and open source work, This is a

> It's been frustrating me for a long time that most companies when hiring are looking for people who do lots of side projects and open source work, This is a myth. The number of candidates I interview who have side projects worth looking at or open source contributions is maybe 1-in-10 at most. Any company that requires candidates to have significant open source contributions is going to have a hard time hiring, because it’s not very common. Really, the only time side projects are valuable is when someone needs to fill gaps in their resume. For example, if all of your prior experience was writing PHP backend code but you wanted to apply to a React front-end role, it could be helpful to have something like a React TODO app in your GitHub profile to show that you have some minimal experience with React and front-end work. You don’t need a massive open-source contribution that takes months and months of free time, just something small to show that you have some amount of experience that isn’t reflected in your resume. The side project myth is getting out of control. Most recruiters and hiring managers will never even open your GitHub profile.

onion2k 5y ago
Companies don't want people who have side projects and open source contributions worth looking at. They just want people who have side projects. Finding someone who'll learn new things in their spare time for fun is much cheaper than training.
- AlleghenyCrypto 5y ago
  Yes, it is much cheaper than training once employed; however, the company should view training employees in new technologies as something that gives the company a competitive advantage. Technology ages pretty quickly, and if you want to stay at the forefront of technology as a company, then it might be a good idea to encourage your employees to use some of their work time to invest in learning the new tools that will push the company forward. Yes, they might leave once they have "leveled-up"; however, one alternative is that they come to the company and never really grow beyond the skills you initially required but may no longer need.
pradn 5y ago
I'd say the most important factors that recruiters look at are: 1) current company tier 2) roughly relevant experience (in broad strokes - frontend or backend) 3) university tier (less relevant as you gain work experience) 4) a distant fourth is hackathon/side-project experience (though this is quite useful for college students)
magnostherobot 5y ago
> The side project myth is getting out of control. I was rejected in an interview last year within seconds of the interview starting because my answer to "what would you do if you suddenly had a bunch of free time" was not relevant enough to the job. For the record, my answer was that I'd learn basic 2D animation, because I have a deep respect for the people who do it, and I have no real clue how it's done. I also had relevant education on my CV, and the interview was for a graduate position. That most places are looking for side projects may be a myth; there certainly are, however, at least some places that look for them.
- chrisabrams 5y ago
  Sorry you experienced that. As a hiring manager I would think that's pretty cool you want to learn 2D animation even if it has nothing to do with the day job. The fact that you have a desire to learn a skill should be desirable to a hiring manager IMO.
- gregallan 5y ago
  When you say “graduate position” do you mean a position meant for a college graduate, or a position in a Masters or PhD program at a university?
  - angrais 5y ago
    Graduate typically means bachelor, though masters may apply. PhDs typically walk into senior roles depending on what they did for their thesis and what types of code they developed.
atatatat 5y ago
> Most recruiters and hiring managers will never even open your GitHub profile. Tech hiring, and most hiring really, is broken.
jerf 5y ago
"The side project myth is getting out of control. Most recruiters and hiring managers will never even open your GitHub profile." I'm pretty sure some job seekers have figured this out, because I've seen some threadbare github repos put forth on resumes. I also see a related strategy where they're populated, but in a way that will fool someone who isn't familiar with how GitHub works. I always open them if you give them to me because even a glance can tell me a lot, and I've seen a number now that are basically three-ish forked repos, among which there is maybe one commit from the user total that makes a small documentation change or something. I'm thinking some job seekers may have noticed that it's easy to build a github profile in which you have a lot of impressive stuff on it, but if you dig in, the job seeker isn't responsible for any of it. They just pushed "fork" on a few repos and a token commit somewhere. I reluctantly suggest that this is probably a good strategy in general, though it may knock you out of the running with an interview with anyone clueful enough to notice this strategy, so, you know, consider the costs & benefits for your situation.
an_opabinia 5y ago
> Most recruiters and hiring managers will never even open your GitHub profile. This is the first thing I do, because seeing the code you write is the very best story of them all. Maybe every person I've worked with who came in with weak skills demonstrated in GitHub was terminated between 2 weeks and 5 months later.
wallacoloo 5y ago
> Most recruiters and hiring managers will never even open your GitHub profile. For every ten that don’t, there’s one that does. Probably the same recruiters who lurk on HN.
wirrbel 5y ago
> The side project myth is getting out of control. Most recruiters and hiring managers will never even open your GitHub profile. For many candidates one just finds fairly empty repositories with 3-4 commits, sometimes Jupiter notebooks from a coursera course, etc. I hardly find it interesting. 1 in 20 candidates may actually mention an open-source project they contribute to or started and I think this is interesting.
chadash 5y ago
Funny how the FAANG companies never make open source work a requirement, but every once in a while you get a recruiter reaching out from AcmeStartup, having just raised their Series A, listing requirements that boil down to: * Must be a rock star, experienced developer with at least 100 years experience, but also not too old * Must have previous experience as lead developer of open projects such as Postgres, Linux, LibreOffice or similar, in addition to full time employment * Must be willing to work for significant below market wages in exchange for a lottery ticket that might be worth billions
