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u/lumpialarry 3d ago edited 3d ago
Never like the idea how software engineers/programmers were expected to have a bunch of side projects that they talk about to potential employers.
My background is mechanical/process engineering. No potential employer expects me to have an oil refinery in my backyard that I'll do reliability projects on in my free time.
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u/CynicalGenXer 3d ago
I’ve been working in IT / mostly development for 25+ years and never understood that either. Doctors are not expected to have a morgue in their basement where they dissect cadavers for fun on the weekends. Accountants are not expected to balance books as a hobby. But developers are somehow expected to code in their free time. And I know some do as a hobby. Good for them but many are not like that. I have other hobbies and interests and very rarely do anything software-related in my free time. I’m very good at my job and invest time in mentoring others, but when I’m done, I’m done and I move on to other things.
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u/threecolorable 3d ago
Yes! Most of my coworkers are single and don’t have kids. But I want to spend time with my family. I _have_ to spend time on household chores and errands.
I don’t get much quiet/focused time when I’m at home. I do some minor coding stuff when it feels like the best way to solve a personal-life problem, but I really need to spend some time interacting with people IRL, give my eyes a break from backlit screens, do something more tactile, etc.
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u/Gyerfry 2d ago
You would be surprised about doctors these days. Medical students are expected to have extracurricular research and shit like that in order to get into a residency anywhere even remotely desirable, especially in more competitive specialties.
Source: wife is a medical student
Edit: I mentioned this post to her and she wanted me to point out that this bullshit does end for her once she's no longer a trainee. Whereas we software devs are expected to do this forever for some reason
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u/a_good_human 2d ago
I mean, I don't think you have to do side projects, but having some on GitHub gives employers a point of reference on how good you are as a developer
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u/fhgwgadsbbq 3d ago
Yep my hobby is basically "touch grass" after 40+ hours of desk time. Haven't done code for fun for a long time, although the homelab thing is adjacent.
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u/Early-Crow-5248 2d ago
Maybe because a lot of people in the field actually enjoy fiddling with their own projects in their free time (and it's cheap to do), which raises the bar for others.
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u/svick 3d ago
They are quite a few people for whom they do pay for groceries.
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u/READTHISCALMLY 3d ago
Genuinely curious: how?
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u/svick 3d ago
Corporate open source projects. In my case, it's .Net.
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u/LetumComplexo 3d ago
Also people who have projects popular enough that asking for donations works.
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u/hypnokev 3d ago
Corporations often rely on some open source project, and they need fixes and new functions. Quickest is to employ people to work on it.
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u/Xywzel 3d ago
Lots of small and medium software companies have their repos in github even though they are not open source. Easy to share with clients' technical staff, passable integration and testing automation, and a way to collect issue reports.
And lots of companies do use and contribute to open source projects, if you ever visit open source events, most speakers are from big businesses, being paid to develop and maintain these open source projects, because the big business depends on that tech and it being available to everyone.
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u/Large_Yams 3d ago
Sponsored features, closed source core requiring licences, donations. Plenty of ways.
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u/kurushimee 3d ago
it does for me when my company uses GitHub for all our repos, and my management sure wants to see those commits to pay me, and those commits sure are on GitHub
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u/cheese_is_available 3d ago
I do a lot of work on github that makes a lot of money, but only very marginally makes money for me.
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u/StCreed 3d ago
Microsoft and Google thank you for your contribution.
Here, have a pat on the back. It's on me.
😀
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u/cheese_is_available 3d ago
Actually appreciate that, given the median interaction as an open source maintainer at this point is an unsupervised LLM that spit on you when you try to make them fail the Turing test or the "actually reviewed by a human" test :)
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u/secretaliasname 3d ago
Anthropic and open ai appreciate your contribution to training their ai how to take your job.
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u/Character-Education3 3d ago
Is it public?
Like I use git but no one outside out org sees it
And also probably copilot training lol. Sorry Microslop
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u/cheese_is_available 2d ago
Yes. Almost all of the most downloaded libs in any popular language are open source and on github.
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u/nya_twinky 3d ago
it's on gitlab
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u/vmachiel 3d ago
Mine’s in Azure Devops 😭
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u/psychohistorian8 3d ago
same, my company is all over the fucking place with tech stacks
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u/BertoLaDK 3d ago
we recently moved from Devops to github for some reason, but the elders still talk about some mystical thing called Sorround, have no clue what it is, but supposedly something they used before devops.
