It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

https://simonwillison.net/2021/Jul/17/standing-out/

by simonw • 5 years ago

386 374 5 years ago

maxk428• 5 years ago

I don't understand why "public creativity" would be something you'd screen for in an engineering role.

I'm not sure. There does seem to be a pretty significant increase in selection criteria for a lot of things, from hiring to investing, that biases heavily toward rewarding "influencer" and/or "celebrity" traits.

tibbetts• 5 years ago

The amount of information available on candidates to hiring managers is extremely limited. Evidence of outside creativity is a pretty good sign that someone is not a bozo.

maxk428• 5 years ago

Again - I fail to see how the second part is derived from the first. If I'm already engaging in a screening process, wouldn't it be better to ask the candidate to solve a problem that relates to their role than to ask them if they've done any blogging on the topic of tech?

dheera2• 5 years ago

Why is this such a hard problem to solve?

When I was a founder it was incredibly hard to find people who are "available" and skilled because they feared listing themselves as available on LinkedIn.

When I'm not a founder and skilled it's incredibly hard to get to hiring managers. Usually I get warm intros from people within companies I'm interested in, it works way better, and usually often results in jumping straight to the on-site interview step.

Why isn't there a central website where you can just post your name-redacted-resume, accomplishments, and (optionally) target location and salary range anonymously, and if someone wants to reach out, then you can reveal your real name and e-mail?

Or better yet a Tinder-like interface where companies swipe candidates and candidates swipe companies, albeit with no photos, just a name-redacted resume?

simonw16• 5 years ago

It's not something you screen for - as I said in the article, "you don’t want to miss out on a great engineer just because they spent all of their energy making great products for prior employers rather than blogging, speaking and coding in public"

But if someone has it, you're likely to take it into account. So as a candidate it's useful.

maxk428• 5 years ago

In the article you state "you don’t have to put very much work at all into public creativity in order to stand out as a job candidate". This implies that when I am acting as a hiring manager I would be screening for "public creativity." I'm trying to understand why I would want to do that. I've been a hiring manager for well over a decade and it's never been something I thought I should screen for. Indeed, in my career the majority of the best coworkers I've had have had little to no public presence online and I can think of at least one counterexample of a person who was extremely prolific with blogging and giving talks at conferences who happened to be absolutely garbage at their role. There is some underlying assumption in this article that I'm not grokking.

giantg23• 5 years ago

Really? I have a blog (not very active) and two android apps (not popular). I do think the apps help, but I don't think that really makes me stand out. Most places value creativity second to output.

simonw16• 5 years ago

Any time I've been screening candidates I have taken this kind of thing into account.

If I was hiring an Android developer the fact that you have two Android apps would absolutely play into my decision process - it would increase the chance that you'd get to an interview, and I'd very likely ask about them during that interview.

giantg23• 5 years ago

I mean, it could be helpful, but my guess is that you would go with someone who has worked on it professionally. Plus you would probably want someone with more recent Kotlin experience.

ransom1538• 5 years ago

Interviewee: Check me out! I have 239 twitter followers!

Interviewer: Cool. Can you setup mysql replication? What does a read replica mean?

Interviewee: Neat! Check out my github on a emoji generator!

Interviewer: ....

Interviewer: [proceeds to slack least favorite teammate to follow up interview]

azinman24• 5 years ago

Or..

Interviewee: Check me out! I wrote a NES emulator that is cycle accurate and supports a game with a specialized chip that I reverse engineered that no other emulator supported.

There’s a large spectrum of quality of public content out there. You could say the same thing about any resume.

maxk428• 5 years ago

But that's a counterexample to the OP's thesis that "it doesn't take much". An "NES emulator that is cycle accurate and supports a game with a specialized chip that I reverse engineered that no other emulator supported" is a MASSIVE undertaking that would take a huge amount of time and effort. I would certainly give a candidate like that a second look - if NES emulators were remotely related to the kind of skills I was looking for.

cirrus33• 5 years ago

To be fair, the OP started with "I have 239 twitter followers!", not "I wrote a NES emulator"

I think the point was clear and you missed it.

endisneigh2• 5 years ago

This is an interesting post - though it saddens me. It seems modesty is going the way of the dodo. Though it leads to an interesting quandary - is it possible to have an online presence and still honestly call yourself a modest person?

To elaborate - my issue with this post is that it promotes the further commercialization of activity. If you’re doing it because you want to, then you would’ve done it already.

This post basically says, “hey, you - person who probably doesn’t do it, do it and you’ll have an advantage!” IMO it promotes further insincerity, not to imply that those who do have a presence are insincere.

simonw16• 5 years ago

I don't think modesty is incompatible with writing about things online, or sharing projects that you've built.

JoshTriplett3• 5 years ago

It seems modesty is going the way of the dodo. Though it leads to an interesting quandary - is it possible to have an online presence and still honestly call yourself a modest person?

If by "modesty" you mean not bragging and not presenting yourself as better than you are, that's absolutely a desirable quality. And that's perfectly compatible with publishing your work.

If by "modesty" you mean keeping your work unpublished, or presenting yourself as worse than you are, that's neither a useful nor a desirable quality.

The article here talks about posting a project to GitHub with a README and screenshots, or having a technical blog with some articles about things you've learned or worked on. That seems perfectly reasonable.

endisneigh2• 5 years ago

If by "modesty" you mean keeping your work unpublished, or presenting yourself as worse than you are, that's neither a useful nor a desirable quality.

To be fair, historically the entire point of modesty was to present yourself as worse than you are (historically this was done with attractiveness specifically).

Has modesty taken on a new definition where it means simply not bragging? I honestly wasn't aware.

dsjoerg• 5 years ago

Everyone's best work and well-considered thoughts are worth sharing.

jameshush3• 5 years ago

Of course. Even modest people text their friends and colleagues and say “You gotta see this, look at this testing library I just found!”

Just copy that text and paste it in LinkedIn or Twitter too.

runawaybottle2• 5 years ago

We’re actively encouraging peacocking. It’s no surprise since it’s the current pattern in social media, and obviously it was bound to seep into tech.

‘Keeping up with the Johnsons’ scaled like hell in the digital world. We all know it’s bad, but here we are. If you can’t beat them, join them, and let’s just keep making the world shittier.

The main reason why this line of advice (original tweet) is bad is because it is self promotion for the sake of self promotion.

