My kids are my side projects. I used to be worried about how they affected my career, but three years ago a bicycle accident put me in the hospital for a week and I completely reevaluated my life. It's a little sad (and a bit of a cliché) that it took nearly dying to realize their importance, but now I just smile and think about my kids when someone talks about their amazing project.
agree x10. tragically, it took losing one of my children to realize that the extra hours and time management i put into balancing parenting w/ startup-life should have just been put into spending more time w/ my kids.
i'm currently back at a far less exciting enterprise job, and made it to every baseball game this year even though they started at 5pm. you only get one short chance at being their hero, so better make the most of it.
i haven't coded on the side in a long time, but look forward to doing so soon w/ my oldest now going into 1st grade. whatever i code will be for/with them.
A friend of mine died in the last year from cancer. He was in his 30s. I too replaced a lot of the time I spent hacking to spend with my family. I like side projects but I love my family.
I have 2 little ones. When my oldest was growing from 0-2, I can remember nearly every moment. I was at an unexciting 9-5 job.
As my youngest goes from 0-1, I've been working lots of projects via my own consultancy. I look at him and can't believe how much I've missed. I'm currently shifting gears to get back to focusing on my family. I'm still new at this, but it's pretty clear programming/career is so far below family in importance, I need to adjust my life accordingly.
You will make more money if you have an active github account. For most people this means side projects/work.
You will be a better developer if you code more. You will be exposed to more languages, tools, people, and ideas.
If you don't code in your spare time, but you are happy where you are, don't feel like you are a bad developer, you just will not be as good at development as you could be. It is your life, why does it matter if you prefer to paint paintings at night instead of code? If you don't need to maximize your future revenue, don't feel bad.
If you want to be a better developer more than anything, then you should code. If something is stopping you from doing that, remove the blocker.
Personally, I don't hire anyone if I can't see code samples. 95% of the people I hire have their code samples on Github (not in a .zip file). So make sure you have some code samples available, but it doesn't have to be a side project or open source work.
I hear this quite often about Github and it's a bit disturbing to me. If I heard an editor judge an author's work based on what that author posts to twitter, I'd be horrified.
I can't be the only person on Github that uses it primarily as a junk drawer full of bad implementations and abandoned "projects" that were more quick and dirty personal itches. Sometimes I'll contribute to random OSS, but the vast majority of GH for me is just a place to store random ideas, many of which were just toying around with some new tool or whatever and would never see the light of day in production without given much more thought.
Honestly, if you want to see code samples, you're probably better off watching the person work through a problem. Give prospective hires a project. Whether its as simple as fizzbuzz or as difficult as a trial week is up to you, I suppose.
> If I heard an editor judge an author's work based on what that author posts to twitter, I'd be horrified.
And yet, many potential hires are judged by their facebook posts[1,2], tweets, blog entries, and anything that can be found in a google search. All of this amounts to methods of elimination. You can treat it like a portfolio, but an active github account is just a cheap way to filter out possible negatives.
It is also good to mention that, unlike writers, a lot of programmers cannot show their previous work, because it is the private property of their current/previous employer.
I think a stackoverflow page would be much more valuable. Just looking at how a person answers a question tells a lot more than the code they forked or abandoned.
I think judging an author from their tweets is a horrible idea, but what about their blog? That seems reasonable. If anything, the average 'technical' interview is closer to the Twitter idea, with lots of code golf questions, but you can see what a person can really do and really likes to do on Github.
I don't think you're necessarily judged by the quality of your Github code as much as the fact that you have Github code. Especially if it's a bit out of your normal box.
Yeah I agree this is pretty scary. Two of my clojure projects on github are from when I was learning the language. I'm much better at clojure now, but the public facing code is junk because I was in proof of concept mode, not fluent, idiomatic mode.
I'm torn. Do I leave it up there to show that I enjoy learning new technology in my free time, or do I take it down because it's not coded in the professional quality I hold myself to at work?
Leave it up.I think the fact that you're the type of developer who goes out of his/her way to learn Clojure trumps the fact that it might not be the highest standard code.
I agree with philangist. 99.9% of people that apply for web dev jobs don't have clojure experience. Worst case scenario put it in the README that these were projects from your early understanding of Clojure.
