[morgante]

I'm fine with only hiring people who have done some work outside their workplace. If they're really great at programming, they have the drive to try new things outside work. Indeed, a couple good personal projects is probably the best predictor of skill you could find.

(Skill and interest tend to be highly correlated.)

[kelnos]

I used to believe that as well. Now I'm not so sure, mainly through my own personal experience.

For 5.5 years (2004-2009), I was a core developer and maintainer over at Xfce. Over that span of time I wrote tens of thousands of lines of code, perhaps more. I did this in addition to my job, which morphed from engineering project management to programming tasks that I didn't find very challenging.

After I left that job, I joined a tiny, early startup. The programming work there I found very challenging, and the insane hours quickly ate up any spare time I might put toward Xfce. Eventually I realized that lacking a life outside of work made me sad, so I left. Fast forward a little bit, and now I'm at another startup, which (while demanding, challenging, and rewarding) gives me time for outside pursuits and a social life. But I don't feel the desire to work on personal coding projects anymore. The job fulfills my desire to write code, and outside of that I'd rather be, well... outside.

It's interesting, because all my Xfce contributions are on git.xfce.org, and not on GitHub. My GitHub account contains 2 personal projects: a semi-finished Android UI library (which was really only relevant and useful in the 2.x days), and a script for building a Gentoo image for a Raspberry Pi (which I've since abandoned as I mainly run Debian nowadays). Looking at my GH account would be fairly unimpressive, and might even be worse than not having a GH account at all.

So I'd easily fail the GitHub test. If a particular company was making that a no-go for getting through an interview pipeline, well... their loss, I guess.

I'm responsible for a fair bit of hiring at my current company, and I rarely ask about personal projects anymore, unless a candidate has one listed on their resume. While I'm not always happy with the coding problems I usually give (they tend to be data-structure/algo problems that I'd probably have trouble solving in an interview setting), they do at least clearly show whether or not the candidate can write code, and I also get a rough idea of how cleanly they code, not to mention insights in how they approach and solve problems. And not being able to completely solve the problem isn't an auto-fail in my book either, as long as they tried to work on it and their approach (and whatever code they did write) was sound.

I do very strongly believe in the aptitude test + work sample formula as the best way to evaluate candidates, but the problem is more that it's not always so easy to apply those tests in a traditional interview setting. Maybe that just means we need to come up with a different way of interviewing, though.

[danielweber]

I have a bunch of personal projects, but few of them are on github, and the ones on github are not done under my real name, because I find the concept of me having to work on nights and weekends to impress future employers offensive.

My personal projects also include things like my very playing around with a new language (so it is freaking ugly and so I would never want it used as a job indicator) and old abandoned projects that I've salvaged and updated as a favor to friends, which means the entire architecture is alien and "I Don't Care If It's Ugly Just Make It Work Because Right Now It Does Not Work At All" is exactly what the 'client' wants.

I also reverse-engineer game protocols and find vulnerabilities in them. There is no social good to me releasing that stuff. (No, I really don't feel like being a soldier in your Full Disclosure army.)

I do lots of coding stuff in my spare time. I don't do it to get a job, I do it because it's fun.

[bluedino]

>> For 5.5 years (2004-2009), I was a core developer and maintainer over at Xfce.

>> But I don't feel the desire to work on personal coding projects anymore. The job fulfills my desire to write code, and outside of that I'd rather be, well... outside.

Another thing to remember is that you're 5-10 years older then you were at that point. Life priorities have changed. You might not be a caffeine-fueled 19 year old anymore, instead you're 28 with 2 kids and a mortgage. Or 34 and just have other things that interest you than tweaking Linux or exploring video drivers.

[lelf]

It's interesting, because all my Xfce contributions are on git.xfce.org, and not on GitHub

In this case, just mention it. It's not about github literally.

[kelnos]

Sure. The intent of that statement was kinda muddled. I was more referring to the fact that my "main body" of open source code, to which my contributions stopped 4 years ago is all on a non-GH site, so it's interesting to look at what is on GH, which represents what I've done out in the open since then, which is... not much.

My assumption (which maybe is wrong) is that 5 years of OSS contributions that ended 4 years ago may not be all that impressive. Why did I abandon it? etc.

[jasonlotito]

Minor nit-pick.

> So I'd easily fail the GitHub test.

The github test isn't about your what you have on github. It's about what code you can show, out in the public. Github just happens to be the common way to do that now.

If a company requires Github specifically, than it's just a stupid company you wouldn't want to work for anyways, so it saves you the trouble.

[nostrademons]

You'll probably never get anyone who used to work at Google/Facebook/Apple/Twitter then.

The problem is that IP agreements in the state of California say that the employer is not entitled to work done "on the employee's own time, without using the resources of their employer, and unrelated to the lines of business of their employer". Google claims to be in basically every tech-related business there is. Do something as simple as a mobile app or casual game and you can potentially get in trouble for it because it may compete with a division you've never heard of.

There's a procedure to get around this, but it's fairly slow and bureaucratic, and so many Googlers find it more efficient to do their "for fun" coding as 20% projects. Facebook has a similar system with their hackathons. Apple just works its devs so hard they don't have time for independent coding products.

I think that GitHub profiles are a good way to identify good devs who don't work for the leading tech companies, but once you're in one of them you a.) don't have time for personal programming projects anymore and b.) find that the stuff that your coworkers are doing is more interesting than pretty much anything you could work on as a solo dev.

[aestra]

This is crazy stupid and naive.

I like spending time with my friends and family, some of which I have to travel far to see, for one.

I spend 40+ hours a week in front of a computer, when I get a chance to go out in the world, I want to GO OUT.

None of these things don't mean I don't love software (I do) or I'm not interested in it (I am). I just have varied interests.

Disregarding that, I used to work for a Big Nameless Faceless Corporation, and the legalize in employment agreement said basically that because I was a software engineer for them, they owned all the software I wrote while employed, even if I wrote it on my own time and with my own computer.

[mariozivic]

I've heard one too many times that I have to react now and voice my confusion. When you have students and you want then to have had some work done outside of coursework, I'm perfectly ok with that as I understand the merits but I wonder is it true for people 10+ years into their career. I see great people having great jobs who, if they have free time, code something that can help their current job but that code also ends up being own by the employer and is very rarely released as open source.