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If you don’t have pet projects, I don’t think I want you

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Re: If you don’t have pet projects, I don’t think I want you

#41

Post by daleharvey »

0x12 wrote: post #35
daleharvey wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pet projects answer a thousand questions that a cv and an interview cannot. What type of work does this person enjoy, are they building libraries for developers or products for end users, A lot of time people will open source their side projects, you get insight into their working practices, how clean their code is, do they test, do they get caught up in details and not the end product. Sometimes people pets projects…

> pet projects answer a thousand questions that a cv and an interview cannot. If the answer is 'no' you'd have to ask a lot of follow up questions, some of those may be illegal, to decide whether or not having pet projects is even a possibility for the applicant. > What type of work does this person enjoy, are they building libraries for developers or products for end users, A lot of time people will open source thei…

I guess I could have been clearer,

"Sometimes people pets projects are working on a large open source project, for employers I believe that is the jackpot, you have full insight into how they communicate with users and peers, what work they produce and insight into the thought processes that go along with it."

Re: If you don’t have pet projects, I don’t think I want you

#42

Post by brosephius »

sorry, but I think this is an arrogant and insulting attitude. I get the value of side projects, but assuming that someone who doesn't have any is an inferior candidate is bullshit. I know the blog post says "Not having pet projects doesn’t mean that you are a bad developer" but dismissing such people out of hand says otherwise.

you don't care about experience? so someone who writes ultra-high-performance code for a trading firm is worth less to you than someone who writes a 50-line rails app that lets you use the fabled "pomodoro technique"? good luck finding great developers with that attitude. but hey, at least they'll have "passion", right? because all salaried coding is generic and mindless, and anybody doing it is a drone with no skills or ambition.

Re: If you don’t have pet projects, I don’t think I want you

#43

Post by georgemcbay »

0x12 wrote: post #24

If you have a life, I don't want you. If you have a family, I don't want you. If you have enough energy to do your work but not enough energy that after work you can work some more, I don't want you. What is it that makes employers so enamored of people with 'pet projects'? Are they easier to take advantage of? Do they work long hours without expecting compensation? Does not having dependents mean that it's easier to…

The worst side-effect of this is actually "If you were really passionate about your last job, I don't want you."

I have old pet projects from times when my work at previous jobs was interesting but not all-consuming. The work I do for my current employer is so interesting and fun to me in so many ways that when I have spare coding time on non-work-hours, I'm still working on these work projects. My work projects are my pet projects.

Granted, someone like me is less likely to be in the market in the first place because I love my job, but if I suddenly were in the market (there are many very hypothetical reasons this could happen -- company runs out of runway, company is acquired by company that shifts focus in ways I don't care for, etc, etc) a filter like this would cut me out for all the wrong reasons.

Having said all of that, I think people hiring employees do need to employ some arbitrary filters that could potentially filter out stellar employees as a side effect, and I don't think that's a horrible thing.. it probably helps more often than not and is thus worth the rare corner case situations where it ends in a tragic mistake.

If I'm in the market looking for another job I have more than enough contacts with people I've worked with in the past that such arbitrary filters are a non-factor for me, so the take away is that if you're a great developer, develop contacts and then you don't have to worry about things like this.

Re: If you don’t have pet projects, I don’t think I want you

#44

Post by mirkules »

First off, some of us have lives and families. Some of us work more than just 9-5 and commute for more than one hour each way.

Secondly, none of my pet projects are OSS. I have a lot of pet projects, some in their infant stages, some pretty far along. And they are not for public viewing, but for my pleasure, which is why they are not OSS. [edit: and some are a collaboration with other people who would prefer that code stays closed]

Thirdly, is there such a thing as a passionate .NET programmer!? (half-joking)

Re: If you don’t have pet projects, I don’t think I want you

#45

Post by petercooper »

adbge wrote: post #34
hackinthebochs wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that programming in your spare time is not a necessary condition for enjoying or having passion for programming. Further, its also discriminatory against people with families, or other hobbies, or against people who don't want to do the same thing that they did 40-50 hours during the week on the weekends too.

