Comment by noirbot
2 days ago
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.