Here’s a quiet solution: Have a small website and a projects page. Describe a few of the projects and what’s interesting about them. Then send it to the company. It’s no one else’s business.

simonw16• 5 years ago

My point here was meant to be that you DON'T need to invest a huge amount of effort in peacocking. Just a small amount of effort in ensuring there are public examples of your work out there is all it takes to get a boost against other candidates who haven't done that.

A small website and a projects page is exactly the knid of thing I'm suggesting here.

runawaybottle2• 5 years ago

But the active promotion via the social channels is what sets off the ‘keeping up with the Johnsons’ effect. Some people are so shy that they would never consider advertising like that. The peer pressure builds, and suddenly you have a generation of self conscious people maintaining appearances.

cirrus33• 5 years ago

I need to add "peacocking" to my HN bingo board asap.

austincheney• 5 years ago

I used to think this but now I don’t. It’s what lead to this comment that received many upvotes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27906769

simonw16• 5 years ago

That discussion was part of my inspiration for writing about this.

The point I'm trying to make here is that the idea that you need to invest vast amounts of effort into side projects in order to increase your chances of being hired is misleading.

But... putting just a small amount of effort into having e.g. a couple of blog posts and a single public project on GitHub CAN give you most of that value.

Hiring managers faced with five candidates, one of whom has a blog post about the technology they are hiring for, are more likely to bump that candidate through to a phone screen or interview round.

yesenadam3• 5 years ago

But if that candidate only made the blog posts and put stuff on github to help them get work, and not, say, because they were interested in the subject?... Then that becomes a reason to ignore their blog and github.

jameshush3• 5 years ago

In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care. I had credits at large companies, posted talks online (interviewers rarely looked at them), but if I forgot how to write binary search in 10 minutes in an interview it didn’t matter.

This actually made me realize being just an IC wasn’t actually my goal though. Once I started interviewing for management and sales, all of those things _really_ mattered. Now that I’m running workshops and talks professionally, posting publicly is _critical_.

Moral of the story: if you enjoy posting in public and teaching in public, but you feel like its getting you nowhere career wise, maybe you are in the wrong career like I was. Once I decided to double down on my strengths and spent nights and weekends at public speaking training instead of grinding leetcode things started to click.

wpietri5• 5 years ago

I think it depends a lot on the place. I'm hiring now and we actively appreciate things like mentoring and doing public work.

I agree that people not feeling appreciated should try other things, but I think that includes different kinds of employers as well as different kinds of job.

jameshush3• 5 years ago

I agree, I was in the California market for 7ish years so my experience is heavily skewed for that culture.

That being said, I’m NOT bashing those interviews. I’ve been a hiring manager too, if I was able to offer double money and high prestige like a FAANG company I would have had a high filter too. I focused more on sourcing people through friends of friends so the interviews were more of a soft sale on my end than a leetcode grind.

N00bN00b6• 5 years ago

Yep. I basically made the same remark. For a lot of positions they're just not looking for creative people, just chairs to fill. They want "good enough" and nothing more.

EvilEy34• 5 years ago

I don't see how having high enough standard means that they want "good enough".Do you want their hiring level to be even higher or what?

k__3• 5 years ago

It helped me to get offers from companies, so I didn't have to apply for anything anymore.

Sure, when I applied, I had to do dumb tests. But when a C or VP level asked me it was usually not an issue to get a job.

AlwaysRock3• 5 years ago

This really depends. Are you talking about FANG+ type companies? Doesnt matter who you are you will probably have to whiteboard.

Outside of FANG? I'm sure you can bypass many technicals with credentials.

cableshaft7• 5 years ago

Yep. I've had a portfolio of full video games I've coded and released on my own, as the sole programmer, that could be played on the web, had my name credited on the title screen, and you could even see the code on some of them, and I proudly included the link on my resume.

Never brought up during the interview process, I was still expected to take the coding tests, and if I did a little poorly on one question I almost always got passed, even though the games I made had plenty of things going on, and some were even finalists in game contests (one hosted by Microsoft, even).

I don't bother keeping up a portfolio anymore (I am working on a new personal site again, but not to put on my resume).

Hermel• 5 years ago

Maybe you should have applied with smaller companies that don’t have bureaucratic hiring processes yet?

golergka• 5 years ago

I've worked in gamedeve since 2007 and interviewed a lot of people. Small games portfolio doesn't matter, because small games, just like beginner tutorials from Unity, don't teach you skills necessary to work on a large-scale project with multiple developers. When you're working on small-scale projects, you can follow bad practices and don't hit their limitations.

However, if I would be interviewing a game designer and not an engineer, this portfolio would have been incredibly relevant.

SlowAndCalm• 5 years ago

I am similar (putting my WebGL games on my portfolio) and I've found it's actually a pretty good filter of employers for me. If they bring it up and are willing to have a discussion about it, it's always a good sign. There's a wide range of topics to talk about that can relate to the possibly more boring requirements of the job.

If they are dismissive of them, it tends to be an early sign that they are unable to think of things in a broader or alternate context. These are also the interviews that tend to have questions with right or wrong answers, even if the questions have multiple solutions and warrant discussion.

throwawaylinux4• 5 years ago

I've made lots (thousands? hundreds at least) of commits to the Linux kernel and have been working on it since pre (git) history, have developed a number of novel concurrent data structures / algorithms for it.

I decided to talk with a FANG recruiter a couple of years ago who must have scraped my name from mailing list or commit histories. Despite first making it clear by email I wasn't interested in a job interview at the moment but was just curious about some things, on the call they pretty soon demanded to know what I thought the best Big O notation was for a sort algorithm. They were rather insistent that I answer them this before they would move on and spend much more of their time explaining why they contacted me or answering my questions. Fortunately I hadn't wasted a lot of my time at that point either.

Strange, rude, entitled behavior. Sadly, they probably do hold real power over graduates and new developers, and those without jobs or much experience, or just those who dearly want to work for these companies. So they can get away with treating people like this, putting out these drag nets, paying no real interest or respect to any individual (at least not until they think their canned questions have filtered out most of the useless scum).

jbluepolarbear• 5 years ago

I’ve interviewed a lot of candidates and I make it a point to review their portfolio. It helps me target my interview to focus on subjects they’re familiar with. Your portfolio should be on your resume. Videos are a great way to show off your game.

jdenning• 5 years ago

Definitely. I use a link shortener to track visits to my portfolio links. (Almost) Nobody looks at your public work.

ornornor• 5 years ago

Same experience here. Everyone says you should spend your nights and weekends building a portfolio on top of your day job, but no one looks at it when you apply. And then you get put aside because you didn’t know for sure in an instant what is the result of `‘1’ + 1` in JavaScript.

thefr0g• 5 years ago

I mean why would someone want to visit your online portfolio if it looks like you didn't even put in enough effort to get a proper domain?

driverdan2• 5 years ago

When possible I bypass shorteners so candidates won't know when I've looked, eg add + to the end of bit.ly links.

an_opabinia• 5 years ago

In my experience, for every engineering subordinate that turned out to be good that I didn't bother testing with leetcode, there were 19 who sucked and also failed their coding test, or sucked and we should have tested them. So far, among people who studied programming as their major in college, the best predictor was the prestige of the university they attended.

mattmanser• 5 years ago

If you've hired over 20 people, and 19 of them have been bad, it just sounds like there's something wrong with your process. It also sounds like you're hiring a lot of novices, which isn't what's being discussed really.

