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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

#61

Post by simonw »

Ostrogodsky wrote: post #60
simonw wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried really hard to make it clear in this post that as a hiring manager it is your job to find great candidates who don't do this. So you shouldn't "screen" for this, in terms of filtering candidates based on whether or not they have evidence of public creativity. But... of course I look beyond the resume that the candidate has sent me. Which means that, as a candidate, a relatively easy way to stand out is to hav…

So if the hiring manager does not screen by this, what should I bother then? It does not give me any advantage because you are stating you are not screening for it for FOMO great engineers. Just in the eventuality of a tie? I doubt 1-2 blog posts will be the deciding factor.

For me, they will be. If I have ten candidates and only one of them has 1-2 blog posts about a technology I am using, that candidate is going to be one of the subset that gets an interview.

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

#62

Post by yurishimo »

snowwrestler wrote: post #53
maxk42 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the article you state "you don’t have to put very much work at all into public creativity in order to stand out as a job candidate". This implies that when I am acting as a hiring manager I would be screening for "public creativity." I'm trying to understand why I would want to do that. I've been a hiring manager for well over a decade and it's never been something I thought I should screen for. Indeed, in my care…

> I can think of at least one counterexample of a person who was extremely prolific with blogging and giving talks at conferences who happened to be absolutely garbage at their role. My employer once hired someone into a leadership role who we all knew from conferences and press coverage. We were pretty excited to land such a high-profile guy. Turned out, he spent most of his time prepping and going to conferences, a…

I can picture someone who fits this profile to a T. I’m sure it’s not the same person but now I’m thinking about how many people could fit this description.

Obviously there is a market for these people to exist and for companies who want to pseudo acquire their audience.

I wonder what the total number of these folks are in our industry and worldwide…

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

#63

Post by a_t48 »

dheera wrote: post #26
tibbetts wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of information available on candidates to hiring managers is extremely limited. Evidence of outside creativity is a pretty good sign that someone is not a bozo.

Why is this such a hard problem to solve? When I was a founder it was incredibly hard to find people who are "available" and skilled because they feared listing themselves as available on LinkedIn. When I'm not a founder and skilled it's incredibly hard to get to hiring managers. Usually I get warm intros from people within companies I'm interested in, it works way better, and usually often results in jumping straigh…

You just know someone would ruin it by finding a way to cross reference it with LinkedIn data.

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

#64

Post by AlwaysRock »

k__ wrote: post #42
jameshush wrote: post #27

In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care. I had credits at large companies, posted talks online (interviewers rarely looked at them), but if I forgot how to write binary search in 10 minutes in an interview it didn’t matter. This actually made me realize being just an IC wasn’t actually my goal though. Once I started interviewing for management and sales, all of those things _really_ matter…

It helped me to get offers from companies, so I didn't have to apply for anything anymore. Sure, when I applied, I had to do dumb tests. But when a C or VP level asked me it was usually not an issue to get a job.

This really depends. Are you talking about FANG+ type companies? Doesnt matter who you are you will probably have to whiteboard.

Outside of FANG? I'm sure you can bypass many technicals with credentials.

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

#65

Post by sudeepj »

There are two modes of hiring:

1. General purpose: Typical FANG like where hire first and then do team matching later

2. Targeted hiring: Companies want specific people and they try to recruit them

A sizable number of top open-source contributors get recruited are in #2. Eg. 1) Top contributors in Rust lang hired by AWS. 2) FANG companies targeting top AI researchers from academia.

One's open-source presence needs to be really prolific and the project has to make an large impact to be in #2 category.

For #1 category folks, your public profile does not matter that much (atleast for FANG companies)

Other way to think is #1 are treated as cattle, #2 are treated as pets.

The famous incident where author of homebrew was rejected by a top company because he could not invert a binary tree got in the wrong channel (#1) to begin with where he was treated as a cattle.

Note: Recruiter from FANG calling you still goes in #1 category for most people

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

#66

Post by giantg2 »

wpietri wrote: post #28
giantg2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it could be helpful, but my guess is that you would go with someone who has worked on it professionally. Plus you would probably want someone with more recent Kotlin experience.

It depends a lot on the place and the role. I'm hiring for a relatively small cross-functional team that has to deal with a variety of work. One of the characteristics we need is people who are willing to step outside their technological comfort zone and just make something work. We have no mobile code and probably won't, but I was still happy to talk with somebody who'd built a couple of iOS apps for fun. It was a s…

"One of the characteristics we need is people who are willing to step outside their technological comfort zone and just make something work."

