411–420 of 545 posts
Am I the only one who likes side projects? I'm addicted to the idea of starting new projects in new languages. How many of them ever get completed or push into an environment is a different story... It's fresh, clean and filled with possibility. An existing code base is usually filled with hacks etc.
Some of my side projects exist only long enough to understand/solve the deep technical challenge required to make it work. Completing the project after that is just unfun work .
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> 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…
I don't expect my surgeon to do surgery in his spare time. Nor my plumber, dentist, gardener, or any other professional. I look at their past work history and reviews from customers and/or coworkers. I will never understand the belief that side projects are in any way necessary. I'd much rather have a well rounded individual who isn't moonlighting on other things but rather can bring his clear focused mind to the off…
I really like it when my specialist has a prominent public profile.
A recent case: tenure at a major university, had written or was quoted in many good journals and papers, and had a number of impressive accreditations (for example he was also head of his specialty's medical association for the country). This showed dedication and interest as well as some measure of intelligence.
I was accordingly confident he was on top of the latest developments in his field and would be able to deal with complications better than your run of the mill specialist. The care was great throughout.
Similarly, our lawyer has been quoted twice by the Supreme Court in Singapore, has written many articles in the Straits Times, and does great (and visible) pro bono work, all of which I could find off a quick Google for his name. Whilst I hired him based on a recommendation, it was comforting to see this public confirmation of his ability and interest in the field.
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To be fair to the people whose merges failed, I believe this is a shortcoming of git (the tool) and not the people using it. It is fair to expect a developer to invest sometime in learning their tools well but git is a different beast. I know it solves a very complex problem but the fact that it exposes a complex interface to the user to do so seems like a shortcoming of the tool to me. Heck, we even have a comic for…
Haha nooooo, it's really not that difficult! I really don't think git is a different beast. It's much, much harder to master a programming language or web framework. Compared to something like Rails, iOS development, or React + Redux + Redux Saga, Git is just a couple of commands and basic concepts. Everything is listed here, and I don't think that's an unreasonable number of commands to know: https://git-scm.com/doc…
Either Git has a complex user interface like I claim or I am beginning to grow old.
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> instead you get dance-like-a-monkey "coding tests" (unpaid, of course) that are nonportable from employer to employer. This - the non-portable aspect - is what irks me the most. Especially for enterprise developers. Since most of the software we develop is under NDA, we cannot put any of it online to showcase our skills. I've had to do 3 different take-home "coding exercises" over the last 10 days. 1 was for a Hedg…
If you asked a musicians to perform an audition before you hired them, would you accept the response, "Sorry, I don't work for free." Would you expect a musician to practice their instrument in their free time or only play their instrument during paid gigs?
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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…
This. Not once has a potential employer ever said to me: "Based on your Github, you can obviously fizzbuzz with the best of them, and know a for-loop from an if-statement. Let's skip the phone screen/homework assignment and get you onsite directly."
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…
As for why I don't take Github profiles too seriously, we had plenty of applicants who did have projects on their Github profiles who tripped all over themselves on our simple coding test. Maybe we would have found out something similar by digging into their commit history, but that would be an even greater time investment than the hiring process already was.
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Hiring manager here who reads Github profiles -- it just occurred to me that I've almost never actually mentioned it to the interviewee. It's flavoured the conversation for sure (except for the bootcamp grads who all have identical Githubs) but I tend to talk more about your process than the actual code.
As a software engineer who does technical interviews, I also regularly review GitHub contributions if mentioned on the resume. It's not a deal killer if someone doesn't have these things...but if you're up against another candidate who does (and their work is good)...then the other candidate is likely getting the job.
Because I myself feel that this is such a good and reasonable way of hiring people, I wouldn't want to work for an employer that wouldn't let me do open source work.
I mean, it's also because I consider open source to be the public sphere, and I really do believe in software freedom. Maybe my professional metaphor would be the coder as a writer. Of course I want to see your published work.
It is hard to believe they would waste your time or theirs with an onsite interview, if they decided apriori a candidate with no side/opensource projects is unfit for them.
I think the problem is with the interviewers. It is a difficult task to interview and when everyone is allowed to lead an interview, it just leads to very random outcomes.
Companies don't really focus on developing interviewing skills for the people who are inside. Maybe they are just too scared to do that - pulling people away from their gut feel and not having an even distribution of people who can interview properly (across teams). It probably feels much safer to say a bunch of No's and then say Yes.
The lesser experienced and the hard-headed experienced ones are worst interviewers. They probably are looking more for people like us.
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…
But I'm bewildered that this person has zero line of code to show. The only case I could think of where that makes sense to me is that the developer is still in college. Imo even recent grads generally have something to show off for what it's worth.
You don't even need to be hacking every night and week-end for that to happen. If you're a minimum into what you do, chances are you put at least a night or week-end aside to hack together something.
Personally, I'm far from behind a great developer, but you can find loads of "unmaintainable junk" in my GitHub (github.com/hery). And as many pointed out, when you're prolific, you tend to accidentally produce valuable things, and I do have some decent projects in there that I explicitly pointed out in the process of interviews, which helped me skip technical challenges or interviews straight to offers. A bit extreme huh?
Most developers have a life and hobbies outside of coding, and I believe it holds even truer for the best developers. But with decent priorities, it's easy to invest some time in hacking side-projects. Otherwise it feels like you're putting 99% into other hobbies, and 1% into coding, i.e. you're just doing it to make money. Balance is key.