- mtnGoat 5y ago
  all of the ones i know of that did this, ended up hiring some guy that had very strange expectations of what code should look like, coded the company into a corner and the whole thing flopped. ive now had to come in and replace two of these types, rewrite the code and get the company functioning once scale started to happen. ive found that often those with really impressive resume(like the over funded startups like), have a very limited skill set making them not the best candidates for lead positions anyhow.
  - mesozoic 5y ago
    Then they have early equity, get rich after you fix it, and everyone thinks they're smart.
    - mtnGoat 5y ago
      exactly! the CTO that replaced me, sure thinks he is cool. but i know the code base hasnt changed much and i discovered my SU ssh keys were still working 5 years later. but i bet he got a lot less equity then i walked from.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > Funny how the FAANG companies never make open source work a requirement When I got rejected from Google the feedback was I should do more open source work.
cryptica 5y ago
Agreed. It's not true anymore. It was true maybe 5 to 10 years ago; especially for startups.
ufmace 5y ago
Yup this. I've interviewed a bunch of people and been on a bunch of post-interview discussions of candidates. I've never looked at or asked about side projects, and nobody else has ever mentioned anything about the candidates' side projects either. From an interviewer's standpoint, it's much better to have a standard set of questions that you give every candidate, so you can judge candidates against each other relatively fairly and objectively. Assuming a candidate has any side projects that demonstrate any expertise at all, it's a ton of work to dig into one of them enough to get an idea of how that person works. It's almost never worth the time, just ask your standard questions instead.
woofie11 5y ago
> Any company that requires candidates to have significant open source contributions is going to have a hard time hiring, because it’s not very common. Nope. Logical fallacy. FAANG needs to hire thousands. Startups I've been at need to hire maybe 1-3 people at a time. Best CEOs I've met spent a ton of time recruiting those 1-3. Best strategy is to look at something others aren't looking at -- any other source of signal. If your hiring process is like FAANG, you're competing with $350k+ compensation packages. If you can find good developers who FAANG can't, and there are plenty, you'll have a much easier time. A hiring process which selects for 10% or even 1% is plenty fine for a startup. 1% of developers in the US nets you 3000 people. Best managers I've worked with hire through side channels which FAANG doesn't look at. If I'm a startup CEO/CTO/etc. I can afford to read code in your github. FAANG can't. Indeed, I can afford to browse github to find good people doing similar work, and work on getting them to join. I'm not going to post my favorite ways to hire, since they'll lose signal if more people adopt them, but: (1) they typically find on the order of a dozen people (and exclude far more than 1:10) (2) all the people they find tend to be good (3) I'll usually need to extended 3-4 job offers before someone takes one
- pmw 5y ago
  > Best strategy is to look at something others aren't looking at -- any other source of signal. Better's CTO has several blog articles on this -- a great read! How to hire smarter than the market: a toy model[1] Interviewing is a noisy prediction problem[2] 1: https://erikbern.com/2020/01/13/how-to-hire-smarter-than-the-market-a-toy-model.html https://erikbern.com/2020/01/13/how-to-hire-smarter-than-the... 2: https://erikbern.com/2018/05/02/interviewing-is-a-noisy-prediction-problem.html https://erikbern.com/2018/05/02/interviewing-is-a-noisy-pred...
- uVacCXNiiJCTnYB 5y ago
  Yeah, I've had my Github or other related things often mentioned by companies headhunting, even though I don't have _that_ much on it. I literally received a job offer not long ago from a very high profile startup that only has a handful of employees, based on my Github
captainmuon 5y ago
Maybe we should turn the premise around. I agree that most recruiters and hiring manages won't look at your side projects. But as a prospective employee, I'd want to work at a place where those count. I want colleagues who are passionate about their tools and tech. Not just people who churn out "solutions" and "applications" for someone else's problem in a Blub language. I want to work at a place where people appreciate open source contributions, because that's not a place where people violate the GPL or do the minimum neccessary to appease the lawyers. I want to work at a place where people appreciate design taste and are happy that I put in a mere half day more work to make the product polished, instead of rushing it to the door prematurely (in chase of profit now, but detrimentally long term). So, as a picky job searcher, I would totally put up a portfolio and clean up my GitHub. Even if only to see if they notice.
andrewljohnson 5y ago
1. As a hiring manager that can code, I'd always open your GitHub if you put it prominently in your application. 2. If there was a lot of work on your GitHub or a really interesting project, I'd riffle through it. 3. If you had a bunch of good public code, that was a good signal, and you'd likely get an interview. If you didn't put a GitHub profile, no problem. If you put one that was blank, then you at least lost some time from my review of your application having me click through, so it probably hurt you at least a minor amount.
dnautics 5y ago
I dunno, I'm pretty sure I was hired without technical interview on the power of my GitHub profile. This is for a small startup (post-series-A, pre-series-B), programming in a slightly-less-popular-but-gaining-in-popularity language. Pre job-search I pinned all of my repos (the most popular ones to the top) in that language. I was sure to carve out exceptions for all of my side projects in my employment contract, they did not argue about it.
- cooljacob204 5y ago
  The interview for my current job was basically reviewing my GitHub projects and discussing design decisions. I really enjoyed that process but I can also see how that isn't really viable in most cases (A lot of people don't have side projects, nor should they have to IMO).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
golergka 5y ago
