I have no side code projects to show you • Hacker News Board

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#541

Post by bryanrasmussen » Sat, Oct 28, 2017, 6:59 PM UTC

ultrasaurus wrote: post #218

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…

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.

How deep of a reading is your reading of the profile though?

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#542

Post by dang » Sat, Oct 28, 2017, 8:04 PM UTC

ztratar wrote: post #74

It's great you're a passionate person, but this article's tone and implication is saying that's enough, and that projects shouldn't be viewed as a just ask. As a career professional and founder of a career related company, I have some news for you: you clearly have the time and passion to create, but at nearly every chance when you have additional time, you're not putting it into programming. Yes, you've found a job.…

Please don't use uppercase for emphasis: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#543

Post by sobani » Mon, Oct 30, 2017, 12:31 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #484

sobani wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We aren’t talking about people moonlighting as developers. We’re talking about people in the industry working on software every waking hour. Roughly 220 work days a year, 5 hours a day at work if you are full time, 6 if you dabble a bit outside of office hours, that’s around 5 years out of school, which isn’t too far off from my experiences prior to Malcolm Gladwell.

Working != practice.

When I'm building some CRUD interface for my job, there's nothing I'm practicing with that. When I spend my entire day doing that, I've gained 0 relevant hours for Malcom's 10K.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#544

Post by scaryclam » Mon, Oct 30, 2017, 1:59 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #358

justboxing wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is becoming a real problem IMHO. Asking me to do 3 to 4 hours of work on a "test" just to get to a real interview is a big ask. I do it because I have to; but as my time has gotten more valuable I've started just politely refusing and thanking the recruiter for reaching out. I have a ton of stuff on github that I'd much rather talk about.

We generally offer candidates who made it through the 15 minute phone screen to bring along some code to an interview. Quite honestly, it can be their own project or we can supply a simple "test" so that they have something to bring. We make it clear that we're not looking for perfect code samples, or even great ones, just something for the candidate to talk about. This seems to work pretty well, makes sure they're not doing any free work for us, and doesn't ask for much in the way of their free time.

I've had too many "tests" that were a giant waste of my time to ask it of others.

Re: I have no side code projects to show you

#545

Post by warcher » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 3:28 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #328

warcher wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computing is really noisy and chaotic. There are a lot of dudes out there that just can’t cut it, for whatever reason, and there’s no good way to figure out who’s who. Whiteboard stuff selects for a particular algorithmic dexterity that I just don’t need a lot of the time. And rejects some of the grungier virtues that make a big difference in moving units in production. Hiring folks for a couple weeks is fantasticall…

> And there are a whole lot of guys that just don’t ship. They show up. They commit code. They are prompt and attentive at meetings. But if you need to ship, they just can’t shit it out. Inability to ship tends to be a project planning and scoping problem, not an engineering performance problem. If you can't ship, it's not because you have lazy developers but because you either bit off more scope than you could chew,…

I'm kind of a slacker responding to HN stuff, but here's what I'll say:

Yeah, you're right, if shit isn't shipping, it's my fault.

But.

There are a variety of psychological profiles in computing, and they have various pluses and minuses. I need folks with kind of a... move fast and break things attitude. That's what I select for.

Furthermore, the 80/20 rule is a super real thing and the last 1% until a project ships hurts real, real, real bad. There are people who can push through that and there are people who can't. Yeah, it's my fault we're not sipping tea as we ship, but I've been doing this a long time and I'm pretty good at it, and I can't make that pain stop. I just can't. I've been on teams that shipped and suffered, and I've been on teams that didn't ship.

If somebody's cracked this code for me, man, throw me a bone. But while I'm always trying to do better, I also kind of have given up. I'll make it up to you on the other side, I promise, but it's gonna hurt a little pushing it out.