[davidw]

None of these things are perfect - I agree with you about quizzes and the like.

> Let them show off recent personal projects. They'll probably have no problem spending a weekend hacking on something they're passionate about.

Nope. Not spending my weekend fooling around to impress some potential employer. I'm going to spend it with my kids, riding my bike, and enjoying life.

[enraged_camel]

>> Nope. Not spending my weekend fooling around to impress some potential employer. I'm going to spend it with my kids, riding my bike, and enjoying life.

Okay, it is time for some harsh love. You won't like it, and I'll get downvotes, but whatever. It needs to be said.

My parents are both doctors, and they are in their 60s now. And you know what? They still work their asses off, on many evenings and weekends, trying to stay up-to-date with new developments in their respective fields. My dad just got back from an ophthalmology conference in Europe. My mom is a guest speaker at a pathology conference and she has been preparing furiously. And it has been like this _all my life_.

So yeah, I detest this sense of entitlement that programmers have, where they want to a) get paid a lot and b) have lots of free time on the side. How about this instead: if you want to have a high salary, then it is reasonable for people to expect you to make certain sacrifices, such as work on your own projects on the side experimenting with new technologies and ideas. Don't like it? Well, it may be time to pick another profession...

[themarkn]

I’m not sure that the lesson to be learned from the medical profession’s overburdening of its professionals is that other well paid industries should follow suit and overburden their own professionals.

[CompanionCuuube]

Is the medical profession unique in that way? Do lawyers not need to keep up with existing legislation and case law? I know research scientists that use alerting tools for getting notified about publications covering their subject.

[themarkn]

Sure, I just used medical as the example because that’s what the parent comment talked about. There are many other industries with problems maintaining a good work/life balance for people who work there. Often those gigs are lower paid than tech work. I worked many more hours and had a more stressful, less predictable life when I worked at a nonprofit, before I became a developer. Now I mostly work 9-5, sometimes an extra hour or two here and there but no expectation that I’m doing stuff outside of work. I have some side projects, meetups etc that I spend time on, but can also spend time at work learning new things or trying stuff out.

[shawnz]

Then salaries in our industry need to decrease if we don't want to be held to a standard of overburdening ourselves.

The salaries in our industry have a precedent which was set by individuals that overburdened themselves. That might have been irrational, but if we want to change that, then we need to accept less pay. We can't have the same rewards as they did while doing less work, even if the amount of work they did was unreasonable.

[themarkn]

We aren’t being rewarded for how hard we work, we’re being rewarding for having skills that are in high demand while supply has not caught up yet. Salaries may well go down in future when the need for developers is less or the pool of talent is bigger. We also aren’t trapped by the examples set by previous developers - our productivity varies depending on what we are doing, the tools we are using, what our team is like, etc - not just the raw number of hours we put in.

[eropple]

Nonsense and worse words. It's a market. Undervaluing ourselves only hurts ourselves.

The net revenue per software developer at any even moderately successful tech company is so eye-poppingly high that demanding a solid cut of it is still a bargain.

[CodeMage]

> So yeah, I detest this sense of entitlement that programmers have, where they want to a) get paid a lot and b) have lots of free time on the side.

That mentality reminds me of the 2014 commercial for Cadillac ELR Coupe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNzXze5Yza8

It's not entitlement to want work-life balance and be paid well for your skills.

[linuxftw]

Start paying me doctor money and I'll do all that stuff.

I'm currently under a wide intellectual property assignment that would cover 'side projects' so I don't really do them as I'm not giving away my ideas for free.

[shados]

> I detest this sense of entitlement that programmers have

I don't agree with all of your post (but do some of it). However at the pace companies are expanding their hiring net, the supply and demand ratios are going to flip sooner or later. The current seller's market isn't going to last and a lot of folks will have a serious reality check.

[somebodythere]

How do companies expanding their hiring net decrease demand?

[shados]

They don't? Demand is increasing.

However as the sources for software developer expand (and the barrier for entry goes down, along with more people going into the field), the availability is drastically going to outpace it.

We had a very short period of time where even entry level engineers with no CS degrees had companies begging them to join them, but that's quickly going away, and its slowly creeping up the ladder.

If you're a principal engineer or even "only" a senior one, you're likely still at a point where you have people trying to woo you every single day. That's not gonna last.

[davidw]

Do hospitals expect doctors to work on some patients for free over the weekend to see if they're worth hiring?

I'm guessing no.

