[ifhd]

I work on internal tools for a major company. You can't see them, some I probably shouldn't even tell you about.

When I get home I play video games and watch tv and play with my dog. sometimes I'll screw around with a new language or something else. I don't post stuff on github and keep a blog or anything else like that.

I think your view is pretty myopic. Ask me to talk for 30 minutes about one of my projects and force me to answer some tough questions about it. whiteboard some designs.

Maybe I should just hire some guys off a freelance site to write me some side projects.

[warcher]

This will sound flippant, but you can’t win them all.

There are hordes of false negatives in any hiring process, anyplace. My process is more accurate IMHO but it’s indisputably more work and it does not scale at all. Ultimately everybody is going to beef with any criteria they don’t align well with and I have to remain flexible enough to not throw the baby out with the bath water. I don’t mind getting drug a little on HN— I have a good team, and their open source contributions might not be as impressive as you assume.

[59nadir]

> When I get home I play video games and watch tv and play with my dog. sometimes I'll screw around with a new language or something else. I don't post stuff on github and keep a blog or anything else like that.

Presumably you also don't think people should stop thinking side projects and public code is important in hiring. You've made a choice to not have these things and asking the world to change one of the few sane things in hiring because you just don't fit the mold is a whole other story than just accepting that this is something you lack that could potentially sway an employer.

As another comment said: You can't win 'em all.

By chance, I happened to have a pretty productive few years on GitHub and having no degree I still managed to land the first job I went to interview for, in part because of my GitHub profile. Am I "for" the current situation because it benefited me at the time? No, because I think it's a clearer indicator that a colleague won't be a nightmare to work with than a degree or if he can implement the correct data structure on a whiteboard.

[lucaspiller]

As somebody who has been on the hiring side (not the hiring-manager, just the technical person assigned with deciding whether someone looks like they are what we want or not), I've often just been given a CV after they've been 'pre-screened' by HR.

The issue is I'm usually given a bunch of CVs, and I need to fit this in to whatever other work I've got going on (probably too much already which is why we are hiring). I can arrange interviews, but that probably means I'll need to stay after hours (a lot of people can't just take an hour off in the afternoon to go for an interview), so it's in my best interests to filter down that list. Plus arranging interviews won't just happen the next day - although we need someone yesterday, just deciding who we want to hire is going to take another few weeks.

If I can see that you've got some open source projects or a blog or anything to show how you work, it really helps to make you stand out from everyone else, because most people don't have anything to show. If I had a candidate that looked good, I wouldn't throw them away because they didn't have any side-projects, but if I've got two candidates who both look good on paper, that probably would be the deciding factor.

So yes, hiring someone to build some side-projects for you might be beneficial. At the very least you could use it as a management side-project :D

Another place I worked at gave a small programming assignment (build something to import a CSV into a database). It was pretty simple, and would take you no more than two hours, but it was rather good to see how people work and whether they could follow instructions (>50% of candidates ignored the "write tests" line). This was used to screen people for an interview, during which we would ask them questions about it.

[rhizome]

You work at a major company, you have some different quality signals available to you that can obviate all of this.