The uni thing is not exactly a revelation. It's the same for every single field/job. Better uni, usually better worker.

All you're actually saying is that novice programmers straight from uni mildly correlate in ability with SAT scores.

Nothing surprising in that.

BlissWaves2• 5 years ago

I like leetcode as a hiring metric and I think it's the best measure to test out an engineer. Unless a company uses it basically to find people that implement the fastest algorithm(read: have memorized it already) in 30 minutes it can be a very very effective way of screening.

RandallBrown• 5 years ago

For a pure engineering role things like credits at large companies, online talks, side projects, etc. are all really great ways to get an interview.

I can't really remember the last time I was turned down for an interview.

You're totally right about the other part though. I've lost a lot of jobs I think I could have been great at because I'm really bad at whiteboard coding interviews.

kebman6• 5 years ago

Does this mean that the whiteboard coding interviews are flawed, or that guys like us, who has made a ton of more or less great projects are flawed? Why would a company rather have a guy that can solve binary search in five seconds, than one that has showed continuous progress with several finished projects over the years? Do they think accomplished guys somehow are a liability? Or is it that they want a blank sheet imp that they can mould wholly in their own image? Is real creativity and output really of no value to these guys?

lmilcin3• 5 years ago

In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care.

I am interviewing a lot of people. I look very suspicious at these kinds of moves to try to impress me.

I don't necessarily ignore, but I try to figure out if this is some kind of shallow engagement.

It impresses me if you can stick to something meaningful and do it regularly for years but you can just as well hurt your chances if you propose 5 simple commits to random projects on Github to be your greatest accomplishment.

A blog about programming is not going to impress me if you are still junior engineer. Rather, it is worrying. I always remind people to learn something first before you try to teach other people.

I will still want to see you code yourself out of a paper bag.

teknofobi• 5 years ago

I always remind people to learn something first before you try to teach other people.

Teaching is one the greatest ways to learn and develop your relation and vocabulary for what you are currently learning. It’s one of the greatest tricks a good college class will pull, having students continually drag each other a step further as they learn something new and then have to explain it to their peers. Most blogging is this kind of “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”, so it’s seems to me you might be dismissing some eager learners if you think the act of blogging is self-important.

ghosty141• 5 years ago

A blog about programming is not going to impress me if you are still junior engineer.

I don't quite agree here. Junior engineer doesn't always say much about skill. People can have deep knowledge in a field like reverse engineering but still work as a junior because they got out of college 1-2 years ago.

When it comes to junior/senior titles I get the feeling age is more important than "skill".

I get what you're saying though, you should never act like you're a god amongst men, but blogposts that show deep knowledge aren't something I would dismiss.

vaylian2• 5 years ago

if you are still junior engineer. Rather, it is worrying. I always remind people to learn something first before you try to teach other people.

The curse of knowledge is also a thing: An expert might have a harder time explaining things to a novice. A novice can more easily explains things to a fellow novice.

And if someone gets something wrong on the internet, sooner or later someone else will point it out. #XKCD386

maxFlow• 5 years ago

I don't keep a blog to impress you. Nor to "try to teach other people"; if anything I use it to teach myself (ie to organize my own thoughts and to document my learning).

Blogs are simple media to share one's thoughts, because one likes to write and... to share---that is it. If you don't care for my writing and my sharing then you're free to move on.

The beautiful thing about knowledge is that it's free and open to anyone, implying that junior engineers shouldn't have blogs is next level elitism and conceit. That is what I find worrying.

I feel sorry for the people having to interview with you or working under you, that need to code themselves "out of a paper bag" to impress you.

otabdeveloper44• 5 years ago

if I forgot how to write binary search

The binary search algorithm isn't something you can "forget". For a literate programmer it's like forgetting how to write the letter 'A' or forgetting which pedal is the gas and which is the brakes.

sedeki• 5 years ago

I think the overall point is the risk of forgetting something judged as "fundamental."

cassonmars• 5 years ago

I think you’re overestimating most people’s ability to withstand the stress that quiz show style Leetcode interviews can put on people. I’ve literally blanked on an interview before when I was tasked with writing a simple parser and I’ve written entire compilers. The interview processes are broken in most companies. Pair programming sessions with debugging and incremental graduation of the problem scope are way better at assessing programming competency, because you also get a sense for how well the candidate can collaborate and communicate.

jerrre• 5 years ago

Your analogies are things that you use a large % of the time, almost any second. Whereas I've been programming for years, and never wrote a binary search (I think?), but perhaps I don't qualify as literate?

I think writing an if-statement would be closer to your analogies.

midasz• 5 years ago

How often are you writing binary search algorithms hahah, is it like your variant of a doodle?

kragen4• 5 years ago

Well, but he said "forgot how to write binary search in 10 minutes". This came up here three months ago: "school was years ago...I've forgotten how to implement a hash table in C within 30 minutes. Is that really the gatekeeper we want?"

Well, I thought, yes, I think it is, actually? So I tried implementing a hash table in C—without testing it, as if I were writing it in an interview without programming tools. It took me 15 minutes and had a significant bug: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26593250

I concluded that implementing a hash table in C in 30 minutes is a reasonable thing to ask someone to try during an interview, and how people work on it will probably tell you a lot about their programming abilities. I wouldn't hire them for a C programming job if they said "school was years ago, I've forgotten", but you shouldn't necessarily expect them to succeed flawlessly.

Binary search in particular is notoriously tricky. It's easy to explain the idea in a lot less than 10 minutes, and it's easy to write a version of the code that sometimes works in less than 10 minutes, something like

   bs(k, a, i, j)
   {
     int m = (i+j)/2;
     return a[m] == k ? m :
            a[m]  < k ? bs(k, a, m, j) :
            bs(k, a, i, m);
   }

But it's easy for the algorithm to hide subtle bugs. That version has at least one type error (in modern C, anyway), one obvious correctness bug, at least one obvious performance bug, and probably some subtle correctness bugs as well. Many years passed between the first publication of a binary search algorithm and the first publication of a correct one.

