Yeah, it’s very common in other fields to show off side projects. Doctors have examples of all the surgeries they did for fun. Electricians can show off the small power plants they built in their basement. Chemists can walk through the meth lab in the backyard shed. Mechanical engineers can demonstrate the load bearing weight of the bridge they built over a weekend.

Why, exactly, do we expect tech workers to have side projects?

Nice analogy and a thought that could also be extended to a hiring process look-alikes in those and similar fields. I always wondered what is it that shaped the hiring process in software engineering jobs to be that full of scrutiny. Nobody outside the field runs such heavy lifting interviews.

Every career you mention is highly regulated.

So if these fields weren't highly regulated demanding personal projects from candidates would be a good approach for hiring?

Electricians are a service job which usually have references and reviews and a government body which is indirectly required to monitor their performance by collecting complaints.

Doctors are also a service job with references but they also have a surgical record for various surgeries and a board they answer to which can revoke their ability to practice medicine.

Many mechanical engineers will have something they can show from a previous employer because for ME the field is about improving processes/machines, not the machines that are produced. Others also have CAD that they do on their free time. With 3d printers becoming more accessible I have seen some ME students/grads do some cool stuff on the side.

Chemists, that is the only one I don't know anyone in the field and a field which is not very regulated.

I do not follow. None of those you mentioned are personal hobby projects, they're the same kind of references you can ask software engineer for. I'm regularly asked to provide at least 2-3 contact points from my previous jobs but that's largely insufficient to get the offer and is most usually done only at the end of the hiring process (meaning that it probably does not pose a big factor).

So, what's the deal? Why have we ingrained serious doubts when it comes to software engineering skills? Why a 10+ year experienced SE must go through a process of "proving" the skills through 5-6 interviewing rounds while a 10+ year experienced doctor doesn't?

I don't think this correlates to job regulations as some seem to be suggesting here but I also don't have a better answer myself. It's intriguing to me overall.

If I were any good at spotting problems for which writing novel software is a good solution, valuable enough to be worth the time it takes, I wouldn't need an employer because I'd have (or at least be a co-founder of) one or more successful software businesses. The reason I need employment as a dev is precisely because I'm not much good at finding those kinds of problems.

Problems I personally have almost never pass the point on the cost/benefit curve for which it's worth firing up a text editor, and when they do the "solution" is usually a few lines of shell or something similarly trivial. I used to get excited about personal projects, years and years ago, but that was mostly because I didn't realize what solutions already existed so was reinventing the wheel a lot. Plus I just had a whole lot more free time.

I also don't do a lot of plumbing or wiring or wall-framing or drywalling for their own sake. Though I do find a lot more good reasons to do those things in my personal life, than I find good reasons for writing code.

To a lot of good programmers, it's just a fucking job.

IMO 40 hours per week, for weeks on end with very few breaks, is already a shitload of time to spend on a single activity. It's well beyond what I'd willingly spend per week, with that kind of year-round consistency, on anything, including dumb entertainment like playing video games.

good but rarely great, if your looking for great this is a common attribute

> - "Leetcode is unfair" - "Whiteboarding is too stressful" - "Personal projects are biased in favor of people with too much free time..."

It’s not usually the same people saying all those things. People have different preferences.

No matter what hiring method you use you’ll find some group of people criticizing it.