Honestly (and no offense), this sounds just like every place. My current job expects me to be full stack on multiple stacks, be the application security champion, and provide rotating (1 week every 3 weeks) prod support for about 10 apps that we own. And it's a mix of legacy and somewhat newer stuff, so DB2 to Dynamo, JSF to Angular, plus all the no-code stuff like Tableau. I feel like this is a huge efficiency drain. Did ECON 101 stop staching about specialization of labor? I'll never be an expert when split across 10 different technologies. I have a bad mid year rating because I'm "slow", but it shouldn't really be surprising when I'm context switching all over the place.

I would love a place that says "you will do this one [tech/language/stack] 90% of the time". As soon as a posting or manager starts talking about a plethora of tech that I will have the "opportunity" to work with, I mark that as a potential red flag, it's really just a matter of magnitude since they all do it.

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

#67

Post by solipsism »

maxk42 wrote: post #47
Zababa wrote: post #43

I had a few jobs interview recently. Here's what I got out of it: If you have something you want to promote (or is on your CV in general), be ready to talk about it. I'm very lucky because I can talk about things on the spot very easily. If that's not you, make a list of the few main points that you want to talk about and try to memorize it. If you always get the same questions, it may be a good idea to address them…

> I really underestimate the amount of stress that can be felt when you're alone facing 6 people for a job that you want. Practice. Go on interviews even when you don't need a job. Get that practice in and get comfortable with it. I went on 18 - 30 interviews a year for many years when I was a contractor and got very good at interviewing over time. I still get a bit tense when the job is particularly appealing, but w…

Ah, yes, purposefully waste people's time. Fuck them, right?

I've seen this kind of attitude before, and it's usually justified with something about how the companies don't respect your time so why should you respect theirs. The thing is... the kind of people at these companies who don't care about your time are the kind of people who would do something like this.

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

#68

Post by kylec »

sudeepj wrote: post #65

There are two modes of hiring: 1. General purpose: Typical FANG like where hire first and then do team matching later 2. Targeted hiring: Companies want specific people and they try to recruit them A sizable number of top open-source contributors get recruited are in #2. Eg. 1) Top contributors in Rust lang hired by AWS. 2) FANG companies targeting top AI researchers from academia. One's open-source presence needs to…

I don't know if hire first, team match later is a FAANG thing, I've worked for two of FAANG and neither did that, I was interviewed by and hired onto the team I ended up working on.

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

#69

Post by jldugger »

snowwrestler wrote: post #53
maxk42 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the article you state "you don’t have to put very much work at all into public creativity in order to stand out as a job candidate". This implies that when I am acting as a hiring manager I would be screening for "public creativity." I'm trying to understand why I would want to do that. I've been a hiring manager for well over a decade and it's never been something I thought I should screen for. Indeed, in my care…

> I can think of at least one counterexample of a person who was extremely prolific with blogging and giving talks at conferences who happened to be absolutely garbage at their role. My employer once hired someone into a leadership role who we all knew from conferences and press coverage. We were pretty excited to land such a high-profile guy. Turned out, he spent most of his time prepping and going to conferences, a…

Yea, it took me a while to realize that the people with amazing stage demos multiple times a year have optimized their career for amazing stage demos; they effectively have a different career than practitioners. Presenting at conferences is not a 10 percent time project you do while supporting the company as an SRE the other 90 percent of the time. You have to spend time developing talks, pitching them at open RFPs, and rehearsing them that a pager somewhat precludes.

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

#70

Post by tdeck »

sudeepj wrote: post #65

There are two modes of hiring: 1. General purpose: Typical FANG like where hire first and then do team matching later 2. Targeted hiring: Companies want specific people and they try to recruit them A sizable number of top open-source contributors get recruited are in #2. Eg. 1) Top contributors in Rust lang hired by AWS. 2) FANG companies targeting top AI researchers from academia. One's open-source presence needs to…

I'm not sure if the extra work is rewarded as much as you might think. For example, I was shocked to see a prominent open-source contributor hired into Google as an L5. Without going into detail, this person built projects used by many people reading this comment. Granted, I don't know what their comp or interview process was like, but 5 is basically an ordinary senior engineer level at Google.
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