Make sure 1) the product has already been released to the public and 2) the hardware isn't stolen. Rig up a small power supply and find a way to light it up.
Being able to drop that in front of an interviewer and explain the entire system front-to-back is a massive advantage over people that have listed random "projects" in their resume but don't have much more to say about it. Be honest about your contributions, don't give away anything proprietary, but be proud of the project and show some enthusiasm when you talk about it.
That alone will get you 80% of the way to the job.
I also keep a binder with a single page for every project I've done. Just a photograph and maybe 3-4 lines of text. Keep that off to the side. When an interviewer asks about a technology or idea that matches even a little you whip that book out and point to the page. Now you're showing and telling again. Super easy to put together and maintain over your career.
Unfortunately doesn’t sound like a scalable application strategy
Basically no one I've ever met was able to show me work from the giant corporation they worked for.
But it's not because of NDAs. Indeed because of the nature of my business, those companies are my customers, we already all work together, I've signed NDAs, they are actually permitted to show me stuff.
It's because they didn't do anything. NDA = Not Doing Anything.
> That alone will get you 80% of the way to the job.
Large corporations (500+) employ like half of Americans, and probably way more than 50% of tech workers. So many of their management systems boil down to having 2-10 people redundantly doing the same work. So many do no work. I mean I'm sure they aspire to do work, but there isn't any to do.
As long as this remains the norm, your interviewers will, statistically speaking, have done similarly little as you, and that will be okay, and leetcode will prevail.
No, it's because it's my employers code, not mine.
God knows what trying to exfiltrate it opens me up to criminally or civilly.
I've been meaning for years to put together a proper "projects" portfolio for my own site. I really like what Tom MacWright has for that https://macwright.com/projects/
Are we sure the author is not showing some unconscious bias by looking in others for traits he has (public creativity)?
There is no particular reason why public creativity is linked to good engineers. It's one way to show good engineering, sure. But far from the only way. I could see some other hiring managers arguing the opposite: if you have time to write lightweight tech posts on your blogs, maybe you are not a great engineer who will solve my company's most difficult problems.
That being said, especially for new grads, I strongly recommend showing something, anything beyond "I graduated from this university and here are the classes I took".
Blogging takes time away from work. Some people like myself do not want to make their thoughts public because I value privacy. I also don't feel like I have anything much interesting to say. I just like getting "shit" done.
I feel I'm capable of learning anything required to complete a task/job. Yet, I wouldn't fit his idea of someone who stands out. Then, again I don't really like working with people who show such extreme bias and are not open minded.
That being said, I see no reason this advice wouldn’t work on hiring managers with less experience blogging.
He never claimed it means you're a good engineer. It's advice for standing out among other applicants when you're looking for a job.
Some of them are live, have screenshots, proper documentation and such.
Some of them gets stars or people reach out for support on these projects.
Some of them I've advertised on Reddit etc and reached 100K+ views and a lot of upvotes in their respective Communities.
I also have a substack which has reached top of HackerNews once.
All this has netted me exactly ZERO opportunities till now.
Thankfully, I'm doing Github and Substack as a hobby/learning so no expectations = no disappointment.
But the author is deluded to think these things help. You might win the lottery and the right person might see your content at the right time. But it's better to just use this time to cram Leetcode and get a job.
After reading your post, I reviewed your GitHub profile. You're certainly on the right track, but there's room for improvement. Here are my personal observations and opinions:
- You have numerous small projects, but they lack detailed descriptions and the README files don't tell me much about their purpose. Why are you building these? How can they be run? What functionality do they offer?
- Many projects have minimal activity, suggesting they might be incomplete or abandoned.
- There are several boilerplate projects like "calculator", "todo", and "tutorial".
- Your commit messages in most repos are quite short, often just one or two words. This practice might not be accepted in a professional team setting. I've been guilty of this with my personal projects at times too.
- Your project https://github.com/prakhar897/workaround-gpt shows promise in terms of community interest and the start of what could be a well-constructed README. Perhaps you should consider continuing with this project or developing a similar, well-structured project. Just a thought.
If that's going to be seen as a red flag, then I'm not going to share any of that.
At least in the companies I've worked for in the UK and the US it should help you make it past the first filter - the "I have a stack of candidates, which of these are worth setting up an initial phone interview with" phase.
Here's my Resume for reference: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u9F8_2m2W1mcKIoFs3hwUEn5Kgf...
I'm quite Junior so I don't know if this applies to more senior positions, but in my experience when applying to jobs my Github page was always a point of discussion when I got an interview.
That said, not sure you can easily quantify projects as having no impact. Back when I was a seeker my resume had a handful of non-trivial public projects buried in a footnote and one would come up in about 75% of interviews. Despite bias I doubt this is too unique assuming the projs themselves are interesting.
Remember: your entire resume is adtech for your skills to a future employer. I'm of the belief that if human eyes ever skim it: project: Java CLI fizz buzz will never outperform project: RISC-V microkernel in Rust.
Due to competition, very few measures are competed upon very fiercely.
Whatever applies in west doesn't apply here.
I have had friends like you who did incredible projects and contributed to open source.
