When I do interviews I like to ask candidates if they want to share anything interesting they've made, studied, worked on, or played with outside of their jobs. I explain their answer can only help, not hurt, as a non-answer is not a negative. It's simply an opportunity to bring up something that wouldn't normally come up during the work-history driven interview.
Very few candidates say they've done any programming outside of their jobs. At most, they share something like running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi and using Python to automate their house or something. Another common one is to hear about how they used an Arduino or Raspberry Pi to accomplish some small task.
Very few people say they have side projects. Of those who do, when I ask for details most admit it never went far beyond the idea phase.
So from what I can deduce, it's very uncommon for programmers to have true side projects that go beyond a couple git commits worth of code to solve some task, or an idea they had that they never followed up on.
I don't know how this can be true. Interviewing for a job is a zero-sum competition against the other candidates. If something isn't a positive, it has to be a negative.
Side projects are less interesting as the number of decades you write software for a living increases. Of course, everyone is different here and use cases arise.
I think this is a rude question to ask, and it would reflect negatively on you, the company, and the group dynamics, if I were asked it.
It shows an unprofessional and inappropriate interest in things unrelated to work, and, from my experience, is a good indicator that the person will either micromanage, has poor work life balance, or is not socially fit to be a manager.
I know that sounds super harsh, but you should seriously reconsider. You're going to scare people away. There's a power dynamic that you don't seem to be aware of, during the interview process. It's not your concern what they do with their free time, unless they present it to you, unprovoked.
This is from someone who has interviewed hundreds of people.
Besides all of that, it opens you up to litigation for discrimination, depending on the answer they give. I suggest talking with your HR department. Where I am now, questions about personal life are strictly prohibited, for that reason.
edit: please note the "unprovoked". If people want to share the projects they do in their personal time, they will include it in their resume as a line item. I've seen it in probably 30% of the candidates. It means "ask me about these things".
> It shows an unprofessional and inappropriate interest in things unrelated to work,
No, it's a chance for candidates to bring up relevant experience that might help their candidacy.
The question isn't about things unrelated to work. The question is asking if they have any additional experience outside of work that might help us better understand their skills for their job application. Many people have relevant experience for the job that they gained outside of work. Asking about that is not only okay, it's a good thing.
> and, from my experience, is a good indicator that the person will either micromanage, has poor work life balance, or is not socially fit to be a manager.
Asking candidates if they have any extra experience to share is not an indicator of micromanaging.
Jumping to completely unrelated conclusions and drawing extreme assumptions about people is not a good way to interpret a question like that.
I explained that the question cannot have any negative value to the candidate. It's a chance to bring up extra things if they have them and we didn't cover them. Literally doing the candidate a favor, not being rude or micromanaging.
> It also opens you up to litigation for discrimination, depending on the answer they give. I suggest talking with your HR department.
Asking candidates to share their work-relevant experience does not invite discrimination lawsuits. How are you coming up with these interpretations? Legal was involved in reviewing our hiring processes, so no need for condescending lectures about getting HR involved.
> Asking candidates to share their work-relevant experience does not invite discrimination lawsuits.
I suggest you talk to your HR department. This isn't my interpretation, it's that of our cooperate lawyers.
If they say "I just had a kid, I spend time with them", is a good example. This should be obvious to you, which is further evidence you should not be asking these questions.
edit: can't reply directly. No, that's not how it works. You being made aware of it, and you using that information is enough. Good luck!
> If they say "I just had a kid, I spend time with them", is a good example.
Your understanding of these laws is flawed. A candidate volunteering information doesn't make the company liable for discrimination against them.
It's a common misconception that if topics like having kids or being married comes up in an interview then the company is liable to be sued for discrimination. It should be obvious that a candidate can't entrap a company by injecting this information into the interview when it wasn't asked. Even if the interviewers do ask, a discrimination lawsuit has a much higher bar than the topic simply coming up in the interview. It has to be demonstrated that the information was used to discriminate against the applicant, not just that it was discussed.