You will make more money if you have an active github account. For most people this means side projects/work.
More than what? The highest earning programmers I know have never heard of github and would never consider using it.
You will be a better developer if you code more. You will be exposed to more languages, tools, people, and ideas.
You will be a better developer if you deliver more. "More languages, tools, people, and ideas" can just as easily dilute your focus as improve your skill. To get better, you must focus on results, not activity.
If you don't code in your spare time, but you are happy where you are,
Why do you assume these 2 are mutually exclusive? I know lots of excellent programmers who deliver more before noon than most deliver all week. Nothing wrong with being excellent during working hours and doing something else in your spare time, like perhaps, enjoying your spare time.
If you want to be a better developer more than anything, then you should code. If something is stopping you from doing that, remove the blocker.
If you want to be a better developer more than anything, then you should deliver production quality software. Sometimes the "blocker" is a distraction. Distractions can be other things that masquerade as "side work".
Personally, I don't hire anyone if I can't see code samples. 95% of the people I hire have their code samples on Github (not in a .zip file). So make sure you have some code samples available, but it doesn't have to be a side project or open source work.
Personally, I never show code samples. I'll gladly go through the right company's process, including coding for them. But they don't get to see anything I've ever done before out of context and without proper permissions. And personally, I will never work for anyone with hard and fast rules about hiring. 3pt14159 is choosing to not consider many of the best programmers who refuse to show their underwear. His loss.
> Personally, I never show code samples. I'll gladly go through the right company's process, including coding for them. But they don't get to see anything I've ever done before out of context and without proper permissions. And personally, I will never work for anyone with hard and fast rules about hiring. 3pt14159 is choosing to not consider many of the best programmers who refuse to show their underwear. His loss.
This is a pretty bizarre position. Don't you have any code that's carefully prepared and that you think represents your ability to at least write clean code? And wouldn't you rather show a potential employer that carefully prepared code than trying to whip something up on the spot?
Also, a lot of things like showing off your chops at configuring complicated builds with, say, maven or ant can hardly be demonstrated in an interview or an overnight coding assignment. You need to have a nontrivial project prepared to show that you can write a nontrivial project.
> More than what? The highest earning programmers I know have never heard of github and would never consider using it.
Honestly edw519 you are being pedantic. The highest earning programmers I know made billions of dollars starting a company and now no longer program. The outliers don't matter because most people are not competent enough to be an outlier. And that is ok. It is OK to "just" earn $200k / year at 27 years old working a 8/9 to 5 job. If someone follows my advice, they can easily achieve that if they want to.
> You will be a better developer if you deliver more. "More languages, tools, people, and ideas" can just as easily dilute your focus as improve your skill. To get better, you must focus on results, not activity.
I completely disagree. I hand rolled ASP (pre .net) code for 4 years manually stitching things together. No. Production on its own once you stopped learning doesn't matter to your personal development. I became much more productive once I switched to Ruby/Python.
Results mean coding up another pricing page for yet another A/B test.
> Why do you assume these 2 are mutually exclusive? I know lots of excellent programmers who deliver more before noon than most deliver all week. Nothing wrong with being excellent during working hours and doing something else in your spare time, like perhaps, enjoying your spare time.
Why do you assume that I assume that they are mutually exclusive? I said essentially "If X and Y then Z" someone could code in their spare time, and be happy where they are (coding is self fulfilling for its own sake). But if someone is not happy where they are, and they are not coding outside of work then I think they should start coding after work. This is not exactly a ground breaking opinion. If you are sick of working at a souless jquery job, learn a more productive language on the side and get moving.
> If you want to be a better developer more than anything, then you should deliver production quality software. Sometimes the "blocker" is a distraction. Distractions can be other things that masquerade as "side work".
I agree that this could happen, but more often the opposite thing happens. People come to work, check out, and slowly stop caring about learning because every day they are doing the same thing and working on small problems that don't really matter (like making a stupid parallax effect because the marketing guy wants it). Usually people could be more productive and be paid more if they understood more productive technologies.
> Personally, I never show code samples.
