I have no side code projects to show you • Hacker News Board

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#201

Post by rco8786 » Wed, Oct 25, 2017, 9:58 PM UTC

warcher wrote: post #186

walshemj wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude as a Dude who knows a little about employment law all your work code belongs to your employer.

Sure, sure. And if you followed the letter of the law I’m sure you deleted it all from your laptop promptly and is unavailable to you no matter what. But if you didn’t, for whatever reason, and you happen to have an illegal copy of some production CRUD app hanging around so I can look at how you organize your thoughts, nobody I’ve interviewed has ever gotten even a whiff of heat for letting me look over their shoulde…

You start off relationships with potential new subordinates by asking them to break the law in order to demonstrate their value to you? Wtf man.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#202

Post by apple4ever » Wed, Oct 25, 2017, 9:59 PM UTC

eropple wrote: post #42

warcher wrote: post #31

I’m not mad at you, but as the dude on the other side of the desk, I have to decide whether you can cut it and I’m fine saying no. I could make you do some whiteboard problems, but I think whiteboard problems are pretty far removed from your day to day development and I am uncomfortable relying on them as a proxy for your ability to ship code. I don’t really disagree with your philosophy of working while you’re worki…

On the flip side? As somebody who has plenty of open source projects--the set of employers who actually looks at them is within epsilon of zero. I have not once, not once gotten a meaningful question from anything I have posted on Github in any interview or client meeting even after suggesting up-front that it's worth taking a look. And I used to interview on a monthly basis just to keep in practice! No--instead you…

You must be applying to the wrong companies then. I just got done doing interviews, and I looked at what the second round candidates had available on GitHub and their personal site, and the one who got the job had about 5 projects that were impressive.

Good employers care. I care. Its not signaling. Its important.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#203

Post by kenhwang » Wed, Oct 25, 2017, 10:01 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #179

notzorbo3 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what's universally hard? Finding people who are good at their jobs. References don't matter, experience doesn't matter, education doesn't matter. Why not? Because it doesn't say anything about actual skill. What does? Side projects, where you can actually see if a person has skills. > a corporate lawyer purely based on their pro-bono work? You hire a corporate lawyer based on their public reputation. For a p…

Except that, side projects are nothing like day to day coding in a company. Beyond basic coding skills, they are very different animals.

I use side projects to figure out what aspects of software engineering the candidate seems to enjoy. Do they fiddle with the CSS nonstop to get the margins just right? Are they constantly trying to decrease the memory impact of a function? Does the README read like an appliance manual or a haiku of puns?

Side projects are a strong signal the candidate enjoys this line of work, and ideally I'd want them working on things they would enjoy.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#204

Post by apple4ever » Wed, Oct 25, 2017, 10:02 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #75

kelnos wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're espousing a false dichotomy. The options in evaluating a candidate aren't merely "give them whiteboard coding problems" or "examine their side projects". Give them a take-home assignment. Give them an in-person assignment where they have several hours to complete a smallish design-and-build task. There are a lot more options, and I'm getting tired of people claiming they don't know how to evaluate technical ca…

Giving a candidate a "take-home assignment" is actually the most disrespectful of the options listed. Unless you're an awesome company, with really cool projects and offering me a jaw dropping salary and benefits, then no, I'm not going to do free work for you. Even if you are an awesome company, people probably have to actually work for you to see that, so no, I'm not going to do free work for you. I'd rather spend…

That's fine, I'm happy to hire someone who is dedicated, passionate, and loves coding enough to to a quick assignment. Its not free work, its a demonstration of skill.

In fact, we just hired someone who did that, and her assignment came back better than expected. At first we were so-so on her due to potential lack of experience, but the assignment (and her projects on her personal site) showed us were wrong.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#205

Post by itomato » Wed, Oct 25, 2017, 10:04 PM UTC

This again?

Hello, I'm your peer. You're showing me.

Not HR, not the Engineering Manager, not some mythical burn-down chart, but your partner in crime.

What sort of jobs have you pulled? I don't care about the minutiae, but about the overall scene.

Code smell is a factor, like it or not. Same story for by-catch and "gore" in the form of spaghetti, inheritance and commentary.

If you can't be bothered, I get it. Punt, shift blame, cross your arms and dig your heels in.

