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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

#321

Post by AlwaysRock »

jon-wood wrote: post #223
raverbashing wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great to know, an editor is much easier than a whiteboard I'd much prefer it rather than scribbling in a whiteboard with an eraser that doesn't work and trying to put together the solution Whiteboard does work for higher level discussions, not for anything resembling code Lest they ask you to whiteboard FizzBuzz, that makes me want to leave the interview immediately.

I’ve had a couple of interviews where I was asked to either whiteboard FizzBuzz, or answer 00s era Google brain teasers. From a big company that would be a swift exit from the interview process for me, but in both cases it happened to me I was interviewing as the first engineer at startups - I did the tasks, and then had a conversation about how if I were hired I’d remove them from the interview process. In both case…

Because their interview questions were silly?

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

#322

Post by TrackerFF »

wreath wrote: post #159
TrackerFF wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Id rather grind leetcode and system design problems and get credentials for it and dont have to again. Wait.. thats what my university degree was for..

Yes - but for some reason, there's this extreme (irrational?) fear that imposers might have coasted through Uni., and you get these infamous blogs and articles stating that "comp. sci graduates can't code anymore! candidate failed fizzbuzz!", and everyone seems to have their own anecdote about that one co-worker that couldn't code themselves out of a wet paper bag.

It seems like we're in a situation where companies would rather pass on 10 competent devs, rather than hire 1 incompetent dev.

Personally, I think most of the above boils down to bias. You only remember the best and the worst coders you meet in your life, as far as work quality goes. And those are outliers. Coding interviews are stressing, so you can end up with competent candidates completely blocking due to the stress, and thus failing trivial problems.

Anecdotes seem to be the gold standard, as far as evidence goes.

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

#323

Post by whataremyvalues »

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…

I've found careerexplorer.com to be a helpful tool for career planning and exploration.

Knowing where I stand and what my values are also helps when it comes to navigating the professional environment.

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

#324

Post by k__ »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #320
k__ wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about big companies. I'm not that famous. But I think, if a person above VP level wants you at Facebook, an assesment center isn't an issue.

That's actually not really true. You still have to interview. A referral or being recruited directly isnt a free pass. You'll probably get some additional prep but the person recruiting you cant just say let's make this person an offer.

Really?

I had a professor who got people jobs at big corps and he said, many of them failed the assesment, so he had to talk to higher ups.

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

#325

Post by DJHenk »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #299
throwawaylinux wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To play devil's advocate, having a standardized process for all candidates has some benefits. I've witnessed otherwise stellar candidates with amazing open source contributions absolutely bomb coding interviews. Real "write a function that does X" in whatever language you're comfortable with and whatever tools or resources you want. Simple stuff. I'm not sure if you're playing devil's advocate very well here, becau…

> I'm not sure if you're playing devil's advocate very well here, because this suggests to me that the interview process did not work well. Do you want to hire someone who can write a binary tree insertion in 30 minutes, or someone who can make amazing contributions to real software projects? Most companies want malleable, fungible engineers. Most companies are not stable, something is usually in flux -- projects, te…

> I'd rather have someone I can work with.

> I almost never look at a candidate's resume/CV. > I don't have time to peruse your GitHub profile or past projects. I don't even have time.

So you want someone you can work with, but you don't want to spend a couple of seconds to look at who you're talking to. Which is, you know, sort of the most basic of things necessary to get an actual relationship started.

This goes both ways. If you don't even want to spend a few minutes to assess whether the resume or the projects are interesting to you, then why on earth would the candidate spare you any time or energy?

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

#326

Post by jodrellblank »

yesenadam wrote: post #98
sigstoat wrote: post #95

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. 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.

It's hard to believe you're arguing in good faith - you allow that a resume is written only to get work and so consider it, but if they write a blog only to help them get work you dismiss it with the reason "they only did it to help them get work"? How is that consistent?

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

#327

Post by refactor_master »

LadyCailin wrote: post #312
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure if you're playing devil's advocate very well here, because this suggests to me that the interview process did not work well. Do you want to hire someone who can write a binary tree insertion in 30 minutes, or someone who can make amazing contributions to real software projects? Most companies want malleable, fungible engineers. Most companies are not stable, something is usually in flux -- projects, te…

> One in a hundred applicants even get interviews If you don’t bother to read the CV, who do you even pick to interview? Randomly?

Of course. You wouldn’t want an unlucky candidate.

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

#328

Post by ericd »

colonelpopcorn wrote: post #319
jjeaff wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they are stellar candidates with amazing contributions. Yet they can't do your whiteboard questions. So, are you trying to hire someone who will make stellar contributions to your codebase or are you looking for candidates who are good at answering dumb questions?

It filters out those who know how to structure code, but don't know how to write it. Stack overflow copy and paste can still create public projects.

It also filters out people who get anxious in interview situations, since anxiety tends to put people in fight or flight mode and shut down the critical thinking parts of the brain.

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

#329

Post by TheRealPomax »

watwut wrote: post #253
puppet-master wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then you'll have a leg up on the overwhelming majority of employed developers. Just because lots of people don't have public presence, doesn't mean that you having public presence doesn't make you stand out. Quite literally the opposite: it will make you stand out.

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

#330

Post by nonameiguess »

vaylian wrote: post #245
carnitine wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Binary search? I would never hire anyone who couldn’t implement it from scratch. There’s no complex idea or trick to remember, it’s the most basic algorithmic around.

StackOverflow disagrees: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/504335/what-are-the-pitf... I quote from the thread: "binary search was first published in 1946 but the first published binary search without bugs was in 1962"

I wonder what the expectation of the interviewer is on this. Virtually every single piece of code I'll ever write is going to have a a few off-by-one errors and probably other common bugs. That's why you do some basic validation and QA to find those bugs and fix them. The first pass isn't likely to even compile, but who cares? The compiler will tell you exactly why and you can fix that, too. Perfect code on a first try is a useless skill.

On the other hand, just understanding how the algorithm works is what matters. And binary search may have been "published" as an implementation on programmable electronic computers in the recent past, but it's a timeless and intuitive algorithm that I understood perfectly well when I was 4 years old and first learned to read and started looking up entries in the dictionary, encyclopedia, and phone book.

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