I dunno. I've had two initial interviews with two different companies in the same short spane of time, where I mentioned that I was trying to gradually adopt functional programming in my Typescript codebases, using fp-ts ecosystem. In both of those interviews they immediately navigated there and noticed that the latest commit in the repository was mine. Even though I immediately told them that it was a minor documentation issue and I don't have major open source contributions (my most popular repo has about 15 stars, so I'm a pretty below-or-average developer in that regard), they still seemed impressed.
wayoutthere 5y ago
I actually encourage the people I hire to not work on tech projects on the side. Go take up an artistic hobby or just go play with your kid. Unplugging from work is healthy; grinding side projects until you burn out is not.
- andybak 5y ago
  Coding is my artistic hobby. :)
  - wayoutthere 5y ago
    Which is a good way to burn out on tech in your early 30s! Speaking from experience here — using the thing you do to make a living as a creative escape isn’t really much of an escape.
    - andybak 5y ago
      I'm 50.
NikolaNovak 5y ago
Agreed; and there's also a selection bias: The most visible, active, HackerNews population is likely to be (for whatever reason) more involved in opensource and side projects. Whereas, in the overall population of IT workers, that percentage will be far far smaller. For what little it's worth - I'm now a middle-manager (ick) in a traditional large IT company (ick ick), and neither myself nor the recruiting / HR teams I work with have ever once looked for, demanded, or even seen side projects. The UNIX SYSADMINs, Oracle & DB2 DBAs, VMWare specialists, application developers, testers, etc... they're all dedicated professionals but not necessarily zealots. Some of them will tinker and do certs and play with stuff off hours, most of them don't, but all I strictly care about is can you do your actual job professionally when and where I'm paying you. We do encourage learning, and have incentives for taking courses, reading books, etc. But we don't expect you to do unpaid work. As a sibling comment indicated, on operations side we work hard enough that I encourage team members to unwind and take care of their family, needs, hobbies, mental health, life goals etc when they're offline. (My personal 100 Croatian Lipa, all opinions are my own, etc :-)
- grenoire 5y ago
  Careful with the denominations man, I thought the exchange rate crashed to 100 TRY for 'ten cents!'
  - NikolaNovak 5y ago
    Good point, corrected! :->
jasode 5y ago
>This is a myth. The number of candidates I interview who have side projects worth looking at or open source contributions is maybe 1-in-10 at most. It's not a myth depending on the industry (software as profit-center vs cost-center) -- or type of company (startup vs mature company). E.g. HN skews towards startups so the excerpts from the most recent "Who is hiring?" thread[1] often mention Github profile as desirable (but not mandatory). On the other hand, the programming where IT-as-a-cost-center where development is CRUD work like moving zipcode field on a webpage ... those types of jobs advertised on Monster.com won't mention that they're looking for Github side projects. All that said... with real-life statistics being what they are... Since most programmers don't have Github side projects, it means that hiring managers that asked for Github side projects may end up hiring 100% staff with no side projects -- because those were the only hiring candidates that applied. Some excerts from the most recent "Who is hiring?" thread[1]: >To apply, please send an up-to-date: [...] - Personal website, GitHub profile, or any representative examples of code you have written recently that reflect your engineering capabilities -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27818013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27818013 >Please provide a CV and links to previous work or projects, ideally with contributions visible on Github. -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27700557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27700557 >Please contact evan.scholl@bmc-group.co.jp with your resume. Not required, but side projects and github contributions are helpful and appreciated. -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27699747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27699747 >To apply, send your CV with your GitHub profile and an answer to the below questions to work @ fingerprintjs.com -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27703097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27703097 >Interested? We want to hear from you! Please send resume, Github, or LinkedIn to jobs@blackbird.us. -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27701022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27701022 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27699704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27699704
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Most of those quotes you selected are very clear that GitHub projects are not required, but will be looked at if you have something to share. The myth is that most companies only want people with lots of side projects. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any companies who will take side projects into consideration, as in your examples. The myth is that side projects are a prerequisite for getting the job, which isn’t even true in the examples you selected.
jmcgough 5y ago
Adding to this - I did interviews for about six months and I don't think I ever saw a candidate who had a significant side project or open source contributions (at least not in the last couple years). It signals a potentially strong candidate, but I'd never weeded out someone for not having it.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  I stopped talking about them because no one ever cares. Removed from resume and everything. So it's a bit hard to tell if I have side projects, you would have to ask. Nearly all of my skills are from side projects.
xwdv 5y ago
There is a business opportunity though. You can hire someone to build say 5 side projects of their choosing so you can place them on your resume and feature them in your GitHub profile. Could be a good way to fund open source work for small useful things.
- bluedevil2k 5y ago
  Wouldn’t it be easier to just make up past jobs and put those on your resume? Hiring companies never confirm past jobs.
