61–70 of 396 posts
If you are in the right clique and do minor work in an open source project, that may also be true, as long as you go along with the correct politics.
So in that sense the title is correct and describes the sad world we live in.
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It can be any part. Usually, the problem is that companies find out that I'm not good as a cog in a machine. That can happen at any time, but once they do, they're not interested.
> Usually, the problem is that companies find out that I'm not good as a cog in a machine IMO this is the real problem - and it comes through in your blog posts. It's very risky to hire someone who can't be a cog, you need a lot of social proof that they're worth the risk.
Edit: From what others wrote about about your blogs, I think your ascertion that your personal views shouldn't pose a proboem are wrong. By that I don't mean having them is wrong, but being as outspoken about, lets put it mildly, potentionally controversial opinions in a borderline aggressive way is the problem. It would be an equal problem if we talked veganism as another, potentionally bad, example. Nobody wants to be called out by their co-worker during lunch for having a steak everytime. And nobody wants to talk about why a co-worker feels insulted for not being ablento bring a gun to the workplace.
Edit 2: Paul Graham has one of his earlier articles that seems relevant: the one about keeping a low public profile. Is more relevant than ever, the more said profile deviates from the mainstream the more it can become a problem. GP is great example for this.
When I applied recently to a new job, the interviewer(s) didn't even look at my github profile (or if they did, they might have clicked on one repo for 5s, and left). I know this based on the questions they asked me. Unless you highly curate your online presence for the hiring people (e.g. your blog only contains articles of interest to the interviewers in one place), I think nobody cares. The exception being is if y…
I have tried similar tactics before for some other positions I was highly interested in but nothing, it never works from what I can tell, the jobs I have gotten were all using my generic CV and not much else.
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At what point in the job finding/interviewing process are you having trouble with? If you don’t mind me asking?
It could be when they see that https://git.gavinhoward.com/gavin/petty-tyrant-businesses
Maybe be a little careful with the conspiracy theories, but I am quite done with the corporate-friendly personas we are pushing in our tech world.
I wanted to write a couple posts about anarchism on my personal blog, nothing crazy, and kept being concerned it might drive off a potential recruiter. Who the hell cares, a company where I cannot have a touch of personality is not a place I want to work at either.
Must be because I learned this job in the early 2000s, when sysadmins were wearing black shirts and listening to death metal, and the CEO stayed well away from that office, not the shirt-wearing, well-trimmed DevOps you see at conferences these days.
The only potentially "controversial" idea (as in, corp might not like it but will have to deal with it) that is still accepted in tech is being trans or a furry. I have no issue with either, mind you, just pointing out that anything else is a no-no.
People don't realise how easy it is to get to top 1% in most fields, if you are sufficiently intelligent (say 110-120). Most intelligent people don't get there because they are either not willing to do the work or don't know how honest work looks like or they put artificial barriers before themselves. And even if you are less intelligent you still can get there, you will just have to put in more work. I think of thos…
You're using the word "easy" but I think what you describe only seems easy when you have the right attitude and few distractions. For many people, this is actually hard.
I think there are not many people that have few distractions. It's a (very very hard) decision to force yourself getting rid of them or ignoring them. Distractions are everywhere. At some point you have to resist and move on.
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At what point in the job finding/interviewing process are you having trouble with? If you don’t mind me asking?
It could be when they see that https://git.gavinhoward.com/gavin/petty-tyrant-businesses
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…
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Also pretty sure most of the people working on bare metal are not LGBT or furries. Certainly some are, but... what a weird thing to assert.
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IME, most companies generally don't care about Github or your blog, but _some_ companies that are heavily involved in on FOSS or OSS, do care and hire contributors.
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 few years ago I was offered a job explicitly because I had a github account where I hosted a public project that used a framework.
Later, I was the recruiter in a few hiring rounds, and public source code repos was my primary source of data to assess q candidate. If a candidate had shit code in their repos, they'd be rejected. By "shit code" I mean a candidate for a senior software engineer for a C++ project showed up his GitHub project as his C++ portfolio, and all he had for show was a project that didn't even used include guards.