The best of my friends have ended up in relatively good startups due to open source and projects, after lot of struggle.
But on the other hand, I have seen absolutely incompetent morons who did Leetcode (or even cheated at it) and got a high life job.
Scale ruins things I guess. This market is pathetically fucked.
Unless you highly curate your online presence for the hiring people (e.g. your blog only contains articles of interest to the interviewers in one place), I think nobody cares. The exception being is if your code/articles are in the top 5% of read articles, then I'd guess that speaks for itself without gaming the presentation.
On mine I list three attributes that make me a great, and unique, worker for the jobs I'm looking for. Go ahead and be grandiose here -- the point is to start a conversation!
https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an...
Maybe part of the problem is that I'm grossly under-estimating the amount of work involved in "post an interesting technical article to it once or twice a year" for people who don't already spend a lot of their time writing.
Here are the struggles I've had with this over my career:
* Public vs private persona. I'm a pretty open person and happy to share with people I know or where it feels "safe" (eg, Facebook where I more explicitly control the audience) but I'm deeply uncomfortable with publicly announcing things under my name on the internet to go god-knows-where. This is one reason I've been tremendously uncomfortable with Twitter. I absolutely despise the public-broadcast model, and I'm somewhat suspicious of people who want to make such a show of themselves (to build an "audience"). I've toyed with various forms of pseudonymity but that brings its own problems; I think it encourages antisocial behaviors and then at some people you have to 'expose' yourself (eg, when you have to tell your prospective employer, yes, NSAhacker31337 is my github, take a look!)
* Along with the above, blogging/demonstrating things always has a bit of a show-off feel. "Look at this great thing I know how to do, I bet you don't know how to do it!" Or, worse, you're demonstrating something "everybody knows" and you look like a naive fool.
* Consistency. I've made various "I should start a blog" efforts over the years, and inevitably get bored of the tools and want it somewhere else, or I don't like the tone I used to use, or I forget which site I used, or whatever. It's sort of like how "just go to the gym 3 days a week" shouldn't be that hard, but for 99% of people is.
Again, these are just my personal struggles, to maybe help you understand why people don't. It's nothing against your advice, which I think is fantastic.
That's one of the reasons I'm so keen on the TIL format - it gives you permission to write about tiny little things (things you just learned) without feeling like you need to be original or explain something groundbreaking and new.
I just published a tiny one about figuring out typing.Protocol in Python for example: https://til.simonwillison.net/python/protocols
I wrote more about that here: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/
I know I'm coming at this from the idealistic position of someone who's lucky enough to have a job, but isn't it kind of a good thing if you find out early that you're applying to a company where doing things is a red flag?
Generally it's been easy for me to get interviews, and hard to get offers (something like a 95% onsite rejection rate). I have enough experience and the resume items that gets recruiters excited about their next bonus. But it seems folks walk away saying "Yeah he's technical, but <xyz nitpick or undermining statement about my contributions>" ...
Oh well, I've also given up on caring.
I've had a surprising number of interesting interactions just because someone saw my email and went to my website. Some yielded job leads and eventual referrals to jobs through old-school networking.
Oh, but the explanation is simple. They resent being told to eat their vegetables. They know you're right, but don't want to or can't do it, and attack you for reminding them of that.
> I'm grossly under-estimating the amount of work
Probably a big part of it - if you write a lot, it is very easy to forget how intimidating it can feel to those who don't. And related hang ups can be amplifiers - if you don't write much and have insecurities (sorry, "imposter syndrome"), being told this should be an easy thing can be triggering. And this is employment we're talking about - it is definitionally high-stakes, whatever the stakes are.
I think that's largely it. I've thought of things that would be interesting to write as a short blog post. What's stopping me?
* I don't already have a blog where it'd be easy to post things. I'd have to research what to sign up for. Free sites would spam my readers with ads that I don't agree with, and try to track them. Paid sites cost money, obviously, and may be predatory. The platform could be acquired and/or killed, and I could lose my content or have to transfer it somewhere else. I anticipate 50% of my total blogging effort would be spent just on dealing with all this bullshit. That's time I could be spending with my kids. "Just self-host!" okay now 90% of my total blogging effort, plus server costs.
* I'd want proper code formatting, examples, good visuals; you know, something publishable. I'd simply never get it good enough to post. Perfect would absolutely be the enemy of good. And ideas are constantly evolving and changing. I don't agree now with everything I wrote a year ago; that's what progress and learning is supposed to do. So the temptation to constantly go back and nitpick it, edit it, would be there, all day, every day.
* Nobody would ever read it anyway. It wouldn't hold a candle to the blazing light of SEO spam. Even in the unlikely event someone did read it, they wouldn't care. Even in the unlikely event they did care, it would be different from the way they're already doing things, and therefore they'd become extremely hostile and write hateful comments about some minor point they misunderstood. Which I'd read, despite myself, and then I'd have shower arguments with them instead of focusing on actual work.
So why am I doing all this work? Who am I blogging for? A potential future employer for the one time I'm looking for a job in the next decade, who probably won't even bother to look at it? "You write for yourself, to organize your own thoughts" -- okay, I already do that, I just don't publish it, for all these reasons.