  - bradstewart 5y ago
    Easier, maybe. Honest.... obviously not. Also most (maybe all) of my employers have confirmed previous jobs listed on my resume.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      An honest thing that will get you a leg up when uploading to a system that will scan it for keywords is to use white text with the word not followed by a bunch of keywords not in the rest of your resume. The system doesn't care about text color, so it will match the keywords, when a human reads it, they won't see them, and even if they do you're still being honest with the word 'not'.
      - bradstewart 5y ago
        Now this is actually pretty good. A sad comment on the state of affairs maybe, but quite amusing nonetheless.
      - PeterisP 5y ago
        Instead of "not" use white text "no previous experience with: buzzword, foobar, latestfad."
  - JackFr 5y ago
    > Hiring companies never confirm past jobs Very much not true
deregulateMed 5y ago
It's been a conversation in every interview. It's no requirement, but it's made every job easy to get.
- dheera 5y ago
  Yes, this. Most of the things I've had to do at work are very mundane things. Many boil down to shoveling JSONs around from one system to another or dealing with another former coder's bullshit. The actually interesting, hard tech knowledge I have comes mostly from spare time explorations. I was asked at an interview about CANbus once, and that's not something I would have known from work, but I aced the question because I did quite a bit of side project hacking at reading a car's sensors.
- jordansmithnz 5y ago
  I’ve had the same experience too. A side project is interesting, shows initiative, and if it comes down to you and another otherwise equal candidate - it may well be the deciding factor in a hiring decision. On top of that, hiring aside: the skills and expertise I’ve gained from a side project have been invaluable, and even for this reason alone I’d say it has been well worth it.
deleted 5y ago
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giantg2 5y ago
"The number of candidates I interview who have side projects worth looking at or open source contributions is maybe 1-in-10 at most." It depends on what they are looking for. Some managers don't care what the project is. They want to see that you can learn new things, have a creative mind, have spare time (that they can hopefully capitalize on), etc. Prior professional work is the important part, but personal projects become important if you're straight out of college. I know my Android apps helped me get a job. They never looked at the code, but I was able to demo the apps right on my phone and comment on some basic stuff.
azangru 5y ago
> Most recruiters and hiring managers will never even open your GitHub profile. I wouldn't expect recruiters or hiring managers to be able to read code or appreciate its quality or complexity; but what about the engineers who conduct technical interviews? Would they not be interested to learn as much as they can about the candidate, especially if that candidate, if hired, will join their team?
- clintonb 5y ago
  Nope. My company has a set slate of interviews. I am there to primarily get signal from my specific discussions/questions. I rarely look at resumes before I start the interview. Even if I did, I’m not going to peruse the candidate’s GitHub profile. The majority are pretty sparse or not relevant, and not worth the effort.
- swiftcoder 5y ago
  > but what about the engineers who conduct technical interviews? You will be lucky if they read your resume at all, and when they do, it'll likely be on their phone as they walk down the hall to the interview room. Resumes are mostly to get past the HR filter, and maybe impress the hiring manager - the engineer interviewing cares how you perform in the room itself. Also at a lot of big companies, interviewing is not for specific teams, so the odds of someone they haven't specifically headhunted ending up on their team is low.
- ThrowawayR2 5y ago
  There's no way to know whether that's the candidate's code or copy-paste or they paid someone else to do it, short of using interview time to evaluate it. However, employers also want to provide a level playing field to all candidates, including those without side projects, so there are common evaluation points that are used for all candidates for each interviewer, meaning that little or no time is left in the interview to have that discussion. As an aside, unlike other comments, I do read all resumes of candidates that make it to the interview stage in detail and ask questions about it to try and get a sense of whether there's any inflation going on or not.
handrous 5y ago
> The side project myth is getting out of control. Most recruiters and hiring managers will never even open your GitHub profile. I once interviewed someone who listed authorship of a paper on his résumé. I skimmed it and, curious, asked a question about it in the interview. He looked surprised and told me I was the only person who'd ever even mentioned it.
- mattmcknight 5y ago
  Maybe it's because I am hiring in data science, but that's the first place I go to in order to be able to ask deeper questions about what someone knows about. There are some interesting aspects of co-authorship though. A few years ago, I ran into a guy who did not understand the key aspects of a network security paper where he was the primary author. As I kept asking him about, he admitted he didn't know much about the topic!
  - wirrbel 5y ago
    I didn't do much of research and went straight away into employment. But my wife did and ended up in a bunch of papers in the co-authors just for helping out with a small part of the stuff (sometimes she really was surprised when she found out). So in a way one cannot expect her to know every detailed corner of the papers she has co-authored.
    - mattmcknight 5y ago
      That's why I mentioned the person as being the primary author.
- res0nat0r 5y ago
  Most interviewing I've been involved with from large FAANG companies to smaller IT shops basically are just running around with their heads cut off when it comes to interviews. They get resumes from HR, skim them to see if the person is even in the right ballpark, cc: the team asking "yes/no?", then proceed to schedule an interview whenever everyone on the invite list has an open slot. Everyone then proceeds to examine said resume closer ~10 mins prior to the meeting when their email pings them that they have an upcoming interview scheduled.