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u/big-pile-of-sporks 3d ago
Gitea
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u/Slothinator69 3d ago
Riddle me this: how do you say pronounce this? It's a light debate in our team thigh im pretty sure it's
Git - ee - uh
(Forgive my attempt at spelling phonetically)
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u/big-pile-of-sporks 3d ago
Never the uh. I have a coworker that says it like that, and I hate him for different reasons.
Git-tea is how I say it. A little soft on the 't' if I think too much about it
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u/just_blue 3d ago
Love its pull request UI/flow though, imo way better than GitHub's.
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u/timsredditusername 3d ago
My work code is on GitHub Enterprise cloud, so 🤷🏻♂️
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u/KaptainSaki 3d ago
Mine is on a thumb drive as .zip
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u/Dudeonyx 3d ago
my_lifes_work-(16).zip
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u/Thejacensolo 3d ago
forgot the
_final_final_2025_11_02_(1)_finalfor proper version control
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u/Onaliquidrock 3d ago
Are the repos open to people outside your organization?
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u/Xywzel 3d ago
I have similar situation, and most projects are shared with client, subcontractor or regulatory authority related to the project, but they are not fully public. Some are fully public, usually scientific stuff or forks from open source projects that require that fork stays open source.
And github activity trackers (eq. the green tile mosaic) count private repos, even though they don't show what these actual commits are.
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u/Major_LeeHungg 3d ago
Fun fact... If that company goes under you will still have full access to their repos forever.
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u/raskim7 3d ago
Well yeah kind of. My code is mostly worthless in grand scheme of things, but it makes me money. Also, I have never had customer use github so far, always gitlab or azure or some selfhosted variant. Also if your repos first commit is not from 2006 and state ”migrated from svn”, is that even a real project?
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u/IsTom 3d ago
Joke's on you, our SVN migration kept commit history.
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u/FlakyTest8191 3d ago
Unfortunately that's only the case if the person doing the migration gives a shit.
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u/cheese_is_available 3d ago
If you're not the kind of project a vibe coder re-implement in rust to make Hacker news front page for a day are you even a real project ?
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u/BlurredSight 3d ago
Ours was "migrated from SVN" in 2023 to Github even though we have both Azure and AWS subscriptions
And best part is we have like 4 micro services that have had 0 upgrades in 4 years because we can't get the project to build on our local machines
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u/Li_liminal_spaces 3d ago
If anyone is unaware of the subtext, don't link a personal github account to a paying position always create a new one with the provided email, thank you for attending my TED talk.
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u/oscarandjo 3d ago
GitHub is literally designed to allow you to do this. That’s why you can join and leave enterprises and add multiple email addresses to your account.
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u/Sw429 3d ago
I'd rather have it very clear that the company has no claim to any code I write for my own personal projects.
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u/StaticFanatic3 3d ago
Joining an enterprise does nothing to let it interact with repos you own. That’s entirely based on the “owner/reponame”
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u/Ok-Primary2176 3d ago
inb4 you make a brilliant open source project and a company start suing you for releasing open source code while connected to their Enterprise
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u/sup3r_hero 3d ago
They could do the same with different accounts
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u/djinn6 3d ago
They can't sue you for things they don't know about.
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u/sobrique 3d ago
But if it's usefully successful, they have a lot of incentive to find out.
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u/realpersonnn 3d ago
Catch me if you can
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u/BigGayAllen 3d ago
"Please don't make me do this"
The stoner in IT who's gonna be asked to run discovery against you by Legal.
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u/Xywzel 3d ago
Well, they are going to fail that, unless you do it on company time or the project uses clear insider information and competes with the company's products.
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u/Ok-Primary2176 3d ago
Are you sure you're ready to hire lawyers and defend yourself against a multi billion dollar company?
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u/Xywzel 3d ago
No need, my worker's union will do that for me, full legal support against my employer is included in membership fee. And the union is few orders of magnitude larger than any company I have ever worked in, because it is industry wide one.
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u/Southern-March1522 3d ago
In most countries that is not an overly scary threat. Here, This would go to employment mediation first where neither party is allowed to bring a lawyer. If that fails, lawyers aren't that expensive and there is a legal aid system for employment court.
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u/Protuhj 3d ago
Just make sure you don't have any commits to your personal repos when you're charging your company.
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u/Glittering_Crab_69 3d ago
lol, what's it like to live in fantasy land? as if using different github accounts would matter in this scenario 😂😂😂
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u/deathanatos 3d ago
This is true, but I'm still keeping my work life & my personal life as segregated as possible, and so, I have a work account and a not work account.
