Robert Rothenberg wrote:
Surely the better candidates have written some code for their own personal
use or even to share with the wider world.
4 out of the best 5 programmers I know haven't. Personally, I started
programming projects in the background a couple of times but it didn't really
get very far, and the last time I did it was a long time ago.
Here are some reasons for a strong programmer not to program outside of the
office:
* If you have a good job, you're likely to get to do whatever kind of work you
want to do as part of that job anyway.
* You might be interested in and/or be good at other things which can occupy
your spare time.
* For a project to succeed (as in have any side effects in addition to having
the code take bytes on your hard drive), you may need more than just good code
(ranging from equipment to time/skills needed to communicate with other people).
You may prefer some organization to deal with it and concentrate on programming.
* You hate software. You only want to write good code when you work with other
people on something, and you want the software not to exceed a hatefulness
threshold so that people dealing with it are not too miserable.
There are other reasons. Sometimes all these reasons cause people not to code at
their spare time at all; sometimes they cause them to work on code which is hard
to discuss at interviews (like brainfuck interpreters or ioccc entries or code
for doing things inside their obscure window manager connected to their fridge
via bluetooth or whatever).
And then there's the horrific category of people who love software and can talk
for all day long about it and know everything they've ever used inside out but
somehow manage not to get anything done properly and/or annoy everyone around
themselves and/or they have very strong religious beliefs about technology
causing them to make costly wrong decisions. These people are not unlikely to
write code at their spare time.
So it's not that simple, although the false negative cases are probably much
more frequent than the false positive cases.
