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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

#341

Post by sanderjd »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #297
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…

One of the best ways for me to understand a candidate in an interview process OR a prospective lead that I'm reporting to (be it CEO, CTO, VPE) if I'm on the other end is to see how they think and how they interact with a community. Whether that's through a blog, through their socials, LinkedIn posts, through their YouTube, through their GitHub - I review all of it; anything I can find. I want to see how they communi…

I think this is not a good idea. It is misleading to dig into what people are like in their personal lives in order to understand what they're like in their professional lives. People have different personas in different situations and for different audiences, and what matters as an employer is what they are like professionally, which may or may not have anything to do with what they're like on social networks or youtube.

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

#342

Post by feoren »

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…

> 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.

I think that's largely it. I've thought of things that would be interesting to write as a short blog post. What's stopping me?

* I don't already have a blog where it'd be easy to post things. I'd have to research what to sign up for. Free sites would spam my readers with ads that I don't agree with, and try to track them. Paid sites cost money, obviously, and may be predatory. The platform could be acquired and/or killed, and I could lose my content or have to transfer it somewhere else. I anticipate 50% of my total blogging effort would be spent just on dealing with all this bullshit. That's time I could be spending with my kids. "Just self-host!" okay now 90% of my total blogging effort, plus server costs.

* I'd want proper code formatting, examples, good visuals; you know, something publishable. I'd simply never get it good enough to post. Perfect would absolutely be the enemy of good. And ideas are constantly evolving and changing. I don't agree now with everything I wrote a year ago; that's what progress and learning is supposed to do. So the temptation to constantly go back and nitpick it, edit it, would be there, all day, every day.

* Nobody would ever read it anyway. It wouldn't hold a candle to the blazing light of SEO spam. Even in the unlikely event someone did read it, they wouldn't care. Even in the unlikely event they did care, it would be different from the way they're already doing things, and therefore they'd become extremely hostile and write hateful comments about some minor point they misunderstood. Which I'd read, despite myself, and then I'd have shower arguments with them instead of focusing on actual work.

So why am I doing all this work? Who am I blogging for? A potential future employer for the one time I'm looking for a job in the next decade, who probably won't even bother to look at it? "You write for yourself, to organize your own thoughts" -- okay, I already do that, I just don't publish it, for all these reasons.

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

#343

Post by icedchai »

dmoy wrote: post #324
doctorpangloss wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's your prerogative. Nobody said anything about "exfiltrating." Showing someone X doesn't mean that X isn't owned by its owner anymore. These aren't semantic arguments. You're going to have a hard time expressing what exactly is the violation when everyone has signed the same NDAs and CIIAs! Like if you work for Google, and I work for Google, you can fathom, well I can look at code you've written for Google. Okay,…

> Like if you work for Google, and I work for Google, you can fathom, well I can look at code you've written for Google. wait how does that work in the context of an interview though? You're by definition interviewing somewhere where you don't currently work > you're going to have to screen share a "diff" here or there, and show people concretely what the hell you've been doing for a year at BigCo or UnicornCo. I can…

It is more common than you think. I've had candidates submit code samples with proprietary code from their current employer during interviews. One example: some files from a telco billing system. Right or wrong, there is essentially zero risk for this sort of thing.

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

#344

Post by ellis0n »

Public activity is marketing. Most good developers are not good marketers. But for rockstars blogging is definitely a big plus.

I have over 100 past projects and need a cheat sheet to answer HR questions. Recruiters are usually not impressed with your past projects because you are a flood of resumes and interviews to them, and they usually not impressed with you because they just want to close the task. Because time is key.

The 80/20 rule applies here. Only 20 percent of recruiters will read your resume carefully (not your show, blog, youtube, twitch, twitter, etc).

Add to that 20% of fake jobs and your chances of finding the most relevant tech job for you are greatly reduced.

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

#345

Post by fardo »

fnimick wrote: post #128
fardo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't ask my plumber to show me their blog posts. Yes, but you probably read his reviews online, compared his quotes with competitors in the space to pick one with a good reputation, and otherwise sought signals of competence. Blog posts are the very same thing, quickly verifiable, albeit potentially wrong, signals of skill and competence. > Just hire people that can do the job you're paying them for Speaking blu…

I didn't know being a plumber that gets good reviews involves putting in a substantial amount of unpaid work.

It often quite literally will.

