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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

#21

Post by JoshTriplett »

endisneigh wrote: post #14

This is an interesting post - though it saddens me. It seems modesty is going the way of the dodo. Though it leads to an interesting quandary - is it possible to have an online presence and still honestly call yourself a modest person? To elaborate - my issue with this post is that it promotes the further commercialization of activity. If you’re doing it because you want to, then you would’ve done it already. This po…

> It seems modesty is going the way of the dodo. Though it leads to an interesting quandary - is it possible to have an online presence and still honestly call yourself a modest person?

If by "modesty" you mean not bragging and not presenting yourself as better than you are, that's absolutely a desirable quality. And that's perfectly compatible with publishing your work.

If by "modesty" you mean keeping your work unpublished, or presenting yourself as worse than you are, that's neither a useful nor a desirable quality.

The article here talks about posting a project to GitHub with a README and screenshots, or having a technical blog with some articles about things you've learned or worked on. That seems perfectly reasonable.

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

#22

Post by dsjoerg »

endisneigh wrote: post #14

This is an interesting post - though it saddens me. It seems modesty is going the way of the dodo. Though it leads to an interesting quandary - is it possible to have an online presence and still honestly call yourself a modest person? To elaborate - my issue with this post is that it promotes the further commercialization of activity. If you’re doing it because you want to, then you would’ve done it already. This po…

Everyone's best work and well-considered thoughts are worth sharing.

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

#23

Post by wpietri »

maxk42 wrote: post #7
tibbetts wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of information available on candidates to hiring managers is extremely limited. Evidence of outside creativity is a pretty good sign that someone is not a bozo.

Again - I fail to see how the second part is derived from the first. If I'm already engaging in a screening process, wouldn't it be better to ask the candidate to solve a problem that relates to their role than to ask them if they've done any blogging on the topic of tech?

I think you're missing the "stand out" part of this.

I've done a lot of tech interviews lately, which is where I get at ability to do the work. But when a hiring team is trying to pick among the people who do approximately as well on that, then other factors can help.

At that stage, I definitely like to see things that indicate people are excited about something enough to just make a thing (a library, a small project, a blog post). If that's related to our domain or tech stack, even better. But even without that it's a plus in that it's a sign I can just give them a user problem or a technical issue and trust they'll go off and do something good with it.

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

#25

Post by endisneigh »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #21
endisneigh wrote: post #14

This is an interesting post - though it saddens me. It seems modesty is going the way of the dodo. Though it leads to an interesting quandary - is it possible to have an online presence and still honestly call yourself a modest person? To elaborate - my issue with this post is that it promotes the further commercialization of activity. If you’re doing it because you want to, then you would’ve done it already. This po…

> It seems modesty is going the way of the dodo. Though it leads to an interesting quandary - is it possible to have an online presence and still honestly call yourself a modest person? If by "modesty" you mean not bragging and not presenting yourself as better than you are, that's absolutely a desirable quality. And that's perfectly compatible with publishing your work. If by "modesty" you mean keeping your work unp…

> 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.

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

#26

Post by dheera »

tibbetts wrote: post #5
maxk42 wrote: post #2

I don't understand why "public creativity" would be something you'd screen for in an engineering role.

The amount of information available on candidates to hiring managers is extremely limited. Evidence of outside creativity is a pretty good sign that someone is not a bozo.

Why is this such a hard problem to solve?

When I was a founder it was incredibly hard to find people who are "available" and skilled because they feared listing themselves as available on LinkedIn.

When I'm not a founder and skilled it's incredibly hard to get to hiring managers. Usually I get warm intros from people within companies I'm interested in, it works way better, and usually often results in jumping straight to the on-site interview step.

Why isn't there a central website where you can just post your name-redacted-resume, accomplishments, and (optionally) target location and salary range anonymously, and if someone wants to reach out, then you can reveal your real name and e-mail?

Or better yet a Tinder-like interface where companies swipe candidates and candidates swipe companies, albeit with no photos, just a name-redacted resume?

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

#27

Post by jameshush »

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_ mattered. Now that I’m running workshops and talks professionally, posting publicly is _critical_.

Moral of the story: if you enjoy posting in public and teaching in public, but you feel like its getting you nowhere career wise, maybe you are in the wrong career like I was. Once I decided to double down on my strengths and spent nights and weekends at public speaking training instead of grinding leetcode things started to click.

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

#28

Post by wpietri »

giantg2 wrote: post #20
simonw wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any time I've been screening candidates I have taken this kind of thing into account. If I was hiring an Android developer the fact that you have two Android apps would absolutely play into my decision process - it would increase the chance that you'd get to an interview, and I'd very likely ask about them during that interview.

I mean, it could be helpful, but my guess is that you would go with someone who has worked on it professionally. Plus you would probably want someone with more recent Kotlin experience.

It depends a lot on the place and the role.

I'm hiring for a relatively small cross-functional team that has to deal with a variety of work. One of the characteristics we need is people who are willing to step outside their technological comfort zone and just make something work. We have no mobile code and probably won't, but I was still happy to talk with somebody who'd built a couple of iOS apps for fun. It was a sign they were enough of a self-starter that I could trust them to learn on the job when that was necessary, and also that they could think about user needs and how to solve them.

It's true that some places basically take the resume of a current engineer and try to clone them by hiring an exact technology match. I'm not sure if that gets them better results or it's just something that's easier for a cumbersome recruiting process. But consider that maybe those are places you wouldn't be very happy anyhow.

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

#29

Post by simonw »

austincheney wrote: post #24

I used to think this but now I don’t. It’s what lead to this comment that received many upvotes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27906769

That discussion was part of my inspiration for writing about this.

The point I'm trying to make here is that the idea that you need to invest vast amounts of effort into side projects in order to increase your chances of being hired is misleading.

But... putting just a small amount of effort into having e.g. a couple of blog posts and a single public project on GitHub CAN give you most of that value.

Hiring managers faced with five candidates, one of whom has a blog post about the technology they are hiring for, are more likely to bump that candidate through to a phone screen or interview round.

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

#30

Post by N00bN00b »

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 someone else, even if you've got 10x more skills than someone else.

Given that creativity doesn't pay anyway (there's a cap on pay and I've already reached that cap), there's no point to show it. I can get hired based on what's on my resume alone and by answering the same set of questions they always ask.

Then I get hired, I automate everything in under 6 months and I go sit on my ass or do something else. Flaw in the capitalistic system. I know what I'm worth, I can bring across what I'm worth, but it's simply outside the bounds of what's expected or needed.

And I know that sounds weird, but think of it like this:

No one is going to pay the fastest cashier in the world 3x minimum wage. Not even if they check out customers 6x faster than the next person. And claiming you're the fastest cashier in the world during the hiring process just gets you thrown on the discard pile.

The same goes for a lot of other professions, including mine.

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