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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

#141

Post by TrackerFF »

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 think the crux of the matter is that for almost all other such professions (MD, Engineers, Lawyers, etc.), there is a more formal type of gatekeeping when it comes to recruiting.

Education, licenses, and similar - often in combination.

The world of software development is MUCH more open to people that necessarily don't have the correct formalities, because there's a common knowledge that there are tons of talented people that never studied CS / Software Engineering / etc.

That, combined with high pay, of course attracts a lot of incompetent people.

So what would the solution be, to require all "professional" developers to have a degree and/or some professional license? I mean, yes, it could work - just look at the Cisco certification system. Some of those are quite rigorous, so the networking industry knows that if you hire someone that hold certain certs, they're probably competent.

But, then again, most the certifications boom of the 90s kinda died out.

That's why we're stuck with the grinding leetcode + technical interviews + side projects situation today.

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

#142

Post by wingworks »

Nition wrote: post #120

> Build a small personal project and put the code on GitHub. Accompany it with a README with a detailed description of the project and screenshots of it in action—almost no-one does this, it only takes a few hours extra and it massively increases the impact your project will have on hiring managers who are checking you out. Not to mention the impact your project will have on potential users. Please include a screensh…

^ this, so much this. Please, if your project has a UI, please include a screenshot or two. I can't believe in this day and age, I still come across way to many repos (or software companies) with 0 screenshots.

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

#143

Post by ant6n »

colordrops wrote: post #140
booi wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most FAANG companies do actual coding now instead of whiteboarding :(

Why the unhappy face? Is this considered a bad trend? I'm personally way better at online coding sessions than whiteboarding.

Jotting down an algorithm and talking about complexity is probably easier than implementing it?

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

#144

Post by KronisLV »

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…

> ...these are the people who (usually) play games with you...

I don't think this even matters, to be honest. Not only is interviewing good for you personally (as you said), but also lets the company gauge the talent pool in the job market a bit better.

Furthermore, if you have a positive experience with the company, there is precisely nothing stopping you from recommending it to your friends, should they be looking for work.

However, for the most part i agree with you in response to the previous commenter's post - interviewing is good in general, even when you don't need a job at that exact time. There's also the possibility of just reaching out afterwards, if the situation changes.

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

#145

Post by lodovic »

dheera wrote: post #26
tibbetts wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of information available on candidates to hiring managers is extremely limited. Evidence of outside creativity is a pretty good sign that someone is not a bozo.

Why is this such a hard problem to solve? When I was a founder it was incredibly hard to find people who are "available" and skilled because they feared listing themselves as available on LinkedIn. When I'm not a founder and skilled it's incredibly hard to get to hiring managers. Usually I get warm intros from people within companies I'm interested in, it works way better, and usually often results in jumping straigh…

This may not provide you with the desired results - you usually want to hire people for their technical skills, not how good they are building an online presence and marketing themselves.

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

#146

Post by bawolff »

eru wrote: post #101
cableshaft wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That was interesting.

> But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes, absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used that.

To me at least, being a dick is a negative that outweighs making good things, especially for a large organization. Maybe google made the right call.

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

#147

Post by Hermel »

cableshaft wrote: post #86
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've had a portfolio of full video games I've coded and released on my own, as the sole programmer, that could be played on the web, had my name credited on the title screen, and you could even see the code on some of them, and I proudly included the link on my resume. Never brought up during the interview process, I was still expected to take the coding tests, and if I did a little poorly on one question I almo…

Maybe you should have applied with smaller companies that don’t have bureaucratic hiring processes yet?

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

#148

Post by cxr »

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.

Job-seeking is anti-inductive. From https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/11/the-phatic-and-the-ant...>:

> “Oh God,” they answered. “No, anything but that. Nothing says ‘person exactly like every other bright-eyed naive new doctor’ than wanting to help people. You’re trying to distinguish yourself from the pack! [...] Okay, tell you what. You have any experience treating people in disaster-prone Third World countries? [...] Talk about how you want to become a doctor because the people of Haiti taught you so much.”

> During my interviews, I talked about my time working in Haiti. I got to talk to some of the other applicants, and they talked about their time working in Ethiopia, or Bangladesh, or Nicaragua, or wherever. Apparently the “stand out by working in a disaster-prone Third World country” plan was sufficiently successful that everyone started using, and now the people who do it don’t stand out at all. My interviewer was probably thinking “Oh God, what Third World country is this guy going to start blabbering about how much he learned from?” and moving my application to the REJECT pile as soon as I opened my mouth.

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

#149

Post by glangdale »

One unintended consequence of this advice being widely followed will be a lot of (or, frankly, "even more") write-only projects appearing on Github. As an interviewer I wouldn't be against this metric, but I would prefer to see that it wasn't too obviously gamed. You'd hope that the public creativity was pursued for intrinsic reasons (interest in the topic) rather than extrinsic.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't get hired if they don't have some huge repo that everyone loves, just that this shouldn't turn into some new thing for people to desperately grind.

At the very lowest level, I'd expect to see a lot of plagiarism and projects that are barely competent rewrites of someone else's work. I often go searching for various exotic keywords and often see fragments of things that I've worked on "written up" in almost entirely content-free blog posts; more likely to attract clicks rather than interviewer attention, but still.

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