| I think it does the profession a great disservice to present these things as mutually exclusive ie "If I don't do side projects, I am a bad developer". For me I like to think of things in a different light. What I find with side project developers is a certain self-directedness that bodes well for the kind of employees that can thrive in a pure startup environment. The kind of thinking it takes to go ... "I have this problem, Heck, I'm going to hack something together that does what I need" or "this open source tool I use is missing this one feature, I'll just code it and send in a pull request" Then actually take time out of your life to code it up and put it out for use and, even better still, maintain it over a period of time. That tells me that such a person will have no trouble figuring out what they need to do if they go to work for a startup that they're passionate about. It tells me that they'll usually be the kind of people to drive initiatives at bigger firms if they don't lose patience with the politicking, red tape and glacial pace of things. Now, this DOES NOT mean that developers who don't do side projects won't possess these traits as well. Its just that the signal is clearer with the side project types. In the end you still have to go ahead and find out if they're actually good engineers before you hire them |