I totally agree with your first point. He seems to be saying that you are no good to him if you have not worked on side projects or open source. He seems blinded by his 35 years in the industry, and seems to not understand two things:
1) That there are a ton of companies that give 0 time for open source
2) That some people just write code as a job, not as a hobby. Personally, I would want my employees to give me 100% of their effort on coding. If they are going home and coding, how much effort are they actually putting in at work?
You are correct on the second point. I do fully understand the first point, however my answer is that if programming is a craft to you, take your own time to master your craft and put your efforts up on github.
As to your second point, some developers are not passionate about programming as a craft. I know developers and have worked with developers that programming is a job. Outside life, they have other interests and do not want to spend their evening turning a unit test green. I'm fine with that but when I am hiring, I am looking for passion.
Horseshit. You're welcome to hire that way, but I can tell you right now, you're missing a whole class of excellent devs that put 100% of their time into the stuff they're working on at the office. I have side projects I occasionally work on, for myself, but they're not on a public github, and they're almost always when things at the office have slowed down a bit. The rest of the time, I enjoy what I do so much, that I spend it on the work tasks, trying new PoC's, refactoring, etc. Now tell me exactly why you'd not hire someone like me?
>Personally, I would want my employees to give me 100% of their effort on coding. If they are going home and coding, how much effort are they actually putting in at work?
If you owned a restaurant, would you object to your cooks going home and making themselves a nice meal?
Note: This is more of an idle curiosity thing that popped into my head reading your comment. This is not a "Boom, roasted!" type of comment.
That's fair. I guess it is more of a management issue then. I wouldn't want my chef cutting corners and rushing his/her work in order to prepare a 5 course dinner at home, but maybe I would want them to try out new recipes at home and bring them to the restaurant. Something to think about.
That's close to, but not quite the point. Let's say you're happy with your chef's output at work. The chef is making good dishes, and suggests changes and new items. Great.
You ask, when the chef comes in for the day, what he or she did over the weekend. "Well", comes the response. "My in-laws were visiting, so I made them a proper Italian supper, with fresh pasta and homemade meatballs."
Your restaurant isn't Italian. Are you annoyed? The point is that it's wrong to control people when they're not at work. If you're happy with a programmer's output at work, it's ridiculous to tell them that they shouldn't program when they go home. If you're unhappy with their work, then the point is not "you're doing too much at home", but "you're not doing enough at work. Do what you need to do to produce as we agreed your job requires."
I feel like I'm being a bit misunderstood. I wasn't trying to talk about current employees, but lets work with this analogy.
I take issue with the author trying to judge this chef based on the meal he made for his in-laws. That seems to be the same as judging a candidate's merit based upon their side projects.
My example and question might have been a bit off, but I still think it is a bit flawed to make this judgement when trying to hire someone.
Cooking is different as it's something you do in order to eat--a basic necessity of life. So a cook would likely go home to cook a meal for his family but might not be happy about it.
Software development is not a basic necessity of life.
Okay, so replace it with professional racing drivers who drive off the track; an illustrator drawing something in their free time; a photographer taking pictures of their friends; a manager who helps organize a charity event; a sysadmin who owns their own computer; really, any similar combination of employment and use of job-skills on personal time that would allow you to engage with the actual point of my comment.
My comment was not about cooks; that was just the first example that came to mind. The point is that sometimes people do things in their spare time that make use of the skills that their employer pays them for. Why is it inherently negative for an employee to use their job-skills for non-job purposes?
>>Why is it inherently negative for an employee to use their job-skills for non-job purposes?
It's not. I guess my point to the original comment is that they might not put in as much passion on the after-hours stuff because they are tired from work; and that doing it because you're kind of obligated to do it (for family, friends) is different from being required to do it in order to keep your career moving forward.
This sub-thread is the response to a sentiment I've never seen before -- wbronitsky's argument:
>Personally, I would want my employees to give me 100% of their effort on coding. If they are going home and coding, how much effort are they actually putting in at work?
The discussion is over "what should coding at home mean about a candidate or employee?" While certainly I agree with you that coding at home should not be /required/, I don't agree with the argument presented in the quote that says "coding at home means you're not working hard at work".