For both #1 and #2, there are dozens of static site generators that handle all of this for you automatically. Not all of them are as complicated as the big ones. You can get started with a theme in Zola in a couple hours and that can be your blog forever, with support for code syntax.
For number 3, the idea is not that people will organically stumble on your blog in a search, but that you'd share it to different communities relevant to your blog post. If you're writing about F#, post it on the F# reddit. SEO spam can't really mess with you there. In fact, I feel like SEO spam is only pushed by Google, and communities tend to not engage with that content.
I feel you on the extremely hostile responses, though. Without fail, any article that makes it to the top of HN has lots of people insinuating it was somehow written maliciously, even if it's just about something minor like Sum Types vs Union Types. Unfortunately the answer is to shut off your brain to the hostility but take in their counterpoints. These people likely think about nothing but code for most of the day, so even if they're well-rounded and nice in real life, their brain has temporarily narrowed the scope of their world view, and they make mountains out of mole hills
My recommendation these days is to start with GitHub Pages.
1. It's free
2. The default address - yourname.github.io - looks good enough. You can assign a custom domain to it easily for free too if you want to: https://til.simonwillison.net/github/custom-subdomain-github...
3. GitHub have a REALLY GOOD track record of not breaking things like this. I trust them more than most other companies with respect to my stuff there staying online for a long time into the future.
My trick for formatting syntax highlighting is to write my posts in Markdown (with the ```python tags for code) and then run it through this little tool to turn it into HTML: https://til.simonwillison.net/tools/render-markdown - then I publish the resulting HTML.
I actually think that we'd have a much better job market without any of this.
I'm also among the people that see too much pointless content being published simply for hidden advertising, including by companies.
I think there's a small correlation between "having a tiny bit of evidence online that you're capable of solving problems" and "getting invited to an in-person interview" - at least given my own experience at the companies that I've worked at (and hired for).
That said, I do think there's a strong correlation between being good at written communication and being a great senior / staff-level engineer.
I do intend (as in, have been particularly intending recently) to do it, because I think then I would find it lower effort, I would do it, and that I would like that. We'll see, the list of things I've intended to do is long!
I particularly like the style of (others') blog where you dive semi-deep on something semi-obscure to fix or do something, perhaps it's not your usual area, and then write up a nice explainer for the next searcher, or a note to self for the future. Explain it to someone who's never understood it before, while you still remember that perspective.
I'd suggest a regular repo, but GitHub block search engine crawlers from indexing anything other than the README.md file - so Gists are weirdly better for publishing content.
Edit to add: I feel like this came off as harsh, but it really wasn't intended to at all. We all have this kind of bias. I have a bit of the opposite bias as you, for what it's worth, because the best people I've worked with have been essentially silent in public, and I tend to see people with robust public profiles as having spent time on marketing themselves that could have been better spent on other things. This kind of bias that we all build throughout our life experience is why hiring is extremely fraught.
I have about five ideas I really want to write about, that I know would be really great future PR for myself in the niche I'm interested in right now. They wouldn't need to be long, but they would still be hard for me to write and edit to a point that I feel good about having them out in public attached to my name. So they don't get written. (But maybe they will someday.)
But making your voice heard and stand out from the crowd is no simple feat: we don't all have the luxury of Twitter following, a much subscribed RSS feed, a prominent domain name to spread the fruits of our hard work.
The network effects that benefit early influencers are difficult to pierce, I find.
You just need something you can link to from your resume, so the hiring manager can click through and see a tiny bit of evidence that you can talk about code or build a project.
Whether that's through a blog, through their socials, LinkedIn posts, through their YouTube, through their GitHub - I review all of it; anything I can find. I want to see how they communicate, how they think, how they comment their code (or don't), their view points on various touchy subjects in software engineering and system design.
It's basic background research. Why suffer through a relationship that isn't going to work out for either party if some basic digging can short circuit that problem? It also provides great context for an interview and points of discussion that help connect with the other party.
As a hiring manager I weigh a candidate's public presence at 10~15% of my initial decision, even more if it's exceptionally impressive. And I hear from other hiring managers that they view this similarly.
If you have good academic qualifications and a great record of past work experience ... guess what, there are several other candidates with great academic qualifications and an impressive work experience. Having a strong portfolio of public work can be what distinguishes you and gets you the opportunity to be invited to interview.
One important note: just having publicly available content isn't enough. It also has to be credible and impressive. Original articles that demonstrate deep expertise and are valuable to others. Serious codebase you wrote yourself or made significant contributions to. Real achievements on things like Kaggle competitions. I sometimes see people including a link to a "business card" type website with their photo and links to their social media or a blurb about themselves. That doesn't impress and won't make a difference.
Companies already want us working an amount of hours well beyond what our salaries should cover, being on-call, and often working well into the night for deadlines, and sometimes the entire night into the next work day when incidents arise.
Then, when we need a job, we need to custom write a compelling “cover letter” that sucks the dick of some corporate entity in order to “tell us why you’d love to work for us” in a unique way that gets someone’s eyeballs in the 5 seconds of time your resume has to get attention or shredded.
