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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

#151

Post by intellectronica »

tgv wrote: post #134
intellectronica wrote: post #33

100%. Especially in a tough, competitive job market like today's, having a credible portfolio of work, published content, and external validation makes a huge difference. It can take a good candidate to the top of the list, and when that list is a few dozen great applications, that's critical. As a hiring manager I weigh a candidate's public presence at 10~15% of my initial decision, even more if it's exceptionally i…

What credible, impressive, publically available work did you do to become a hiring manager?

Plenty. I have an unusual background with no education beyond high school and all-over-the-place career history, and everything I got in my career was on the strength of my work. It's amazing how many times my publicly available work was crucial for being able to get an opportunity.

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

#152

Post by BaculumMeumEst »

rewmie wrote: post #70
BossingAround wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even for companies like Red Hat, Canonical, SUSE, Mongo, ..., my experience is that a good blog or a good Github doesn't account to anything more than a few pleasant sentences at the beginning of the interview. Of course, it might happen that they'd hire contributors, as you say. I'd say this is incredibly rare (but does happen). Usually, from my experience, this happens when the company wants to essentially "acquire…

> (...) my experience is that a good blog or a good Github doesn't account to anything more than a few pleasant sentences at the beginning of the interview. A few years ago I was offered a job explicitly because I had a github account where I hosted a public project that used a framework. Later, I was the recruiter in a few hiring rounds, and public source code repos was my primary source of data to assess q candidat…

There are exceptionally talented, successful, high-profile software developers with incomplete & unpolished exploratory projects on their GitHub. It's surprising that you would take pride in using this as a basis to disqualify.

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

#153

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #122
okeuro49 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your blog post: > Got another programming job. Got fired for "performance." I think the reason wasn’t good, but I also have a hard time building a theory of mind, which means I can’t read code written by others. If you can't read code written by others, that's going to be a big concern for companies that require you to read and modify other people's code. Perhaps you need to be a contractor, not an employee.

Yikes! https://gavinhoward.com/2023/04/rust-is-dead-to-me/ > Rust the language is dead to me. > why? > Because, quite literally, the Rust Foundation wants to make people like me unwelcome in any Rust event, not just official ones. > Don’t believe me? > Look at the draft Rust Trademark Policy that the Rust Foundation is asking for comments on and go to page 12: > > We will consider requests to use the Marks on a case…

Fascinating how they place more importance on how “unwelcome” they would feel if not allowed to carry a gun, versus how physically unsafe others might feel if they were.

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

#154

Post by maccard »

sph wrote: post #117
maccard wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wanted to write a couple posts about anarchism on my personal blog, nothing crazy, and kept being concerned it might drive off a potential recruiter. Who the hell cares, a company where I cannot have a touch of personality is not a place I want to work at either. If it's important to you then you should. There are places that allow/encourage people to be individuals. >The only potentially "controversial" idea (as…

> That said be careful what you write and how you phrase it because it's one thing to have an opinion, and another to make a statement like that. That's the bloody point. Fuck having to walk on eggshells, especially when I made it quite clear I have no issues with that. I had to be quite careful with the wording, and I know exactly this opens me to be attacked and pointed out as a bigot because I equated gender ident…

You made a conscious decision to introduce gender identity into the discussion when nobody else was talking about it. It's not walking on eggshells for getting pulled up on you bringing up your beliefs when nobody asked.

> especially when I made it quite clear I have no issues with that.

No, you didn't. You pretty much said "just saying" as though that absolves you of what you actually said [0].

[0] https://www.npr.org/2010/12/18/132160770/its-rude-its-crude-...

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

#155

Post by _mh56 »

I have 50+ public projects on Github.

Some of them are live, have screenshots, proper documentation and such.

Some of them gets stars or people reach out for support on these projects.

Some of them I've advertised on Reddit etc and reached 100K+ views and a lot of upvotes in their respective Communities.

I also have a substack which has reached top of HackerNews once.

All this has netted me exactly ZERO opportunities till now.

Thankfully, I'm doing Github and Substack as a hobby/learning so no expectations = no disappointment.

But the author is deluded to think these things help. You might win the lottery and the right person might see your content at the right time. But it's better to just use this time to cram Leetcode and get a job.

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

#156

Post by AussieWog93 »

_mh56 wrote: post #155

I have 50+ public projects on Github. Some of them are live, have screenshots, proper documentation and such. Some of them gets stars or people reach out for support on these projects. Some of them I've advertised on Reddit etc and reached 100K+ views and a lot of upvotes in their respective Communities. I also have a substack which has reached top of HackerNews once. All this has netted me exactly ZERO opportunities…

I got my first software engineering job only once I had a successful open source hardware/software product. Every interviewer asked about it, and it was the reason I got in the door despite not doing anything CompSci related.

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

#157

Post by wilde »

Hiring managers are looking for people like themselves. Simon is big on blogging and OSS so he looks for that. This type of bias is especially present at smaller companies where there isn’t much formal evaluation of hiring processes. Hell, some even amplify it with a “culture” interview.

This post didn’t say “I’ve found that candidates with public work are more likely to pass the interview.” Just that he noticed that he’s biased and that could be a good way to get the interview. It’s unfair but if you want the job you could use this to your advantage.

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

#158

Post by tzekid »

_mh56 wrote: post #155

I have 50+ public projects on Github. Some of them are live, have screenshots, proper documentation and such. Some of them gets stars or people reach out for support on these projects. Some of them I've advertised on Reddit etc and reached 100K+ views and a lot of upvotes in their respective Communities. I also have a substack which has reached top of HackerNews once. All this has netted me exactly ZERO opportunities…

I think it's meant as an add-on to stand out when applying to a job.

I'm quite Junior so I don't know if this applies to more senior positions, but in my experience when applying to jobs my Github page was always a point of discussion when I got an interview.

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

#160

Post by nybdty »

maccard wrote: post #154
sph wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That said be careful what you write and how you phrase it because it's one thing to have an opinion, and another to make a statement like that. That's the bloody point. Fuck having to walk on eggshells, especially when I made it quite clear I have no issues with that. I had to be quite careful with the wording, and I know exactly this opens me to be attacked and pointed out as a bigot because I equated gender ident…

You made a conscious decision to introduce gender identity into the discussion when nobody else was talking about it. It's not walking on eggshells for getting pulled up on you bringing up your beliefs when nobody asked. > especially when I made it quite clear I have no issues with that. No, you didn't. You pretty much said "just saying" as though that absolves you of what you actually said [0]. [0] https://www.npr.o…

You are the one introducing gender identity into this subthread. The poster you reply to has done no such thing.

People increasingly don't even read the posts before the go off on ideological rants and false accusations.

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