Let's be clear: it's only discriminatory against people that don't have pet projects. Having a family or other hobbies and having pet projects are not mutually exclusive.

Exactly. It's hardly as if there's a lack of time. The average geek, in my experience, seems to waste more than enough time playing computer games, watching movies, or bunkum on the TV. It's not a giant leap to suggest that people actually using their spare time to work on aspects relating to their career are, and should be, doing better than people who treat it as a 9 to 5. (Oh, and posting on HN.. hehe)

Re: If you don’t have pet projects, I don’t think I want you

#46

Post by chollida1 »

mxavier wrote: post #21
wyclif wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe your employment contract states that anything you create is owned by your company so there is no code "outside of work." The question then becomes whether that is a contingency that has affected your passion or not.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting. Are there really contracts that say that any code you write, even if it is unrelated to your work and off-hours is the property of the company you work for? If so, that sounds like a horrible arrangement. That would be like a chef making a sandwich for himself at lunch and having to give it to the restaurant where he works instead.

http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/19422/if-im-working-...

This is often referenced when a question like this comes up.

Re: If you don’t have pet projects, I don’t think I want you

#47

Post by kkowalczyk »

sunkencity wrote: post #30
hvs wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad that you associate "passion" with "hipster". I can't think of a more inaccurate characterization of a highly motivated developer. I also didn't get the impression that he was looking for a "hipster".

I am myself a passionate developer, that doesn't mean I have the time to make massive open-source projects just to get a better resume, because I'm neck deep in writing code for the company I have been running for the last 7 years. Not all people have the luxury to figure out something worthwhile do do and put on github. I hate hiring people and putting a price tag on them, it's a cruel world but not every job interv…

You're absolutely right: they just need to deliver at work.

At the same time let's assume, for the sake of the argument, that having side coding project is the best predictor whether someone can "deliver at work". If that's the case then it's perfectly rational for an employer to look for people who do that.

Is it the case? I certainly think that when I look at someone's non trivial code, I can better tell whether he's a competent programmer than from reading a one page resume or even an hour long interview.

Important note: it's not the existence of the code that is important but an existence of good code.

Re: If you don’t have pet projects, I don’t think I want you

#48

Post by petercooper »

I make good money from job ads so this does me a disservice but.. stop discriminating against people by getting them to send in their CVs. Headhunt!

I'm selfishly in support of preferring to hire people who show a strong out-of-hours dedication and passion for their work but it's not a realistic expectation for a regular job ad. Instead, hit GitHub, hit mailing lists, find the top blogs on the topics you're hiring for, and approach the people who pop up and seem to know what they're talking about.

You might have to let people work remotely, pay them more, or come up with other ways to pique their interest, but if you really want 24/7 passionate programmers, you can get them, with enough resources.

It's amazing how few employers do this, even those who do have the resources. Grab the top talent in your areas and find them by their byproducts. Why Google/MSFT/etc aren't trying to scrape up every seriously prolific developer on GitHub at $250k+ a year or whatever is beyond me.

Re: If you don’t have pet projects, I don’t think I want you

#49

Post by eropple »

factotvm wrote: post #40
cmorrisrsg wrote: post #20

I actually reject people without pet projects for an entirely different reason. I can find out much more about how you behave as a developer and whether or not you'd fit in with our company by reading your code than I can from any kind of interview or whiteboard challenge. Ideally you'd actually hire the prospective developer for a short contract project before hiring, but that has significant challenges and costs as…

Then give them a coding problem that takes a short amount of time but allows you to evaluate their skills. I relish these opportunities and respect the companies that ask me to do them. To keep with your metaphor, ask the carpenter to make you a cabinet door. Again, I agree with others here... if you're passionate about the startup you're working at (and you should be), that is your side project. I distrust people wh…

A coding problem is less illustrative than a decent--LOC is always suspect, but let's say 10,000 LOC--corpus of work. Something to show much more than a toy problem.

Better still, however, is collaboration with open source projects--you can see individual communication between people as well as the developer's ability to enter a foreign codebase and be productive, (hopefully) without introducing bugs due to ill-advised changes without understanding what's being changed.

(We don't look at side projects or open source at my current employer. I wish we did.)

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