101–110 of 436 posts
I would consider being an online ghost as a great compliment with how everything has been lately. There is way too much public information being pumped out for no reason at all.
Okay, so what? Is it a blogger or promoter position? Otherwise, why should you have any visible online presence?
The whole thing is about one guy who decided to make a personal website and how he made it, that's fine. But why call it "You should have a personal website" without any reasoning/examples for others? I don't get it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have the opposite problem, I share the name with someone else working in the tech field who is academically and professionally my senior. I frequently get emails and phone calls from recruiters offering positions with a salary up to 200k more than I'm expecting at my level because they think I teach at Stanford
Did you ever try to bullshit your way into one of these positions? Obviously it's a bad idea, but I'm only half joking since it might be an interesting experiment to see how people rate and value you if their mind may have already been made up.
I don't judge a person's technical skill through this metric (or at least I make an attempt not to), but it's rather noticeable when someone has nothing going on online. A blank GitHub, no website, no projects, etc. For an employed person, eh, whatever, maybe they just have a life. But for a student? I'll admit I get a little suspicious. I'm not saying students should have a huge roster of projects and crazy extracur…
Personally, I tried to do side projects several times. But after a while I realized, that I really don't care and that it is not necessary for my employment. SWE is just a job, it's enjoyable work, but still nothing but work. I do enough at home to remain employable and to be decent at my job. There is no point doing any more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be curious to know how well that's enforced. There's an ocean full of HR tech startups that are doing just that programmatically, to produce scores on all sorts of things to rate candidates.
Sounds like all those HR tech startups would violate GDPR in Europe and they should be fined out of existence. If you want to hire people, look at their CV and talk to them. Don't go behind their back making judgements based on websites, facebook profiles or reddit accoints that are likely to be wrong.
A lot of commentary around recent development on the web kind of falls into a common theme of "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a way to do WWW like it was 1997 again?" The thing that makes a personal webpage now different from a personal webpage in 1997 is this: Back then you could expect to immediately rank #1 on your own name, and you would even have a decent chance of ranking for some keywords related to content…
You make it sound like a big audience is the only thing that matters. The linked post talks about a personal website as a digital identity. Giving people a link so they can find you online is a good reason to have a website, even today. Besides that, making your own website is rewarding in many other ways - Being creative, getting thoughts out of your head, pinning down certain arguments you tend to repeat, etc.
But otherwise: If you apply for an job, say in finance, you'll be asked for a resume, because people can't be bothered dealing with information that's extraneous to what goes into a resume.
If you apply for a job as a coder, you'll be asked for a link to a github repo, because people can't be bothered with looking at anything other than your code.
If you apply for a research role, you'll be asked for a link to where your publications can be found, maybe on researchgate, because people can't be bothered with looking at anything other than your peer-reviewed publications.
Do you see the pattern here? It's another example of the balance between information and attention shifting towards too-much-information/too-little-attention. -- And personal webpages aren't good at dealing with the too-little-attention part of the equation, so there is rarely a demand for giving people information about yourself in the "free form" style.
The second aspect you mention: If you produce some webpage content, you can always decide whether you want to see it as a diary and not put it up online, or whether you want to see it as something that should be out in the public, and do put it up online. It seems to me like a contradiction to prefer putting it online, but then not to care about whether it actually gets seen or not. (Especially considering that one gets into a lot of liability everytime one puts something up online).
In Finland it is illegal to google for applicant's online presence, because of the possibility of judging the candidate because of misidentification. You have to have applicant's permission to that. And I am glad, because one of my name doubles isn't very representative person according to their online presence.
I have the opposite problem, I share the name with someone else working in the tech field who is academically and professionally my senior. I frequently get emails and phone calls from recruiters offering positions with a salary up to 200k more than I'm expecting at my level because they think I teach at Stanford
Completely agree with the article. I think it's very unfortunate that so many think a LinkedIn or StackOverflow profile is a viable replacement for a custom-made website that can portray you in any light you so choose. I've been told several times that I was Googled prior to interviews/meetings and have heard great things about my website, my online presence, my books (I have an "author" card when people Google me),…
A logical consequence is that you compete with other vain people online who might choose to stretch the truth a bit more than you do. At which point does telling convincing lies about yourself become a useful skill to have?
In addition, there should be a search site that only indexes personal web sites.
PS: I am not qualified to write such thing any time soon.