Whereas, in the overall population of IT workers, that percentage will be far far smaller.
For what little it's worth - I'm now a middle-manager (ick) in a traditional large IT company (ick ick), and neither myself nor the recruiting / HR teams I work with have ever once looked for, demanded, or even seen side projects. The UNIX SYSADMINs, Oracle & DB2 DBAs, VMWare specialists, application developers, testers, etc... they're all dedicated professionals but not necessarily zealots. Some of them will tinker and do certs and play with stuff off hours, most of them don't, but all I strictly care about is can you do your actual job professionally when and where I'm paying you. We do encourage learning, and have incentives for taking courses, reading books, etc. But we don't expect you to do unpaid work. As a sibling comment indicated, on operations side we work hard enough that I encourage team members to unwind and take care of their family, needs, hobbies, mental health, life goals etc when they're offline.
(My personal 100 Croatian Lipa, all opinions are my own, etc :-)
* Must be a rock star, experienced developer with at least 100 years experience, but also not too old
* Must have previous experience as lead developer of open projects such as Postgres, Linux, LibreOffice or similar, in addition to full time employment
* Must be willing to work for significant below market wages in exchange for a lottery ticket that might be worth billions
When I got rejected from Google the feedback was I should do more open source work.
If an interviewee reached out to me for feedback, and I weren't comfortable giving honest feedback[1], that's probably what I would tell them.
[1] There is no reason I should ever be comfortable giving honest feedback, every bit of interviewer training anyone has ever taken will tell you as much.
Yeah it didn't even make sense so I'm sure it was a generic 'you're not good enough' answer. I had hundreds of thousands of lines in a major open source project at the time. Not sure I could really do any more anyway!
Nope.
Logical fallacy.
FAANG needs to hire thousands. Startups I've been at need to hire maybe 1-3 people at a time. Best CEOs I've met spent a ton of time recruiting those 1-3. Best strategy is to look at something others aren't looking at -- any other source of signal. If your hiring process is like FAANG, you're competing with $350k+ compensation packages. If you can find good developers who FAANG can't, and there are plenty, you'll have a much easier time.
A hiring process which selects for 10% or even 1% is plenty fine for a startup. 1% of developers in the US nets you 3000 people.
Best managers I've worked with hire through side channels which FAANG doesn't look at. If I'm a startup CEO/CTO/etc. I can afford to read code in your github. FAANG can't. Indeed, I can afford to browse github to find good people doing similar work, and work on getting them to join.
I'm not going to post my favorite ways to hire, since they'll lose signal if more people adopt them, but:
(1) they typically find on the order of a dozen people (and exclude far more than 1:10)
(2) all the people they find tend to be good
(3) I'll usually need to extended 3-4 job offers before someone takes one
Better's CTO has several blog articles on this -- a great read!
How to hire smarter than the market: a toy model[1]
Interviewing is a noisy prediction problem[2]
1: https://erikbern.com/2020/01/13/how-to-hire-smarter-than-the...
2: https://erikbern.com/2018/05/02/interviewing-is-a-noisy-pred...
I literally received a job offer not long ago from a very high profile startup that only has a handful of employees, based on my Github
I once interviewed someone who listed authorship of a paper on his résumé. I skimmed it and, curious, asked a question about it in the interview. He looked surprised and told me I was the only person who'd ever even mentioned it.
Everyone then proceeds to examine said resume closer ~10 mins prior to the meeting when their email pings them that they have an upcoming interview scheduled.
The most wrong thing I have been told about adulthood. Doing homework at the last minute is hardly just a kids thing.
Meanwhile, adults were telling me it was the best time of my life, or that if I was stressed out and struggling now, just wait until I got to the "real world".
LOL, WTF? The real world is so much easier and less demanding. Even the couple times over Summers or early on when I worked low-wage unskilled jobs, it was easier and less stressful. All high school did was give me mental problems and a decade of nightmares.
I went to an expensive out of state school and it just felt like the stakes were so much higher. A bad exam could lead to a low GPA, loss of scholarship, being pushed out a program or major, academic probation, etc.
In the working world I met so many successful people who failed at some point, have a criminal record, poor credit scores, bad employment records, etc. and it never seems to go as bad as it's portrayed.
Even creditors don't scare me anymore. I just tell em to fuck off, verify the debt, and never contact me by phone ever again. A younger me would freak out about my credit score if a collector called. Because I thought that's what mature adults worry about.
In the real world I'm generally only working one project at a time with only one group of people. And crucially we can fire people from the project who don't contribute.
Remember this was in the late 90s so it was all OpenGL immediate mode and I didn't have a 3D accelerator so it had to run at a reasonable framerate on a 75Mhz CPU. Luckily we didn't have to texture anything, flat shaded polys were fine.
