Few companies look at personal projects in my experience (UK). You can mention them in interviews for bonus points.
It doesn’t take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
21–30 of 396 posts
Re: It doesn’t take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#22As a person involved in hiring in my company, one of my goals is to remove biases for things that are not really related to the thing I'm evaluating, which is the ability to do a given job. There are valid reasons not to have an interest in publishing your coding or writing work, there are lots of great developers that don't do that, so I don't feel like this should make a difference.
Re: It doesn’t take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#23IME in Aus, it's mostly recruiters, the kind who ask if I have experience with 'Jasons', who do the initial screening. I'm not sure I'd have much more luck getting past them with a substantial online presence behind me. On the other hand, I was recently referred by a friend for a role with the state gov. The HR person said my lack of experience with X hurt my chances. I passed this on to my friend and said thanks any…
Also worked in Aus - Melbourne and Sydney, as well as London. I have zero blogs, and I don't contribute towards open source. My github has random bits of code, a few coding exercises from other companies.
What I do have though is a decent CV.
When people say you need this or that, what they're actually saying is you need to show somehow that you're technically capable.
There are other ways of doing that than just having a blog.
Re: It doesn’t take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#24The act of taking a serious look at people's github repos, blogs, or whatever else, appears fairly unusual. I've asked.
I’ve had an in person interview where we talked about them actually reading through my website. It was awkward to be honest but also cool they read it - was also strange to talk about “extracurriculars” during a technical interview.
Always had a really really difficult time with how to present “myself” on a personal website - too many sides (code, personal preferences, opinions, etc) in one place. But whatever just send it and own it I guess - am still content selective though.
Re: It doesn’t take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
At what point in the job finding/interviewing process are you having trouble with? If you don’t mind me asking?
It can be any part. Usually, the problem is that companies find out that I'm not good as a cog in a machine. That can happen at any time, but once they do, they're not interested.
So you can't get a job that you want, but you could get a job that you don't want (software dev cog)
Re: It doesn’t take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#26Worked for me at the start of my programming career. I had a few Stack Overflow answers (few hundred karma) and a fairly barebones GitHub profile.
I applied to a large local IT corporation. The person interviewing me (who was a team lead) simply assumed I have the skills necessary for an entry position and we pretty much skipped the technical part of the interview. (I ended up in a fairly fantastic team full of great engineers and coworkers. Turns out the guy who interviewed me was awesome at hiring.)
Re: It doesn’t take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#27The act of taking a serious look at people's github repos, blogs, or whatever else, appears fairly unusual. I've asked.
GitHub can be faked by taking work of others. When screening there’s no time to investigate each artifact. It’s nice if someone has a github repo, but it’s by no means the deciding factor.
Just happened to come across a coworkers GitHub today and really only looked at it for like 5 minutes. My take always were: “wow they have a LOT of recent activity”, “all the history of this repo is 8 years old”, and “didn’t know they coded with next|node|ruby”
But it gave positive impressions
Re: It doesn’t take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
At what point in the job finding/interviewing process are you having trouble with? If you don’t mind me asking?
It can be any part. Usually, the problem is that companies find out that I'm not good as a cog in a machine. That can happen at any time, but once they do, they're not interested.
Yeah, this is usually a killer in interviews. You can be super smart, know what you're taking about... but if you're not willing to "play the game" you're going to go nowhere.
I'm Australian based, probably similar elsewhere.
Re: It doesn’t take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#29Unlike another top poster, this doesn't ring true for me. I have a blog with 170-ish posts. About half are technical. Three or four have gone viral on HN. The other half are personal, but I live in a place where people generally share the same values, so those other posts shouldn't be a problem. I've got a personal project. It's used in production and ships as part of the base install with FreeBSD and Mac OSX. It dem…
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.
Re: It doesn’t take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#30Other comments here mention there's no real time to look through actual code or a GH repo. I agree, however that's why I think it's better to focus on the other markers here - blog, community involvement, and so on. It doesn't have to be grandiose; just list it on your CV!
You cover a few things this way. You show that you think beyond the terms of warming a seat, and can highlight particular ways you may fit a specific job.
I've had several jobs/contracts that told me they think I'm a fit because of me listing my involvement with meetup hosting and how I've tailored my CV to highlight specific kinds of work that I'm interested to do more of (e.g. payment integrations).
Like with dating or sales, it's kind of the same idea: you want to look specific instead of generic, in order to filter out jobs that would be a lukewarm-to-negative fit for you.
If you have nothing to differentiate yourself, then start something and highlight it. For kicks and giggles I even have "Certified Log Home Builder" in my CV after taking a course on it.