Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 396 posts

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

#321

Post by asynchronous »

tristor wrote: post #268
themoonisachees wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good PR CYA. They ensure that there will be a much lower chance of an article headlined "mass shooting at rust conference" being written. I am personal'y of the opinion that brands play it too safe in general and people aren't stupid and know that just because a brand happened to be near something bad doesn't mean the brand is responsible and therefore bad, but apparently brands don't agree and they're the ones…

> They ensure that there will be a much lower chance of an article headlined "mass shooting at rust conference" being written. I don't think this follows. Historically speaking, most mass shootings have occurred at locations that specifically disallow firearms, making them "soft targets" where the cowardly attacker will not have anyone fight back. It doesn't seem logically consistent to assume that this policy item h…

They’re downvoting you because they don’t like hearing logic or the truth.

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

#322

Post by simonw »

OJFord wrote: post #277
simonw wrote: post #255

I'm always surprised at how much push-back this one gets. The point I was trying to make here is that you DON'T need to be someone who spends every free moment blogging, writing open source code and so on. Stick up a few posts somewhere and leave them there, as a tiny piece of extra evidence that you're someone who knows how to do things. Maybe part of the problem is that I'm grossly under-estimating the amount of wo…

For me the barrier has been that I've never gotten around to setting the blog up. Often having ideas for (I think) a good post, but don't have the blog to post it to. Some of them get noted down in case I ever do. I do intend (as in, have been particularly intending recently) to do it, because I think then I would find it lower effort, I would do it, and that I would like that. We'll see, the list of things I've inte…

Suggestion: start with Gists! Post markdown files on https://gist.github.com/ - you can migrate them to a proper blog should you set one up in the future.

I'd suggest a regular repo, but GitHub block search engine crawlers from indexing anything other than the README.md file - so Gists are weirdly better for publishing content.

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

#323

Post by simonw »

dleeftink wrote: post #276
simonw wrote: post #255

I'm always surprised at how much push-back this one gets. The point I was trying to make here is that you DON'T need to be someone who spends every free moment blogging, writing open source code and so on. Stick up a few posts somewhere and leave them there, as a tiny piece of extra evidence that you're someone who knows how to do things. Maybe part of the problem is that I'm grossly under-estimating the amount of wo…

In spirit, I agree–spread your knowledge, far and wide. But making your voice heard and stand out from the crowd is no simple feat: we don't all have the luxury of Twitter following, a much subscribed RSS feed, a prominent domain name to spread the fruits of our hard work. The network effects that benefit early influencers are difficult to pierce, I find.

That's the trick here though: you don't need any distribution at all for this to work.

You just need something you can link to from your resume, so the hiring manager can click through and see a tiny bit of evidence that you can talk about code or build a project.

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

#324

Post by dmoy »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #316
temp51723 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's because they didn't do anything. NDA = Not Doing Anything. No, it's because it's my employers code, not mine. God knows what trying to exfiltrate it opens me up to criminally or civilly.

It's your prerogative. Nobody said anything about "exfiltrating." Showing someone X doesn't mean that X isn't owned by its owner anymore. These aren't semantic arguments. You're going to have a hard time expressing what exactly is the violation when everyone has signed the same NDAs and CIIAs! Like if you work for Google, and I work for Google, you can fathom, well I can look at code you've written for Google. Okay,…

> Like if you work for Google, and I work for Google, you can fathom, well I can look at code you've written for Google.

wait how does that work in the context of an interview though? You're by definition interviewing somewhere where you don't currently work

> you're going to have to screen share a "diff" here or there, and show people concretely what the hell you've been doing for a year at BigCo or UnicornCo. I cannot predict the future and I cannot generalize, but in my experience, the likelihood of criminal, civil or even the far more realistic reputational and cultural repurcussion is extremely small

Ah, nvm

No thanks, I'm not gonna do that

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

#325

Post by sfg »

A team I was on hired someone because I dug up an emulator he had written in the past (I think it was of some Nintendo console). I took a quick look at it, showed it to the other devs on the team, asked the candidate about it to check he really built it and understood it, and then we told the manager to hire him, if he passed the personality assessment. He hadn't even mentioned it on his CV as he worried it would look unprofessional.

I got another person hired as I found a Android game she had written and pushed to the Play store. Again, I don't think she mentioned it on her CV. After looking at it and talking to her about it, I told management to hire her, if they found no issues in her as a person.

In both cases they were outstanding at their job, relative to their level of seniority and pay. Both are very high up the list of people I'd happily work with again.

It might not be fair to the candidates that didn't have projects (or had ones that I couldn't find), but it was a very effective way of getting amazing people. Which makes sense as examples of work are probably better than CVs and interviews for judging someones ability to do the job.