Another project was a web application with a database backend that was basically just IMDB. Of course this was the 90s so it was CGI.
Sadly there was no Git either. CVS was it, but since everybody was on dialup modem and there were not cloud services you could use it didn't work so well. One had to be good at compartmentalizing mostly. One guy would work on one part and someone else would work on a totally different part and integration was always fun.
Granted, I went to a pressure filled high school, but nothing came close to being as demanding as that, even engineering school.
As a staunch advocate of teaching the humanities and someone who thinks the "what k-12 education needs is math education that looks more like what the 0.1% of people who are math nerds wish they'd been taught" folks are dead wrong, I still think high schools ought to re-consider having every class be the same length, and maybe cut some of their social studies and history entirely (because it's almost never well-taught enough to be worthwhile) so the homework portion of mid- and high-level math classes can be brought into the school day proper. It'd be a much better use of time, and I think having a teacher available for questions and guidance during "homework" time would do wonders for math comprehension and test scores.
Though how schools would justify giving their coaches full teacher salaries without as many history and social studies classes for them to teach, is an open question.
But at my high school, they did.
I was sure to carve out exceptions for all of my side projects in my employment contract, they did not argue about it.
Finding someone who'll learn new things in their spare time for fun is much cheaper than training.
A side project is interesting, shows initiative, and if it comes down to you and another otherwise equal candidate - it may well be the deciding factor in a hiring decision.
On top of that, hiring aside: the skills and expertise I’ve gained from a side project have been invaluable, and even for this reason alone I’d say it has been well worth it.
Most of the things I've had to do at work are very mundane things. Many boil down to shoveling JSONs around from one system to another or dealing with another former coder's bullshit. The actually interesting, hard tech knowledge I have comes mostly from spare time explorations.
I was asked at an interview about CANbus once, and that's not something I would have known from work, but I aced the question because I did quite a bit of side project hacking at reading a car's sensors.
2. If there was a lot of work on your GitHub or a really interesting project, I'd riffle through it.
3. If you had a bunch of good public code, that was a good signal, and you'd likely get an interview.
If you didn't put a GitHub profile, no problem. If you put one that was blank, then you at least lost some time from my review of your application having me click through, so it probably hurt you at least a minor amount.
I'm pretty sure some job seekers have figured this out, because I've seen some threadbare github repos put forth on resumes.
I also see a related strategy where they're populated, but in a way that will fool someone who isn't familiar with how GitHub works. I always open them if you give them to me because even a glance can tell me a lot, and I've seen a number now that are basically three-ish forked repos, among which there is maybe one commit from the user total that makes a small documentation change or something. I'm thinking some job seekers may have noticed that it's easy to build a github profile in which you have a lot of impressive stuff on it, but if you dig in, the job seeker isn't responsible for any of it. They just pushed "fork" on a few repos and a token commit somewhere.
I reluctantly suggest that this is probably a good strategy in general, though it may knock you out of the running with an interview with anyone clueful enough to notice this strategy, so, you know, consider the costs & benefits for your situation.
1) current company tier 2) roughly relevant experience (in broad strokes - frontend or backend) 3) university tier (less relevant as you gain work experience) 4) a distant fourth is hackathon/side-project experience (though this is quite useful for college students)
From an interviewer's standpoint, it's much better to have a standard set of questions that you give every candidate, so you can judge candidates against each other relatively fairly and objectively. Assuming a candidate has any side projects that demonstrate any expertise at all, it's a ton of work to dig into one of them enough to get an idea of how that person works. It's almost never worth the time, just ask your standard questions instead.
It depends on what they are looking for. Some managers don't care what the project is. They want to see that you can learn new things, have a creative mind, have spare time (that they can hopefully capitalize on), etc.
Prior professional work is the important part, but personal projects become important if you're straight out of college. I know my Android apps helped me get a job. They never looked at the code, but I was able to demo the apps right on my phone and comment on some basic stuff.
For many candidates one just finds fairly empty repositories with 3-4 commits, sometimes Jupiter notebooks from a coursera course, etc. I hardly find it interesting.
1 in 20 candidates may actually mention an open-source project they contribute to or started and I think this is interesting.
But as a prospective employee, I'd want to work at a place where those count. I want colleagues who are passionate about their tools and tech. Not just people who churn out "solutions" and "applications" for someone else's problem in a Blub language. I want to work at a place where people appreciate open source contributions, because that's not a place where people violate the GPL or do the minimum neccessary to appease the lawyers. I want to work at a place where people appreciate design taste and are happy that I put in a mere half day more work to make the product polished, instead of rushing it to the door prematurely (in chase of profit now, but detrimentally long term).
So, as a picky job searcher, I would totally put up a portfolio and clean up my GitHub. Even if only to see if they notice.
