Comment by micheles

> Most people have still written code for school or a hobby project. Maybe I'm missing empathy, but I cannot understand how some developers have no code to show.

First: they might have private code, but not necessarily code to show (I, for example, am rather not willing to show quite some of the code that I wrote privately).

Second: the kind of "code" that I tend to write privately (and into which I invest quite a lot of time) is really different from what I do at work, and what is actually considered "code" by many. It's more like (very incomplete) drawings and TeX notes about observations and proofs of properties and symmetries between some algorithms. Once finished, they will be very easy to systematically transform into a program in a computer language.

This is about very novel stuff, which to explain would take quite a lot of time.

> Most people have still written code for school or a hobby project

School was years and years ago, and has nothing to do with my current skills.

From the people i personally know, most do _not_ have a hobby project, even fewer have hobby projects that showcases their technical skills. Nor should they be expected to. Most people have non-programming hobbies.

> I cannot understand how some developers have no code to show.

It's really not that deep, I'm worried if you really cannot understand. I don't code outside of work, I'm not interested in doing it. I'm good at software engineering, not passionate about it. I have a bunch of other hobbies. There's no reason I'd have any code to show now or at any point in the future.

> let them make a small project over the weekend and then do another interview where you ask stuff about what they've made

If I'm paid for it, sure why not I could do that. I won't love it but hey I'm looking for a job, I'll put the legwork in. But if this is the only or the "preferred" interview process for a company, I need to point out that it is deeply discriminatory as it advantages people who have the time to do a weekend project: for example it benefits males disproportionally (women do most of the care work in any country, also the most house work, also have a higher chance to be a single parent, all of which impacts the time they can put in a "weekend project" if they can do it at all).

I don't code much outside of work. I have hobby projects from 10+ years ago, but they're not much more than landing pages copied from templates and wordpress installs. I mostly work in backend/data/platform engineering professionally.

If I were asked to make a small project over a weekend, I'd be likely to decline rather than doing a more standard interview, or I'd use AI to do it in a reasonable timeframe (which seems to defeat the purpose as it relates to this discussion)

School was a few decades ago, and the code I have on Github is mostly toy stuff I do in rainy weekends, most of us have a life without room to code outside work most of the time.

Friends, family, stuff to take care of.

I started writing code when I was 12 and started doing it professionally at 22. I'm now in my mid-30s and outside of work, I haven't written anything more than one-off scripts for my homelab in close to a decade. I'm already spending upwards of 50 hours with code each week and I need to do something else at night and on the weekends to release my brain from it. I also didn't go to school for CS, and even if I did... it was over a decade ago. So I have ~25 years of experience writing code but could not show you a single line of it. And even if I could, how would you know I was the one to write it?

This is an extremely flawed interview process in my opinion and the last time I encountered it led to an awkward scenario that led to me walking out. Personally, when I conduct interviews, it's a mix of things. We talk about your past work, I quiz you a bit on some topics you'd encounter in your day-to-day here, and then we'll spend an hour doing some combination of a code review of a working-but-flawed demo project I created, a 30-40 minute coding exercise, and/or a problem-solving scenario where I give you a problem and then we talk through how, as a pair, how we could solve it.

Like many of the other commenters, I have no code to show. I'm strongly motivated at work to solve problems and create correct, performant, maintainable code. I appreciate a job well done.

Outside of work, I just don't have the motivation to code anything. I don't have sufficient at-home problems where code will fix them.

In an interview, ask me anything! ... except to show you code on Github.

>Maybe I'm missing empathy,

Worse actually. There is more to life than code - unless you are a savant. Most of us aren't.

But it is the way you are, you probably know no better and you are doing your best, what you can do is to refuse to interview.

Please share your GitHub @

I’ve been working professionally for almost 30 years. I have never written a single line of code “for fun”. I write code for money. I then take that money to fund my hobbies. The absolutely last thing I want to do when I get off work is stare at a computer.

If I already have a job, unless you are paying top of market, why would I spend my weekend writing code?

School? You want to see my 1999 Java code? I’ll go dig out the 3.5 floppy for you.

I’ve written code for hobby projects. It’s mostly HTML, JavaScript and Bash.

I’m a data engineer, so at work I mostly use SQL, Python and Bash. There’s not much overlap.

Who are these "most people"? School was over 10 years ago for me when schoolwork was not posted on GitHub nor is it relevant to my current job anymore, and I don't do hobby coding since I have other hobbies and responsibilities.

WTF is this hobby coding bullshit expectations? What other professions expect you do more work after work as a hobby and show it? Do bus drivers film themselves driving busses after work as a hobby? Do surgeons cut up people in their spare time as a hobby?

>Maybe

The word maybe is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. What if you never had to do that? Not everyone's work is public. Inf act I'd say most people's work is not public. Sometimes even the product is not public since it's B-2-B.

> I'd bring up some very interesting theorems (related to some deep algorithmic topics) that I proved in my PhD thesis. [...] I switched to industry because of the bad job prospects in academia - this is not what interviewers want to hear.

In my experience you'll be fine giving that answer assuming you're going for the kind of programming job that hires PhDs.

You remind them you have a PhD - and in something deeply algorithmic. You can successfully answer any follow-up questions from them, as you literally have a PhD in the topic they're asking about. There's no shame in entering industry because you want jobs and money - in fact, those things are precisely what the hiring manager is able to offer you.

You'd rather be in academia but it doesn't have the pay and job security? Well, the hiring manager would rather be a snowboard instructor in Aspen but doesn't for the same reason. So you've got common ground with them.

> Yes, I would have loved to stay in academia, but I switched to industry because of the bad job prospects in academia - this is not what interviewers want to hear. :-(

I would love to hear that from a candidate I'm interviewing. Who can't relate to the distinction between your ideal job and the job that will actually pay you money?

>The problem is: there is a very negative incentive to give honest answers. If I were to answer these questions honestly, I'd bring up some very interesting theorems (related to some deep algorithmic topics) that I proved in my PhD thesis.

This is unfortunate that you would get that response. FWIW, I would be interested in hearing all this in an interview and I would look at it favorably.

>What I want to point out is that this topic is much more subtle than a "one sentence answer".

Yes, you would definitely get bonus points for nuance. The one sentence answer was minimal. What it filters out are people who don't know anything about Delphi but applying for the job with highly embellished resumes hoping to get lucky. This was for software used in hospitals, so bugs or errant code could have pretty drastic consequences.

If I'm applying for a Java position and I claim to have Java experience on my resume, it's perfectly valid for them to ask me the difference between an int, an Integer, and a BigInteger.

But it's certainly not a universal question applicable to all programming languages.

Likewise, Clubber says in their post that their 'gotcha' question doesn't apply to most languages.

I have no idea either. I can easily look it up though. You can often tell an inexperienced interviewer from the extremely domain specific question they ask which _they_ are familiar with.

It’s ok to say that it’s never professionally mattered. No one has ever been paid to know that. “Are side effects a bad pattern?” Lotsa people have needed to know that on day one.

A function returns a value.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/721090/what-is-the-diffe...