It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by eru » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 4:20 AM UTC

cableshaft wrote: post #92

eru wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I was working for Google at the time, and saw an internal post by the guy who interviewed the candidate.

I'm not sure if there's anything public (and what I am even allowed to say.)

See https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... where he (at least partially) admits that he was bullshitting:

> I want to defend Google, for one I wasn't even inverting a binary tree, I wasn’t very clear what a binary tree was.

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

#102

Post by eru » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 4:20 AM UTC

catillac wrote: post #97

eru wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27927159

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

#103

Post by eru » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 4:23 AM UTC

sudeepj wrote: post #94

eru wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

No worries.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27927159 for some more.

> May be he meant to use "invert binary tree" as a representative example of questions that typically asked.

Yes, that's a charitable and believable interpretation of his tweet.

(Though I don't know where he got that 90% figure from. Probably made up, like 85.12% of statistics.)

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

#104

Post by yesenadam » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 4:25 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #85

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.

Honestly that wouldn't make a difference for me. If it was obvious that they had only put up blog posts to help them get work, but the content of those blog posts was good, they'd still bump themselves up my list of candidates compared to candidates that hadn't done that. The signal I'm looking for here is proof that the candidate can write, can think and can do some aspect of the work. A resume usually won't prove t…

Sure, ok, fair enough. p.s. I did enjoy the article, thanks for that. :-) It's encouraging to be told you don't need to feel like you need a gapless decade on github and/or blogging, that anything is still something.

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

#105

Post by EvilEy3 » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 4:42 AM UTC

N00bN00b wrote: post #37

jameshush wrote: post #27

In 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…

Yep. I basically made the same remark. For a lot of positions they're just not looking for creative people, just chairs to fill. They want "good enough" and nothing more.

I don't see how having high enough standard means that they want "good enough".Do you want their hiring level to be even higher or what?

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

#106

Post by barbarbar » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 4:45 AM UTC

Is a doctor also going to publish achievements? A construction engineer should he/she publish calc of beam dimensions? A carpenter how should he/her show creations. If it was doors or windows installed in people's houses. Something is wrong here in this industry.

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

#107

Post by EvilEy3 » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 4:46 AM UTC

fibonachos wrote: post #71

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…

After interviewing with multiple FAANGs and receiving no offers, my current employer recruited me based on my LinkedIn profile for a role on new team. I have since started telling the FAANG recruiters “thanks for reaching out, but no thanks“. I guess that puts me in group number 2?

No, you're still a cattle. Until you receive an actual offer, you're always a cattle.

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

#108

Post by EvilEy3 » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 4:50 AM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #9

maxk42 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again - I fail to see how the second part is derived from the first. If I'm already engaging in a screening process, wouldn't it be better to ask the candidate to solve a problem that relates to their role than to ask them if they've done any blogging on the topic of tech?

Because it gives you a more rounded sense of the individual. Other passions. Other ideas. Areas they’ve worked in unrelated to your problem. Job/coding interviews are very difficult to do well, and many people such as myself tend to perform poorly due to the stress of the interview (so much that I’d rather stay in a mediocre position than go through the agony of interviewing — I hate it with every fiber of by being,…

> it correlates 0% to my in-job performance

False. It correlates directly to your job performance, unless you're YAML developer.

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

#109

Post by simonw » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 4:51 AM UTC

barbarbar wrote: post #106

Is a doctor also going to publish achievements? A construction engineer should he/she publish calc of beam dimensions? A carpenter how should he/her show creations. If it was doors or windows installed in people's houses. Something is wrong here in this industry.

I would hope that carpenters would include photographs of their work as part of an interview process.

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

#110

Post by EvilEy3 » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 4:52 AM UTC

N00bN00b wrote: post #30

The 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…

> Flaw in the capitalistic system.

???