# Yeah, I think that if a hiring manager or human resources person is grading
people on whether or…

As a regular person who writes code, when I decide how seriously to take
somebody’s ideas about a technical domain I don’t know much about…

* * *

Yeah, I think that if a hiring manager or human resources person is grading
people on whether or not somebody codes in their free time, that’s extremely
problematic. (It also ruins the heuristic when this is done, because people
start to think that doing side-projects in their free time is a career
builder.)

As a regular person who writes code, when I decide how seriously to take
somebody’s ideas about a technical domain I don’t know much about, determining
whether or not the person is sufficiently curious is very important. Having
whatever proxies are used to determine this never be directly rewarded by
businesses is therefore extremely important. Whatever behavior is rewarded by
businesses in an over-compensated field like ours becomes almost immediately
worthless for both the business and everything else.

(If doing side-projects in order to attract HR attention becomes widespread
enough that you can’t identify the career-building intent from the number of
buzzwords in the description, I’ll need to determine how seriously to take
someone based on how many side projects they have that would actually lower
their likelihood of getting hired.)

By [John Ohno](https://medium.com/@enkiv2) on [April 26,
2018](https://medium.com/p/94fa4a28861b).

[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/yeah-i-think-that-if-a-hiring-
manager-or-human-resources-person-is-grading-people-on-whether-
or-94fa4a28861b)

Exported from [Medium](https://medium.com) on September 18, 2020.