I have no side code projects to show

> When companies say they want "passionate developers" that are coding in their free time, when companies say they want "the best," I get nervous. It's a myopic approach to team building. It's a subtle way of requesting human machines.

I take issue with this.

I don't write code in my spare time for fun, I have a family.

When I do write it, and when I do Open Source it, it's because it makes my life easier. It makes it easier to check my email, track what I still need to do on the house, and cut out half my work tomorrow, so I can take some leave and be with my family.

I release it to the wild so that others might benefit, and I can pull it out when recruiters ask to see my code, even if they can't understand it, which is most of the time.

I want to work in a group where they appreciate that I was basically born to code. That despite my youthful features, I have still been coding for over 30 years. That I can do many tasks in an hour, that other people would take days to do. That I will spend an extra 3 hours to put a cherry on top, just because I can. I may even do it on a Saturday, because code is what I like to do with my spare time too.

So when the last company I interviewed at asked me "what is the difference between range and xrange in Python?" I just kind of rolled my eyes (on the inside). To me this is like asking a professional translator "what is the difference between 'si' and 'sí' in Spanish?" They were not interested in the thousands of lines of code I have on GitHub for my side projects, nor in a recent project that got me 15 seconds of fame. I ended that interview by saying "I don't think I'm a good match for this job".

Different companies have different cultures. It's good to be able to identify the kind of culture you want to work in, and even better to be able to respectfully decline an opportunity because it doesn't work for you. Don't become bitter and think that all companies want you to be a coding robot, just because Google and Facebook do (or seem to; I'm not sure how many of my friends who work there actually have that many side projects either). There are plenty of jobs that will work for you that won't work for me, and vice versa.

I've had a few companies ask me for my Github account, so they can see what code I've written. I never give it out, because I think the request is pointless to start with.

A friend of mine, who works for a well-known technology giant, recently told me about a Linux guru they interviewed and hired. He was amazing in the interview, and they gave him an offer on the spot. When he started working, however, he constantly turned in sub-par work. A couple of months later, one of the members of the team who had interviewed this guy flew out to where he was working, and discovered that the guy sitting in the cube doing the work was not the guy they had interviewed. It was someone else. The guy went through quite an effort to cheat his way into a job, but when he was discovered, he was immediately fired.

If cheating was my thing, and I really wanted to get a job via nefarious means, so I could worry about my job on a daily basis, how hard would it be to pay someone to write a bunch of Github code for me? Exactly, which is why the request is pretty dumb to start with, I think.

For a bunch of smart people, we engineers sure have a hard time figuring out how to interview people and ascertain their skills.

I actually don't mind being a human machine. Not that I've had the chance yet. I'm still in college to get my CS degree and would fall into one of those people where "coding is a Craft". I genuinely love programming. I don't have a family, or really desire one. My weekend plans always consist of building another project of my own. A place that will let me code all day, give me a nap room, a shower, some salary, and food sounds like a dream. It's unfortunate that it costs so much money to get to the cities that promote this.

I think the author is just realizing that this field isn't for them. Tech moves fast and to stay on top of it you have to move fast too. At least for modern tech. Maybe that author would be more comfortable being a COBOL programmer, or an embedded systems one.

The range/xrange question was likely to check if you were a fraud.

Having interviewed close to a hundred people in a year for a senior C dev position I can assure you that people lie like you wouldn't believe. They cheat with take-home tasks, they show others' code as their own. And that's in the system programming circles, where the level of professionalism is typically much higher than in app/web development areas. We got burnt really bad when a brilliant dude whom we relocated across the country turned out to be the laziest moron I've ever had a misfortune to work with. So you bet we started most of the interviews with fuzz-buzz kind of questions.