[enraged_camel]

Hospitals don't expect that and the reason is obvious: the medical field is highly regulated, and you need to go through nearly a decade of grueling education and training before you earn your medical degree.

Programming could not be more different. Not only is our field as unregulated as fields can go, but the hiring pool is also full of self-taught developers. Therefore, yes, it is in fact reasonable to have people go to great lengths to prove their skills to potential employers.

[ghostpepper]

Hospitals expect doctors to have up to date skills, whether they learned them on the job or in their "free time". Doing medicine on a person and writing some code that will never be used in production are not really comparable.

[davidw]

To me there's a difference between

* Keeping skills up to date and occasionally spending a bit of my own time on it. And I mean legit new and interesting things, not just some BS rehashing of an old idea or other churn.

* An emergency situation at work where some extra time and dedication are required. I'm not going to tell the company that I couldn't be bothered to fix the web site that's down because it's 1715 and I'm heading home.

* Professional conferences or learning that might take up some extra time outside of work.

* Doing some random BS over the weekend.

[walshemj]

That's more the profession demands it and those seminars are mostly in working time I actually got asked to goto such a seminar as an example of a rare expression of Sarkoidosis.

[walshemj]

Why do they not certainly in the UK Doctors have both good leave entitlements (and fabulous DB pensions) and can legally work on the side.

And the pay for a senior Doctor is what 4 to 5 times what a senior developer would get

[knd775]

In the UK, developer pay is quite low. In the US, devs are much closer to doctors in pay, and can potentially earn more than most doctors.

[chrismatheson]

Technology’s main usage/promise is to make us all more efficient and rid us of the dependency on pure time & effort for outcomes. It’s like the definition of work smart not hard.

Personally I think this is why you see a ton of people who live and breath tech think in terms of low time, high impact.

High impact should equal high compensation.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I'm going to add my thoughts in agreement, mainly because I see the following sentiments fairly commonly:

1. "Coding quizzes" are arbitrary and unfair in a technical interview!

2. Take home projects as part of the interview process are unfair because I've got a busy life!

3. No, I don't have lots of side projects to show because I've been working for the past 15 years and all the IP I've worked on is owned by my current/prior employers.

To add to your harshness, if all those three things above are true, (a) maybe you're not as good a developer as you think you are, and (b) as someone who has done a lot of hiring, I am certainly able to find folks who will (pretty enthusiastically, I'd add) fulfill at least one of those tasks (i.e. in-person coding questions, take home problem, or extensive existing personal projects/open source), even in today's competitive market.

[CodeMage]

The sentiments you presented there are extremes, just like your own position is the opposite extreme. The reality, as usual, is somewhere in the middle:

1. Even the best designed and well thought-out coding quizzes are not guaranteed to be a good predictor of the candidate's abilities. And that's when we're talking about the best. A great deal of coding quizzes currently in use are things interviewers came up with because they had to come up with something. So I guess the real sentiment is: coding quizzes need to be crafted and used better.

2. If you use take-home projects in your interview process, you'll invariably be filtering out people who value their free time, regardless of their skills. Put yourself in your candidates' shoes. A typical hiring process is already quite involved. Your candidate has to set aside the time for a recruiter chat, phone screen, a meeting with some of your team, etc. And the vast majority of devs don't get any overtime pay. The bottom line is that free time is extremely valuable. If you're asking your candidates to spend a weekend coding a project for free, be prepared for a whole bunch of them to lose interest and go looking somewhere else.

3. Yes, it's quite reasonable that a candidate with 15+ years of experience doesn't have any side projects to show. I've lost count of things I've played and fiddled with, and then abandoned, because they're simply not good enough to publish. Not to mention that your responsibility for your code doesn't end when you publish it. You're expected to maintain it, keep it documented, bug free, etc. A candidate might not have anything to show because they're "not good enough", but they also might be a mature and responsible dev.

I don't doubt that you've done a lot of hiring and that you're able to find candidates to suit your requirements, but don't fool yourself into thinking that there isn't a whole bunch of bias baked into your process. The fact that this bias isn't hurting you right now should make you question whether today's market really is as competitive as you think.

[knd775]

As long as it's not a requirement or expected, I think it's fine. If someone has side projects they're proud of, I think it would be helpful to both parties for them to be brought up.

[davidw]

Oh, sure; side projects that people have worked on for fun over the years are a good thing to have and should be a potential avenue to show off one's abilities.