onion2k 5y ago

Companies don't want people who have side projects and open source contributions worth looking at. They just want people who have side projects. Finding someone who'll learn new things in their spare time for fun is much cheaper than training.

AlleghenyCrypto 5y ago
Yes, it is much cheaper than training once employed; however, the company should view training employees in new technologies as something that gives the company a competitive advantage. Technology ages pretty quickly, and if you want to stay at the forefront of technology as a company, then it might be a good idea to encourage your employees to use some of their work time to invest in learning the new tools that will push the company forward. Yes, they might leave once they have "leveled-up"; however, one alternative is that they come to the company and never really grow beyond the skills you initially required but may no longer need.

pradn 5y ago

I'd say the most important factors that recruiters look at are: 1) current company tier 2) roughly relevant experience (in broad strokes - frontend or backend) 3) university tier (less relevant as you gain work experience) 4) a distant fourth is hackathon/side-project experience (though this is quite useful for college students)

magnostherobot 5y ago

> The side project myth is getting out of control. I was rejected in an interview last year within seconds of the interview starting because my answer to "what would you do if you suddenly had a bunch of free time" was not relevant enough to the job. For the record, my answer was that I'd learn basic 2D animation, because I have a deep respect for the people who do it, and I have no real clue how it's done. I also had relevant education on my CV, and the interview was for a graduate position. That most places are looking for side projects may be a myth; there certainly are, however, at least some places that look for them.

chrisabrams 5y ago
Sorry you experienced that. As a hiring manager I would think that's pretty cool you want to learn 2D animation even if it has nothing to do with the day job. The fact that you have a desire to learn a skill should be desirable to a hiring manager IMO.
gregallan 5y ago
When you say “graduate position” do you mean a position meant for a college graduate, or a position in a Masters or PhD program at a university?
- angrais 5y ago
  Graduate typically means bachelor, though masters may apply. PhDs typically walk into senior roles depending on what they did for their thesis and what types of code they developed.

atatatat 5y ago

> Most recruiters and hiring managers will never even open your GitHub profile. Tech hiring, and most hiring really, is broken.

jerf 5y ago

"The side project myth is getting out of control. Most recruiters and hiring managers will never even open your GitHub profile." I'm pretty sure some job seekers have figured this out, because I've seen some threadbare github repos put forth on resumes. I also see a related strategy where they're populated, but in a way that will fool someone who isn't familiar with how GitHub works. I always open them if you give them to me because even a glance can tell me a lot, and I've seen a number now that are basically three-ish forked repos, among which there is maybe one commit from the user total that makes a small documentation change or something. I'm thinking some job seekers may have noticed that it's easy to build a github profile in which you have a lot of impressive stuff on it, but if you dig in, the job seeker isn't responsible for any of it. They just pushed "fork" on a few repos and a token commit somewhere. I reluctantly suggest that this is probably a good strategy in general, though it may knock you out of the running with an interview with anyone clueful enough to notice this strategy, so, you know, consider the costs & benefits for your situation.

an_opabinia 5y ago

> Most recruiters and hiring managers will never even open your GitHub profile. This is the first thing I do, because seeing the code you write is the very best story of them all. Maybe every person I've worked with who came in with weak skills demonstrated in GitHub was terminated between 2 weeks and 5 months later.

wallacoloo 5y ago

> Most recruiters and hiring managers will never even open your GitHub profile. For every ten that don’t, there’s one that does. Probably the same recruiters who lurk on HN.

wirrbel 5y ago

> The side project myth is getting out of control. Most recruiters and hiring managers will never even open your GitHub profile. For many candidates one just finds fairly empty repositories with 3-4 commits, sometimes Jupiter notebooks from a coursera course, etc. I hardly find it interesting. 1 in 20 candidates may actually mention an open-source project they contribute to or started and I think this is interesting.

chadash 5y ago

Funny how the FAANG companies never make open source work a requirement, but every once in a while you get a recruiter reaching out from AcmeStartup, having just raised their Series A, listing requirements that boil down to: * Must be a rock star, experienced developer with at least 100 years experience, but also not too old * Must have previous experience as lead developer of open projects such as Postgres, Linux, LibreOffice or similar, in addition to full time employment * Must be willing to work for significant below market wages in exchange for a lottery ticket that might be worth billions

mtnGoat 5y ago
all of the ones i know of that did this, ended up hiring some guy that had very strange expectations of what code should look like, coded the company into a corner and the whole thing flopped. ive now had to come in and replace two of these types, rewrite the code and get the company functioning once scale started to happen. ive found that often those with really impressive resume(like the over funded startups like), have a very limited skill set making them not the best candidates for lead positions anyhow.
- mesozoic 5y ago
  Then they have early equity, get rich after you fix it, and everyone thinks they're smart.
  - mtnGoat 5y ago
    exactly! the CTO that replaced me, sure thinks he is cool. but i know the code base hasnt changed much and i discovered my SU ssh keys were still working 5 years later. but i bet he got a lot less equity then i walked from.
chrisseaton 5y ago
> Funny how the FAANG companies never make open source work a requirement When I got rejected from Google the feedback was I should do more open source work.