Free quotes and inspections prior to work commencing, time potentially spent waiting for jobs to come in in which customer support and taking calls are essentially a pure unpaid cost center for the business, taking the time to answer customer questions wholly unrelated to the job potentially even after the job completed, a desire by customers to hear you say things like

> hey, I saw your valve on blah was loose when it shouldn’t be, since I was there and it was an easy fix, tightened it for you as part of the job, no charge.

And there are likely more, I’m not a plumber.

If you are looking for it, you’ll find many cases of “free work is used as a tool to distinguish oneself, delight, and lubricate business”, and plumbing is no exception.

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

#346

Post by dleeftink »

simonw wrote: post #323
dleeftink wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the trick here though: you don't need any distribution at all for this to work. You just need something you can link to from your resume, so the hiring manager can click through and see a tiny bit of evidence that you can talk about code or build a project.

I hope it'll pay off. In the mean time, how to keep motivated when much time is spent publicising to little public response?

Asking for the proverbial friend.

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

#347

Post by [deleted] »

icedchai wrote: post #343
dmoy wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like if you work for Google, and I work for Google, you can fathom, well I can look at code you've written for Google. wait how does that work in the context of an interview though? You're by definition interviewing somewhere where you don't currently work > you're going to have to screen share a "diff" here or there, and show people concretely what the hell you've been doing for a year at BigCo or UnicornCo. I can…

It is more common than you think. I've had candidates submit code samples with proprietary code from their current employer during interviews. One example: some files from a telco billing system. Right or wrong, there is essentially zero risk for this sort of thing.

[deleted]

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

#348

Post by Capricorn2481 »

feoren wrote: post #342
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…

> 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. I think that's largely it. I've thought of things that would be interesting to write as a short blog post. What's stopping me? * I don't already have a blog where it'd be easy to post things. I…

I'm not a blogger and have no horse in the race, but I think you should re-evaluate a couple things on the list if you think you'd be interested in blogging.

For both #1 and #2, there are dozens of static site generators that handle all of this for you automatically. Not all of them are as complicated as the big ones. You can get started with a theme in Zola in a couple hours and that can be your blog forever, with support for code syntax.

For number 3, the idea is not that people will organically stumble on your blog in a search, but that you'd share it to different communities relevant to your blog post. If you're writing about F#, post it on the F# reddit. SEO spam can't really mess with you there. In fact, I feel like SEO spam is only pushed by Google, and communities tend to not engage with that content.

I feel you on the extremely hostile responses, though. Without fail, any article that makes it to the top of HN has lots of people insinuating it was somehow written maliciously, even if it's just about something minor like Sum Types vs Union Types. Unfortunately the answer is to shut off your brain to the hostility but take in their counterpoints. These people likely think about nothing but code for most of the day, so even if they're well-rounded and nice in real life, their brain has temporarily narrowed the scope of their world view, and they make mountains out of mole hills

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

#349

Post by lkjdsklf »

icedchai wrote: post #343
dmoy wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like if you work for Google, and I work for Google, you can fathom, well I can look at code you've written for Google. wait how does that work in the context of an interview though? You're by definition interviewing somewhere where you don't currently work > you're going to have to screen share a "diff" here or there, and show people concretely what the hell you've been doing for a year at BigCo or UnicornCo. I can…

It is more common than you think. I've had candidates submit code samples with proprietary code from their current employer during interviews. One example: some files from a telco billing system. Right or wrong, there is essentially zero risk for this sort of thing.

There's certainly more than 0 risk.

I do hiring at my company. If a candidate showed me non-public code during an interview, they're an immediate no hire. Interview is immediately over. This isn't my personal preference or anything either. It's specifically in our interview training.

It demonstrates a clear inability to protect company IP. That's a big deal. Especially if you're a publicly traded company.

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

#350

Post by BossingAround »

CapricornNoble wrote: post #49
BossingAround wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even for companies like Red Hat, Canonical, SUSE, Mongo, ..., my experience is that a good blog or a good Github doesn't account to anything more than a few pleasant sentences at the beginning of the interview. Of course, it might happen that they'd hire contributors, as you say. I'd say this is incredibly rare (but does happen). Usually, from my experience, this happens when the company wants to essentially "acquire…

>a good blog or a good Github doesn't account to anything more than a few pleasant sentences at the beginning of the interview But it may contribute to you getting an interview in the first place , no?

Weeeell.. I mean, look, anything's possible, but if the CV looks kinda meh but the candidate has a good blog, would that get them an invite? I'm not so sure.
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