Well ok. Put yourself in my position. You get 1000 resumes a week and 58% of people exaggerate or outright lie (I know MySQL, can't do a basic join clause) and 40% are completely unqualified. Now, I put in a very basic requirement. Send me code sample or a link to your github. 100 resumes, half of which have horrible, horrible, horrible code. 45 of which have decent, but not amazing code, and 5 of which have outstanding code.
I've yet to interview someone that had amazing code and turn them down for the job. I went from rejecting 8 or 9 out of 10 people in an interview to 1 or 2 out of 10 (depending on the position).
Code isn't underwear. Code is a product. You don't hire photographers for your wedding without seeing their work. You don't give production keys to people that don't know what a hash table is. It is that simple. Not my loss. The rest of you are the crazy ones and in the long run I'll be proven right.
How does your no hiring without code samples work when it comes to IP encumbered industries? I for one haven't worked without a NDA that includes my code for over 10 years, and neither have any of the people on my current team.
Further, contributing to open source projects (outside of what I do for my employer) is also problematic, because nearly all the things I'm interested in/expert in are very related to what I do for my employer. Figuring out what is and is not work product and what I can and cannot release is a hassle I just don't want.
Seems like your rule and your reliance on GitHub is a very narrow filter and you are likely getting a very narrow subset of potential applicants.
Keep in mind that the OP is probably in a very different industry than you are; if you have enough expertise that your interests are things you can't work on independently (like quant or security?), you will likely be applying to a nonoverlapping set of jobs as the OP, which (I'd guess) are much more interested in experience than a github profile.
On the other hand, if you're a startup CRUD hacker, your potential employers are much more likely to expect some personal CRUD projects in your github, since 1) that's easier to do than personal quant/sec/whatever work and 2) there are likely a lot more applicants for such jobs, so they can afford to filter for "hustlers"
With reference to my comment here [1], here are the two weak points I see in what you wrote:
A. From a legal standpoint, AFAIK (IANAL), things that fall under the same trademark code are considered to be one industry. I have said this before in various discussions forums and while I am open to hear that I am wrong, no one so far as told me so. This means that "Computers, software, electronic instruments" are considered to be one industry [2] from a legal standpoint.
B. Even if the OP or you feel that you are in a very different industry, you/OP need to check your contracts for such IP issues before concluding that you do not have the same issues.
This exactly. As I have written in many comments before, a large set of people have such IP issues from their employment contracts without even realizing that they "too" have such issues. From the discussions that resulted in those comments, my understanding is that unless you find your case to be otherwise, if you are working for someone else in the tech sector, by default you are under an employment contract that prevents you from having side-projects of your own. This seems to vary between countries somewhat. If you have not even read your contract, or were not even aware that you signed one, please do not retaliate before actually confirming your case.
If someone has side projects on Github, it may reveal something (good or bad) about their coding skills [1], but it also reveals, most probably, their lack of understanding of legal and IP issues [1]. (It may in principle be telling about their risk-thresholds if they were aware of the legal issues and still took the risk, but this is not the most probable case.)
In various discussions I have had on the topic, even companies who otherwise are open to their employees having side projects nevertheless block them from the same in their employment contracts. In other words, if it all goes well for the company, it's fine, but if things go wrong, the employee may be under a big trouble.
[1] While telling nothing on this front, good or bad, about the same for people without such side projects on Github or elsewhere.
I know our devs cannot share internal code and are limit to what OSS projects they can work. They actually need to get approval to work on an OSS project outside of work (yes). So that basically means they can't share the bulk of their work. The only option then is side projects on github, and this leaves you in a bad situation if your life outside of work doesn't involve coding non-stop.
This still may not be the complete picture. I do not think, most probably, even side projects on Github or elsewhere is legally an option. See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6245738
It may depends on laws in your area also. I see people in CA defend this because they have laws that allow "moonlighting". Not all places are like this. I'll admit that I no very little law. That's why a lawyer came in to explain the contract to us. He basically said don't sign it if you want to continue OSS projects.
Being based in California, I am well aware of the laws specific to here also (though IANAL). After having read two books on IP laws, I totally agree with what this lawyer told you -- not to sign. If you were to sign, there are plenty of things there that prevent you from having side projects and moonlighting even if you are in California.
