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My friend just got a job at Intel. During his interview, he tells me, they were more interested in his side projects then what he did at his previous job.
It's easy to point out that this question will exclude some false negatives, good people that don't have side projects. I rarely hear anyone worried that it will produce false positives, crappy people that have a github profile bursting with interesting work. But here's the thing: If you think that this is a bad question to ask in an interview, I have a challenge for you: Describe a repeatable, objective process for…
Actually I do worry about that, and have seen it -- and maybe not surprisingly could have predicted it.
The symptoms are often a very active set of open source projects, often a maintainer, lack of enthusiasm about virtually anything they did in their day job.
My theory is their day job at some point wasn't fulfilling and they moved to the side projects to compensate. But by the time they joined us, their side project consumed them. There's nothing worse than someone being consistently late or delivering poor quality, and looking and seeing they did 200 commits, some very non-trivial, to their side projects last week. As I said to one during the exit interview -- you should consider making the "side project" your day job, because that's your passion. Unfortunately it wasn't working here.
Given a choice between someone who was enthusiastic about their day job, and has some good end results from it, and having no side projects, and one who has a lot of side proejects, but no enthusiasm or anything of interest to say about his last job -- I'll take the person with no side projects.
For a variety of reasons, there are many one-dimensional programmers out there -- people who seem to be only interested in computers and oblivious to everything else. Come on people, the world is wide. Programming is not the best way to become an enterprising, dynamic individual. Unless your company is anti-risk and boring, don't you want to hire people who are different from you? People who have taken crazy trips around the world and learned skills that provide lateral insights rather than just what you get out of sitting at a computer writing code and reading Hacker News?
If someone could provide evidence of doing something daring, that would show more initiative to me than a GitHub project.
It's easy to point out that this question will exclude some false negatives, good people that don't have side projects. I rarely hear anyone worried that it will produce false positives, crappy people that have a github profile bursting with interesting work. But here's the thing: If you think that this is a bad question to ask in an interview, I have a challenge for you: Describe a repeatable, objective process for…
I want the best person I can get (for a very, very subjective definition of 'best') for the cheapest I can get and keep them (both employed and happy). That's not fair, that's life.
It's easy to point out that this question will exclude some false negatives, good people that don't have side projects. I rarely hear anyone worried that it will produce false positives, crappy people that have a github profile bursting with interesting work. But here's the thing: If you think that this is a bad question to ask in an interview, I have a challenge for you: Describe a repeatable, objective process for…
Was a pretty good way to learn Kohana (PHP MVC framework) and dip my toes back into web dev!
My friend just got a job at Intel. During his interview, he tells me, they were more interested in his side projects then what he did at his previous job.
Same here (though not Intel), recently most people I've worked for hired me because of my side projects.
I take issue with this article because it would come across to me as a red flag about work-life balance. That an employer would expect you to be doing something programming related in your spare time comes across as a bit self-serving. Instead, I would ask "What would you like to develop in your spare time, if you had any?" That way they can answer the same as his question if they are working on stuff, but can still…
Nothing says you have to spend ALL of your spare time doing ONE thing. You can rotate. I can certainly accept that some people's circumstances are such that they really don't have the time, but I think casting side projects as necessarily creating time conflicts is wrong.
Some of them are here http://twitterex.com http://reduce.li http://twitexplode.com And am building a facebook application: http://namesucker.com One pattern in all these, I lose interest and they fizzle out. So, if i could pose a question here, how do you keep yourself motivated?
Are you struggling to get traction? If so, use analytics (AB testing?) to figure out how to get more customers.
If you are just setting stuff up to satisfy your own curiosity (be honest), then it's quite rational to lose interest once the problem is solved.