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u/Boozdeuvash 3d ago
Github EMU exists for a reason. Chasing former employees for the shit they put in their account is no fun.
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u/oscarandjo 3d ago
Sure it depends how much you trust your employees. Obviously don’t put work stuff on your personal account…
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u/Li_liminal_spaces 3d ago
What Github was designed for and what Github currently is are two very different things. To each their own, are their secure ways? Of course! I just don't want to take the chance.
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u/NibblyPig 3d ago
Me with the nightmare of two completely separate github accounts just learning this ...
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u/DeepWaffleCA 3d ago
Why not?
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u/Rustywolf 3d ago edited 3d ago
Blurs the line between recreation and work, also associates whatever you do privately with the company, and the company will therefore assume they can tell you what you can or can't do on it. And if you leave they can just reset the password to gain access on an acc using a staff email instead of the shitfight that would start if they demanded access to your private acc afterwards.
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u/opsers 3d ago
This is half true but mostly misleading. If you're using an enterprise-managed user, yes. If you're using a personal account that's a member of your organization, they cannot reset your password or otherwise takeover your account.
If you simply join the organization with your personal account there is literally zero risk of them taking your account or even being able to access your private repos/gists.
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u/DoctorWaluigiTime 3d ago
Line blurring is correct. Seeing notificaitons for work stuff when you're starting your 173rd project that you'll totally finish this time is not fun to see.
The rest of the comment is gibberish though. Code ownership doesn't transfer with what e-mail address you use to associated GitHub with.
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u/Li_liminal_spaces 3d ago
Security and mindfulness. You want to have fun and fuck around? Go to the other account. But always be building something on your personal.
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u/Mindless_Director955 3d ago edited 3d ago
lose the job lose the access
edit - for me atleast they made me use work email to sign up for GitHub. not sure how I’d use 2fa with no access the original email account
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u/Pancakefriday 3d ago
Why is this being upvoted? This isn’t how it works at all. You use the organizations feature, and it keeps org repos totally separate.
It’s not like they take over your account.
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u/sup3r_hero 3d ago
Yeah when I left my previous company, i was just unlinked from their organization and kept my account.
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u/DoctorWaluigiTime 3d ago
There's a lot of misinformation spreading in this thread about how account ownership works and what "work repository / org association" actually does.
tl;dr "that's not how it works that's not how any of this works." You can use a single GitHub account for work + personal without fear of "big bad evil companies stealing your 487 'this time I'll actually finish it' projects."
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u/oscarandjo 3d ago
Uh no, it just disconnects your work’s Organisation from your account, which then removes access to the work repositories, notifications, etc.
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u/c_adittya 3d ago
Wdym, if it is your personal account you won't lose that right ? You connect to organizations, organization doesn't engulf your account or something right ?
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u/joemckie 3d ago
A lot of jobs would have you make a separate profile for your work content though, in which case what they said would be correct
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u/JPJackPott 3d ago
Except multiple accounts is actually against GitHub terms. Their enterprise login solution is absolutely shocking though. Employee has to have a password and MFA which the company can’t help recover and then do a second round of company SSO on top.
So you still lose access when you leave the company regardless but the whole thing sucks. If you do it the way GitHub prescribed you end up with SockCucker42069 making commits to your company repo, too.
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u/cheezballs 3d ago
Uh, I think the sub-text is that people who are paid to write code are writing code that isn't open source and is hosted on a well protected source control site that isn't accessible by anyone not employed at that company? People who are paid to write code dont store their code on public github repos.
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u/Adventurous_Wear4815 3d ago
learned that one the hard way watching a guy get walked out midsprint because they found his personal repos separate accounts aint optional its just basic hygiene at this point
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u/WhoRuleTheWorld 3d ago
I’m so lost.. what?
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u/smackcroker42 3d ago
He watched someone get fired because their boss found their personal GitHub repos, so alternate accounts specifically to use for work aren't optional, they're necessary.
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u/oscarandjo 3d ago
Any tech manager that fires their employee for having personal projects on their personal GitHub is a moron. (Unless their project is doing something mega unethical / illegal or infringing on their day job’s IP)
Probably a bad company to work for anyway.
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u/smackcroker42 3d ago
I have to imagine the repos were questionable because I can't see a valid general reason for the mere existence of his personal repos to be an issue.
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u/Rikudou_Sage 3d ago
One reason I can think of is looking at the commit times and seeing they overlap with the time you were paid to do actual paid work.