A question: So did you join the company without signing it? What was the reaction of the company? Were they just OK? I know of cases where not signing meant refusing to accept the job. I also know of one case where they allow you to not sign it, but then also bar you from receiving any sign-on and performance bonuses while you are with the company (i.e., you get only the basic pay plus benefits, no RSUs, cash bonus, etc.)
We were acquired and in order to stay employed you had to agree to the new terms. This is a very very large corp that's core business is IP, they don't make exceptions for this. I have bills to pay so I signed.
This is what I expected too. Thanks for responding. I keep on asking these questions to people where relevant to understand how many people have these issues, and thereby also advice other people who are plain unaware.
A majority of people who are aware of their employment contracts report having these issues and cannot legally have contributions to open source or side projects on their Github profiles [1]. I extrapolate from that that those who are unaware of these also are legally-speaking bound by their contracts for these contributions. I still see this rising use of Github profiles to tell good developers apart from bad developers. There was a huge thread I had started on "Startup Engineering" Coursera discussion forums on this topic itself that generated over 50 replies, several new data-points, and also over 20 down-votes for me ;-)
[1] Unless they have appropriately written permission from their employers of course...
The people I hire are more useful to me if they can contribute to open source. Also, if you can't get me a code sample of SOMETHING, then 99.99% chance you could not pass our technical interview. I'm not asking for the world here. I'm asking for 10k lines of Ruby / Python / Lisp / C++ / C / ANYTHING.
We are clearly in a different industry. Even asking for code samples in my industry opens me up to potential legal liabilities.
I've stopped interviewees during an interview when I felt like they were treading on what we would consider protected work product.
It is entirely possible I can't pass your technical interview, but I'd be surprised if everyone in my industry couldn't, and they are all as restricted as I am.
Finally, I hope that is a typo. Asking for 10k lines of code is beyond the pale for anything I've ever heard of. If you want 10K lines of my code you better be prepared to pay for it.
My bet is that 3pt14159 is in the same industry too and unless he has is own startup, is probably bound by the same restrictions either without realizing or without caring.
>> If you want 10K lines of my code you better be prepared to pay for it.
+1.
I do not mind someone having me write code on a whiteboard during an interview. Asking for 10K lines is indeed out of question since this would invariably be code I have developed for a previous employer. I am working on my own startup now and still won't show 10K lines of code to protect the startup's IP!
There have even been a case where a colleague pulled out code he had written at previous employment for use in the current employment. We blocked him from doing that.
> You will make more money if you have an active github
> account.
I highly doubt this, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
There's also a downside with sharing too much information about yourself without being present to answer questions or provide more context: It lets an employer discount you as a potential candidate simply because of their misunderstanding of your work.
As evidence, refer to the "n projects on github have SQL injection security flaws" articles that show up here occasionally. But we all know that when you're just hacking around on something for fun, you might write code like this. The point of your project might have been to quickly demonstrate something cool, yet it can be used to demonstrate that you lack security awareness (even if that's not actually true.)
If you doubt this then you are probably in a completely different industry than I am. I cannot prove it to you except by my own experiences with managers and salary recommendations.
This seems highly dependent on which kinds of software companies you are talking about. I hire lots of developers and I have never looked at anyone's github profile. Also, I don't recall any candidate asking me to look at their profile. I have seen a few resumes that have included one, but not very many - and I look at a lot of resumes.
I'm not making any judgement about the value of the profile, but in my corner of the world it doesn't seem very important or even common.
> If you don't code in your spare time, but you are happy where you are, don't feel like you are a bad developer, you just will not be as good at development as you could be.
This is simply not true. Some developers will improve the more they code under the right circumstances. Others are sort of like the person at the gym who has bad form that, for one reason or another, is never corrected. For this person, more exercise is actually detrimental.
This is quite bad. Why don't where I work and what I do get any credit? If you see my github account will you hire me without an interview and without asking me any of those "programming puzzles" popularized by google? You could learn about the drive of a person by his github account but cannot get anything else from it. Of course that does not mean a person without a github account is without motivation.
> I do attend (and give) technical talks; and perhaps most
> importantly, I pick my day job based on learning and
> growth opportunities: which company I’m working at, which
> team I’m on, and which projects I take on. I stumbled
> onto this a little bit by accident, but I discovered that
> responsibilities in your day job that require you to
> learn are a great forcing function for learning.