Also, though, there are lots of kinds of programmers. You can spend a lot of time writing screen-scrapers or CRUD or machine learning models in Python without ever needing to implement binary search. In Python you should probably just use the bisect module in practice, most of the time, rather than reimplementing it.

adamors• 5 years ago

This comment is nonsense. Nobody is writing binary searches in their day-to-day jobs, and if they do it's once in a blue moon, not every day. You're using pedals every time you drive.

sheikheddy• 5 years ago

What does ‘credits’ mean in this context?

the_only_law• 5 years ago

Yeah I need to leave the industry.

Problem is, not much else looks appealing. Most realistic pivots look more miserable and end up just being adjacent roles that remove all the parts of what I like about software development while becoming mostly what I don’t, likely with a much lower salary cap. I thought about doing something radical and going back to school, but I don’t have the time or money. Though this thread makes me want to look again.

whataremyvalues• 5 years ago

I've found careerexplorer.com to be a helpful tool for career planning and exploration.

Knowing where I stand and what my values are also helps when it comes to navigating the professional environment.

jimbob45• 5 years ago

Where are you finding public speaking training? I’m asking because that’s a skill I would myself like to develop.

N00bN00b6• 5 years ago

The opposite is also true. I work in system engineering (sometimes it's called sysops. Hybrid programming/administration, often production stuff) and I've learned to I hide my creativity.

A lot of employers want people they can understand and they can trust.

The companies I work for generally don't want someone that's creative. They want someone that's dull and reliable. Show your creative side and they'll look for someone else, even if you've got 10x more skills than someone else.

Given that creativity doesn't pay anyway (there's a cap on pay and I've already reached that cap), there's no point to show it. I can get hired based on what's on my resume alone and by answering the same set of questions they always ask.

Then I get hired, I automate everything in under 6 months and I go sit on my ass or do something else. Flaw in the capitalistic system. I know what I'm worth, I can bring across what I'm worth, but it's simply outside the bounds of what's expected or needed.

And I know that sounds weird, but think of it like this:

No one is going to pay the fastest cashier in the world 3x minimum wage. Not even if they check out customers 6x faster than the next person. And claiming you're the fastest cashier in the world during the hiring process just gets you thrown on the discard pile.

The same goes for a lot of other professions, including mine.

simonw16• 5 years ago

That's a really interesting perspective.

I've been in interview debriefs where the fact that the candidate speaks at dozens of conferences a year has been raised as a potential problem, since it suggests they may not be as dedicated to the work that needs to be done.

N00bN00b6• 5 years ago

I've been in interview debriefs where the fact that the candidate speaks at dozens of conferences a year has been raised as a potential problem, since it suggests they may not be as dedicated to the work that needs to be done.

You are right, that's another good example. Hiring someone that's very passionate might just not be in the best interest of the employer.

wpietri5• 5 years ago

I'm sorry to hear it, but it's definitely true for certain kinds of employer. I once met somebody doing similar work to yours. Like you, he would bust his ass early on to automate everything and then be kind of bored. At one point he had two full-time jobs where he had done that and he still had time to play a lot of video games.

I hope he found an employer who could really challenge him, as he was happier during the initial phase of hard work. But I wouldn't be surprised if he never did.

EvilEy34• 5 years ago

Flaw in the capitalistic system.

???

N00bN00b6• 5 years ago

What is it called.. Market failure? It's got a name, I don't remember it.

The job market doesn't support certain overqualified people. I gave you an example.

Rationally, you'd think that a cashier that works 3x faster than other cashiers can make 3x the income. Or even 2x.

A plumber could do that, or a woodworker (they might have to start their own company, but they can do it). But a cashier relies on employers and they're just not going to pay a cashier that much. Cashier being an example. There are many support jobs were it just doesn't pay to be good at your job.

These people are technically incentivized to be mediocre. And they often are. Some of these positions allow growth paths, but not all. And just because I'm the world's best cashier, doesn't mean I'm a good store manager.

wyager2• 5 years ago

I've interviewed probably >100 people and maybe 7 or 8 had anything interesting that I could look at publicly on their resume. It doesn't even have to be job-related. It's cool to see a website that's just photography or motorcycle customization or whatever. It helps me get a handle on the person I'm interviewing as an individual, maybe gives us something to talk about.

TrackerFF3• 5 years ago

My experience has been that if you're interviewing for a younger, or more modernized company, then side-projects and such can be a cool thing to talk about.

But if you're interviewing for some F500 dinosaur, your CV is all that maters.

Zababa• 5 years ago

I had a few jobs interview recently. Here's what I got out of it:

If you have something you want to promote (or is on your CV in general), be ready to talk about it. I'm very lucky because I can talk about things on the spot very easily. If that's not you, make a list of the few main points that you want to talk about and try to memorize it. If you always get the same questions, it may be a good idea to address them before people even ask them, or to memorize an answer to them too.

I really underestimate the amount of stress that can be felt when you're alone facing 6 people for a job that you want. I don't have a good answer on how to handle it, although I think having my canned answer ready helped. It got better once this started to be a conversation. The good part is that I developed a lot of empathy for people that talk about interview stress.

It's going to be my first "real" job so these are probably obvious, but it might help someone so I'd rather share.

maxk428• 5 years ago

I really underestimate the amount of stress that can be felt when you're alone facing 6 people for a job that you want.

Practice. Go on interviews even when you don't need a job. Get that practice in and get comfortable with it. I went on 18 - 30 interviews a year for many years when I was a contractor and got very good at interviewing over time. I still get a bit tense when the job is particularly appealing, but with practice it gets to the point where they'll rarely throw a question at you that you don't know how to handle.

solipsism• 5 years ago

Ah, yes, purposefully waste people's time. Fuck them, right?

I've seen this kind of attitude before, and it's usually justified with something about how the companies don't respect your time so why should you respect theirs. The thing is... the kind of people at these companies who don't care about your time are the kind of people who would do something like this.

the_af2• 5 years ago

"Practice. Go on interviews even when you don't need a job."

I'm ambivalent about this kind of advice. On the surface it seems right, and I've never been more comfortable in interviews than when I was thinking "I don't need this job", at the same time interviews are incredibly stressful time wasters. For a lot of people, interviewing is one of the most stressful situations they are going to be in, barring life or death situations.

