[grecy]

> The problem is that this method disproportionately hurts people who don't have the time or energy to effectively hold two jobs (one full-time position at their day job and one as an independent developer or open-source contributor by night)

No, not at all.

You're assuming that "will you please tell me about the best project that you’ve ever created?" has the words "Outside your previous jobs" - which it clearly doesn't.

If you've made or contributed to something great at a previous job - talk about that!

As soon as I read that question I paused and thought about how I would answer it - of the 10 possibles I came up with, about 5 are "personal projects" and about 5 are "from previous paid jobs" - the thing about the paid jobs ones is that I get to talk about all the awesome people I got to work with, all the stuff they taught me, all the conflicts I had with that Project manager (!!), all the trade-offs we had to make so the project actually shipped, some of me reservations about so much technical debt being created, etc. etc.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with answering this question about something you were involved in at a previous job. The point is to find people that are passionate.

[themartorana]

Not to mention that sometimes paid jobs lead to getting to work on large projects that have millions of dollars of input or output, or on hardware scales you never could as an individual. I have to imagine if I worked on some software for the Mars rover, it would trump everything not because it was the best software I ever wrote per se, or it was the greatest environment, but my software is on f-ing Mars!

I'm incredibly proud of some independent projects, but they're definitely informed by my days working on million-dollar projects, some of which were pretty awesome.

[collyw]

And if your job has been maintenance programming?

[joezydeco]

So what? If you made it to the desk interview, you had something worth talking about.

And what if you were the guy that found a bug in a Mars rover? Sure, maintenance programming, but you still did something worth talking about.

And even maintenance programmers with a bit of initiative can do something interesting. "Well, I had to dynamically change the name of 20,000 functions in a project so I wrote a tool to do it automatically and went home early while the tool did the work". That's the quality the interviewer is looking for.

[collyw]

Most of the maintenance programming I have done has involved fixing bugs and adding pretty minor features. Not the sort of thing you would be proud to talk about at an interview. Not saying it is any easier a job, but its not like I created anything great.