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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

#251

Post by intelVISA »

hoherd wrote: post #222
joezydeco wrote: post #210

Are you an embedded developer? Bring a show-and-tell to your next interview. Bring an example of something you've worked on. Doesn't have to be in a finished case. In fact, a raw PCB can be more effective. Make sure 1) the product has already been released to the public and 2) the hardware isn't stolen. Rig up a small power supply and find a way to light it up. Being able to drop that in front of an interviewer and e…

This reminds me of one of my coworkers who was interviewing around for his next job. One company he was interviewing for had a website with public facing user profiles. My coworker found a SQL injection vuln and wrote a POC virus that would spread to any other account that was logged in while viewing an infected profile and took it with him to his interview, gave them the code, and showed them how they could fix it.…

Lucky for him but that kinda approach can go sideways for the 'candidate' very easily I fear.

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

#252

Post by hef19898 »

gavinhoward wrote: post #192
hef19898 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is being a mindless cog, and honestly, at the extremes, nobody eants that except for the most mindless, easiest manual jobs. And there is being a professional who does his job as part of a team, follows some basic rules and still speaks his mind, but also knows when it just doesn't do any good. Try being the second, because at the other extreme of the mindless drone (which people are forcedbto be and hardly are…

I went shooting with previous colleagues. They carried guns to the workplace too.

Something is deeply wrong with the USA, like truely and deeply wrong.

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

#253

Post by loeg »

nitwit005 wrote: post #3

The act of taking a serious look at people's github repos, blogs, or whatever else, appears fairly unusual. I've asked.

That's why the article suggests screenshots and a README. Even that level is unusual, of course, but it doesn't hurt.

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

#254

Post by philipwhiuk »

justinpombrio wrote: post #226
honzabe wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear something like that from other Americans as well and do not doubt that what you are saying is true, but why is it like that? Isn't the unemployment rate in the US low (around 3.5%) right now? I live in a country where the unemployment rate is pretty low (2.5%) and the situation is kind of the reverse of what you are describing. Companies are trying to entice potential employees, not the other way around. Give…

> Isn't the unemployment rate in the US low (around 3.5%) right now? Remember that the "unemployment rate" in the US is very particular. If you haven't searched for a job within the past 4 weeks then you're not unemployed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_in_the_United_Sta...

There's similar stuff in the UK though the thresholds may be different - can't speak for other countries.

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

#255

Post by simonw »

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 work involved in "post an interesting technical article to it once or twice a year" for people who don't already spend a lot of their time writing.

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

#256

Post by dwaltrip »

_sojh wrote: post #126
intellectronica wrote: post #33

100%. Especially in a tough, competitive job market like today's, having a credible portfolio of work, published content, and external validation makes a huge difference. It can take a good candidate to the top of the list, and when that list is a few dozen great applications, that's critical. As a hiring manager I weigh a candidate's public presence at 10~15% of my initial decision, even more if it's exceptionally i…

This may be the uncommon opinion, but hell no. Companies already want us working an amount of hours well beyond what our salaries should cover, being on-call, and often working well into the night for deadlines, and sometimes the entire night into the next work day when incidents arise. Then, when we need a job, we need to custom write a compelling “cover letter” that sucks the dick of some corporate entity in order…

It’s not about groveling. It’s about demonstrating that you have the skills and experience they are looking for.

You are selling something, why should anyone buy it? Convince them.

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

#257

Post by beebmam »

hoherd wrote: post #222
joezydeco wrote: post #210

Are you an embedded developer? Bring a show-and-tell to your next interview. Bring an example of something you've worked on. Doesn't have to be in a finished case. In fact, a raw PCB can be more effective. Make sure 1) the product has already been released to the public and 2) the hardware isn't stolen. Rig up a small power supply and find a way to light it up. Being able to drop that in front of an interviewer and e…

This reminds me of one of my coworkers who was interviewing around for his next job. One company he was interviewing for had a website with public facing user profiles. My coworker found a SQL injection vuln and wrote a POC virus that would spread to any other account that was logged in while viewing an infected profile and took it with him to his interview, gave them the code, and showed them how they could fix it.…

There's no way he found this without actually performing sql injection attacks. Not a good idea.

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

#258

Post by doctorpangloss »

agentultra wrote: post #245

It does work to build professional connections. A good number of my jobs came through people recognizing me from talks I've given, my writing, meetups, and working on open source projects. However it didn't help much in the interview process. I've never been in an interview where the interviewer looked at my profiles on various code hosting platforms, reviewed some of my pull requests before hand, and came into the r…

> I've never been in an interview where the interviewer looked at my profiles on various code hosting platforms

I guess one thing Simon didn't consider is that as long as the vast majority of developers (let alone people) express no creativity, your interviewers won't either.

> ...they could send over recent PRs

As long as the cultural norm is NDA - better known as Not Doing Anything - it won't happen.

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

#259

Post by BeetleB »

gavinhoward wrote: post #6

Unlike 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…

> It demonstrates careful work with every function documented in Doxygen comments and a development manual entirely designed to raise the bus factor to infinity.

In my experience, not a single employer cares about documentation.

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

#260

Post by asdf6677 »

kelnos wrote: post #78
gavinhoward wrote: post #6

Unlike 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…

I'm sure you'll get pissed at this, but assuming hiring managers see your blog and Gitea instance, here are some of my guesses as to why they don't want to hire you: * You call BLM a "terrorist organization". * You explicitly object to the idea that the phenomenon of police killings of black people is rooted in white supremacy. * You give off serious antivaxxer vibes, and refuse to wear a mask during a global pandemi…

> gender dysphoria is essentially a mental illness to be cured

I thought this was the progressive opinion? Gender dysphoria is a mental illness and transitioning is the treatment. What’s the accepted view now?

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