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

#326

Post by strictnein »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #316
temp51723 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's because they didn't do anything. NDA = Not Doing Anything. No, it's because it's my employers code, not mine. God knows what trying to exfiltrate it opens me up to criminally or civilly.

It's your prerogative. Nobody said anything about "exfiltrating." Showing someone X doesn't mean that X isn't owned by its owner anymore. These aren't semantic arguments. You're going to have a hard time expressing what exactly is the violation when everyone has signed the same NDAs and CIIAs! Like if you work for Google, and I work for Google, you can fathom, well I can look at code you've written for Google. Okay,…

> Nobody said anything about "exfiltrating."

Copying work code to a non-work device to show during an interview is exfiltrating code. Well staffed security orgs at large companies have insider threat teams that look for this type of thing, in addition to monitoring for exfiltration of company documents and other materials to personal devices.

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

#327

Post by clbrmbr »

simonw wrote: post #255

I'm always surprised at how much push-back this one gets. The point I was trying to make here is that you DON'T need to be someone who spends every free moment blogging, writing open source code and so on. Stick up a few posts somewhere and leave them there, as a tiny piece of extra evidence that you're someone who knows how to do things. Maybe part of the problem is that I'm grossly under-estimating the amount of wo…

I’m not a big self-publisher myself, but as a hiring manager, I am definitely attracted to candidates who have a robust public portfolio. That said, in hindsight, I’m not sure I’ve noticed any correlation between the strength of the public portfolio and job performance.

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

#328

Post by sanderjd »

simonw wrote: post #255

I'm always surprised at how much push-back this one gets. The point I was trying to make here is that you DON'T need to be someone who spends every free moment blogging, writing open source code and so on. Stick up a few posts somewhere and leave them there, as a tiny piece of extra evidence that you're someone who knows how to do things. Maybe part of the problem is that I'm grossly under-estimating the amount of wo…

I think you nailed it in your last paragraph!

I have about five ideas I really want to write about, that I know would be really great future PR for myself in the niche I'm interested in right now. They wouldn't need to be long, but they would still be hard for me to write and edit to a point that I feel good about having them out in public attached to my name. So they don't get written. (But maybe they will someday.)

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

#329

Post by sanderjd »

clbrmbr wrote: post #327
simonw wrote: post #255

I'm always surprised at how much push-back this one gets. The point I was trying to make here is that you DON'T need to be someone who spends every free moment blogging, writing open source code and so on. Stick up a few posts somewhere and leave them there, as a tiny piece of extra evidence that you're someone who knows how to do things. Maybe part of the problem is that I'm grossly under-estimating the amount of wo…

I’m not a big self-publisher myself, but as a hiring manager, I am definitely attracted to candidates who have a robust public portfolio. That said, in hindsight, I’m not sure I’ve noticed any correlation between the strength of the public portfolio and job performance.

Ha, I think this is a pretty classic description of unconscious bias; you have warm fuzzies about people with robust public profiles, without having given much thought to whether it's a strong signal of performance.

Edit to add: I feel like this came off as harsh, but it really wasn't intended to at all. We all have this kind of bias. I have a bit of the opposite bias as you, for what it's worth, because the best people I've worked with have been essentially silent in public, and I tend to see people with robust public profiles as having spent time on marketing themselves that could have been better spent on other things. This kind of bias that we all build throughout our life experience is why hiring is extremely fraught.

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

#330

Post by wiseowise »

sph wrote: post #187
wiseowise wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a different matter. What I meant is your blog is an extension of your personality. You can’t discriminate based on sex or race, you can based on personality.

You're allowed to discriminate based on personality by law, but socially, if you do it with anyone you don't agree with completely: 1. You probably don't have many friends or 2. Your friends are not very diverse Outside, in the real world, I can sit and have a very pleasant conversation on TV shows or Lisp interpreters with someone with terrible ideas or belief which are inconsequential to the matter at hand and are…

> if you do it with anyone you don't agree with completely

Where did I say that?

> Outside, in the real world, I can sit and have a very pleasant conversation on TV shows or Lisp interpreters with someone with terrible ideas or belief which are inconsequential to the matter at hand and are not part of the conversation. I can sit for a beer with childhood acquaintances that I know are racist, bigots or generally idiots, because we're talking about something else than the things I know we don't see eye to eye. And that's fine.

Good for you. We're multinational company with thousands of employees, I personally been witness to situations where incompatibility in views caused issues during work. In my free time, with my childhood acquaintances I can talk about anything, during work with my colleagues I want to have productive workday - not arguing about current flavor of racism or whoever-knows-what's opinions about anarchy.

Post reply on HN