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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

#161

Post by epicureanideal »

kebman wrote: post #154
RandallBrown wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a pure engineering role things like credits at large companies, online talks, side projects, etc. are all really great ways to get an interview. I can't really remember the last time I was turned down for an interview. You're totally right about the other part though. I've lost a lot of jobs I think I could have been great at because I'm really bad at whiteboard coding interviews.

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…

> Or is it that they want a blank sheet imp that they can mould wholly in their own image? Is real creativity and output really of no value to these guys?

That's what I'm starting to suspect, and that suspicion is shared by several of my friends in the industry.

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

#162

Post by N00bN00b »

EvilEy3 wrote: post #110
N00bN00b wrote: post #30

The opposite is also true. I work in system engineering (sometimes it's called sysops. Hybrid programming/administration, often production stuff) and I've learned to I hide my creativity. A lot of employers want people they can understand and they can trust. The companies I work for generally don't want someone that's creative. They want someone that's dull and reliable. Show your creative side and they'll look for s…

> Flaw in the capitalistic system. ???

What is it called.. Market failure? It's got a name, I don't remember it.

The job market doesn't support certain overqualified people. I gave you an example.

Rationally, you'd think that a cashier that works 3x faster than other cashiers can make 3x the income. Or even 2x.

A plumber could do that, or a woodworker (they might have to start their own company, but they can do it). But a cashier relies on employers and they're just not going to pay a cashier that much. Cashier being an example. There are many support jobs were it just doesn't pay to be good at your job.

These people are technically incentivized to be mediocre. And they often are. Some of these positions allow growth paths, but not all. And just because I'm the world's best cashier, doesn't mean I'm a good store manager.

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

#163

Post by bryanrasmussen »

mattmanser wrote: post #138
an_opabinia wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, for every engineering subordinate that turned out to be good that I didn't bother testing with leetcode, there were 19 who sucked and also failed their coding test, or sucked and we should have tested them. So far, among people who studied programming as their major in college, the best predictor was the prestige of the university they attended.

If you've hired over 20 people, and 19 of them have been bad, it just sounds like there's something wrong with your process. It also sounds like you're hiring a lot of novices, which isn't what's being discussed really. The uni thing is not exactly a revelation. It's the same for every single field/job. Better uni, usually better worker. All you're actually saying is that novice programmers straight from uni mildly c…

>If you've hired over 20 people, and 19 of them have been bad, it just sounds like there's something wrong with your process.

I think this is part of the reason for the widespread usage of take home / coding assignments etc.

If you have a bad process making people do some work improves your result.

I remember the first company I had with a friend in the late 90s and our process sucked. It was embarrassing, although thinking about it we still had a 50% success rate in technical quality of people we hired. If we had given tests to the people we didn't have someone to vouch for it would have meant we did not make the mistakes we did. And by saying we had a bad process we had a bad firing process as well. The bad hires we made really were catastrophic because we couldn't handle any part of the process.

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

#164

Post by lmilcin »

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…

> In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care.

I am interviewing a lot of people. I look very suspicious at these kinds of moves to try to impress me.

I don't necessarily ignore, but I try to figure out if this is some kind of shallow engagement.

It impresses me if you can stick to something meaningful and do it regularly for years but you can just as well hurt your chances if you propose 5 simple commits to random projects on Github to be your greatest accomplishment.

A blog about programming is not going to impress me if you are still junior engineer. Rather, it is worrying. I always remind people to learn something first before you try to teach other people.

I will still want to see you code yourself out of a paper bag.

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

#165

Post by BlissWaves »

an_opabinia wrote: post #131
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…

In my experience, for every engineering subordinate that turned out to be good that I didn't bother testing with leetcode, there were 19 who sucked and also failed their coding test, or sucked and we should have tested them. So far, among people who studied programming as their major in college, the best predictor was the prestige of the university they attended.

I like leetcode as a hiring metric and I think it's the best measure to test out an engineer. Unless a company uses it basically to find people that implement the fastest algorithm(read: have memorized it already) in 30 minutes it can be a very very effective way of screening.

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

#166

Post by TeMPOraL »

andyxor wrote: post #129
eru wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

he wasn't "bullshitting", you didn't get the point of his tweet and quora post and I think you're kinda proving his point.

He wasn't "bullshitting" indeed. He was straight up lying. And his lie poisoned the thinking of millions (myself included) wrt. tech interviews.

My opinion of the guy just dropped hard.

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

#168

Post by serial_dev »

Jach wrote: post #139
ganafagol wrote: post #113

> 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…

How do you distinguish between "made a crappy chat app with Python+Flask because I wanted to play with Flask [and perhaps by making it public my hiring prospects will improve as a bonus, or not, but I don't have a strong reason to just keep it private on my machine]" and "made a crappy chat app with Python+Flask because I want to put Flask on my resume and hopefully my hiring prospects will improve"? Or is it just th…

> The only account that rubbed me the wrong way when I interviewed FTEs and interns was the kind that had nothing but a bunch of forks of other repos on it, no commits in them.

Maybe they didn't understand how GitHub works exactly? In the first weeks of me using github, I didn't notice the star feature, so I just forked a project, so I have it on my list. Even today, if I see an important repository, I just fork the repo if I'm afraid the original author will delete the repo.

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

#170

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

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…

> if I forgot how to write binary search

The binary search algorithm isn't something you can "forget". For a literate programmer it's like forgetting how to write the letter 'A' or forgetting which pedal is the gas and which is the brakes.

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