I think that this is the nuance of the article that the headline simplifies away. I think we often look for side-projects because they are an indicator of ongoing learning and they demonstrate expertise. They are by no means the only way to show these things to a prospective employer. Giving presentations, writing articles, being able to discuss industry trends intelligently... All of these things count too.
I agree, you're dead on with the point the author is actually making (there are other ways to learn / build a portfolio in one's free time than side projects) vs the point many commenters seem to want the author to be making: software engineers should be able to do their jobs well, go home, and do something else for a couple hours. I'd like to see someone take that on, but this article--err, Quora post--doesn't quite do that.
I'm a developer who does take on side projects. I have two on the go right now, plus I'm the technical reviewer for an upcoming book. Yet, I agree with this entirely. I think it's silly to expect a "good" developer to code in their spare time, just like it would be silly to expect any other occupation to do so.
Instead, it should be like a carpenter that does their own home renovations, or an accountant who uses double-entry book-keeping for their personal finances: they're using their work skills in their personal lives. That's like a developer who makes up a tool to keep track of errands in their house, for example.
Or, it should be like a technical writer or copy writer who writes short stories in their spare time. That's like an application developer who writes games in their spare time.
In none of these cases would you think that an carpenter who hires professionals or an accountant who just does normal budgeting and so on or a writer who writes only at work must be bad at their jobs. Why should it be any different with programming?
BUT, and this is a big BUT, having multiple personal projects does make you much more marketable to potential employers.
If you don't have a well known University or a well known company on your resume, having a stack of personal projects that show you're constantly learning, that you're passionate about the programming and that you love what you do can mean the difference between getting a request to interview at a start-up vs. getting put in the "pass" pile of resumes/profiles that internal recruiters have to look at.
This especially holds true if you work at a large, enterpris-ey company (IBM, VMWare, Goldman, Delloite, etc.) and want to attract the attention of, and get a job at, a venture funded start-up based on our experience at DeveloperAuction.
I work at a large enteprisey corp (one that you listed actually) and I'm trying to break out. I find what you say to be true. You don't necessarily have to do side work but employers basically require it to hire you. Maybe it's not required but if it's you against someone with an awesome github profile you aren't getting the job.
In my case I'm trying to get out of a consultant role and more into a development role. Said company forbids me to share things I have done internally. My only option is to start doing side projects. I understand that an employer needs a way to make sure you can do what you say you can do. The only choice I have right now is to sacrifice my personal life to develop some projects I can share, look for another consulting role (which I don't want), or suck it up. The problem is the longer I stay the more out of touch I become with the development world. It's like a big trap.
I think it does the profession a great disservice to present these things as mutually exclusive ie "If I don't do side projects, I am a bad developer". For me I like to think of things in a different light.
What I find with side project developers is a certain self-directedness that bodes well for the kind of employees that can thrive in a pure startup environment. The kind of thinking it takes to go ...
"I have this problem, Heck, I'm going to hack something together that does what I need"
or
"this open source tool I use is missing this one feature, I'll just code it and send in a pull request"
Then actually take time out of your life to code it up and put it out for use and, even better still, maintain it over a period of time.
That tells me that such a person will have no trouble figuring out what they need to do if they go to work for a startup that they're passionate about. It tells me that they'll usually be the kind of people to drive initiatives at bigger firms if they don't lose patience with the politicking, red tape and glacial pace of things.
Now, this DOES NOT mean that developers who don't do side projects won't possess these traits as well. Its just that the signal is clearer with the side project types. In the end you still have to go ahead and find out if they're actually good engineers before you hire them
This struck me also. I initially thought "blimey, does HN provide them so much traffic that they're linkbaiting them now", but taking Quora content and repackaging it is just even lower.
It particularly struck me that HN very recently had an article that kicked off this exact debate.
What a sad state of affairs, although the full advert splash and the junky "similar" articles give that impression too.
It's not entirely slimy. Its a great way to drive traffic for both Forbes and Quora. How many people would have read this opinion if Forbes hadn't made it slightly more high-profile? Ars has been doing a similar feature-series for awhile, and I think its one of the best parts of their site:
Are you a bad artist if you don't paint on your own time?
