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

simonwillison.net

371–380 of 396 posts

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

#371
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fair point. I try to reach outside my bubble when I can, and do know and speak with tech workers who live outside SV (and outside the US), but my biases certainly show sometimes.

But I do believe that, even for an employer who might by sympathetic to some of this person's views, many will not want to take a chance dealing with someone who might be a liability in the workplace in various ways due to those views. Certainly writings on one's blog aren't a perfect indication, but I think most hiring managers would prefer people who keep their more extreme views under their hat. Whether or not this is fair is besides the point; I do believe this is the reality.

For the record, I think many companies would have the same reaction to someone who posts angry-sounding leftist rhetoric on their website. But I do expect many are more tolerant of that than angry-sounding right-wing rhetoric.

Beyond that, even without all the social and political views, I think things like "I'll only work in C" and "I'm bad at understanding other people's code" alone would disqualify a candidate for most jobs.

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

#372
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh, I know. My post was not wondering why I wasn't getting hired; it was a refutation of the article saying that blogs were all good. Sometimes you can stand out in a bad way (in other people's minds). I'm okay with this because I'm not a good fit for sterile office work.

The article doesn't say that "blogs are all good". It says:

> Start a blog. Post an interesting technical article to it once or twice a year—something you’ve learned, or a bug you’ve fixed, or a problem you’ve solved. After a few years stop bothering entirely, but leave the blog online somewhere.

That's all it says about starting a blog. It doesn't say blogging about any topic is good. It very much doesn't say posting about social and political issues is good. It just says that posting a couple times a year about technical topics is good.

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

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree. The public presence that's given me a lot of positive attention is: 1. Having a custom domain 2. Using that custom domain for email 3. Have your custom domain point to a professional-looking page. Maybe link to a resume/other things. I've had a surprising number of interesting interactions just because someone saw my email and went to my website. Some yielded job leads and eventual referrals to job…

Do you think the TLD matters? I see you have a .com, but I can never find any plausible .coms available for my name. Do you think people care about this? Does stuff like .me and .io seem unprofessional somehow for this "cool, they have a custom email domain, let's go see what's on it" workflow?

In 2023 I don't think the TLD matters at all. As long as you don't have an offensive term in your domain I doubt anyone would blink twice.

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

#374
post #342
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…

> 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.

My recommendation these days is to start with GitHub Pages.

1. It's free

2. The default address - yourname.github.io - looks good enough. You can assign a custom domain to it easily for free too if you want to: https://til.simonwillison.net/github/custom-subdomain-github...

3. GitHub have a REALLY GOOD track record of not breaking things like this. I trust them more than most other companies with respect to my stuff there staying online for a long time into the future.

My trick for formatting syntax highlighting is to write my posts in Markdown (with the ```python tags for code) and then run it through this little tool to turn it into HTML: https://til.simonwillison.net/tools/render-markdown - then I publish the resulting HTML.

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

#375

I have first hand experience of this being false, just a few months ago to stand out for a React open position for a company called Personio, I created a org chart that feel much snappier and friendly using React and CSS3 animations that the one the company is using in their main product (this one if you are curious https://github.com/Ivanca/personio-demo ), I linked it in the cover letter and also tried reaching out…

How is that friendlier? Can I easily search for someone? Still its a cool demo.

Its subjective, but I meant little usability things, like you can view anyone on the chain of command right in the bottom after their profile pic moves there, and the farther away from you in the chain of command it looks smaller so you can see them all without scrolling like you have to in the current org chart. Also the current one freezes a lot after clicking and this one doesn't, which is arguably non-userfriendly behavior.

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

#376

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…

[flagged]

Whoa - you can't attack another user like this here, no matter how wrong they are or you feel they are. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

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

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Please don't bring in extraneous information to attack someone on HN, no matter how wrong they are or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#378
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From reading through that blog post, he's not wrong is he? The moderation of lobste.rs is nowhere near as even-handed as HN, as his example (and many others) demonstrates.

He is wrong, transphobia has no place anywhere. Trying to pass it under the thin guise of "unfair moderation" is both cowardly and thinly veiled. It certainly has no place in the workplace. Would he try to deny the identify of our trans senior developer? Would he say discriminatory things about our trans in house counsel? He has already shown from this blog he has transphobic beliefs and no problem saying discriminat…

But he wasn't being transphobic, far from it. He was reflecting upon his own experiences of gender dysphoria, what he learned from this, and how he dealt with it. His trans journey is no less valid than anyone else's.

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

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes! https://gavinhoward.com/2023/04/rust-is-dead-to-me/ > Rust the language is dead to me. > why? > Because, quite literally, the Rust Foundation wants to make people like me unwelcome in any Rust event, not just official ones. > Don’t believe me? > Look at the draft Rust Trademark Policy that the Rust Foundation is asking for comments on and go to page 12: > > We will consider requests to use the Marks on a case…

Eh. Nothing that you quoted would concern me about this person. I am anti-gun and vote that way, but I am mature enough to see the other side's perspective. If a person says he refuses to use Rust because because they prohibit firearms, then as a person I would find it quite understandable, and as an interviewer I would bring it up in the interview to point out that he'll have to work with whatever tech stack we use,…

> as an interviewer I would bring it up in the interview to point out that he'll have to work with whatever tech stack we use, and should we switch to Rust, would it be a problem?

And you'd have no problem with your coworkers always keeping a gun on them? This seems like a recipe for a workplace incident

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

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. Nothing that you quoted would concern me about this person. I am anti-gun and vote that way, but I am mature enough to see the other side's perspective. If a person says he refuses to use Rust because because they prohibit firearms, then as a person I would find it quite understandable, and as an interviewer I would bring it up in the interview to point out that he'll have to work with whatever tech stack we use,…

> as an interviewer I would bring it up in the interview to point out that he'll have to work with whatever tech stack we use, and should we switch to Rust, would it be a problem? And you'd have no problem with your coworkers always keeping a gun on them? This seems like a recipe for a workplace incident

I haven't seen the actual blog post, but my understanding was the comment was about Rust conferences, not workplace.

But sure, the workplace will usually have a policy about guns, and that's more an HR problem than a problem for me as an interviewer. And I'd put the burden on him to enquire about that aspect.

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