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.
It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
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Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#42In 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_ matter…
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.
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#43I 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.
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 care…
I tried really hard to make it clear in this post that as a hiring manager it is your job to find great candidates who don't do this. So you shouldn't "screen" for this, in terms of filtering candidates based on whether or not they have evidence of public creativity. But... of course I look beyond the resume that the candidate has sent me. Which means that, as a candidate, a relatively easy way to stand out is to hav…
So the advantage in doing this is for candidates that don't interview well? That doesn't jive with the statement in the article that "you can give yourself a big advantage in terms of standing out from the crowd with a relatively small amount of work", which seems to imply that a hiring manager would prefer candidates with blogs or a twitter audience. When I'm reviewing resumes and someone lists their blog or twitter handle on their resume, I'm going to assume it's because they don't have concrete accomplishments to point to. It's not going to rescue a candidate who has a weak resume from being passed-over and it's not going to compensate for a candidate who made it to the technical interview but then couldn't solve the assigned problem. It's nice to see when someone posts a really great piece of code in their github, but I have no way of knowing whether they were even the person who wrote the code or not, so the technical interview is their chance to show me they have at least a basic grasp of coding. If they fail that, there's nothing short of a ten thousand star project in github that might make me reconsider a poor performance in the interview and that's never happened to me before. So I still don't understand the premise that candidates with a public presence should stand out more nor the premise that if I'm a candidate a small public presence would help me. I could be wrong - it could be that most managers like to see this sort of thing, but it's never been something I've screened for and I've yet to be convinced I should start.
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 care…
I tried really hard to make it clear in this post that as a hiring manager it is your job to find great candidates who don't do this. So you shouldn't "screen" for this, in terms of filtering candidates based on whether or not they have evidence of public creativity. But... of course I look beyond the resume that the candidate has sent me. Which means that, as a candidate, a relatively easy way to stand out is to hav…
I'll rephrase the GP's question because I'm also curious, and I don't feel your response answered the question.
Is there a signal which suggests that "public creativity" equals "good engineer", particularly when the resume already speaks for itself? Or is it purely to compensate, as you suggest, for a possibly poor interview performance?
I'm honestly skeptical that such a signal exists (but can be convinced otherwise), except insofar that a person may be invited to give talks _because_ they have demonstrated strong engineering skills or talent -- whereupon, yet again, their resume should speak for itself.
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#46The 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 s…
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.
>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.
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#47I 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…
> 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.
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried really hard to make it clear in this post that as a hiring manager it is your job to find great candidates who don't do this. So you shouldn't "screen" for this, in terms of filtering candidates based on whether or not they have evidence of public creativity. But... of course I look beyond the resume that the candidate has sent me. Which means that, as a candidate, a relatively easy way to stand out is to hav…
So the advantage in doing this is for candidates that don't interview well? That doesn't jive with the statement in the article that "you can give yourself a big advantage in terms of standing out from the crowd with a relatively small amount of work", which seems to imply that a hiring manager would prefer candidates with blogs or a twitter audience. When I'm reviewing resumes and someone lists their blog or twitter…
The advice I gave in this article will work if I am your hiring manager.
Let's say I have 10 resumes, and I only want to dedicate phone screens to 5 of them and in-person interviews to 2 or 3 (because my time is finite).
If you have some public writing or public code, you are much likely to make it to the phone screen stage.
If you're confident that your resume speaks for itself already, you are free to ignore my advice.
I had assumed that most other hiring managers are affected by this factor in a similar way to me, but maybe I'm wrong about that.
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#49Interviewee: 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]
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.
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.
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#50Interviewee: 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]
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.
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.