Your interpretation of my question is also flawed. I'm not asking "Tell me what you do in your free time." I'm asking them if they have anything outside of work that they'd like to share that would help their case.
> I suggest you talk to your HR department.
Please read my entire comment. The legal team reviewed our interview process and had no problems with it.
I think maybe your HR department has tried extra hard to scare you away from subjects they want to avoid, which has led to a misunderstanding of how the law actually works. It's common for HR professionals to tell interviewers that there are "illegal questions" or that if a topic comes up at all then you're going to get sued for discrimination. In reality, the legal bar for these cases is much higher. HR professionals just want to scare interviewers away entirely and drive the point home.
Asking candidates if they have an additional experience to share isn't an invitation for discrimination lawsuits. I suggest you open your mind a little bit and consider that some candidates may have more to offer than appears on the bullet points under each job on their resume.
I worked for Google for a while and there was a whole set of banned questions and topics- for example, when interviewing, I was told to never ask where somebody was from- that's discriminatory.
Originally I assumed all of this was good-faith advice from lawyers. It was only over time that I recognized that the leadership at Google continuously got itself in trouble by doing illegal things around hiring, and was telling interviewers all sorts of stuff that simply wasn't supported by law (similarly true for the constant warnings about not reading patents, or speculating about legal problems in a discoverable medium- it was the execs who fucked up, not the employees). I had to unlearn a lot when I left for another company.
Please keep asking people questions like this- I like how you phrased it: "this can only help, not hurt you".
I think a lot of this is simply asymmetric incentives for the lawyers. If they give legal advice that is overly conservative, it's some other portion of the business that suffers - we hire the wrong people, or we provide a worse product, or we lose out on revenue, or deals don't get made, or the code is overly convoluted, or employees get muzzled. If they give legal advice that is overly aggressive, they have to deal with the consequences when we get sued (at best) or they get fired (at worst). So they will always err on the side of caution.
I've also noticed a dramatic difference in how willing legal, HR, PR, REWS, etc. is to take risks now vs. back in the heyday of the 00s when the company was smaller and everybody felt like they were in it together. Some of that is probably simply because the company was a lot smaller and hence less likely to get sued, but a lot of it is because back then people tended to act in Google's interests a lot more while now they act in their own interests.
> Asking candidates if they have an additional experience to share isn't an invitation for discrimination lawsuits.
It's the fact that you decided not to hire them, because you found out that protected information. It was unrelated? Prove it in court. That's the reality of discrimination lawsuits.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree.
If you're confident in this, maybe in your next couple of interviews try "That last question is something new that I'm trying. Do you think it's good, or do you think it's too personal?". You'll have to read their body language, since the power dynamics will prevent a direct answer, for many. If you're not comfortable asking that, then that's evidence enough.
> It's the fact that you decided not to hire them, because you found out that protected information.
Again, you don't understand how this works.
If a candidate runs into your interview room and declares that they are a member of 5 protected classes, that doesn't automatically open you up to discrimination lawsuits.
How is this any different than asking someone about a past job and then they answer with "I didn't finish that project because I had kids and left for parental leave". It should be obvious that a candidate can reveal information about having kids for virtually any question.
> It was unrelated? Prove it in court.
Once again, that's not how it works. The onus is on the applicant to prove that the information was used for discrimination.
A candidate can't claim that a company discriminated against them for information they volunteered during an interview and then the company loses. They have to provide reasonable evidence to proceed to discovery, which would have to reveal something substantial that showed the information was used to discriminate, such as e-mails or chat logs.
> I don't believe you asked your legal department.
Legal was involved. Why do you only believe that your HR department wants to be involved in hiring processes, but mine obviously would not?
If you're not interested in discussing in good faith or you only want to ignore what I wrote and inject alternate facts, I can't help you.