I don't care, because without a portfolio, I don't have an opportunity to appreciate the qualities of your work, good or bad.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#206

Post by throw2016 » Wed, Oct 25, 2017, 10:04 PM UTC

It doesn't make sense to volunteer extra information that could be potentially used against you.

Unless you have done your time consuming best to ensure its 'perfect'. And this directly leads to a culture of resume driven development.

For those who are actually active on projects most interviews do not provide the context to absorb the information of your contributions; coding style, tradeoffs, constraints of these projects etc. They will all end up sounding like excuses.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#207

Post by warcher » Wed, Oct 25, 2017, 10:07 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #169

notzorbo3 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Employers don't care. The wrong empoyers don't care. The right ones do. My github portfolio is a means for me to determine if a potential employer is suitable for me, not the other way around. It's not a test for me to pass, it's a test for a potential employer to pass. If a recruiter brings up things listed on my LinkedIn page, I know they're not suitable for me. If they bring up things on my github, I'm reasonabl…

You list things on linked in just so you can blame potential employers for looking at it? I dont even have linked in account and still find it ridiculous to hold it against them if they dare to look there.

“How much time is the interviewer willing to invest” is a super legit question to be asking. It tells you a lot about how many shits they give about you in particular and is a good proxy for the quality of the team in general.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#208

Post by kakwa_ » Wed, Oct 25, 2017, 10:07 PM UTC

city41 wrote: post #125

eropple wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side? As somebody who has plenty of open source projects--the set of employers who actually looks at them is within epsilon of zero. I have not once, not once gotten a meaningful question from anything I have posted on Github in any interview or client meeting even after suggesting up-front that it's worth taking a look. And I used to interview on a monthly basis just to keep in practice! No--instead you…

I disagree, my side projects have led to many employment opportunities, including my current one. I also get recruiters contacting me and mentioning my side projects. I often suspect their system just found my projects and dumped them into the email, but other times the email is clearly from a human who has read my blog and/or investigated my projects.

I've a bunch of personal projects on github.

They are not that successful, a few dozens stars generally for the most serious ones. And also, there are not especially trendy (no fancy react app or js library, but stuff in python (lib, web ui), C, a puppet module, some shell scripts and little bit of perl).

With that, in 5 years, I was contacted only by 2 or 3 recruiters/contacts that emailed me because of my projects. For two of them, it was more a general look at which languages I used in my projects ("hey, this guy knows Python and Bash, he may be good for an SRE position").

The last one actually came across one of my project which is a little bit domain specific (an RFC 3161 timestamp server), not sure if it would have ended in a recruitment offer however.

I get more offers through my crappy linkedin profile.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#209

Post by scaryclam » Wed, Oct 25, 2017, 10:09 PM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #67

colomon wrote: post #48

What strikes me as weird about this is the assumption that it's an either/or proposition. I am passionate about playing traditional dance music. And I have supported this by writing a program to generate high quality sheet music from ABC scores; scripts to download collections of scores or MP3s off the web; scripts to handle tagging/naming my MP3 files; etc. I am passionate about RPGs. Back in the day I supported thi…

A lot of code you can't just toss up on Github. Is that your best code? It better be because that's all the code the interviewer is going to see!

Except, this isn't true. I've been on both sides of the table where less that stellar code has been on github and on both sides: it's more important it was there than the imperfections present in it.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#210

Post by trevor-e » Wed, Oct 25, 2017, 10:09 PM UTC

eropple wrote: post #42

warcher wrote: post #31

I’m not mad at you, but as the dude on the other side of the desk, I have to decide whether you can cut it and I’m fine saying no. I could make you do some whiteboard problems, but I think whiteboard problems are pretty far removed from your day to day development and I am uncomfortable relying on them as a proxy for your ability to ship code. I don’t really disagree with your philosophy of working while you’re worki…

On the flip side? As somebody who has plenty of open source projects--the set of employers who actually looks at them is within epsilon of zero. I have not once, not once gotten a meaningful question from anything I have posted on Github in any interview or client meeting even after suggesting up-front that it's worth taking a look. And I used to interview on a monthly basis just to keep in practice! No--instead you…

FWIW, I'll look at a candidate's Github account whenever they list it on their resume. That doesn't mean I'll bring it up during the interview unless there was something particularly interesting to talk about.

It's pretty useful for screening candidates, especially looking at code written <1 year ago. I do keep in mind that code written in free time might not have the same standards as production code, but often there are some red flags that carry over.