Why do I want to work for your company? Because I need to eat to survive and you’re hiring. That’s why. There may be more about your company I like, but at the end of the day I wouldn’t apply to work there if I didn’t need to in order to survive.
Now, we need to be spending all of our time off, which if you work for a startup isn’t as much as you’d think, developing a blog with highly technical and relevant posts in an industry where all tech is a moving target with fads that move fast, Maintain open source projects that should not be “simple” in nature, speak at conferences, etc. That’s in addition to the never ending time commitment to continued learning we already have to do in order to stay somewhat relevant, while also trying to focus on specific tech enough to become a senior level expert or industry leader.
No. Enough. Corporate America gets enough of our lives. The interview process from applying to offer is already a shit show circus of having to market yourself hoping you get picked to not become homeless, all while dealing with multiple rounds of lengthy calls with people on power trips who can often actually be threatened by an impressive portfolio and not recommend you for hire in order to secure their own role and status.
If I work on open source it will be for me and not for a potential job (that won’t look at it or care anyway unless they can use you for it).
You know what gets people offer letters? Word of mouth referrals coming from highly revered coworkers. If you have solid connections out there that are badass engineers who can vouch to their eng managers that you too are a badass engineer, the interview is essentially a formality.
I live in a country where the unemployment rate is pretty low (2.5%) and the situation is kind of the reverse of what you are describing. Companies are trying to entice potential employees, not the other way around. Give me 6 weeks of paid vacations and do not even think about over-times; you look at me funny and I am gone... there are 10 other companies where I can start tomorrow.
I am now trying to relocate to Spain and it is not like that there - but I get why; because their unemployment rate is really high so employers have the power over employees. But in the US? I am sorry if that is a naive question - I've not been to the US since 2002. A lot has changed, apparently.
They typically will not work you that hard, and no one checks your blog or Github.
Of course, there are downsides to this approach as well...
This is embodied in the contractor lifestyle: no corporate bullshit, no politics, and the "you give me money, I give you a limited slice of my time and skills" equation is crystal clear, without any BS like "we are a family", and such like.
> You know what gets people offer letters? Word of mouth referrals by highly revered coworkers.
Equally relevant as a contractor. And the bonus is that interviews are usually done quicker than for permies, actually, the last time I had a single 45 minute interview, with a minimal amount of technical questions asked (YMMV!).
You are selling something, why should anyone buy it? Convince them.
I agree that hundreds of hours of non-paid work is not a reasonable thing to expect of IT workers. But TFA's message has worked for me for landing several jobs.
If you read my post, you'll see that I'm not advocating for that. I'm suggesting the bare minimum: "Start a blog. Post an interesting technical article to it once or twice a year—something you’ve learned, or a bug you’ve fixed, or a problem you’ve solved. After a few years stop bothering entirely, but leave the blog online somewhere."
The point of my piece is that you don't need to dedicate huge amounts of effort to doing this kind of work. Do a little bit, stick it online somewhere and it will still give you a huge benefit compared to other candidates who don't have any public evidence of their work.
First, let me say that I don't disagree, pragmatically, with the truth of what you're saying, in terms of increasing your odds on the whole as a candidate.
But that said, as another hiring manager, let me respectfully disagree with this as a strong hiring signal. I say this, to boot, as an engineer with an, in my experience, above average OSS contribution, research, and patent portfolio, although these things are a bit power-law-esque so obviously I'm nothing next to many.
When I interview, I want to know you have a track record of high quality delivery, and are good for the skills you attest to. I can understand some folks looking at the public displays as a proxy to that, but I'd argue, at that point, indexing on the "public" part is orthogonal to what we're looking for it to display, and carries both false positives and negatives.
To some degree we may be agreeing loudly here, where you'd say "well that's what them putting it in public is" but I'd worry that by caring about the public component vs. a more generalized examination of professionalism and accomplishment, we preclude folks who have no time or interest in curating that sort of profile.
If I put myself into the absolute edge case of two candidates all things being equal but one seems to have also made a more visible portfolio of work, MAYBE, MAYBE that would move the needle in terms of establishing a degree of external validation, but I think I'd be looking _hard_ for other aspects to differentiate that would seem to have more direct applicability to our day-to-day needs, and am hard pressed to think of a time in the last few hundred interviews I've had to make such a choice without a stronger differentiator for any candidate above a very junior level.
Completely anecdotal and probably another extreme of the coin - but I'm curious if folks have some experience with this and how to spot this case.
Not OP, but I'd want to chime in and state the following fact: if you're looking for a job, your goal is to sell yourself as the best choice that your potential employer can make. If you cannot make that case for your employer, why do you think any third party would make it for you?
There are indeed a lot of paper tigers out there. I worked with a couple of them. They can interview better than most. If hiring managers have a limited amount of time to make that call, are you helping them find you by failing to present your case?
However it didn't help much in the interview process. I've never been in an interview where the interviewer looked at my profiles on various code hosting platforms, reviewed some of my pull requests before hand, and came into the room with a good idea of what I do and how I work. They will still ask the same pre-canned questions they are forced to ask and we're back to reversing linked lists and memoizing tree walking algorithms.
