[kenjackson]

In my spare time I'm working on making the next million for my company. Oh, when I'm not working for my company? I'm with my family or friends.

I feel like the energy I could spend doing a side project is probably better spent getting these last two features in, or fixing those lingering bugs, or getting that automation solid, etc....

It seems really odd to actually penalize someone who leaves it all on the floor. It's like a basketball player saying, "If you really want to see my skills, come to the park. The NBA is just my paycheck." -- is that the guy you want on your team? The guy who will tell his next employer, "Company XYZ paid the bills, but my real cool work is this GitHub project I did on the side".

[famousactress]

is that the guy you want on your team? The guy who will tell his next employer, "Company XYZ paid the bills, but my real cool work is this GitHub project I did on the side"

I'll bite. Yeah. I want that guy. I want that guy because he's got energy and enthusiasm to burn, and I'm confident I can give him a place to use it.. Additionally, we'd love to see more open source projects come out of what we're working on..

I feel like the energy I could spend doing a side project is probably better spent getting these last two features in, or fixing those lingering bugs, or getting that automation solid, etc....

Awesome, if this was how it works, but it's not. The people that get itchy enough to bang out these projects on the side need to keep building stuff. Great stuff. I burn out on bug fixes, and automation.. and sometimes I feel like working on something different, so I bang on a new cache library for Django, or write something a little tangential to what we're currently iterating on. In my case, I'm really stoked with all of the problems we have that need doing, so none of my 'side-projects' are totally sideways to the values of our company... but lots of them aren't exactly high priorities :)

[kenjackson]

Awesome, if this was how it works, but it's not. The people that get itchy enough to bang out these projects on the side need to keep building stuff. Great stuff. I burn out on bug fixes, and automation.

This actually might the crux of the difference. While we have an open moonlighting policy the people that work here are a lot more likely to use the extra coding energy on something directly related to the priorities we have. There's no shortage of things to do. And t's not like you spend three straight weeks fixing bugs -- there's plenty of diversity in things that we need to in the business -- and I suspect most companies I'd want to work at are similar.

And again, I'm not necessarily against side projects. But it seems like an odd way to measure a potential employees passion to the job. It does seem like a great way to measure their passion for side projects, but we generally aren't hiring people explicitly to work on side projects. It seems like a much better way to measure their job passion is to see what they actually did at their job -- look at what they shipped.

If they shipped a crap product, but had a cool side project, what is that really saying? If anything its telling you to NOT hire them, but to get them interested in your product on the side! :-)

[c4se]

It really depends on the situation. At my last job the pay wasn't great and there was no profit sharing or stock options. At least they had interesting projects for me to work on, but still they got me for 8 hours and I did my own projects on the side.

My current employer has profit sharing, I love the work we do and there's always more interesting work to do than a 10 hour day allows. So now the projects I do at home are my pet projects for work that excite me but aren't part of my core tasks.

The question is "Is this someone passionate about programming?" and involvement with open source projects are a great way to find that out, but it's not the only way.

Some one who shows initiative and puts in extra work for a company they're excited about show's just as much passion for programming.

It's that programmer who puts in their hour and a half of coding in between reddit posts and forgets about it when 5 oclock hits that you want to stay away from.

[slashdot]

I think you make a good point. But I also think that in high school, yeah, I want the guy who spends a whole lot of time in the park playing ball, because he's the guy who's gonna make it into the NBA. It takes a big time investment to get really good at something. So, do senior devs need to have a github account? Maybe. Should a junior dev? Definitely.

[sminnee]

Your analogy breaks down because the NBA is televised. If you're allowed to show some of your daytime work to an interviewer, by all means do that.

[kenjackson]

Only part of sport is televised. You don't see camp or practice, which is a big part of the game too. The game you watch on TV is like the shipping product. The code is like the practices, camp, training, etc...

My point is the lead dev for Angry Birds ends up at your desk and it seems almost pompous to say, "Where's your GitHub app?" This person broke his neck to ship, upgrade, and maintain a product that you can look at (the NBA game), yet a lot of people still seem to be saying, "w/o seeing your code (your practice sessions) I need the GitHub repo" (I need to watch you play at the park).

I guess as an employer this works to my advantage if more startups require GitHub accounts, since I can pick off proven talent that doesn't have this requirement. So yeah... it's a great idea! :-)

EDIT: And I should add that I was responding to someone who said that if you aren't working on something in your spare time that this is a red flag. So according to that poster, simply having great code from my "daytime" job isn't sufficient. Kobe Bryant NBA footage isn't sufficient. If he doesn't also play pickup games there must be a problem?!

[famousactress]

It also breaks down because virtually no one in the NBA has only the NBA as their employer. At the very least they have sponsorships, many own businesses.. successful people just tend to be hustlers. Hustlers do lots of things.

[Locke1689]

Uh, your company is already paying you -- unless you're getting paid a bonus proportional to the stuff you're writing I see no point to give your company that. You made your company money, but your best ideas and projects should be for you. You work hard and earn your salary, but that's it.