cryptica 5y ago

Agreed. It's not true anymore. It was true maybe 5 to 10 years ago; especially for startups.

ufmace 5y ago

Yup this. I've interviewed a bunch of people and been on a bunch of post-interview discussions of candidates. I've never looked at or asked about side projects, and nobody else has ever mentioned anything about the candidates' side projects either. From an interviewer's standpoint, it's much better to have a standard set of questions that you give every candidate, so you can judge candidates against each other relatively fairly and objectively. Assuming a candidate has any side projects that demonstrate any expertise at all, it's a ton of work to dig into one of them enough to get an idea of how that person works. It's almost never worth the time, just ask your standard questions instead.

woofie11 5y ago

> Any company that requires candidates to have significant open source contributions is going to have a hard time hiring, because it’s not very common. Nope. Logical fallacy. FAANG needs to hire thousands. Startups I've been at need to hire maybe 1-3 people at a time. Best CEOs I've met spent a ton of time recruiting those 1-3. Best strategy is to look at something others aren't looking at -- any other source of signal. If your hiring process is like FAANG, you're competing with $350k+ compensation packages. If you can find good developers who FAANG can't, and there are plenty, you'll have a much easier time. A hiring process which selects for 10% or even 1% is plenty fine for a startup. 1% of developers in the US nets you 3000 people. Best managers I've worked with hire through side channels which FAANG doesn't look at. If I'm a startup CEO/CTO/etc. I can afford to read code in your github. FAANG can't. Indeed, I can afford to browse github to find good people doing similar work, and work on getting them to join. I'm not going to post my favorite ways to hire, since they'll lose signal if more people adopt them, but: (1) they typically find on the order of a dozen people (and exclude far more than 1:10) (2) all the people they find tend to be good (3) I'll usually need to extended 3-4 job offers before someone takes one

pmw 5y ago
> Best strategy is to look at something others aren't looking at -- any other source of signal. Better's CTO has several blog articles on this -- a great read! How to hire smarter than the market: a toy model[1] Interviewing is a noisy prediction problem[2] 1: https://erikbern.com/2020/01/13/how-to-hire-smarter-than-the-market-a-toy-model.html https://erikbern.com/2020/01/13/how-to-hire-smarter-than-the... 2: https://erikbern.com/2018/05/02/interviewing-is-a-noisy-prediction-problem.html https://erikbern.com/2018/05/02/interviewing-is-a-noisy-pred...
uVacCXNiiJCTnYB 5y ago
Yeah, I've had my Github or other related things often mentioned by companies headhunting, even though I don't have _that_ much on it. I literally received a job offer not long ago from a very high profile startup that only has a handful of employees, based on my Github

captainmuon 5y ago

Maybe we should turn the premise around. I agree that most recruiters and hiring manages won't look at your side projects. But as a prospective employee, I'd want to work at a place where those count. I want colleagues who are passionate about their tools and tech. Not just people who churn out "solutions" and "applications" for someone else's problem in a Blub language. I want to work at a place where people appreciate open source contributions, because that's not a place where people violate the GPL or do the minimum neccessary to appease the lawyers. I want to work at a place where people appreciate design taste and are happy that I put in a mere half day more work to make the product polished, instead of rushing it to the door prematurely (in chase of profit now, but detrimentally long term). So, as a picky job searcher, I would totally put up a portfolio and clean up my GitHub. Even if only to see if they notice.

andrewljohnson 5y ago

1. As a hiring manager that can code, I'd always open your GitHub if you put it prominently in your application. 2. If there was a lot of work on your GitHub or a really interesting project, I'd riffle through it. 3. If you had a bunch of good public code, that was a good signal, and you'd likely get an interview. If you didn't put a GitHub profile, no problem. If you put one that was blank, then you at least lost some time from my review of your application having me click through, so it probably hurt you at least a minor amount.

dnautics 5y ago

I dunno, I'm pretty sure I was hired without technical interview on the power of my GitHub profile. This is for a small startup (post-series-A, pre-series-B), programming in a slightly-less-popular-but-gaining-in-popularity language. Pre job-search I pinned all of my repos (the most popular ones to the top) in that language. I was sure to carve out exceptions for all of my side projects in my employment contract, they did not argue about it.