It's good for getting to know folks which can help in finding places to apply to where you might already know some people.
But I doubt it's going to make you stand out in the interview process itself.
Update: That being said, I've been on the other side of the table and when I was the one setting up the interview process I made sure candidates knew that they could send over recent PRs they've made for us to review in order to bypass any coding exercises. I find it much easier to discuss the problem they were working on and seeing their solution is really helpful.
I guess one thing Simon didn't consider is that as long as the vast majority of developers (let alone people) express no creativity, your interviewers won't either.
> ...they could send over recent PRs
As long as the cultural norm is NDA - better known as Not Doing Anything - it won't happen.
I have a blog with 170-ish posts. About half are technical. Three or four have gone viral on HN.
The other half are personal, but I live in a place where people generally share the same values, so those other posts shouldn't be a problem.
I've got a personal project. It's used in production and ships as part of the base install with FreeBSD and Mac OSX.
It demonstrates high proficiency with C. It demonstrates careful work with every function documented in Doxygen comments and a development manual entirely designed to raise the bus factor to infinity. It also shows I've got fuzzing chops.
I have other code. It's not complete, but I've got hundreds or thousands of hours in it, and it's to the same quality.
And I can't get a job.
> Got another programming job. Got fired for "performance." I think the reason wasn’t good, but I also have a hard time building a theory of mind, which means I can’t read code written by others.
If you can't read code written by others, that's going to be a big concern for companies that require you to read and modify other people's code.
Perhaps you need to be a contractor, not an employee.
https://gavinhoward.com/2023/04/rust-is-dead-to-me/
> Rust the language is dead to me.
> why?
> Because, quite literally, the Rust Foundation wants to make people like me unwelcome in any Rust event, not just official ones.
> Don’t believe me?
> Look at the draft Rust Trademark Policy that the Rust Foundation is asking for comments on and go to page 12:
> > We will consider requests to use the Marks on a case by case basis, but at a minimum, would expect events and conferences using the Marks to…prohibit the carrying of firearms…
> I have a concealed carry permit. I have firearms and other weapons. I know how to use them, and I will use them in defense of my wife and myself.
> And you can bet I carry them into places I consider dangerous if it is legal to.
Unfortunately, I'd say a key skill for a contractor is probably reading code written by others because - at least in my experience - you're 90% of the time coming in to clean up or maintain an old mess someone else has made.
If you can't read code by written by others, being a (software) contractor is probably the worst job you could have. Now you need to read new code at every new client you start at.
I read a couple of the posts; I can't comment on the demographics or beliefs of the people recruiting in the location you are looking, but I suspect they are not as uniform as you imply - and even those who share them may not share also your penchant for mixing the professional with cultural evangelism - especially if they have responsibility for team cohesion and company reputation.
I was just refuting the article.
> Labor Code section 1101 prohibits an employer from preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or preventing employees from becoming candidates for public office.
I lost the motivation to continue.
Of course, it might happen that they'd hire contributors, as you say. I'd say this is incredibly rare (but does happen). Usually, from my experience, this happens when the company wants to essentially "acquire" the code (and sometimes, the contributor is hired as a contractor for a couple months).
Judging by your description and comment you certainly stand out, but is that enough to get a job? I can't tell unless I have an interview with you.
I am not a good fit for companies, and I know it.
I was just refuting the article.
* You call BLM a "terrorist organization".
* You explicitly object to the idea that the phenomenon of police killings of black people is rooted in white supremacy.
* You give off serious antivaxxer vibes, and refuse to wear a mask during a global pandemic.
* You're petty enough about the above to post a list of businesses you won't patronize because they require masking.
* You are boycotting Rust because they don't want people bringing guns to their conferences.
* You complain about being banned from lobste.rs for posting transphobic comments. (And yes, despite your protestations, they are indeed transphobic.) And also for claiming that gender dysphoria is essentially a mental illness to be cured.
You clearly think these are all reasonable positions to hold, but the fact of the matter is that these sorts of things will be considered red flags by many recruiters and hiring managers at many tech companies. You may believe that these things should have no bearing on whether or not you get a job, but what matters is the reality, not what you believe.
On the technical side:
* You don't want to work in any language but C.
* You claim that you can't read/understand code written by others, citing a dubious "theory of mind" excuse.
Most tech companies don't use C these days. Certainly there are some, but most that write internet-facing programs don't use it. Even a company that does have C positions might be concerned about your unwillingness to write anything else. And reading, understanding, maintaining, and adding features to other people's code is a huge part of nearly any software development job.
I have no doubt that some of your technical achievements are impressive, but companies consider much more than that when making hiring decisions.
All this is just from a few minutes perusing your website.
> I live in a place where people generally share the same values, so those other posts shouldn't be a problem.
I'm assuming you live in Utah based on some of the things I read on your website; I don't expect there are a ton of tech-company employers there. And of those that are there, I suspect many people who work at them don't share as many of your values as you think they do.