Are you a bad writer if you don't write on your own time?
Are you a bad carpenter if you don't craft on your own time?
No. You can be an excellent, professional .+\. But it's very rare to see someone at the top of their field who isn't passionate about their vocation. I haven't heard of many rockstars who started playing music for the money.
Well the thing about art, music, and writing is that, at least until you make it big (which most people never do) you're doing it only on your own time, since no one's paying you.
Software's in this weird spot where it has some qualities of art (creative, inspires "passion", we expect people to do it without getting paid) and some qualities of a craft (it pays)
School doesn't pay for itself (quite the opposite, really). Learning on your own time certainly doesn't pay for itself. You're right in that a larger proportion of programmers "make it big" but I don't believe there's a fundamental difference.
Are you a good developer if you do take on side projects? I think the answer to both questions is "not necessarily".
The big problem that I see with questions like these is that it presents a false dichotomy of "bad" vs. "good" developers. Not only is this a false dichotomy, but skills aren't even one dimensional, so even considering them as falling on a spectrum is wrong.
I'm certain that there exists some task that would take me 10 hours that would take my co-worker 1 hour, but there also exists some task that would take him 10 hours and only take my 1 hour.
People should spend their time doing things they like. I don't think people should feel bad, or like they lack balance because they enjoy programming side projects. People should do them because they enjoy them. (Like exercise, people who don't, usually only mean to do them. And that's fine).
They are important in a careers way though. Not so much because 'you need code samples' - there is a skills shortage you know. It's more that at large companies, you learn to be a Facebook Programmer, rather than a programmer. Goldman Sacs apparently have their own private programming language.
Side projects let you do things that are not your job. That is why they are fun (rather than more of the same). Some places, programmers never get to decide what they build (they get a list of features). Some programmers are 'test engineers', or maintenance engineers, and never write greenfield code. A lone inhouse programmer in a non IT company might enjoy working on opensource stuff and actually talking to someone about what they write.
And you do need that. I've work with plenty of C++ people who have never touched a dynamically typed language. One day they will need to - the world always moves on faster than your team.
When I first got into development, I was urged to do side projects because I could make more money and because people thought I would learn a lot. After a two years, I really didn't learn a lot and ended up dealing with customers who were overzealous and pushed me around to get more out of me then what they were paying me for (virtually peanuts).
After a while, I figured I would take a year off and not do any side projects and focus on building my skills. I built more stuff in that year then I ever could being shackled to something which I would never learn much from.
I never looked back after that first year. I continue to learn faster and pick frameworks, techniques and languages far faster than I ever imagined.
What's the downside?
- Maybe not putting a few thousand tax free American dollars back in my pocket.
What's the upside?
- Spending more time with my family since I can learn on my own time and at my own pace without any deadlines looming.
- Learning things that are interesting to me.
- Building things I think are cool - not what somebody else thinks they want. Like having Comic Sans in their company logo.
- Staying on the cutting edge of my industry without falling behind.
One side effect of this is people feeling like the have to work on a side project. People who otherwise would be happy working for their company find themselves spending hours and hours on something on the side.
This cuts into hours that could be used for work or family or fun, and probably won't succeed because their heart isn't actually in it.
You are a good developer if you make stuff that helps people. Not if you have an impressive résumé, not if you make a lot of money. Not even if your stuff is really technically impressive or shows off IQ or promise.
Really, that's important. There's a lot on this site about being the cleverest, the fastest, knowing more comp sci than the next person or handling trickier interviews or proving there's something wrong with some other ecosystem, program, language, etc. Sometimes I'm not sure everyone feels they have a job to do that can improve people's lives.
Whether sideprojects can sometimes help you reach career goals is a more appropriate question. For applicants I think there's an initial threshold of whether they can ship nontrivial stuff. They can demonstrate it with their past jobs or by actually building stuff. A sideproject could certainly help you get hired if you have no experience and the credentials aren't getting you there; it might be smart to do if you're having trouble finding right work out of college, say. Likewise, it might help you show you have potential in a radically different specialty that your past experience has no bearing on (e.g., you used to write Ruby on Rails but want start to writing code for microcontrollers).
