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Comment by zeroonetwothree | Hacker News Reader

How does this work if they only have coded as part of jobs? Do you assume everyone is working on some side project or open source?

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My bet is that it doesn't work. My experience is that they are assuming that, just like those recruiters and hiring managers that look for “an active github” and swear by that

If you can write software, have you never once encountered a bug in something you use or a tiny feature that would have made your life so much easier + just done it yourself?

I understand not wanting to do a ton of weekend projects and having other hobbies, but it's wild to me to think that being able to do these sorts of things but never doing it happens.

It's sort of like a car mechanic who doesn't fix/tweak his own car.

A car mechanic isn’t evaluated for a job by whether they fix their own car as a successful one may own a luxury car that must be serviced at a specific location.

Since analogies compare dissimilar things with at least one similarity, I think you lost the one similarity and undermined the point you thought you were making

What does a programmer seeing a bug have to do with this conversation? What exactly are you imagining? I’m imagining how silly it would be for me to run a custom version of a chrome extension that wont get any updates just because I didnt like how a feature was implemented, I’m guessing you are imagining something else?

  > What exactly are you imagining?

Submit a PR to whatever tool it is you use that fixes the bug so it stops bothering you

Build some small tool to automate a task that you have in your daily life

Write a program based around one of your hobbies that caters to something niche so there's no good tools for it already

Anything of this sort, I guess.

I do a lot of open-source work but it's selfish -- I submit those PR's because they are things I wanted/needed and it would be silly for me to have a fork and try to keep it up to date with master.

Maybe it's different for other people but I constantly run into bugs/missing features in tools I use for both job and personal stuff. If I didn't do this there would be so much I'd have to hack around or flat-out wouldn't be able to do.

Submitting a PR runs into the most random etiquette expectations from a gatekeeping project maintainer that arbitrarily chooses to not merge

It requires a lot more effort and back and forth than you are describing and its disingenuous. I’m glad you’ve had a good experience with it though.

Writing an automation tool often has nothing to do with the experience and acumen required for a job, it could be a mouse motion recording to a bash script. It requires pure happenstance or contrived altruism to do it in a worse language for the task just to say “see look what I did” for a future employer

I think this requires more empathy, not in an “emotional intelligence” sense just in the concept of putting yourself in other people’s shoes and imagining what they encounter instead thinking what you encounter is normal

Would make sense to provide it as an option, and approach candidates without side projects in a different way. I would much rather show up with code I've already written and use that as a starting point for conversation.

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