I thought this was the progressive opinion? Gender dysphoria is a mental illness and transitioning is the treatment. What’s the accepted view now?
My post was not wondering why I wasn't getting hired; it was a refutation of the article saying that blogs were all good.
Sometimes you can stand out in a bad way (in other people's minds).
I'm okay with this because I'm not a good fit for sterile office work.
I work for an established (perhaps legacy) tech company. While people with such views aren't the norm, we have quite a few of them, and we all get along quite well. The only thing that would give pause in the list above are the transphobic comments.
In my experience, not a single employer cares about documentation.
It was kinda embarrassing, but I also felt joy that there are actually people out there who look at my stuff. The job didn't fit, but it was still a good experience.
So yeah: Investing a few minutes in writing up a personal readme which gets shown on my gitlab was worth it. I can recommend!
Most interviewers will not discuss your public work because they want to be unbiased and have the same discussion with multiple candidates without any other factors other than your performance in the interview itself influencing their assessment. They are doing the right thing.
Where a portfolio can help you is in getting you from application to being invited to interview, which can be a challenge when there are many applications for a role.
In some cases it might also influence a hiring manager's or hiring committee's decision as a tie-breaker between you and another candidate who did just as well as you did in interview, but I believe that's less common.
Heck, as part of the most recent interview process I was asked to provide a code walkthrough of a part of a personal project of mine for two developers from the company I was interviewing for. It was fun actually.
I’ve never come across a candidate where anyone has dug into someone’s online presence prior to an interview.
And to be honest, I’d rather speak to the person that read something they wrote.
But again, that’s big corp so obviously other companies might do it differently.
Always had a really really difficult time with how to present “myself” on a personal website - too many sides (code, personal preferences, opinions, etc) in one place. But whatever just send it and own it I guess - am still content selective though.
Then they need to have questions, which triggers curiosity that has them looking for more.
Only then does having a piece of content help you.
Yes it helps, but it doesn't help as much as having a resume that suggests you're a potentially good match without oversharing why you're not a good match. A good resume raises questions that leads to a conversation.
The resume matters more... but if all else is equal and candidates you're competing against also have great resumes, then content matters. You'd be very surprised at the lack of great resumes though.
One thing I haven't seen anyone touch on here is that I think this is more relevant early on in someone's career when there is less visible history on candidates.
If you make it easy for someone doing so to get in contact about job opportunities and make it clear you’re open to them, you’ll often start to get some.
What I do have though is a decent CV.
When people say you need this or that, what they're actually saying is you need to show somehow that you're technically capable.
There are other ways of doing that than just having a blog.
Also, is it me, or is this ridiculous? Accountants don't need to do any open-source accounting to prove their bona fides. Lawyers don't need to side-hustle some public defense cases to get respect. Civil Engineers don't build some free bridges to get hired.
The employer working out if I have the technical skills I say I have is literally not my problem. They need to have a technical test or whatever they feel ticks that box for them. I'm happy to jump through whatever hoops they put in front of me (except a "take-home project" that will actually take more than an hour), but they have to put the hoops out.
I'm not against open source, but I don't see that as a qualification either. It's a different thing from writing commercial code, with different skills and conditions. Plus, 90% of "projects" that I see on people's Git*b repos are forks or non-working code. I'm all for having my mistakes in public, but if I was to judge the average coder by their Git*b content I'd never hire any of them.
Same for blogging - the ability to write a coherent, meaningful blog is great, and possibly a useful indication that the author can actually string a sentence together, but it's a different skill from what's required to write commercial code.
The HR person probably also wrote the job spec with "at least 10 years experience with programming language that is 1 year old" or "minimum 5 years managing a team of more than 20 people and revenue over $100mil - entry level starting salary $30,000"
It works out well.
If they actually gave enough of a crap to look deeper and question you on it you're onto a winner.
However, having one gives the interviewer some additional insights about you. While no candidate should be discarded for not having public code, I don't think dismissing it completely without even looking at it is correct, because you are discarding a great source of information about a candidate.
Note that the insight could even be negative (such as a candidate applying to a senior position with sub-par public code recently written)
Demonstrating professional skills shouldn't be discounted just because someone else doesn't.
It absolutely should make a difference if it's relevant even other people have reasons for not doing the same.
Hiring is selecting the right person and not selecting the wrong person. It is not about sorting all people 100% correctly into hire/no-hire groups.
A blog with code can tell a lot about a person. Do they understand the material? Can they write coherently about it? Can they target an appropriate level of audience with that? Maybe these can't be answered just by reading the blog, but it gives a lot to discuss in the interview process.
Some people want to have the exact same interview process between all people. People are different, though. Locking the interview down to a single process doesn't allow for the variety of skills out there to shine individually. If that avenue is through a portfolio or blog, it's fair game.
It's not bias to hire non-one-dimensionally. People are not cogs.
I got another person hired as I found a Android game she had written and pushed to the Play store. Again, I don't think she mentioned it on her CV. After looking at it and talking to her about it, I told management to hire her, if they found no issues in her as a person.
In both cases they were outstanding at their job, relative to their level of seniority and pay. Both are very high up the list of people I'd happily work with again.