And if someone has unrealistic expectations about how much of a rockstar you need to be, maybe you don't want to work for them. If a potential employer wants you to have a github account that shows you spend all weekend every weekend hacking, maybe you dodged a bullet when they didn't hire you.
I say this having just taken a bunch of time to build a side project. It was fun and stuff (building from scratch instead of tweaking a giant codebase! learning golang! making things go fast!) but there's no possibility in my mind it makes me "better" or I'd be "bad" had I not done it.
I have found that I don't have the energy to take on paid side projects and still be my best-and-brightest for my primary employer. I still do small things on my own, but I just don't have what it takes to moonlight for money without being a zombie the next day.
> Side projects are not necessarily a great way to get better at engineering, and by no means the only way to get better. If you take on a side project, you do go through the process of defining a product and coding it up, most likely full-stack and hopefully with some interesting technologies, but you’re probably not going to be working with a lot of teammates on a large, complicated codebase with evolving and expanding product requirements and scaling it up and maintaining it over time, which ends up being a lot of what software engineering actually is.
Notwithstanding the fact that working "with a lot of teammates on a large, complicated codebase with evolving and expanding product requirements and scaling it up and maintaining it over time" is not necessarily what "software engineering" entails (or should entail) at every company, I actually think this is why a lot of developers take on side projects: being able to design and build something of one's own using the technologies of one's own choosing can be a lot more satisfying than refactoring code and putting out fires for 8+ hours every day.
Obviously, developers who are adequately stimulated and satisfied by their day jobs probably have less incentive to indulge in side projects, and there's nothing wrong with that, but most people in the industry know that engineering jobs, even at the hottest or most prestigious companies, often leave something to be desired.
Are there great developers who just code 9 - 5? Yes.
Are there great developers who code in their own time? Yes.
Are there terrible developers who just code 9 - 5? Yes.
Are there terrible developers who code in their own time? Yes.
Doing stuff in one's own time - or not - isn't any substantive determinant and we shouldn't try to make it so.
If this is the case then every developer working at a 12 hour a day Start up, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (who all are anti-moonlighting) are bad developers.
I don't have side projects. My one main project is all consuming enough that side projects would be distractions. The only distractions I can afford are enough to keep my live/work balance so I don't burn out.
The fact that this is even a question at all, let alone one that could make it on to forbes, is symptomatic of the tech industry being a giant echo chamber. Are you a bad [lawyer | accountant | civil engineer | doctor | musician] if you don't take on side projects?
I would say that the reason people tend to look for developers who work on side projects etc. tend to generally be good developers, while those who don't can go either way.
It's hard to know whether a developer is good or bad with only a resume/interview. If you're looking for smart motivated people, the ones who tend to work on side projects etc. can actually show you stuff they've built, and generally you can get a good idea as to how/if they'd fit in with your company/start-up.
While this doesn't mean developers who don't take on side projects are bad, it's just hard to identify whether they are in fact good or bad.
You should do something you enjoy in your spare time, if that is a side project, so be it. Some people do maker type things, others spend time with their families, for myself it is biking and gardening.
When I have had to interview people, there is the technical abilities that are pretty easy to get through. What I prefer, when trying to find out something about the person, is to have them talk about a passion or something they enjoy. For some, that is coding, for others something else.
Most of what I do is a side project to my central tasks of eating, shitting and attempting to reproduce (or at least tricking my body into believing I'm making the attempt). I really feel like these side projects of reading, thinking and exploring are very important to my reason for existing. I could have finished with the real imperatives when I was 13.
I don't have side projects, instead I spend that free time training for and running triathlons. I can't show as impressive a GitHub as my peers, but I'm sure as hell a lot more healthier and physically active. Whether that means anything to recruiters, who knows.
I think there are plenty of jobs that wont weigh side projects too heavily, as long as what you are working on for your job is awesome. I also think there are companies who like the modo I suggested at the top, and are looking for someone who loves to hack away at projects
I want to say yes, but it could just be because I can't imagine having my coding needs satisfied by coding for someone else. I suppose there might be people who are truly satisfied with their jobs out there.