cooljacob204 5y ago
The interview for my current job was basically reviewing my GitHub projects and discussing design decisions. I really enjoyed that process but I can also see how that isn't really viable in most cases (A lot of people don't have side projects, nor should they have to IMO).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

golergka 5y ago

I dunno. I've had two initial interviews with two different companies in the same short spane of time, where I mentioned that I was trying to gradually adopt functional programming in my Typescript codebases, using fp-ts ecosystem. In both of those interviews they immediately navigated there and noticed that the latest commit in the repository was mine. Even though I immediately told them that it was a minor documentation issue and I don't have major open source contributions (my most popular repo has about 15 stars, so I'm a pretty below-or-average developer in that regard), they still seemed impressed.

wayoutthere 5y ago

I actually encourage the people I hire to not work on tech projects on the side. Go take up an artistic hobby or just go play with your kid. Unplugging from work is healthy; grinding side projects until you burn out is not.

andybak 5y ago
Coding is my artistic hobby. :)
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  Which is a good way to burn out on tech in your early 30s! Speaking from experience here — using the thing you do to make a living as a creative escape isn’t really much of an escape.
  - andybak 5y ago
    I'm 50.

NikolaNovak 5y ago

Agreed; and there's also a selection bias: The most visible, active, HackerNews population is likely to be (for whatever reason) more involved in opensource and side projects. Whereas, in the overall population of IT workers, that percentage will be far far smaller. For what little it's worth - I'm now a middle-manager (ick) in a traditional large IT company (ick ick), and neither myself nor the recruiting / HR teams I work with have ever once looked for, demanded, or even seen side projects. The UNIX SYSADMINs, Oracle & DB2 DBAs, VMWare specialists, application developers, testers, etc... they're all dedicated professionals but not necessarily zealots. Some of them will tinker and do certs and play with stuff off hours, most of them don't, but all I strictly care about is can you do your actual job professionally when and where I'm paying you. We do encourage learning, and have incentives for taking courses, reading books, etc. But we don't expect you to do unpaid work. As a sibling comment indicated, on operations side we work hard enough that I encourage team members to unwind and take care of their family, needs, hobbies, mental health, life goals etc when they're offline. (My personal 100 Croatian Lipa, all opinions are my own, etc :-)

grenoire 5y ago
Careful with the denominations man, I thought the exchange rate crashed to 100 TRY for 'ten cents!'
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  Good point, corrected! :->

jasode 5y ago

>This is a myth. The number of candidates I interview who have side projects worth looking at or open source contributions is maybe 1-in-10 at most. It's not a myth depending on the industry (software as profit-center vs cost-center) -- or type of company (startup vs mature company). E.g. HN skews towards startups so the excerpts from the most recent "Who is hiring?" thread[1] often mention Github profile as desirable (but not mandatory). On the other hand, the programming where IT-as-a-cost-center where development is CRUD work like moving zipcode field on a webpage ... those types of jobs advertised on Monster.com won't mention that they're looking for Github side projects. All that said... with real-life statistics being what they are... Since most programmers don't have Github side projects, it means that hiring managers that asked for Github side projects may end up hiring 100% staff with no side projects -- because those were the only hiring candidates that applied. Some excerts from the most recent "Who is hiring?" thread[1]: >To apply, please send an up-to-date: [...] - Personal website, GitHub profile, or any representative examples of code you have written recently that reflect your engineering capabilities -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27818013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27818013 >Please provide a CV and links to previous work or projects, ideally with contributions visible on Github. -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27700557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27700557 >Please contact evan.scholl@bmc-group.co.jp with your resume. Not required, but side projects and github contributions are helpful and appreciated. -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27699747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27699747 >To apply, send your CV with your GitHub profile and an answer to the below questions to work @ fingerprintjs.com -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27703097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27703097 >Interested? We want to hear from you! Please send resume, Github, or LinkedIn to jobs@blackbird.us. -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27701022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27701022 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27699704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27699704

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Most of those quotes you selected are very clear that GitHub projects are not required, but will be looked at if you have something to share. The myth is that most companies only want people with lots of side projects. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any companies who will take side projects into consideration, as in your examples. The myth is that side projects are a prerequisite for getting the job, which isn’t even true in the examples you selected.

jmcgough 5y ago

Adding to this - I did interviews for about six months and I don't think I ever saw a candidate who had a significant side project or open source contributions (at least not in the last couple years). It signals a potentially strong candidate, but I'd never weeded out someone for not having it.

datavirtue 5y ago
I stopped talking about them because no one ever cares. Removed from resume and everything. So it's a bit hard to tell if I have side projects, you would have to ask. Nearly all of my skills are from side projects.

xwdv 5y ago

There is a business opportunity though. You can hire someone to build say 5 side projects of their choosing so you can place them on your resume and feature them in your GitHub profile. Could be a good way to fund open source work for small useful things.