Tech hiring, and most hiring really, is broken.
I was rejected in an interview last year within seconds of the interview starting because my answer to "what would you do if you suddenly had a bunch of free time" was not relevant enough to the job.
For the record, my answer was that I'd learn basic 2D animation, because I have a deep respect for the people who do it, and I have no real clue how it's done. I also had relevant education on my CV, and the interview was for a graduate position.
That most places are looking for side projects may be a myth; there certainly are, however, at least some places that look for them.
PhDs typically walk into senior roles depending on what they did for their thesis and what types of code they developed.
It's not a myth depending on the industry (software as profit-center vs cost-center) -- or type of company (startup vs mature company).
E.g. HN skews towards startups so the excerpts from the most recent "Who is hiring?" thread[1] often mention Github profile as desirable (but not mandatory).
On the other hand, the programming where IT-as-a-cost-center where development is CRUD work like moving zipcode field on a webpage ... those types of jobs advertised on Monster.com won't mention that they're looking for Github side projects.
All that said... with real-life statistics being what they are... Since most programmers don't have Github side projects, it means that hiring managers that asked for Github side projects may end up hiring 100% staff with no side projects -- because those were the only hiring candidates that applied.
Some excerts from the most recent "Who is hiring?" thread[1]:
>To apply, please send an up-to-date: [...] - Personal website, GitHub profile, or any representative examples of code you have written recently that reflect your engineering capabilities -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27818013
>Please provide a CV and links to previous work or projects, ideally with contributions visible on Github. -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27700557
>Please contact [email protected] with your resume. Not required, but side projects and github contributions are helpful and appreciated. -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27699747
>To apply, send your CV with your GitHub profile and an answer to the below questions to work @ fingerprintjs.com -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27703097
>Interested? We want to hear from you! Please send resume, Github, or LinkedIn to [email protected]. -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27701022
The myth is that most companies only want people with lots of side projects.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any companies who will take side projects into consideration, as in your examples. The myth is that side projects are a prerequisite for getting the job, which isn’t even true in the examples you selected.
I do understand your point but just to be pedantic about interpreting op's phrasing of "are looking for people who do lots of side projects"...
I've personally never interpreted that to mean "if you don't have a Github profile, you are unhireable" so the "looking for people" didn't mean prerequisite but simply a weighting to help choose between candidates.
The Who's Hiring excerpts of Github projects being desirable-not-mandatory seemed to match the intended meaning of the op's premise even if their exact phrasing doesn't satisfy language lawyers and makes them appear naive.
I wouldn't expect recruiters or hiring managers to be able to read code or appreciate its quality or complexity; but what about the engineers who conduct technical interviews? Would they not be interested to learn as much as they can about the candidate, especially if that candidate, if hired, will join their team?
You will be lucky if they read your resume at all, and when they do, it'll likely be on their phone as they walk down the hall to the interview room.
Resumes are mostly to get past the HR filter, and maybe impress the hiring manager - the engineer interviewing cares how you perform in the room itself.
Also at a lot of big companies, interviewing is not for specific teams, so the odds of someone they haven't specifically headhunted ending up on their team is low.
As an aside, unlike other comments, I do read all resumes of candidates that make it to the interview stage in detail and ask questions about it to try and get a sense of whether there's any inflation going on or not.
I rarely look at resumes before I start the interview. Even if I did, I’m not going to peruse the candidate’s GitHub profile. The majority are pretty sparse or not relevant, and not worth the effort.
This is the first thing I do, because seeing the code you write is the very best story of them all. Maybe every person I've worked with who came in with weak skills demonstrated in GitHub was terminated between 2 weeks and 5 months later.
For every ten that don’t, there’s one that does. Probably the same recruiters who lurk on HN.
Depends on the company. Many companies use the Equifax Work Number database. Example article about it: https://www.fastcompany.com/40485634/equifax-salary-data-and...
A google search query if you want to dig around some more: https://www.google.com/search?q=Equifax+%22Work+Number%22+%2...
This is a myth.
The number of candidates I interview who have side projects worth looking at or open source contributions is maybe 1-in-10 at most. Any company that requires candidates to have significant open source contributions is going to have a hard time hiring, because it’s not very common.
Really, the only time side projects are valuable is when someone needs to fill gaps in their resume. For example, if all of your prior experience was writing PHP backend code but you wanted to apply to a React front-end role, it could be helpful to have something like a React TODO app in your GitHub profile to show that you have some minimal experience with React and front-end work. You don’t need a massive open-source contribution that takes months and months of free time, just something small to show that you have some amount of experience that isn’t reflected in your resume.
The side project myth is getting out of control. Most recruiters and hiring managers will never even open your GitHub profile.