It might not be fair to the candidates that didn't have projects (or had ones that I couldn't find), but it was a very effective way of getting amazing people. Which makes sense as examples of work are probably better than CVs and interviews for judging someones ability to do the job.
It is hard, period. Otherwise everybody would be there, and if the advice works then you will have to find something else as in any other market, gaps close.
“work life balance shouldn’t be penalized, going beyond will be rewarded. if you aren't interested in those benefits you should still be able to collect a paycheck at a static level, if you are it is accurate that you can get offers and counteroffers more easily”
Judging from my experience as business unit lead in an enterprise company, for every very high paying dev (VHPD) there is a mentor who supports this person. This is like in real life: no one promotes himself, you get pulled up.
Usually there is a specific business case behind VHPDs - and someone with technical prowess, to understand the need behind it. The line between ignorance and support is thin: "Why pay someone so much money? We can have 4 people for the same amount. 4 are better than 1!"
Putting out public consumption content shows you're the type of developer that enjoys putting out public consumption content. That can be a useful role for companies to fill, but it's hardly the only role needed.
It's a little flashy for interviews, and that can help get a foot in the door sometimes - but like the author mentions... Interviewers aren't stupid, we know that some of our best hires don't do any blogging/public content at all. It's not going to move the needle much either way for most of the hiring I've been involved in.
There are tons of devs who have little interest in those $500k jobs. But regardless, applying for any position at any company is a sales and marketing task. The advice in this article applies well to them all.
The problem is that if you don't know what good looks like, you don't know that your thing isn't good and you may not even know how to recognize someone who can review it for you.
The question to strive for: "if someone doesn't know me or my work and my company at all, can they look at my resume and understand what I've done, why it's impressive: and why I am an interesting candidate?"
As someone who sits on the other side of the table all the time, when someone has structured their LI/resume this way, it tells you they (1) cared to do it well (2) found a way to understand what's relevant and (3) found a way to implement it: those add up to a very strong signal layered on top of their technical skills.
Someone will inevitably reply that you can be a great dev and a terrible writer and I guess that's true but it makes it so much harder for someone to "see through it" and hire you.
I applied to a large local IT corporation. The person interviewing me (who was a team lead) simply assumed I have the skills necessary for an entry position and we pretty much skipped the technical part of the interview. (I ended up in a fairly fantastic team full of great engineers and coworkers. Turns out the guy who interviewed me was awesome at hiring.)
This post didn’t say “I’ve found that candidates with public work are more likely to pass the interview.” Just that he noticed that he’s biased and that could be a good way to get the interview. It’s unfair but if you want the job you could use this to your advantage.
Yes, but you probably read his reviews online, compared his quotes with competitors in the space to pick one with a good reputation, and otherwise sought signals of competence. Blog posts are the very same thing, quickly verifiable, albeit potentially wrong, signals of skill and competence.
> Just hire people that can do the job you're paying them for
Speaking bluntly, this is what hiring people that can do the job looks like. Attacking those that take the effort to show they have that experience because others wouldn’t is tall poppy syndrome, and it neither improves the quality of the field nor actually helps those struggling that need more support so they can operate at the same level as others.
Do you also complain about fit people having bigger chances to find a partner than people who don’t work out because of their situation?
You cover a few things this way. You show that you think beyond the terms of warming a seat, and can highlight particular ways you may fit a specific job.
I've had several jobs/contracts that told me they think I'm a fit because of me listing my involvement with meetup hosting and how I've tailored my CV to highlight specific kinds of work that I'm interested to do more of (e.g. payment integrations).
Like with dating or sales, it's kind of the same idea: you want to look specific instead of generic, in order to filter out jobs that would be a lukewarm-to-negative fit for you.
If you have nothing to differentiate yourself, then start something and highlight it. For kicks and giggles I even have "Certified Log Home Builder" in my CV after taking a course on it.
- Proficient in the use of log aggregation tools
- Experience ensuring systems can stand up under heavy load
- Skilled at operating within strict architectural constraints
It's like people have this gut feeling that due to the recent layoffs at FAANG, no calls for interviews and the number of (likely mediocre) applications showing up in a job post in LinkedIn indicates the job market is extremely competitive. But is it? The entire job market?
There's no doubt some companies and markets are beaten up but other are actually doing great and growing.
So rather than invest time on blogging and creating repos why not focus on researching, identifying and learning about the industries that are actually hiring and acquiring new skills so that you can target them?
But for the past 5 years I've been consistently publishing original work and getting absolutely zero feedback and little engagement. My former personal network doesn't respond to my emails anymore, etc.. Might have to do with some defamation that happened in 2016 by an employer, but that shouldn't be surfacing until the reference check after I get an offer--unless I'm on black lists that are decently circulated. Another possibility is my reach is just limited when I post content with depth, as opposed to things that will get more engagement. People used to read my blog directly, which has been shut down for years.
I'm open to the possibility that my presentation is just terrible, that my SEO needs work, stuff like that. Keeping all my web properties up and producing content up to modern standards has been pretty out of reach given my life circumstances... not complaining, just saying.