bluedevil2k 5y ago
Wouldn’t it be easier to just make up past jobs and put those on your resume? Hiring companies never confirm past jobs.
- bradstewart 5y ago
  Easier, maybe. Honest.... obviously not. Also most (maybe all) of my employers have confirmed previous jobs listed on my resume.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    An honest thing that will get you a leg up when uploading to a system that will scan it for keywords is to use white text with the word not followed by a bunch of keywords not in the rest of your resume. The system doesn't care about text color, so it will match the keywords, when a human reads it, they won't see them, and even if they do you're still being honest with the word 'not'.
    - bradstewart 5y ago
      Now this is actually pretty good. A sad comment on the state of affairs maybe, but quite amusing nonetheless.
    - PeterisP 5y ago
      Instead of "not" use white text "no previous experience with: buzzword, foobar, latestfad."
- JackFr 5y ago
  > Hiring companies never confirm past jobs Very much not true

deregulateMed 5y ago

It's been a conversation in every interview. It's no requirement, but it's made every job easy to get.

dheera 5y ago
Yes, this. Most of the things I've had to do at work are very mundane things. Many boil down to shoveling JSONs around from one system to another or dealing with another former coder's bullshit. The actually interesting, hard tech knowledge I have comes mostly from spare time explorations. I was asked at an interview about CANbus once, and that's not something I would have known from work, but I aced the question because I did quite a bit of side project hacking at reading a car's sensors.
jordansmithnz 5y ago
I’ve had the same experience too. A side project is interesting, shows initiative, and if it comes down to you and another otherwise equal candidate - it may well be the deciding factor in a hiring decision. On top of that, hiring aside: the skills and expertise I’ve gained from a side project have been invaluable, and even for this reason alone I’d say it has been well worth it.

deleted 5y ago

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giantg2 5y ago

"The number of candidates I interview who have side projects worth looking at or open source contributions is maybe 1-in-10 at most." It depends on what they are looking for. Some managers don't care what the project is. They want to see that you can learn new things, have a creative mind, have spare time (that they can hopefully capitalize on), etc. Prior professional work is the important part, but personal projects become important if you're straight out of college. I know my Android apps helped me get a job. They never looked at the code, but I was able to demo the apps right on my phone and comment on some basic stuff.

azangru 5y ago

> Most recruiters and hiring managers will never even open your GitHub profile. I wouldn't expect recruiters or hiring managers to be able to read code or appreciate its quality or complexity; but what about the engineers who conduct technical interviews? Would they not be interested to learn as much as they can about the candidate, especially if that candidate, if hired, will join their team?

clintonb 5y ago
Nope. My company has a set slate of interviews. I am there to primarily get signal from my specific discussions/questions. I rarely look at resumes before I start the interview. Even if I did, I’m not going to peruse the candidate’s GitHub profile. The majority are pretty sparse or not relevant, and not worth the effort.
swiftcoder 5y ago
> but what about the engineers who conduct technical interviews? You will be lucky if they read your resume at all, and when they do, it'll likely be on their phone as they walk down the hall to the interview room. Resumes are mostly to get past the HR filter, and maybe impress the hiring manager - the engineer interviewing cares how you perform in the room itself. Also at a lot of big companies, interviewing is not for specific teams, so the odds of someone they haven't specifically headhunted ending up on their team is low.
ThrowawayR2 5y ago
There's no way to know whether that's the candidate's code or copy-paste or they paid someone else to do it, short of using interview time to evaluate it. However, employers also want to provide a level playing field to all candidates, including those without side projects, so there are common evaluation points that are used for all candidates for each interviewer, meaning that little or no time is left in the interview to have that discussion. As an aside, unlike other comments, I do read all resumes of candidates that make it to the interview stage in detail and ask questions about it to try and get a sense of whether there's any inflation going on or not.

handrous 5y ago

> The side project myth is getting out of control. Most recruiters and hiring managers will never even open your GitHub profile. I once interviewed someone who listed authorship of a paper on his résumé. I skimmed it and, curious, asked a question about it in the interview. He looked surprised and told me I was the only person who'd ever even mentioned it.

mattmcknight 5y ago
Maybe it's because I am hiring in data science, but that's the first place I go to in order to be able to ask deeper questions about what someone knows about. There are some interesting aspects of co-authorship though. A few years ago, I ran into a guy who did not understand the key aspects of a network security paper where he was the primary author. As I kept asking him about, he admitted he didn't know much about the topic!
- wirrbel 5y ago
  I didn't do much of research and went straight away into employment. But my wife did and ended up in a bunch of papers in the co-authors just for helping out with a small part of the stuff (sometimes she really was surprised when she found out). So in a way one cannot expect her to know every detailed corner of the papers she has co-authored.
  - mattmcknight 5y ago
    That's why I mentioned the person as being the primary author.
res0nat0r 5y ago
Most interviewing I've been involved with from large FAANG companies to smaller IT shops basically are just running around with their heads cut off when it comes to interviews. They get resumes from HR, skim them to see if the person is even in the right ballpark, cc: the team asking "yes/no?", then proceed to schedule an interview whenever everyone on the invite list has an open slot. Everyone then proceeds to examine said resume closer ~10 mins prior to the meeting when their email pings them that they have an upcoming interview scheduled.