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I have no side code projects to show you

codementor.io

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Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#341

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…

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…

One difference is that many "programmers" actually don't do any programming at work. Their hands on experience is a 5 week java course in uni 10 years ago and after thay they have been stuck in meetings or writing brain numbing CRUD in a proprietary domain specific scripting language at $bigco ever since. The only way for many to get actual hands on is to do side projects.

Hair dressers don't have this problem, they are actually cutting hair 8 hours a day.

Carpenters have a more hands on education compared to compsci which is more maths than version control.

Doctors require 2 years of practice supervised by other doctors before they are certified.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'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 office. I don't think it's wrong to work on side project. Some people like or want to. Who am I to judge what they do on their free time? It might happen to overlap with their job, or it might not. But I agree, I don't require my surgeon to do surgery in his spare time. I've worke…

A lot of coders consider coding not only as a job, but also as hobby. Usually they experiment with new stuffs this way, and thus their open source projects at Sourceforge/Github, etc etc.

I don't expect a brain surgeon to mess with somebody's head because he's bored at weekend, though :p

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#343
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…

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.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#344

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…

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 expect a surgeon to stay up to date on the latest in medical technology. And I don't know too many surgeons who clock in at 9am and clock out at 5pm. Many surgeons pull 60-80 hour weeks regularly.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#345
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One company I work for rejected a candidate based on Github - he'd cloned some repos and stamped his name on it, and claimed they were his. The hiring tech smelled something fishy, and the candidate said that he worked with these various other repos on the backend. Hiring tech reached out to the owners of several repos, and none of them had heard of the candidate before. Github was used in this hiring process to reve…

Likewise I've deleted resumes because they claimed to have coded a website when it's clear they simply installed out of the box software. They didn't explicitly lie and say they coded it from scratch, but I felt like they were implying that Another time I rejected due to side work was a candidate claimed to have written the "worlds fastest framework". Even if it was fast it's possible there's something out there fast…

> so it showed lack of touch with reality, ego, and lack of self awareness.

feel like they'll fit right in with any number of startups out there! But good for you on calling them on it.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#346
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…

> 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…

That's because they want to gauge you against other candidates and the only way to do that fairly is with a standardized test.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#347
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…

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."

That's only because most recruiters are non-technical. They lack the ability to gauge your ability.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#348
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…

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."

There was a time, last year, when I'd regularly receive email-SPAM from recruiters talking about one of my C++ projects. (Console based mail-client with Lua scripting.)

Later I moved that project to a github-organization, as it didn't need to be tied solely to me, and I wanted to allow others to commit, etc.

I'm not sure if the SPAM-mails went away because recruiters stopped scanning github for profiles, or because there was no obvious link between that particular project and my personal email.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#349
Just make a whatever tiny commit in your own public github repo. Its just the way interviews work these days,in a sense its like lying on your resume, its there and only 1 out of a 1000 will check it. I get you are pissed at the concept but as i said just work around it.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#350
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'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 office. I don't understand how you equate doing side code projects to not bringing clear focused mind to the office. Would you also much rather bring a well rounded individual who does not take art classes after work? Do you think taking arts classes after work would affect one's…

Thanks for pointing this out. Working on my humble side projects is the hiking/cooking/traveling of my life. I spend my free time programming for the same reason the author doesn't spend his free time programming: because life is too short not to do what you love when you can. Making progress on these projects helps me to be more present in other aspects of my life, like my job and my marriage.
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