Just the thought of 18 to 30 interviews a year makes me anxious and I don't even need to interview now.

I'm not a young person anymore, and interviewing more is not going to help me either. It's like pulling my teeth: not something I want to practice.

Jach3• 5 years ago

Yup, I've always believed anything on my resume is fair game for someone to ask about, so I should be able to talk about each thing to some extent. As you accumulate more things it can be a useful filtering tool too as you just leave stuff off you don't want to talk about or where your recollection is too hazy.

Getting into a conversation can be stress reducing for both parties (interviewers can get stressed too) though if the interviewee comes off as trying to control the discussion, interviewers pick up on that (even if they're new and bad at driving things themselves like they're supposed to) and will consider it a red flag...

I hope after a while you get to experience the other side being one of the ~6 people interviewing someone for joining your team/the company, it's pretty eye opening too. Judging someone in such a short time period given at these bigger companies is tough, and when you actually want the candidate to join you don't want them to turn down an offer because of a bad interview experience with you. If you ever get involved I'd only encourage you try to improve things -- some ideas include trying to lower stress levels of candidates, or having more reasonable/useful and typing-instead-of-whiteboarding tests of "can you even program?", but there's many possible improvements, the goal of improving on what you have is what's important. (And there does sadly need to be some sort of "can you even program?" test in the pipeline, at least at the sort of companies that do the multiple-people-all-day interviews, because the input stages are even more broken than the interviews.) Even if there are many corporate constraints on what you can do, and even if you can't get management or other interviewers on board with your proposals, you can at least make your section the best it can be.

kirykl• 5 years ago

I’ve been told in the past by hiring managers my resume (at the time) was too creative. And later by hiring gurus that you need a creative resume to be noticed. Noticed doesn’t necessarily get you the job

vermarish• 5 years ago

Are you talking about having a creatively formatted resume, or about exclusively focusing on projects which demonstrate creativity in your resume?

dasil003• 5 years ago

The more experienced you get, the harder it is for any one interviewer to really grok your breadth and depth. This is doubly true in youth-biased tech cultures like Silicon Valley, and quadruply true 12 years into a bull market for tech.

At some point the game becomes: read your interviewer and tell them what they want to hear.

ipnon2• 5 years ago

There's a different interview strategy for every middle manager under the sun. Engineers want a single algorithm to land them a job. Middle managers want someone they get along with to maximize productivity and minimize trouble, and that's a target that moves with every interview.

sudeepj4• 5 years ago

There are two modes of hiring:

1. General purpose: Typical FANG like where hire first and then do team matching later

2. Targeted hiring: Companies want specific people and they try to recruit them

A sizable number of top open-source contributors get recruited are in #2. Eg. 1) Top contributors in Rust lang hired by AWS. 2) FANG companies targeting top AI researchers from academia.

One's open-source presence needs to be really prolific and the project has to make an large impact to be in #2 category.

For #1 category folks, your public profile does not matter that much (atleast for FANG companies)

Other way to think is #1 are treated as cattle, #2 are treated as pets.

The famous incident where author of homebrew was rejected by a top company because he could not invert a binary tree got in the wrong channel (#1) to begin with where he was treated as a cattle.

Note: Recruiter from FANG calling you still goes in #1 category for most people

kylec• 5 years ago

I don't know if hire first, team match later is a FAANG thing, I've worked for two of FAANG and neither did that, I was interviewed by and hired onto the team I ended up working on.

sudeepj4• 5 years ago

Actually there both cases happen:

1. Team matching before hiring commitee [1]

2. Hiring committee approved but rejected because no team matched [2]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProductManagement/comments/o6gs9m/g...

[2] https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-failed-at-the-team-mat...

tdeck2• 5 years ago

I'm not sure if the extra work is rewarded as much as you might think. For example, I was shocked to see a prominent open-source contributor hired into Google as an L5. Without going into detail, this person built projects used by many people reading this comment. Granted, I don't know what their comp or interview process was like, but 5 is basically an ordinary senior engineer level at Google.

vmception• 5 years ago

You shouldn’t be shocked by that, there are similar stories where the maintainer of a project, used by most engineers at Google, couldnt get hired due to the lesser relevant leet code / design / behavioral interviews

sudeepj4• 5 years ago

The key question imo is:

Was he still subjected to same interview process where he has to prove his coding skills inspite of being prominent open-source contributor?

As for L5 level based on anecdotal stories anything beyond L6 is hard in Google.

Search for "Crossing that barrier to L6 is getting more and more difficult with time" in [1]

[1] https://debarghyadas.com/writes/why-i-left-google/

The article is from 2019 and its not that old.

rachelbythebay• 5 years ago

Google hired me in 2006 (then 11 years of experience) as a 3. I didn't know any better at the time, partly because I was coming into the valley from the rest of the world.

I didn't find out just how screwed up this was until becoming part of the hiring process at Facebook... some seven or eight years later.

So... yeah. What you said is totally a thing.

fibonachos• 5 years ago

After interviewing with multiple FAANGs and receiving no offers, my current employer recruited me based on my LinkedIn profile for a role on new team. I have since started telling the FAANG recruiters “thanks for reaching out, but no thanks“. I guess that puts me in group number 2?

EvilEy34• 5 years ago

No, you're still a cattle. Until you receive an actual offer, you're always a cattle.

eru9• 5 years ago

The famous incident where author of homebrew was rejected by a top company because he could not invert a binary tree got in the wrong channel (#1) to begin with where he was treated as a cattle.

It's apocryphal at best. The guy was rejected by Google, but was never asked about inverting binary trees, like he claimed.

(I can believe that he was rejected on some other technical trivia, no clue. But the 'invert a binary tree' thing never happened.)

cableshaft7• 5 years ago

Okay, so you admit he claims it did happen, but you say it didn't without supporting that claim at all. Do you have a source we can verify?

sudeepj4• 5 years ago

My bad. I based on the tweet from the author himself [1]

May be he meant to use "invert binary tree" as a representative example of questions that typically asked.

[1] https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en

catillac• 5 years ago

Interesting anecdote, where did you hear that? I remember the original source tweet that was something like, “invented homebrew but couldn’t invert binary tree so they rejected me.”

wodenokoto• 5 years ago

I’m not sure I fully agree.

There are plenty of good positions (at least in Europe) where they ask for an engineer who can work with tool/Lang x, and won’t ask you to invert a binary tree, but will ask you about what kind of projects you’ve worked on.

