Comment by ramon156
2 days ago
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.
If that's the case however, just let them make a small project over the weekend and then do another interview where you ask stuff about what they've made. It's not that deep
> 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.
The objective in an interview like this shouldn't be to grade the quality of the code you bring in any sort of scale, but to have a discussion about the options you took. In that sense, it really matters very little what you present as long as we can do a small back-and-forth that lets me into what sort of person you are.
> but to have a discussion about the options you took
I can clearly state that this is not I commonly think about code that I write privately (and also for code that I write for the job only if I must). For private code, I rather commonly start with a "gut feeling" about some unexpected symmetry that the problem that I am working on likely has, then try to formulate these "gut feelings" as mathematical properties, and later theorems. At the end, everything "fits (for outsiders: unexpectly) together".
Thus, there is hardly ever a "option that I took", but rather a "I let everything flow: from the source [my gut feeling] to the sea [which is - ironically - the source (code)]".
> 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).
> 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.
It's like asking a dentist interview candidate to show you examples of fillings and crowns they did at home as a hobby. I don't understand why there is this automatic assumption that people who program at work also do it outside of work.
I ask for code, and if they have none prepared I ask that they spend at most two hours building something they enjoy.
I expect a decent developer to be able to bootstrap and write most of a fun toy project in a domain they know well or at worst some kata from the Internet within half an hour. Then we spend some time screen sharing and talking about it, similar to pair programming but less problem focused.
If you can't do it you'll likely struggle a lot when working with us because we commonly use throwaway prototypes.
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If you have literally never written a line of code outside of your work in the last decade, you are not a culture fit. This itself is a filter.
If you're not interested, you're not interested. Not even about "passion" at that point, but the bare minimum interest in your industry. I said it better previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15553482
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)
This points to another issue - when I do code outside of work, it's often specifically to try out things I don't do at work. After a day of doing backend work, I'll maybe put together a basic web UI for something. That code is likely awful because I just need it to be functional more than good, and also probably not related to the work I'd be hired to do.
My most recent real "side projects" are a terrible OSS monte carlo simulator tool that I contributed to, but cannot explain most of the code for, and a half-working React application that has performance issues I never fixed. Both are years old at this point. I'm not sure what an interviewer would gain from those.
This relates to another issue of using people's public github as a hiring signal. I don't share any of these repos because at a glance the code is ugly, broken, incomplete.
Below the surface, I'm probably scratching a very interesting itch. Exploring a specific idea or problem, and then I stop when I get my answer.
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.
So? That's all that's on our Githubs, too. Show us, talk about it. Let us see we're the same.
I am lucky, that closing 50 years old, still get to code out of work.
Not everyone gets to do so.
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?
It looks like you professionally sold 30 years of your life for money with no fun. You could have done something for fun all this time, and got payed for it, too. Much better that way.
I did no such thing, I spent the first 15 years as a part time fitness instructor mostly for the social aspect, hanging out with friends and training for and doing group runs and a little travel.
I spent the next 8 years married (still married) and raising two step sons and spent the last two and half years traveling extensively including over a year doing the “digital nomad thing”.
We have been averaging getting on a plane to do something on average over a dozen times a year since late 2021.
Of course the Covid lockdown slowed us down for two years.
When I am at home in Florida, I go swimming at one of the multiple pools or workout at one of the two gyms that’s part of our complex. It’s warm enough most of the year at least during the day.
During the weekends, I go downstairs and hang out at the bar and just sip soda while hanging out with my friend the bartender and whoever else is down there.
I “retired my wife” in 2020 when I was 46 and she was 44 8 years into my marriage so she could pursue her passion projects and we could pick up and travel as often as we wanted to - the joys of working remotely.
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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?
The amount of time people spend grinding leetcode instead (if you believe what they say about it online) is just as much or more.
Those are bubbles. I am aware such people exist but nobody I know grinds leetcode or does hobby programing.
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Are the companies that want you to do hobby projects and take home test paying close to FAANg level or closer to enterprise Dev level comp?
> 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?
I think programming has more commonality with other creative, 'soft' jobs like graphic design (which itself can involve programming), architecture, media, marketing, etc than meets the eye.
Many of these roles require that applicants have some sort of portfolio that can be perused by the interviewer freely. I feel co-opting that word—'portfolio'—would do us software developers a big favour instead of trivialising outside-of-work programming as 'side projects' or 'hobbies'.
I got to see where architects build bridges over weekends as an hobby.
>architecture, media, marketing, etc than meets the eye.
I disagree. Programing is more engineering than art. Art doesn't have source code. You can show the final painting and I can show the final product I worked on but not the source code I wrote as that belongs to my employer. Also, most art like paintings are not done by large teams, so you can show what you did in that painting but in a large SW projects, I can't show what exactly form the final product I did and what else was done by my team.
Most of my valuable work in programing is engineering, especially fixing bugs, not creating portfolios to show off. I have nothing publicly to show off, mostly because firstly, it's private to my former employers, and secondly because code gets outdated and replaced fast, most of what I worte in the past probably doesn't run today anymore, but have made my employers happy and wealthy.
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I don't like writing code for the sake of it, and have gotten a lot better, over 25 years of writing code, at evaluating whether I need to write code or whether I'd be better off using something that already exists and putting up with its limitations, or even just doing nothing (see that XKCD comic with the time-savings payoff chart).
The result is that I don't think I've written anything longer than about a ten-line shell or python or JS script for my personal use in... a decade or more.
Frankly I probably think you shouldn't be paying anyone to do the thing you're wanting to pay me to do, because computers are likely just an expensive distraction that management's pursuing because the promise of legibility, even if in-fact pointless in this case, is incredibly enticing to them, but also I like money and will build the thing you shouldn't be building for you if you pay me. I'll even do it well, if you let me. But I don't make the same mistake (much) in my own life, any more.
Would I write a bunch of code on my own if I thought it'd be worth it? Yes, but that'd almost certainly mean I had a product idea. If I were any good at thinking of product ideas, I'd long since have had my own business. I'm terrible at it. That's literally the only reason I'm applying for a job. If I had a pile of decent code to show you, it'd be because I didn't need your job.
> WTF is this hobby coding bullshit expectations?
I can empathize with your position if you are also against expecting candidates "prepare for the interview" by leet code grinding or "brush up on CS concepts".
Hobby coding is million times better than that crap.
At least leetcode is something somewhat standardized (algorithms don't change). Hobby coding is not, it's something subjective and varying between the interests of each candidates and often have nothing to do with a job.