My temp bosses are always happy with how good I wash dishes, anyway. I'll never stop publishing my tech work online, but I know it takes more than just publishing what I'm doing to stand out as a job candidate. I'd love to get an objective view about what else I'm lacking or penalized on almost as much as I'd like some good old fashioned Agape love, to help me want to check my email and notifications that I'm programmed to dread checking by now (usually due to non-responses to everything I send, if not trolls).
Sorry that this may come off as negative. I've really had some success standing out and just publishing for most of my career, it's been really hard to figure out how to get out of the crater that it has become. I don't even talk like this that much, to anyone who wants to say my negativity pushes everyone away... I get that, too. Hard conversations are different than negativity; negativity is more like being a parasite, whereas I'm genuinely trying to find the issues which actually exist and fix them.
Things I know I can fix:
* Maintain properties and populate search engine/open graph fields for SEO * Produce thumbnails and editorialize headers * Increase my engagement in ways that are selected for
It's rare that I look at projects when interviewing, but I'd rather see a complete, published open-source project than a dev sandbox. It's a signal that you can stick with something complex and drive it to completion. Alternatively, meaningful PRs to projects can be good because it shows you can work in someone else's codebase and build consensus.
You're selling a notepad app for $30 with the disclaimer "This is the initial release and may contain bugs that lead to data loss, and so frequent backup and careful usage are suggested."
I did a quick Google search for you on LinkedIn but didn't find anything.
Everywhere you say you can take consulting gigs, but I'm not sure why I'd want you as a consultant. What expertise do you bring to the table?
I could be shadowbanned for all I know, come to think of it.
I don't worry about this too much though because in my experience, no employer has ever looked at these things (even though I have usually made some mention of them on my CV). If they have they've never mentioned it at interview.
I have tried similar tactics before for some other positions I was highly interested in but nothing, it never works from what I can tell, the jobs I have gotten were all using my generic CV and not much else.
Still its a cool demo.
In the beginning of my career I did 100s of job interviews. However, in this case I only did a few and I'm sure I got the job because of it.
Also, it was a lot of fun to try and create backend style type of functionality only by utilizing peer to peer! The hacking and reasoning required felt novel and fun.
The project is here (it is currently not live): https://github.com/melvinroest/doodledocs
If you are in the right clique and do minor work in an open source project, that may also be true, as long as you go along with the correct politics.
So in that sense the title is correct and describes the sad world we live in.
That aged well.
I have over 100 past projects and need a cheat sheet to answer HR questions. Recruiters are usually not impressed with your past projects because you are a flood of resumes and interviews to them, and they usually not impressed with you because they just want to close the task. Because time is key.
The 80/20 rule applies here. Only 20 percent of recruiters will read your resume carefully (not your show, blog, youtube, twitch, twitter, etc).
Add to that 20% of fake jobs and your chances of finding the most relevant tech job for you are greatly reduced.
I did a freelance job for someone and they asked to see a portfolio.
I said I can't even divulge the nature of the projects I did for various banks let alone send you screenshots of it because me having screenshots would indicate a breach of contract.
Ask me anything about the tech you want to implement.
I got the gig.
I've also seen "vibes" hiring of people with a good rep in various communities and it doesn't work. Those people are generally awful to work with and lack any desire to compromise
Most candidates nowadays are obliged to deal through low grade, poor quality recruiters. Demonstrating creativity to these morons is an absolute waste of time.
I’d you are not so good - this can backfire. I’ve seen a lot of CV’s with blog links that turned me off on the candidate immediately. Usually for more architecture type positions, not coding, because architects need good written comm skills.
let's talk and see if there's something. outside of that it's just wasting time.
say it louder for the tone deaf recruiters and hiring managers in the back
That sounds like overreach; I don't think an employer is within his rights to try to restrict what you do in your free time with your own resources and without infringing on your employer's legitimate claims to IP (copyright, trademarks, patents, trade secrets, etc.)
This kind of overreach in contractual language and managerial posturing is somewhat common, driven by fears related to your exposure to your employer's IP, but the bark is worse than the legal bite here. I'm not a lawyer, but I still feel confident when saying that an employer wouldn't prevail in court, if they took legal action to enforce such restrictions on what you do outside of work.
anyone can plagiarise a github or a blog. you still need to speak to the person. you're just adding even more steps to what is already an insufferably bad experience.
but adding more steps is something we love to do. every solution creating 10 new problems.
It’s not all bad, and I see how it could be helpful and fun; still, it feels like something that shouldn’t be necessary.
And even if you are less intelligent you still can get there, you will just have to put in more work.
I think of those, the ability to put in honest work is the biggest limitation of most people. I like to compare honest work to Allies fighting World War II -- doing whatever is necessary to win, wherever it leads you. No plan is stupid if it works, there is nothing shameful about trying and failing. There will be setbacks because life is not fair and on short time scales the rewards are never assured. But what makes winners different from losers is what they do in response. If they can persevere, through their setbacks, experience, hard work, the focus they put in they will gain the knowledge that lets them win on the long time scale. You lose only if you lose faith in yourself and quit.