I thought that was what you meant by #2, until you mentioned that it required “really prolific” engagement with open source.

ipnon2• 5 years ago

And still a mere semester at Stanford or year at Facebook still seems to stand out over all. The elite Silicon Valley institutions are extremely efficient at attracting, filtering and acquiring the best of the best. Their simple mention on a resume signals strongly to middle managers the world over that "the right stuff" has fallen into their lap, to the detriment of the rest of us.

eru9• 5 years ago

The elite Silicon Valley institutions are extremely efficient at attracting, filtering and acquiring the best of the best.

Not sure. Google and Facebook have gotten so large, that they had to drop their bars quite a bit.

I do agree that they are still seen as good signals on your CV. But the attraction to hiring managers might be in the same vein as the venerable 'nobody ever got fired for buying IBM'.

hef198982• 5 years ago

Having FAANG, well the A selling stuff over the internet, on your CV was a stronger thing a couple of years ago than it is now. At least my experience, but than it could be industry specific.

benhoyt• 5 years ago

My own experience backs this up: on the hiring side, I always use someone's personal projects as a fun discussion point in interviews (if they don't have any it doesn't count against them ... but like simonw says, it may help get an interview). On the being-hired side, I have a fair bit of tech writing and a few personal projects on my own website. I do these because I enjoy coding and learning, not because I want to get hired, but one of them (GoAWK) piqued the interest of Canonical's CTO and got me an interview and then a job.

barbarbar• 5 years ago

Is a doctor also going to publish achievements? A construction engineer should he/she publish calc of beam dimensions? A carpenter how should he/her show creations. If it was doors or windows installed in people's houses. Something is wrong here in this industry.

simonw16• 5 years ago

I would hope that carpenters would include photographs of their work as part of an interview process.

bryanrasmussen2• 5 years ago

I guess I'd also point out that some doctors might be expected to give talks and publish findings etc.

jschwartzi• 5 years ago

Depends. If you’re a framer they just want to know if you have tools and when you can start. If you’re a lead it’s important to know stuff like how to square a foundation and calculate stair risers and hips/valleys, and you should be familiar with different hardware and where it goes. But nobody is going to ask you about which cracker-jack spec houses you built at your last job.

harvey9• 5 years ago

Some Doctors publish research, and put that on their resumes.

benrbray• 5 years ago

Doctors are also licensed for their specialty by a medical board.

TrackerFF3• 5 years ago

I think the crux of the matter is that for almost all other such professions (MD, Engineers, Lawyers, etc.), there is a more formal type of gatekeeping when it comes to recruiting.

Education, licenses, and similar - often in combination.

The world of software development is MUCH more open to people that necessarily don't have the correct formalities, because there's a common knowledge that there are tons of talented people that never studied CS / Software Engineering / etc.

That, combined with high pay, of course attracts a lot of incompetent people.

So what would the solution be, to require all "professional" developers to have a degree and/or some professional license? I mean, yes, it could work - just look at the Cisco certification system. Some of those are quite rigorous, so the networking industry knows that if you hire someone that hold certain certs, they're probably competent.

But, then again, most the certifications boom of the 90s kinda died out.

That's why we're stuck with the grinding leetcode + technical interviews + side projects situation today.

wreath2• 5 years ago

Id rather grind leetcode and system design problems and get credentials for it and dont have to again. Wait.. thats what my university degree was for..

codingdave• 5 years ago

Every contractor I've ever hired to work on my home has a portfolio of projects they can show. Modernized folks have them online, old-school folks have binders they'll bring in to show you, but they have them, and will also provide references. As will doctors, BTW, especially surgeons. Asking to see examples of prior work is in no way unique to technology.

ganafagol3• 5 years ago

Build a small personal project and put the code on GitHub.

This has lost its effect and partially turned it upside down. In school people seem to be instructed "have a github with personal project" to improve hiring chances so now everybody an their mother has an account with a bunch of meaningless crap projects that they have 0 intetest in but put it there to try to boost interview chances.

Don't. Whenever I screen a job candidate and go to their github, if I find that this is just there so you can tick off "projects on github" from your employability checklist, you get huge minus points from me. Then better not have it at all.

brailsafe4• 5 years ago

Why would you give people negative points for trying anything they can do to compete in a fucking ridiculous job market? I mean, suggest alternatives if your genuine intention is to help people find work, rather than just saying that you actively look down on people for trying something.

You get negative points for being a dick. Of course, I'm making assumptions, which you should never do.

sokoloff• 5 years ago

If what you do comes across as manipulative, and specifically trying to manipulate me into believing you are more qualified, then it’s entirely rational for me to compensate for that by assigning negative points.

The job market is indeed ridiculous right now. Companies need more qualified SWEs than they can find. That causes wages to rise. Rising wages, buzz, and large numbers of openings attract more people to the field to compete for these jobs. Unfortunately, a lot of the people newly attracted aren’t fully qualified SWEs. People not qualified are rarely selected and so keep applying and interviewing. To inject some sanity, companies look for more ways to filter the incoming stream to find the signal in the noise. Applicants look for ways to make their application look more like signal. And the wheel in the sky keeps turning…

ganafagol3• 5 years ago

"Ridiculous job market"? The job prospects for devs in todays market is an essentially 100% guarantee that you get a job. The demand is huge and there are more jobs to fill than candidates available. You may not get into the company of your dreams, but overall, what's ridiculous is not how low the job chances are, but how high the demand is. If you do 100 interviews and 0 offers then you have an issue. It may not be your fault. Maybe it's a visa problem or some medical/psychological condition that makes it hard for people to see a good future colleague in you. But in the general case, there should be no problem getting a job if you're not too picky. Compare that to many other industries where it actually is ridiculously hard to even interview.

My suggestion is to go for quality. Only put up on you github stuff you are genuinely interested in or proud of or do. Not some mandatory exercise which is obviously only there to check a box.

You get negative points for being a dick.

Giving you the benefit of doubt, I'm assuming this was a "generic you".

Jach3• 5 years ago

How do you distinguish between "made a crappy chat app with Python+Flask because I wanted to play with Flask [and perhaps by making it public my hiring prospects will improve as a bonus, or not, but I don't have a strong reason to just keep it private on my machine]" and "made a crappy chat app with Python+Flask because I want to put Flask on my resume and hopefully my hiring prospects will improve"?

