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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

#521

Post by contras1970 »

0xfeba wrote: post #257
apple4ever wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Best company I worked at looked at my personal site and Github, albeit briefly, ahead of time and didn't ask much if anything about it (IIRC). They asked more peer-level questions. Pretty casual. As my first job out of college they didn't expect much from me but later told me the other devs were impressed. Best group of devs I've ever worked with. All of them were pretty smart, wrote nice code, comments, knew how to…

> the answer was: "HTML5 gave us the tag to replace "

i bet the question was: "what has HTML5 done for us?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#522

Post by kafkaesq »

jogjayr wrote: post #151
eropple wrote: 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."

It doesn't happen too often - but I've had that happen several times, actually. Just like people might pretty much hire you (or invite you to substantially greenlighted interview process - sans whiteboarding or over-the-phone grilling) solely on the basis of a talk you gave, or an impromptu discussion about some topic you're insanely interested in, after meeting you at some event.

Granted, this has been for gigs (or temp-to-perm) situations, not official, up-front fulltime roles. And some of these people ended up being flakey or sketchy (as spontaneous / whimsical people sometimes are). But nonetheless, hired (or substantially fast-tracked into their process, bypassing most of the usual interview crap) - pretty much on the basis of single demo or code sample (or in one case, literally on the basis of a single stats plot).

Because by this point, pretty much everyone knows how silly those live fizzbuzz sesions are anyway - including those administering them.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#523

Post by calibration263 »

TrickyRick wrote: post #467
calibration263 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not going to do free work for you Our industry could follow after the restaurant industry and implement stages/trialing. You come in and work a full day. If you get the job that days pay shows up on your first paycheck, if not they send you out the door with a check.

Doesn't really work for any larger scale product, it's unlikely that any candidate will be productive in their first day. Sure they could build something separate but then the value for the company probably diminishes. Unlike serving dishes the process of making software differs quite a lot between workplaces.

That's not entirely true. The way kitchens are set up/configured, what goes into dishes, how stations are set up, etc can change quite a bit from place to place. Additionally there's usually kitchen slang/words for most items on the menu which need to learned.

Also I've had many dev interns at my company, it takes work on my end to enable them to be productive quickly, but it's not impossible. Maybe you need to write some skeleton code for them to fill out and unit test, maybe you need to document things well and spilt up your tasks well, but you absolutely can have some one come in and be productive day one.

In fact my interview was a college hire group interview, we were given a laptop with skeleton code in multiple languages, a problem to solve with fixed inputs. The problems were similar to what you'd likely encounter for whiteboard coding, except I got to be left alone with a computer, the internet, and my editor of choice to write actual code to solve the problem.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#524

Post by wst_ »

ratsimihah wrote: post #510
nanodano wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What % of candidates have side projects to show you? When I did interviews, I saw probably less than 10% have any side projects to show.

That's a surprising number. Did you interview mostly recent grads?

Not surprising at all. None of my colleagues have anything public. If that's not your thing I struggle to understand why should you.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#525

Post by literallycancer »

lozenge wrote: post #516
literallycancer wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm, not a SV thing, plenty of it in Europe. Nothing to do with prestige, it's a simple "will this monkey jump through hoops" test to see if you'll work in shitty conditions for shitty pay. My go to response is asking them to look at my git instead, which ends the process in about half the cases. The other half they look at it for <5 minutes and point out the error that isn't an error (yes I know what an SQL…

If I came onto your project I'd be trying to fix that SQL injection too. Why don't you add a comment explaining why you know it's safe and why you aren't using the standard way of escaping variables in SQL?

That actually didn't occur to me.

I'm not sure where I'd put the comment, since in the part where router paths are set up, it's self-documenting/obvious that it isn't an issue, and if the person skips that and looks at individual functions only, then I'd have to put it in too many places.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#526

Post by mark-r »

Sean1708 wrote: post #487
cat199 wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hope you guys realize there's more to opensource than github.. show me freebsd or linux kernel contribution on github, for example

Here you go: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/692b48258dda7c302e7... I do understand what you're saying though but I don't think people are going to just search Github for your name on the off-chance that you're on there, I suspect that what most people do is look at the things that you've specifically mentioned in your CV.

Searching Github for your name can backfire. My name is not very common, but there are 2 people on Github that have it and I'm not one of them. I do have a huge body of stuff on StackOverflow though.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#527

Post by mark-r »

kemitche wrote: post #269
notzorbo3 wrote: post #117

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…

No, side projects are not necessary. They're just a signal that you're really into this stuff. Like all signals, it can't be evaluated in isolation. It's no different than preferring candidates who come from a top University.

Some jobs are easier to do on the side than others. I'll bet the gardener has some side projects too.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#528

Post by exodust »

Thiez wrote: post #480
exodust wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of FizzBuzz, I had never heard of the fizzbuzz test until recently in interview. In 15 years of frontend work I've never needed to find if a number is divisible by another number, so I forgot about the modulus operator '%', and stumbled on that question. Apparently not knowing about that made me unqualified for the job, above all other evidence of my frontend work and achievements. It takes less than 10 seco…

There are plenty of ways to write fizzbuzz without the modulus operator, although it is the most obvious way. But you can also combine infinite streams, or keep track of the index of the next "fizz" and "buzz" with simple addition...

Perhaps there are plenty of ways, but finding the remainder of the division is what's needed and in my case the test was pen and paper, with just a small space for the answer and no way to test my code.

It's all good, it wasn't the role for me, I'm more creative dev than programmer and I didn't get a good impression of the company anyway. I've moved on.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#529

Post by ratsimihah »

wst_ wrote: post #524
ratsimihah wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a surprising number. Did you interview mostly recent grads?

Not surprising at all. None of my colleagues have anything public. If that's not your thing I struggle to understand why should you.

And most of my work mates have public open source code.

I would guess the environment candidates are selected from influences these numbers significantly.

And you're right, I'd understand that in some of these environments, OSS isn't necessarily considered fun or relevant.

Then again it's all speculation.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#530

Post by lozenge »

literallycancer wrote: post #525
lozenge wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I came onto your project I'd be trying to fix that SQL injection too. Why don't you add a comment explaining why you know it's safe and why you aren't using the standard way of escaping variables in SQL?

That actually didn't occur to me. I'm not sure where I'd put the comment, since in the part where router paths are set up, it's self-documenting/obvious that it isn't an issue, and if the person skips that and looks at individual functions only, then I'd have to put it in too many places.

I guess I'd put it in the paths, as it's something that needs to be kept in mind while updating the paths. Also in the coding conventions, but it's understandable not to have one on a small project.

Another option is to create a function like _escape_numeric_string that returns its input after asserting the string is numeric and has a comment explaining, and use it everywhere. Although yes, that does mean changing all your individual functions.

Generally if a code reviewer suggests a change it is worth documenting why the change isn't practical. That can be adding a test or adding a comment.

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