I quickly edited that out but you saw it. I don't want to dox myself, which is why I removed it. You would trust our legal team. It's an opinion shared by every company I've ever worked for, except a startup, where they didn't know wtf they were doing, and there was no training at all: no personal questions that persuades/compels protected info. It's trivial to find this online.
To stop focusing on this last point...
> I'm not asking "Tell me what you do in your free time." I'm asking them if they have anything outside of work that they'd like to share that would help their case.
You are asking them that, in a practically indistinguishable way. Again, because of the power dynamic you don't seem to be aware of, they must give you an answer that explains why, if not. The legally appropriate response would be "I prefer not to answer what I do in my free time outside of work", which people would be uncomfortable, so they're going to be compelled to reveal to you why they don't have anything interesting, if they don't.
Luckily you guys can work at different companies and not have to interact except on HN.
(Personally I've been on both sides of this - early in my career I had a ton of hobby projects, wrote compilers for fun, and would often ask the interviewers what was the most interesting project they've worked on, either for work or for fun. Now I have a family, work stays at work, home stays at home, and I don't really care what my reports do on their own time. But different segments of the tech industry will fall on different ends of this spectrum. Know what you want and don't waste time interviewing at places where the culture is dramatically different.)
> and would often ask the interviewers what was the most interesting project they've worked on
And that's unprovoked. That doesn't conflict with what I said (I intentionally included it). Whenever someone is interesting in sharing, they present the work themselves. They provide their GitHub link, or include it on their resume, mention it, etc.
> And that's unprovoked. That doesn't conflict with what I said (I intentionally included it).
How is asking a direct question to the candidate "unprovoked"? This doesn't make sense.
> Whenever someone is interesting in sharing, they present the work themselves. They provide their GitHub link, or include it on their resume, mention it, etc.
No, they do not always do this. This isn't a good assumption. Asking candidates if they have anything extra to share reveals additional projects quite frequently. I would know because I do ask.
I was responding to what above above said, in the context of an interviewee:
> and would often ask the interviewers what was the most interesting project they've worked on
Above asking, and initiating the conversation, is clearly unprovoked.
A interviewer asking them isn't the same as them asking an interviewer, where their answer potentially means you don't get hired. The interviewer is forcing an answer about their free time. It's "provoked".
No, you're responding to what I said. There are multiple people calling you out here: please try to keep the usernames straight when responding.
The point of an interview is to ask questions, and particularly in the more freewheeling environment of a startup, "what sort of stuff do you like working on?" is very much relevant to whether they'd be a fit. Sergey Brin would famously ask early applicants to Google "Teach me something that I don't know already, about any topic." YCombinator's application form, for a long time, had the question "Tell us about a time you successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage", and the answers were explicitly supposed to be naughty if not illegal.
Not everybody works for a big company with a big HR department. The tech industry is a broad place.
Author was irrelevant in my reply. I was responding to the context. And come on now, consensus doesn't define correctness.
"Teach me something that I don't know already, about any topic."
"Tell us about a time you successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage"
This should not surprise you, but those are perfectly fine. These are very similar to the examples given to us for the appropriate/professional way to ask.
That's a good recommendation for the original commenter, on how to reword their question. They're not direct probes into personal time. I should have included something like that in my original reply.
It feels slightly disingenuous. Many engineers do their work with a sense of personal duty and pride. Should a drive for self-improvement be neglected because it didn't happen outside of work hours?
For the years I had paid employment I'm very thankful that I didn't make programming my hobby in addition to being my work. For the last 5 years it's been both and I wouldn't wish that experience on anyone
Very few candidates say they've done any programming outside of their jobs. At most, they share something like running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi and using Python to automate their house or something. Another common one is to hear about how they used an Arduino or Raspberry Pi to accomplish some small task.
Very few people say they have side projects. Of those who do, when I ask for details most admit it never went far beyond the idea phase.
So from what I can deduce, it's very uncommon for programmers to have true side projects that go beyond a couple git commits worth of code to solve some task, or an idea they had that they never followed up on.