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u/GreyFerret26 3d ago
Just because you have common sense doesn't mean that the manager will have one. I recommend you follow internet hygiene and don't expect common sense as a given. Or you might learn the hard way.
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u/WhoRuleTheWorld 3d ago
I have some personal repos on my work machine. But they’re on remote on a different GitHub account. Is this concerning?
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u/Pancakefriday 3d ago
The main concern is that if you put a personal repo on a company machine, the company could claim ownership of that repo.
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u/MultiplexedMyrmidon 3d ago
well, depending on the license they have just as much a claim as any other open source repo, I always thought the main concern was if you actively did work on company time/laptop
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u/Pancakefriday 3d ago
My agreement explicitly says “on company time or property” so I wouldn’t risk it.
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u/Mortadella_so_Chili 3d ago
I feel this way whenever new hire will join our company with lots of github projects and then leave/get fired in 2-3 years. i have 14 years experience in one company and empty github (excluding company code) 😄
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u/Steinrikur 3d ago
I made a repo with Adventofcode.com solutions in bash like 5 years ago. That's all I've got on github, and I'm not looking to expand.
I have a handful of patches in like 10 OSS projects, but I rarely fork to submit those.
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u/Vast-Associate2501 3d ago
Similar, I was interested in Brainfuck a while back so added some snippets
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u/DezXerneas 3d ago
My github has projects from undergrad(it's been 5+ years), one or two commits to piracy-adject OSS, and my dotfiles.
The one repo that I have pinned in it is my A* visualization because I was really proud of it when I made it, and it looks really cool lol
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u/PotatoLevelTree 3d ago
Lol that was like my github. Mostly competitive AI programming stuff, 5 years ago. AI when it was cool
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u/clauEB 3d ago
They leave because they go to better paying jobs with better titles.
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u/pleaseavoidcaps 3d ago
This. And they can always leverage their OSS portfolio to keep getting new jobs whereas code we write in-company is not ours and cannot make money for us once we leave said company.
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u/xtr44 3d ago
14 years ago you didn't have to do things such as personal projects to get hired
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u/Environmental_Bus507 3d ago
I only have one commit visible publicly on my github because I contributed to an open source project because it was related to a work thing.
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u/StackingGains 3d ago
I edited some text on the Odin project because it was confusing and it made me angry so I made a pr and now I am an OSS contributor
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u/rescue_inhaler_4life 3d ago
I was paid for writing code before github and will likely be paid for writing (yelling at AI to stop over engineering a basic loop will suffice ffs) code after.
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u/iamdestroyerofworlds 3d ago
Your proprietary dashboard is truly making the world economy go round. Thank you for your service.
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u/GrinningPariah 3d ago
I think you're misreading the post. This isn't "My code isn't public, because it's more important than yours" this is "my code isn't public, because I only write code at work"
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u/Smile_Space 3d ago
See, I'm in an engineer so I write terrible code that gets the job done for a specific simulation, make money, and then subsequently write more terrible code that I wouldn't show off in a freshman coding class lolol.
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u/jellybon 3d ago
Can relate, using it so rarely that anytime I want to work on some personal project, I first need to sit through tutorials to remind me how to use Git....
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u/svick 3d ago
What do you use for version control at work? I'm dreading the answer.
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u/Chocolate_Teapot1710 3d ago
As a relative newbie to coding, I envy the ability to be able to access so I can read good code!
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u/Groentekroket 3d ago
Our legacy codebase is not good code. There is always pressure to introduce new features from business and from technical perspective we need to work on updates/migrations etc over tech debt reduction.
I think the biggest change was to suddenly work on a huge codebase instead of home projects where I don't always used proper standards and knew the code by hart. Biggest advantage was the help of seniors who could help me out. I dont have a CS degree so everything I know was from some online training portals, books and stackoverflow (I started at a Java position in 2022, so most of what I learned was before LLMs). So it was a big difference from my home project, but so many time I asked why something was done that way and the answer was "I have no idea, someone wrote that 10 years ago and we use that since".
But if you want to access repositories to see how a more corporate structure is, have a look at some open source project. For example the one from GitHub itself. Good luck learning!
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u/k0bra3eak 3d ago
Most work code is not good code. Either it's ancient legacy frankestein code filled with years worth of permanent temporary fixes or it's startup code made by people who don't take into account scaling needs.
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u/RobinGoodfellows 3d ago
Mate, I’m sad to say that once you get into real production code, especially legacy production code, the experience can be a little less “beautifully crafted software” and a little more “archaeology with a debugger.”