Or is it just that it's crappy enough to turn you off? If that's the case I'm kind of in agreement with the sibling that it seems overly harsh. Github-as-code-archive is a fine use case, I've never expected that someone linking their account should also be actively contributing to some projects used by other people. I'm happy just to see code of any sort, I don't care if the project is dumb or half-completed or finished or abandoned or still being worked on with a bunch of other people.

The only account that rubbed me the wrong way when I interviewed FTEs and interns was the kind that had nothing but a bunch of forks of other repos on it, no commits in them. It's like they were trying to pull a fast one on me, hoping I'd only look at it for a few seconds and think "oh lots of repos, good coder!" I'd have preferred an account be literally empty, because then at least I can believe they only linked to it out of some imagined (I hope) dumb HR filter as shallow as "has github acccount? check!"

serial_dev• 5 years ago

The only account that rubbed me the wrong way when I interviewed FTEs and interns was the kind that had nothing but a bunch of forks of other repos on it, no commits in them.

Maybe they didn't understand how GitHub works exactly? In the first weeks of me using github, I didn't notice the star feature, so I just forked a project, so I have it on my list. Even today, if I see an important repository, I just fork the repo if I'm afraid the original author will delete the repo.

Nition• 5 years ago

Build a small personal project and put the code on GitHub. Accompany it with a README with a detailed description of the project and screenshots of it in action—almost no-one does this, it only takes a few hours extra and it massively increases the impact your project will have on hiring managers who are checking you out.

Not to mention the impact your project will have on potential users. Please include a screenshot and a decent description of your project if you want people to use it.

GitHub projects I can forgive though, because you aren't usually trying to sell a project, and you don't owe anyone there anything. But even websites selling software occasionally don't have a single screenshot of it. In those cases I sometimes learn more from a Google image search than from the product website.

wingworks• 5 years ago

^ this, so much this. Please, if your project has a UI, please include a screenshot or two. I can't believe in this day and age, I still come across way to many repos (or software companies) with 0 screenshots.

thereare5lights• 5 years ago

This is wholly irrelevant at any tech company that uses leetcode style interviews, which is most companies in the bay area.

komali2• 5 years ago

Depends a lot on what you have to stand on. Got FANG on your resume? or NASA or something? Coast through your career if you want. Fresh out of a bootcamp or a college that isn't One Of Those Big Ones? Yea, a project is a great way to prove you know your stuff.

Having a project I was actively working during my job search was great for a lot of other reasons, too. A lot of interviewers don't really know what to talk about, hadn't looked at my resume, etc. I could quickly take control of these interviews by bringing up my project, and many interviewers would seem almost relieved to have the pressure taken off of them. This had relatively obvious advantages for me insomuch as I controlled the narrative of the interview, came off as very competent (despite having literally no working experience), and left interviewers with a good impression. All in all I consider this, along with my volume of applications, to be the most important aspect of my job search.

Bukhmanizer• 5 years ago

I don’t even think it needs to be technical. A friend posted a jokey video he made in college introducing himself on his website, beside his resume, and he says recruiters often say they contacted him because the video was funny. He’s obviously qualified too, but it just helps him stand out.

glangdale• 5 years ago

One unintended consequence of this advice being widely followed will be a lot of (or, frankly, "even more") write-only projects appearing on Github. As an interviewer I wouldn't be against this metric, but I would prefer to see that it wasn't too obviously gamed. You'd hope that the public creativity was pursued for intrinsic reasons (interest in the topic) rather than extrinsic.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't get hired if they don't have some huge repo that everyone loves, just that this shouldn't turn into some new thing for people to desperately grind.

At the very lowest level, I'd expect to see a lot of plagiarism and projects that are barely competent rewrites of someone else's work. I often go searching for various exotic keywords and often see fragments of things that I've worked on "written up" in almost entirely content-free blog posts; more likely to attract clicks rather than interviewer attention, but still.

cpiemontese• 5 years ago

How fun, a life spent trying to stand out to other people in the hopes of getting hired for the prized job.

BlissWaves2• 5 years ago

Yup, very inorganic way of life. There's no happiness in this line of work.

wreath2• 5 years ago

Side projects show only one attribute that is a reason why id hire someone, which is their technical ability. Delivering on time with reasonable quality, working within given constraints, with people from other disciplines are other aspects that are as important as technical capabilities but blogging and side projects cannot convey, therefore side projects wont make you standout imo unless you built a business around it. Id much rather work with people who have another life outside tech than not.

andy_ppp• 5 years ago

I have a feel having a nice to read and simple layout (one that when recruiters copy and paste into their template without your contact details) might matter just as much!

trhoad• 5 years ago

You'll miss out on a whole range of engineers that have a life outside of work (which also brings some balance and maturity to the job), and therefore have no time (or inclination) to groom a public presence on the internet. Raising a family, going cycling, volunteering, reading books - these are all more valuable insights into a candidate for me, more so than your retweets.

sevagh• 5 years ago

"Why would you make a good candidate for this position?" "I actually wrote a popular open-source app that-" "Shh... do you ride a bicycle? And do you raise children?"

dkdbejwi383• 5 years ago

I think this is a bit of an obtuse take. Doing non-coding things can give one skills that are useful in a software engineering role. Soft-skills like writing or public speaking, organisational skills, etc.

Having an outlet that's not related to your job helps keep your mind sharp and fresh when it comes to work, too. Less chance of burnout if programming isn't 100% of what you do within and outwith work.

If you deal with end-users, having a social life that involves non-technical people is a bonus too. Helps one to maintain an open-mind.

puppet-master2• 5 years ago

Folk post this on every thread as if denying the effect somehow makes it go away. As both a candidate and hiring manager, the effect is very real and it is folly to ignore it. As a candidate, I landed a FANG job early in my career almost exclusively on the basis of my (poor quality) tech blog attracting the attention of a recruiter. As a hiring manager, I've dumped all resumes for a position and practically begged an extremely young (barely legal) candidate to interview and work for me on any terms just based on the strength of the passion found in their resume and web site.

Simon's article is expressly about how little work is required to exploit this effect. You can still have a life outside of work while presenting the appearance of being passionate about what you do during work, it's really not hard.

sdevonoes• 5 years ago

while presenting the appearance of being passionate about what you do during work

Why would anyone want this? It's fake. Let's try to keep the IT world free of as much BS as we can please. Don't follow this nonsense trends.

watwut3• 5 years ago

Folk post this on every thread as if denying the effect somehow makes it go away. As both a candidate and hiring manager, the effect is very real and it is folly to ignore it.

Overwhelming majority of employed developers has literally no public presence.

hnuser847• 5 years ago

As a candidate, I landed a FANG job early in my career almost exclusively on the basis of my (poor quality) tech blog attracting the attention of a recruiter.

