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

simonwillison.net

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

#91

Post by sigstoat »

solipsism wrote: post #67
maxk42 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

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.

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

as an interviewer, i'm far more concerned about the time spent sorting through piles of resumes from people who are just rolling the dice, and didn't read the job posting / aren't qualified.

maybe upper management cares about the time spent, but i'd be happy to talk for 45-60 minutes to somebody who was an even remotely passable candidate who didn't actually want a job.

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

#92

Post by cableshaft »

eru wrote: post #87
sudeepj wrote: post #65

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…

> 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 bina…

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?

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

#93

Post by tdeck »

sudeepj wrote: post #78
tdeck wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Yes, but my point is plenty of fairly ordinary engineers make it to L5 - it's nothing special. I feel uncomfortable going into this person's accomplishments, but other engineers I know were similarly shocked. If that and skipping some interviews is all being a leader in open source buys you, it isn't worth the extra effort from a bigCo career perspective.

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

#94

Post by sudeepj »

eru wrote: post #87
sudeepj wrote: post #65

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…

> 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 bina…

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

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

#95

Post by sigstoat »

yesenadam wrote: post #82
simonw wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

> 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.

they only wrote their resume to help get work, not because they're... i dunno, interested in resume writing. should i ignore their resume?

it's all just a source of stuff to talk to them about.

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

#96

Post by benhoyt »

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.

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

#97

Post by catillac »

eru wrote: post #87
sudeepj wrote: post #65

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…

> 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 bina…

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.”

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

#98

Post by yesenadam »

sigstoat wrote: post #95
yesenadam wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. they only wrote their resume to help get work, not because they're... i dunno, interested in resume writing. should i ignore their resume? it's all just a source of stuff to talk to them about.

It's hard to believe you're arguing in good faith. The only reason for writing a resume is to help get work, as I'm sure you understand.

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

#99

Post by nitrogen »

the_af wrote: post #77
solipsism wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry if I misunderstand you, but are you saying that it's wrong to interview for practice because it's wasting the company's time? Interesting, never thought about this. I think I disagree though; these are the people who (usually) play games with you and put you through some very stressful situation during the interview. I think candidates should be able to practice in a low stakes environment, i.e. one where they…

Even if you are just practicing, it's still an opportunity for the company to convince you to change your mind.
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