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Comment by taxyneno | Hacker News Reader

I had a bad interview experience where the interviewer asked me to walk him through a project, so I chose something I worked on at home for a few months.

He kept questioning me "why" I made the project after I repeatedly told him it was just for fun and learning. He just could not imagine why I would spend a decent amount of time outside of work where I worked on something just for fun.

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To be fair, bringing up a personal project done for fun and learning is just asking for trouble: they are clearly interested in seeing how you perform and talk about a project, maybe how you work with other people, other departments, users, etc.

A home project maybe covers the how you perform but that's it; if you had made it a product then it would be a good example but strictly for fun/learning doesn't seem something I'd bring up in such a context.

I want to be clear that I'm not shunning home projects, just bringing them up at an interview, unless the interviewer specifically asked for this kind of projects.

I wouldn't bring up my personal projects either. This is stuff I do with zero obligation to anyone other than myself, and with no deadlines to worry about. I walk away from projects the second I stop having fun. Many of them are unfinished. I usually have huge bursts of productivity followed by burning out which leads to weeks of inactivity.

It may be evidence of enthusiasm for computers and the craft but it is not really representative of job performance.

I write stuff for fun, but there's always some reason why I chose to build e.g. an in memory inverted index with a gRPC CLI client instead of anything else. Usually it's a simple non-business reason like "I wanted to see how gRPC worked" or "I read a blog post about Elastic and thought it sounded fun" but there's still an underlying story to tell about why exactly word stemming was interesting, fun, and a good learning opportunity.

I believe that's the majority view in general, and as the number of programmers continues to increase, the majority view eventually also affects the average view of programmers as well. Okay with that as long as they don't deem such thing unacceptable (people are different for different reasons, aren't they?). In fact I think a healthy mix of both kinds of people is needed for many cases.

When I interview people, I ask them to describe one of their difficult work projects. I also ask them if they ever developed anything just for fun. I take their responses to both the questions into account when making a decision on taking them to the next round.

>When I interview people, I ask them to describe one of their difficult work projects

This only leads to a "rich get richer" kind of situation, where people who happened to get jobs that provides them with the kind of impressive difficult projects will keep working on difficult projects.

This is just a reality of hiring, I think. People with more experience tend to find it easier to get hired, thus granting them even further experience.

IMO, the best way to avoid this chicken/egg is with government subsidized technical internships like we have in Ontario. It's a great deal, businesses get junior technical labor at 50% on a fixed contract, and the students get access to learning they'd never have during school.

That's not meant to see who works on impressive projects. It's meant to see how you work in projects you find difficult and how you face that kind of difficulty.

why is that signal on how well they'll perform at the job? If someone doesn't code for fun but is a great programmer you don't want to hire them? Why is that considered acceptable?

You parsed it incorrectly. It is the other way, in fact.

Several times, people do very interesting personal projects, but fail to perform at the same level at work. That gives a clue that it may have been an unsuitable work environment that impeded their performance. It could also be a difference pertaining to their orientation to structured vs. unstructured working conditions. It could be related to explicit objectives with tight deadlines vs. exploratory development with open deadlines. And, more.

Knowing what my work environment is, I usually could understand their medium-to-long term fitness.

Hope this clarifies what I meant.

So, if you have a candidate that thrives at fun projects but not at work you put them to the next round, because you think your work environment is sufficiently different to make them thrive at work instead of their fun project?

Did you mean to say "in addition to" rather than "instead of"?

If yes, then the answer is: sometimes, depending on the other factors.

They didn't parse incorrectly. They made a guess about what your poorly worded communication meant.

The fact that someone builds something of their own volition is an excellent marker of initiative, of breadth. If there is a choice of potential hires, this signal factors in.

That's only true if they have the same work experience and other hobbies, which you can't know.

> He kept questioning me "why" I made the project after I repeatedly told him it was just for fun and learning

This sounds like a miscommunication on both sides versus anybody failing (or being correct). Assuming you weren't interviewing for a research or entry-level role, picking--and then sticking to--a home project doesn't answer the implicit question: can you manage a relevant project. On the interviewer's side, instead of doubling down on asking you about the project you chose, they could have nudged you into highlighting relevant experience.

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