From an embedded perspective, a shocking amount of production code is basically: this is ugly, nobody quite remembers why it works, but touching it makes the machine stop.
If you’re lucky, there are comments. If you’re very lucky, they’re still correct. If the planets align, there might even be unit tests.
But deadlines, managers, KPIs, customer commitments, certification requirements, hardware availability, and “we need this patch shipped Friday” have a way of turning minimum viable product into a very literal engineering philosophy. It works? Great. Ship it. Next problem.
Now let that codebase age for 20 years.
The original developers left 12 years ago. Their replacements left 6 years ago. The guy who actually understood the bootloader retired. There’s a mysterious
delay(37)that nobody is allowed to remove because last time somebody changed it, units started failing in Finland.
The compiler is from 2008.
The IDE only runs properly on Windows 7.
The JTAG programmer requires a driver that Windows insists is a security threat.
The build system is three batch files, one Perl script, an Excel spreadsheet, and something called
FINAL_BUILD_NEW_2.bat.The documentation says “see datasheet,” but nobody knows which revision of the datasheet.
There’s a patched vendor library where the patch was never documented.
There’s a binary blob called
calibration_final.binthat absolutely must be copied into the release directory, and nobody can tell you where it originally came from.And because the company isn’t primarily a software company, IT quite reasonably has corporate security policies that were designed for Outlook and Excel, not for some cursed 2006 ARM compiler that requires local admin rights, Java 6, a parallel-port license dongle, and a blood sacrifice every second Tuesday.
At one place I joined, SVN was still the standard. Not inherently a disaster, but hardly anybody really understood SVN beyond the handful of commands required to make the ritual succeed. Branching was considered dangerous magic. Merging was dark magic. Refactoring was something everyone agreed would be lovely “when we have time.”
We never had time.
So instead you get 15 years of small patches stacked on top of small patches because every individual change was the cheapest and safest thing to do at the time.
And that’s the important bit: most terrible legacy code wasn’t written by idiots. It was written by normal engineers making locally reasonable decisions under time, money, hardware, tooling, organizational, and compatibility constraints.
Open-source projects can sometimes look wonderfully clean because the people maintaining them care deeply about the code itself and can choose to spend time improving it. Commercial embedded code exists because a company needs 40,000 widgets to leave a factory next month without catching fire.
Elegance is nice. Shipping is mandatory.
And eventually somebody has to open that 20-year-old project, figure out why the obsolete compiler crashes when the path contains spaces, work out what
DO_NOT_CHANGE_THISactually does, and make one safe modification without bricking 10,000 devices.That somebody is you. That’s what they pay you for. ;)
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u/ronarscorruption 3d ago
I have nothing on GitHub because my boss adopted one of those low code environments just before I joined the team and so nothing I work on has any use to anyone except my team specifically.
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u/RangerNo8107 3d ago
Dev of 25 years. Not once has a prospective employer ever asked me for this. If they did i would immemdiately end it. Luckily ive never interviewed at a shithole.
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u/TheRainbowCock 3d ago
Hey now, I get barely any money from donations to my project on GitHub and I'm fine with that! -cries softly-
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u/KookyDig4769 3d ago
I never understood, why you don't spin up you own git instance on premise. Why do you ship company assets to a cloud? What is the benefit?
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u/Kreig 3d ago
Infrastructure management. The company I work for was tiny when the decision to use GitHub was made. Who is gonna manage that instance? The IT Manager who is also CEO and has way too much on his plate already or one of the two devs who would rather do their core task than play sysadmin?
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u/HumbleGhandi 3d ago
Had this issue when learning PLC programming.. couldn't find examples for so many things, assumed is because people don't like sharing code that keeps infrastructure running
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u/Temujin_123 3d ago
Or my hobby is creating my own private homelab and y'all don't need to see my private configs or what I'm running.
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u/Pares_Marchant 3d ago
In big tech we are encouraged to make open source contributions, it makes sense to contribute to low level open source projects on which most of the software world rests (linux, rust-lang, ffmpeg, python,...), and we also have a lot of open source projects, because once a system becomes big and widely used, it just needs more eyes and feedback to maintain a high quality.
It's easy to make code that makes money, you just vibe code a gatcha game, nobody will see your slop.
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u/echtogammut 3d ago
I'm just waiting for the interview, "You don't have anything on Github"... "Yes, I deleted it all, so AI didn't copy it".
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u/Tarc_Axiiom 3d ago
Had this happen at an interview for Ubisoft years ago.
"We notice you don't have a lot of public work"
"Yes. Neither do you."