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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

#111

Post by whatshisface »

maxk42 wrote: post #49
azinman2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or.. Interviewee: Check me out! I wrote a NES emulator that is cycle accurate and supports a game with a specialized chip that I reverse engineered that no other emulator supported. There’s a large spectrum of quality of public content out there. You could say the same thing about any resume.

But that's a counterexample to the OP's thesis that "it doesn't take much". An "NES emulator that is cycle accurate and supports a game with a specialized chip that I reverse engineered that no other emulator supported" is a MASSIVE undertaking that would take a huge amount of time and effort. I would certainly give a candidate like that a second look - if NES emulators were remotely related to the kind of skills I w…

You're presupposing that the hiring manager would be able to tell what skills are involved in making an NES emulator, or even what skills they are looking for.

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

#112

Post by tolbish »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #52
endisneigh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If by "modesty" you mean keeping your work unpublished, or presenting yourself as worse than you are, that's neither a useful nor a desirable quality. To be fair, historically the entire point of modesty was to present yourself as worse than you are (historically this was done with attractiveness specifically). Has modesty taken on a new definition where it means simply not bragging? I honestly wasn't aware.

I don't see much value in arguing over the definition or intepretation of the word "modesty", beyond the degree to which that started this subthread in the first place. I'm suggesting that either you can interpret modesty as a positive trait (moderation, unpretentiousness) that is perfectly compatible with what this article suggests, or you can interpret it as a negative trait, or you can interpret it as an entirely…

In reality, modesty is not used in the way you say it is. You call someone modest when it is a slightly negative trait. You would otherwise call them unpretentious or humble.

Posting on GitHub and having a decent internet presence seems like something a humble person may do, not something a modest person may do. A modest person would have all of their code on private servers, or would have nothing impressive associated with their public/resume persona.

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

#113

Post by ganafagol »

> 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 screen a job candidate and go to their github, if I find that this is just there so you can tick off "projects on github" from your employability checklist, you get huge minus points from me. Then better not have it at all.

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

#114

Post by bryanrasmussen »

simonw wrote: post #109
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 would hope that carpenters would include photographs of their work as part of an interview process.

I guess I'd also point out that some doctors might be expected to give talks and publish findings etc.

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

#115

Post by nanidin »

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…

I highly recommend interested readers to follow through to the Quora page. It’s more or less a public apology, and helped break me out of the echo chamber that occurs here and on Reddit related to interviewing at Google.

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

#116

Post by JoshTriplett »

tolbish wrote: post #112
JoshTriplett wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see much value in arguing over the definition or intepretation of the word "modesty", beyond the degree to which that started this subthread in the first place. I'm suggesting that either you can interpret modesty as a positive trait (moderation, unpretentiousness) that is perfectly compatible with what this article suggests, or you can interpret it as a negative trait, or you can interpret it as an entirely…

In reality, modesty is not used in the way you say it is. You call someone modest when it is a slightly negative trait. You would otherwise call them unpretentious or humble. Posting on GitHub and having a decent internet presence seems like something a humble person may do, not something a modest person may do. A modest person would have all of their code on private servers, or would have nothing impressive associat…

That's exactly the point I'm getting at: to the extent modesty is incompatible with publishing your work, it's not a positive trait, and nobody should lament it "going the way of the dodo".

(I was, earlier in the thread, attempting to find a charitable interpretation of modesty that was compatible.)

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

#117

Post by harvey9 »

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.

Some Doctors publish research, and put that on their resumes.

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

#118

Post by jdenning »

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…

Definitely. I use a link shortener to track visits to my portfolio links. (Almost) Nobody looks at your public work.

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

#119

Post by rachelbythebay »

tdeck wrote: post #70
sudeepj wrote: post #65

There are two modes of hiring: 1. General purpose: Typical FANG like where hire first and then do team matching later 2. Targeted hiring: Companies want specific people and they try to recruit them A sizable number of top open-source contributors get recruited are in #2. Eg. 1) Top contributors in Rust lang hired by AWS. 2) FANG companies targeting top AI researchers from academia. One's open-source presence needs to…

I'm not sure if the extra work is rewarded as much as you might think. For example, I was shocked to see a prominent open-source contributor hired into Google as an L5. Without going into detail, this person built projects used by many people reading this comment. Granted, I don't know what their comp or interview process was like, but 5 is basically an ordinary senior engineer level at Google.

Google hired me in 2006 (then 11 years of experience) as a 3. I didn't know any better at the time, partly because I was coming into the valley from the rest of the world.

I didn't find out just how screwed up this was until becoming part of the hiring process at Facebook... some seven or eight years later.

So... yeah. What you said is totally a thing.

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

#120

Post by Nition »

> 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 screenshot and a decent description of your project if you want people to use it.

GitHub projects I can forgive though, because you aren't usually trying to sell a project, and you don't owe anyone there anything. But even websites selling software occasionally don't have a single screenshot of it. In those cases I sometimes learn more from a Google image search than from the product website.

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