I would be careful attributing this to your blog or thinking that wouldn't have contacted you if you hadn't had a blog. I've never had a blog, live in the midwest, haven't contributed to my Github repos in years, and I don't even work as an engineer anymore (I've switched into product management), and yet I still get the occasional recruiter email from Amazon, Facebook, and even Google. Recruiters cast a VERY wide net because most people don't respond to their emails. I'm not saying I would necessary be qualified for any of these jobs, but merely haven't a recruiter reach out to you doesn't mean much.

simonw16• 5 years ago

From my article:

The vast majority of candidates have little to no evidence of creativity in public at all. The same is true for many of the best engineers I have worked with.
As a hiring manager, this means you have to learn how to source candidates and interview effectively: you don’t want to miss out on a great engineer just because they spent all of their energy making great products for prior employers rather than blogging, speaking and coding in public.

earthboundkid• 5 years ago

People on Reddit were making the same complaints, even when I expressly wrote "It’s not a must have, but if you do have it, it’s a leg up." I think people are just rationalizing why they don't need to do anything, so they don't actually read the text of the articles/comments and just project what they want it to mean.

no_time• 5 years ago

I always wanted to have a public gh and website that has my name on it... My only problem is that most of my non work related projects are either

a). Reverese engineering projects that may or may not be legal. I don't care at all but I wouldn't put it next to my name. Most of my projects fall under this category

b). So personal that it's very unlikely that anyone would find it useful.

c). Can only be used or even demonstrated with data that falls under strict NDA.

baliex• 5 years ago

Do it. Even if you can only publish parts of them...

a) you could write-up just the parts that aren't (borderline) illegal b) I think you'd be surprised at what people find useful and interesting c) maybe you could apply a little bit of (a) to this one but even if you have to not publish about this, you'll still have something from (a) and (b)

t3ssel• 5 years ago

Same advice: do it anyway.

My write-up are focused on the technical sides. I avoid making references or giving clues to what the target is.

vasilakisfil• 5 years ago

In my experience none really cares about your side projects during interviews. I have plenty of side projects, given plenty of talks, I list some of those in my resume along with my github link, yet from 40 interviews I had in the past 5 years I think ~3 mentioned something about my talks and side projects. And definitely didn't give me any advantage over the other interviewers.

But I am fine with that, I do my side projects & talks because I enjoy it and not to increase my chances when applying to a new job. Although there is nothing wrong to do a side project to increase your chances to get a better job.

angarg12• 5 years ago

You will jump straight to the top of the hiring manager’s mental list, maybe without them even noticing.

That sounds like an unconscious bias that you should fight rather than indulge.

I've interviewed hundreds of candidates for FAANG and I intentionally don't look at their CV to avoid biases. Personal projects can help with the interview if they are relevant, but I'm conscious about not "punishing" candidates who don't have any of those.

machinehermiter• 5 years ago

My job opportunities are limited to what my real connections and friends can help me get.

If I want to expand my opportunities I have to add nodes and strong ties in my network.

Not gimmicks for the interview lottery and pray the hiring manager doesn't have a friend going for the job.

From my past positions I suspect people highly underestimate how many times they go on an interview with no real chance for the position because the hiring manager already has someone in their real network in mind. I mean a real friend or friend of a friend, not someone they just added on social media but don't really know.

peteretep• 5 years ago

As someone who reads a lot of CVs: if you’re applying for a front-end role and your CV looks like ass, maybe fix that?

newfie_bullet• 5 years ago

Build a small personal project and put the code on GitHub. Accompany it with a README with a detailed description of the project and screenshots of it in action—almost no-one does this, it only takes a few hours extra and it massively increases the impact your project will have on hiring managers who are checking you out.

This is one of the key things I pointed out in a post I made after going through a lot of co-op resumes and interviews[1]. A little documentation and attention to detail goes a long way! If someone looks promising I DO look at their LinkedIn/GitHub/Website because it gives me some indication into their capabilities and whether they're willing to go a little above and beyond (to learn or present themselves more professionally online). I know not everyone has the time to do this (I have a 7 year old and don't have a great online presence) but if you're trying to start out in this industry it should be the minimum you're willing to do.

1 https://www.samuelrussell.net/posts/developer-hiring-dos-and...

adspedia• 5 years ago

Recruiters read so many CVs in a day that at some point they all become irrelevant. Has anyone here tried TikTok's new resume feature where people apply to jobs recording a video of themselves on TikTok?

gambler• 5 years ago

Just because you stand out doesn't mean you stand out in a positive way.

The idea that every piece of writing or open-source code you produce in public will be seen as a positive by everyone out there is patently absurd. Yes, you can put "creative" stuff on your resume. Some companies might appreciate it, many will ignore it, and most will judge you for it.

One obvious outcome of putting your blog on your resume in today's environment is that you will have to scrub it of anything anything even remotely controversial or unusual. You will have to constantly self-censor from that point on.

cainxinth• 5 years ago

I have a Wikipedia blog. Been doing it for over a decade. I post articles I find interesting, categorize and tag them, do some light copyediting, find/create a 300x300 pixel image to illustrate each, format them in a digestible feed, and added a random button.

For years people asked me why I bothered. I did it because I love Wikipedia and wanted a record of my wikiwalks, but it has also become a fun example of my style and interests to show prospective clients.

akhilpotla• 5 years ago

It makes the job of the person referring you so much easier. If we agree that getting a referral is the easiest way to get a job, which I think it is, then making the job of the person referring you is the most important thing.

If they can talk about you for a couple of minutes and then email their boss a link to a well written blog post, you derisk the act of referring you. You allow the boss to sell himself by providing the material, so your friend isn't on the hook as badly.

throwaway2727• 5 years ago

I agree with this - if you're a student or just starting in the workforce. However, a lot of companies in the industry have IP agreements that prevent you from sharing code in public - and there have been cases where companies have told employees to stop work on their personal projects/stop contributing to open source because of this. Some even restrict public comments to social media or participation in online discussions.

Now a lot of people, including me, have a Github and contribute to open-source using a anonymous screen name. However that also means that prospective employers can't use this to find me, and that I can't really mention these projects in a job interview.

I'm just surprised that no one has mentioned this here, as I've seen quite fruitful discussion on HN before on such agreements and am surprised this hasn't came up. I know some employers that would definitely tell you to cease work on your (publicly visible) Github projects once you are hired if you mentioned them in your interview.

It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

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