bullshit
It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
251–260 of 387 posts
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#252> Build a small personal project and put the code on GitHub. This has lost its effect and partially turned it upside down. In school people seem to be instructed "have a github with personal project" to improve hiring chances so now everybody an their mother has an account with a bunch of meaningless crap projects that they have 0 intetest in but put it there to try to boost interview chances. Don't. Whenever I scree…
Why would you give people negative points for trying anything they can do to compete in a fucking ridiculous job market? I mean, suggest alternatives if your genuine intention is to help people find work, rather than just saying that you actively look down on people for trying something. You get negative points for being a dick. Of course, I'm making assumptions, which you should never do.
"Ridiculous job market"? The job prospects for devs in todays market is an essentially 100% guarantee that you get a job. The demand is huge and there are more jobs to fill than candidates available. You may not get into the company of your dreams, but overall, what's ridiculous is not how low the job chances are, but how high the demand is. If you do 100 interviews and 0 offers then you have an issue. It may not be your fault. Maybe it's a visa problem or some medical/psychological condition that makes it hard for people to see a good future colleague in you. But in the general case, there should be no problem getting a job if you're not too picky. Compare that to many other industries where it actually is ridiculously hard to even interview.
My suggestion is to go for quality. Only put up on you github stuff you are genuinely interested in or proud of or do. Not some mandatory exercise which is obviously only there to check a box.
> You get negative points for being a dick.
Giving you the benefit of doubt, I'm assuming this was a "generic you".
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#253You'll miss out on a whole range of engineers that have a life outside of work (which also brings some balance and maturity to the job), and therefore have no time (or inclination) to groom a public presence on the internet. Raising a family, going cycling, volunteering, reading books - these are all more valuable insights into a candidate for me, more so than your retweets.
Folk post this on every thread as if denying the effect somehow makes it go away. As both a candidate and hiring manager, the effect is very real and it is folly to ignore it. As a candidate, I landed a FANG job early in my career almost exclusively on the basis of my (poor quality) tech blog attracting the attention of a recruiter. As a hiring manager, I've dumped all resumes for a position and practically begged an…
> Folk post this on every thread as if denying the effect somehow makes it go away. As both a candidate and hiring manager, the effect is very real and it is folly to ignore it.
Overwhelming majority of employed developers has literally no public presence.
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#254In 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…
I've made lots (thousands? hundreds at least) of commits to the Linux kernel and have been working on it since pre (git) history, have developed a number of novel concurrent data structures / algorithms for it.
I decided to talk with a FANG recruiter a couple of years ago who must have scraped my name from mailing list or commit histories. Despite first making it clear by email I wasn't interested in a job interview at the moment but was just curious about some things, on the call they pretty soon demanded to know what I thought the best Big O notation was for a sort algorithm. They were rather insistent that I answer them this before they would move on and spend much more of their time explaining why they contacted me or answering my questions. Fortunately I hadn't wasted a lot of my time at that point either.
Strange, rude, entitled behavior. Sadly, they probably do hold real power over graduates and new developers, and those without jobs or much experience, or just those who dearly want to work for these companies. So they can get away with treating people like this, putting out these drag nets, paying no real interest or respect to any individual (at least not until they think their canned questions have filtered out most of the useless scum).
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#255I always wanted to have a public gh and website that has my name on it... My only problem is that most of my non work related projects are either a). Reverese engineering projects that may or may not be legal. I don't care at all but I wouldn't put it next to my name. Most of my projects fall under this category b). So personal that it's very unlikely that anyone would find it useful. c). Can only be used or even dem…
Same advice: do it anyway.
My write-up are focused on the technical sides. I avoid making references or giving clues to what the target is.
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does this mean that the whiteboard coding interviews are flawed, or that guys like us, who has made a ton of more or less great projects are flawed? Why would a company rather have a guy that can solve binary search in five seconds, than one that has showed continuous progress with several finished projects over the years? Do they think accomplished guys somehow are a liability? Or is it that they want a blank sheet…
> Does this mean that the whiteboard coding interviews are flawed They are optimizing for something. It's just not what you think it is. A lot of it seems to be about the identities of the employees and the hazing ritual that initiates new members into the group.
> hazing ritual
Got it in one.
Whenever I ask people about these tests, we have some back-and-forth, and it inevitably ends with them declaring (in so many words): “Well, I got hazed, so you will, too.”
I don’t suck at the tests, but I’m not particularly good at them. I never practice them, and didn’t come up through the traditional CS curriculum (I started as an EE), so I’m often seeing the problems for the first time, when I look at them.
They just don’t have any relevance to the type of work I have experience doing, or the value I could bring to a team. Since it seems that most interviewers are looking for particularly formulaic responses, they are a pretty good way of filtering out people like me.
I’m always puzzled as to why interviewers waste valuable time on these seemingly pointless exams. If they don't want me to work for them, there's much easier ways to discourage me.
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does this mean that the whiteboard coding interviews are flawed, or that guys like us, who has made a ton of more or less great projects are flawed? Why would a company rather have a guy that can solve binary search in five seconds, than one that has showed continuous progress with several finished projects over the years? Do they think accomplished guys somehow are a liability? Or is it that they want a blank sheet…
I am an individual contributor and technical leader with multiple degrees in computer science engineering, and about 15 years of experience working on safety critical real-time embedded systems. I've interviewed many hundreds of people for software engineering roles over the years. The majority of people that apply for software engineering roles are simply not a great fit. Onsite interviews are very expensive in term…
Thank you for taking your time to give this answer! I think it gives great insight into how you work and what you're looking for!
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#258Earlier 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.
> 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 actua…
> 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.
Yup. If the job I've got for them is any good, if the company is good, and if I am good, they might turn into a hire anyway. That a qualified person doesn't need the job does not rule them out. It raises the bar and reminds us that interviewing goes both ways.
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
If what you do comes across as manipulative, and specifically trying to manipulate me into believing you are more qualified, then it’s entirely rational for me to compensate for that by assigning negative points. The job market is indeed ridiculous right now. Companies need more qualified SWEs than they can find. That causes wages to rise. Rising wages, buzz, and large numbers of openings attract more people to the f…
And you default to assuming that someone who wrote code in order to have something to show a prospective employer is attempting usurp the integrity of your hiring funnel. Wtf is a fully qualified SWE anyway, and how is someone supposed to get there if not by getting in the door? Lastly, it's absolutely not rational to follow that line of reasoning. If you find yourself out of work, and discover that the interview pro…
If somebody is trying to stand out by having a github with two projects, one is a merge sort implenentation they typed essentially 1:1 from a book during an algorithms 101 class and the other is an almost-trivial shopping list app that neither compiles nor they can explain anything about it, and then put a link to this github at the top of their resume, then they'd have been better off not having created that github account at all. It's easy to see through this nonsense and the filter of evalutating this helps avoiding wasted time of a few interview hours.
And yes, I'm totally preducied agains people with those kinds of github contents. That's my whole point.
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've personally come across this dilemma when hiring people. My own take is that's none of my goddamn business and if the person is the most qualified for the job then it's theirs for the taking.
Or you could perhaps discuss your concerns with the candidate... They may have a good reason for applying to this specific job.
"I want to work here because I need money to eat and you seemed like a safe choice"