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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

#271

Post by xyzelement »

The most basic competence signal is a good LinkedIn and resume.

The problem is that if you don't know what good looks like, you don't know that your thing isn't good and you may not even know how to recognize someone who can review it for you.

The question to strive for: "if someone doesn't know me or my work and my company at all, can they look at my resume and understand what I've done, why it's impressive: and why I am an interesting candidate?"

As someone who sits on the other side of the table all the time, when someone has structured their LI/resume this way, it tells you they (1) cared to do it well (2) found a way to understand what's relevant and (3) found a way to implement it: those add up to a very strong signal layered on top of their technical skills.

Someone will inevitably reply that you can be a great dev and a terrible writer and I guess that's true but it makes it so much harder for someone to "see through it" and hire you.

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

#272

Post by melvinroest »

I can confirm. I once created a project called Doodledocs. The reason was because I (still!) haven't seen a project that showed pen styluses pressure sensitivity in a web app. So I whipped up a collaborative drawing app where pressure sensitivity of the stylus was captured (if the stylus was capable of it).

In the beginning of my career I did 100s of job interviews. However, in this case I only did a few and I'm sure I got the job because of it.

Also, it was a lot of fun to try and create backend style type of functionality only by utilizing peer to peer! The hacking and reasoning required felt novel and fun.

The project is here (it is currently not live): https://github.com/melvinroest/doodledocs

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

#273

Post by moneywoes »

_mh56 wrote: post #155

I have 50+ public projects on Github. Some of them are live, have screenshots, proper documentation and such. Some of them gets stars or people reach out for support on these projects. Some of them I've advertised on Reddit etc and reached 100K+ views and a lot of upvotes in their respective Communities. I also have a substack which has reached top of HackerNews once. All this has netted me exactly ZERO opportunities…

Yep, I think there’s a lot of survivor bias

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

#274

Post by thih9 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #212
thih9 wrote: post #211

To me, blogging for a better chance at being hired seems as good as “work for exposure”. It’s not all bad, and I see how it could be helpful and fun; still, it feels like something that shouldn’t be necessary.

Why? How else are people going to get to know you?

My preferred way is via the resume, it has all the relevant information, i.e. skills, achievements, experience or references.

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

#275

Post by BeetleB »

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…

Sorry, but this is all coming from a SV bubble.

I work for an established (perhaps legacy) tech company. While people with such views aren't the norm, we have quite a few of them, and we all get along quite well. The only thing that would give pause in the list above are the transphobic comments.

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

#276

Post by dleeftink »

simonw wrote: post #255

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 wo…

In spirit, I agree–spread your knowledge, far and wide.

But making your voice heard and stand out from the crowd is no simple feat: we don't all have the luxury of Twitter following, a much subscribed RSS feed, a prominent domain name to spread the fruits of our hard work.

The network effects that benefit early influencers are difficult to pierce, I find.

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

#277

Post by OJFord »

simonw wrote: post #255

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 wo…

For me the barrier has been that I've never gotten around to setting the blog up. Often having ideas for (I think) a good post, but don't have the blog to post it to. Some of them get noted down in case I ever do.

I do intend (as in, have been particularly intending recently) to do it, because I think then I would find it lower effort, I would do it, and that I would like that. We'll see, the list of things I've intended to do is long!

I particularly like the style of (others') blog where you dive semi-deep on something semi-obscure to fix or do something, perhaps it's not your usual area, and then write up a nice explainer for the next searcher, or a note to self for the future. Explain it to someone who's never understood it before, while you still remember that perspective.

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

#278

Post by Scubabear68 »

On blogging - I would add to the discussion, ask someone you trust their opinion of your writing. If you are a great or even good writer, this can be good advice.

I’d you are not so good - this can backfire. I’ve seen a lot of CV’s with blog links that turned me off on the candidate immediately. Usually for more architecture type positions, not coding, because architects need good written comm skills.

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

#279

Post by ajb »

simonw wrote: post #255

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 wo…

I think you answered your own question. It's hard to get into writing if you don't do it regularly.I literally have a list of 30 things it would be nice to write up (not all technical) but the chances of my doing it alongside everything else are quite low.

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

#280

Post by moneywoes »

BeetleB wrote: post #207
_sojh wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Tip: Work for an established company - preferably a non-Internet oriented one. Perhaps a traditional engineering company (you know, the type that actually manufactures something physical). Definitely not a startup. Or one that is not in tech (e.g. bank, hospital, etc). They typically will not work you that hard, and no one checks your blog or Github. Of course, there are downsides to this approach as well...

How do you filter for these companies in the job search process?

I saw one and they copied Amazon to a T ( doesn’t help the exec team was lifted from there) with attrition quotas, heavy on calls tight deadlines etc

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