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?
That is a bad analogy. Supply/demand ratio of musicians is way higher then for developers.
I agree that it is a bad analogy, but I think it goes far beyond supply and demand differences: Music is performed mostly by muscle memory, "system 1", while code is developed mostly by ratiocination, "system 2".
That's because they want to gauge you against other candidates and the only way to do that fairly is with a standardized test.
I see the point, but some of these tests can take several hours or longer to complete. I think they shoot themselvess in the foot a bit because many of the really good devs won't waste their time with that. My evidence is all purely anecdotal, however.
If all you've got is a foot-gun, everything looks like a foot.
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.
>Good employers care. I care. Its not signaling. Its important. It's not important. There are plenty of good companies who don't do these things that manage to pay developers $100k salaries. They may assess in other ways, but it's not the only signal. It's only important to you. You choose what you want to see in candidates. You need buy-in from the candidates that your process is conducive to a good environment, goo…
For me, a marginal pay increase is only a differentiator when comparing two otherwise equally ranked opportunities. I once left a 300k job to take a 180k job on the basis of work content, cultural fit, and optionality. But, I make most of my money by holding XMR, so the difference in pay doesn't determine my quality of life - nor my ability to exercise charity - which is, practically, the same thing.
For the first many years, I was this way (considering coding as a job and a hobby). I guess it still is in many ways, but as I've gotten older I've started to feel the burnout more. If I spend my weekend doing anything on my computer, I feel it on Monday and just want to do something different.
Personally, I've lately been considering the opposite: getting out of coding as a job, so that I can continue to love it as a hobby.
Yeah, I tried that. Turns out I missed coding at work a lot and will now go back to it.
From what I have seen, most developers aren't working on anything particularly interesting in their day jobs. At best they are developing a new CRUD application using the latest framework, but at worst they are maintaining legacy codebases, battling management incompetence etc. It can be very hard to sound passionate about these things in an interview. In my view this is where side projects come in - they're the chance to do something actually interesting, which can be a great talking point in an interview.
Shit developers will be shit developers. Everyone can claim they are a developer if they don't have to show code. Heck, you can be anything as long as you don't have to prove it.
My motivation for (and lack of ideas for) side projects has dwindled over the years.
Most of my "side projects" are throwaway pieces of code or scripts that do silly things, or ironically are solutions to "cracking the coding interview" style problems.
>Its not free work, its a demonstration of skill. Was it paid? If not, then it's free work. Call it whatever you want, in my experience the people talking about passion the most are those that are just looking to pay the least they possibly can.
If you were hiring a musician, and you asked them to perform an audition. Would you accept the response, "Sorry, I don't work for free." "Well do you have any recordings you can show me instead?" "No, I do other things with my free time. I don't work outside of work."
Auditions don't usually take several hours, do they?
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…
People who have only recently completed their 10,000 hours don’t understand that there are diminishing returns, and that learning something else entirely may help you more than doubling down on your narrow skill set. Some of the things you can learn outside of this field are what overtraining is (actually not that different from the AI concept), perspective on the learning and teaching process, the importance of prep…
Besides the fact that many consider the 10,000 hours a myth, please keep in mind that the theory is about 10,000 hours of practice.
I bet that even people who have spend 20 years on side projects haven't reached those 10K hours of practice yet.
