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Personal Website for Programmers

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Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#71

Post by onion2k »

stefanfisk wrote: post #69
onion2k wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the exception of frontend developers. There is an expectation that you have a good personal site regardless of how much experience you have if your job is to push HTML, CSS and JS. Its a showcase for what you can do when you're not constrained by a product or a client.

As a frontend developer, I've gotten by with this as my one and only webpage for almost ten years now: https://stefanfisk.com

What I find interesting about your site is that you've updated it at least once to use more modern web standards - that tag was introduced in HTML5 in 2014, and before that you had a PNG image for your name (https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://stefanfisk.com/). Updating a site to give the user a better experience (eg to use semantic tags) is great.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#72

Post by raxxorrax »

userbinator wrote: post #3

Speaking from the perspective of someone looking to hire: It doesn't make for a good impression if I see anyone other than the original author with the same obviously distinctive style of site showing pretty much a subset of the info I can already see from your GitHub account, except the latter doesn't require JS to view. If I'm looking at someone's personal site, it should look personal --- not "I cloned someone els…

Hm. I might share my personal site with you (I don't operate one anymore) but certainly not my github account. I agree with the site would need a personal touch, but not every programmer is a web developer. There is quite a bit of specific knowledge required to set one up.

That might be different if you hire web developers of course.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#73

Post by JDiculous »

onion2k wrote: post #67
JDiculous wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your definition of "frontend developer" is designer, then sure. Otherwise for any dev with experience, this is a dumb expectation. Part of a dev's job is to use the right tool for the job, and there's no sense in wasting time reinventing the wheel. (I say this as someone who used to overengineer my own personal websites with the hottest tech stack of the week, but am now in the process of throwing it all away for…

Otherwise for any dev with experience, this is a dumb expectation. A good website that demonstrates some ability to write frontend code well is a shortcut to demonstrating that you're good at what I want to employ you to do. It's a showcase of your skills, just as a graphic designer would have a Dribbble portfolio or a backend dev would have a few repos on Github. I'm not suggesting you can't get hired without a nice…

Personally I place more weight on their professional experience / portfolio and don't feel that having a pretty or flashy site is a good predictor of a developer's ability, especially when most devs are using templates anyways. But yea, all else equal a nicer site is an advantage even if a minimal one at that, not going to disagree with you there.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#74

Post by 40four »

whycombagator wrote: post #9
userbinator wrote: post #3

Speaking from the perspective of someone looking to hire: It doesn't make for a good impression if I see anyone other than the original author with the same obviously distinctive style of site showing pretty much a subset of the info I can already see from your GitHub account, except the latter doesn't require JS to view. If I'm looking at someone's personal site, it should look personal --- not "I cloned someone els…

> Speaking from the perspective of someone looking to hire: It doesn't make for a good impression if I see anyone other than the original author with the same obviously distinctive style of site > If I'm looking at someone's personal site, it should look personal --- not "I cloned someone else's I found on GitHub To me that seems petty and I feel you'll end up isolating a good portion of the talent pool. Anecdotally,…

It is just one person's opinion. You don't have to try to slam it down as 'petty'.

They didn't say they reject candidates based on this, simply that it doesn't make a 'good impression'. Weather you agree or not, it shouldn't be hard to understand why someone would think that.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#75

Post by pdpi »

userbinator wrote: post #3

Speaking from the perspective of someone looking to hire: It doesn't make for a good impression if I see anyone other than the original author with the same obviously distinctive style of site showing pretty much a subset of the info I can already see from your GitHub account, except the latter doesn't require JS to view. If I'm looking at someone's personal site, it should look personal --- not "I cloned someone els…

On the flipside, developers are not designers. "I took a decent pre-existing design and didn't try to fiddle with it too much" is a Good Thing, surely.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#76

Post by userbinator »

vntok wrote: post #60
ChickeNES wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed! If I were a founder and learned that someone in HR was using such arbitrary judgement, they'd be the one looking for a new job. By their standard they wouldn't hire someone like Fabrice Bellard: https://bellard.org/

Why not? Seems like he coded his personal website himself without an existing template.

Exactly. His accomplishments aside, that's the type of personal website that says "I don't really do web design, but I still made a page" --- obviously if you're hiring a web developer then plain nonstyled HTML would be a bit surprising, but someone in a non-web position showing such a site would definitely be seen positively: It indicates honesty and modesty.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#77

Post by onion2k »

JDiculous wrote: post #73
onion2k wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Otherwise for any dev with experience, this is a dumb expectation. A good website that demonstrates some ability to write frontend code well is a shortcut to demonstrating that you're good at what I want to employ you to do. It's a showcase of your skills, just as a graphic designer would have a Dribbble portfolio or a backend dev would have a few repos on Github. I'm not suggesting you can't get hired without a nice…

Personally I place more weight on their professional experience / portfolio and don't feel that having a pretty or flashy site is a good predictor of a developer's ability, especially when most devs are using templates anyways. But yea, all else equal a nicer site is an advantage even if a minimal one at that, not going to disagree with you there.

While it's nice for someone to have a public portfolio of URLs they've worked on you can't really rely on that so much now. 15 years ago sure, everyone made websites so you just asked to see what site's the candidate had built. Over the past 10 years I've found it increasingly common that developers working with front end tech are building things they can't show off - SaaS, internal apps, etc. That's one of the reasons I like to see a personal site or a side project - often that's the only publicly visible code they have.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#78

Post by userbinator »

samplatt wrote: post #14
userbinator wrote: post #3

Speaking from the perspective of someone looking to hire: It doesn't make for a good impression if I see anyone other than the original author with the same obviously distinctive style of site showing pretty much a subset of the info I can already see from your GitHub account, except the latter doesn't require JS to view. If I'm looking at someone's personal site, it should look personal --- not "I cloned someone els…

I'm a salaried software/database guy for the last 10 years. I ceased programming for personal pleasure before github was invented and haven't done anything more complex than a minor tool on my own time in years. My personal website is a wordpress blog we've I've dumped some photos of the hardware stuff I do as a hobby. I'm curious to hear how this factors into your views on what to look for when hiring people?

I'm curious to hear how this factors into your views on what to look for when hiring people?

Having a WordPress blog is generic enough that it alone won't really sway any opinion, but the content you have on it can. The same goes for a GitHub account.

It's really the "I copied someone else's work and made it look like it's mine" type of thing that gives a bad impression.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#79

Post by L_226 »

userbinator wrote: post #3

Speaking from the perspective of someone looking to hire: It doesn't make for a good impression if I see anyone other than the original author with the same obviously distinctive style of site showing pretty much a subset of the info I can already see from your GitHub account, except the latter doesn't require JS to view. If I'm looking at someone's personal site, it should look personal --- not "I cloned someone els…

When going for a haircut, would you rather have your hair cut by a person with an immaculate haircut, or by a person who has noticeably not had their hair cut in a while?

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#80

Post by BrutalLioness »

userbinator wrote: post #3

Speaking from the perspective of someone looking to hire: It doesn't make for a good impression if I see anyone other than the original author with the same obviously distinctive style of site showing pretty much a subset of the info I can already see from your GitHub account, except the latter doesn't require JS to view. If I'm looking at someone's personal site, it should look personal --- not "I cloned someone els…

Programmer =/= Web Developer

It's amazing how many people forget that there are gainfully employed programmers who've never touched a line of JavaScript.

We need websites too.

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