And still a mere semester at Stanford or year at Facebook still seems to stand out over all. The elite Silicon Valley institutions are extremely efficient at attracting, filtering and acquiring the best of the best. Their simple mention on a resume signals strongly to middle managers the world over that "the right stuff" has fallen into their lap, to the detriment of the rest of us.
It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
81–90 of 387 posts
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#82I used to think this but now I don’t. It’s what lead to this comment that received many upvotes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27906769
That discussion was part of my inspiration for writing about this. The point I'm trying to make here is that the idea that you need to invest vast amounts of effort into side projects in order to increase your chances of being hired is misleading. But... putting just a small amount of effort into having e.g. a couple of blog posts and a single public project on GitHub CAN give you most of that value. Hiring managers…
But if that candidate only made the blog posts and put stuff on github to help them get work, and not, say, because they were interested in the subject?... Then that becomes a reason to ignore their blog and github.
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#83I’ve been told in the past by hiring managers my resume (at the time) was too creative. And later by hiring gurus that you need a creative resume to be noticed. Noticed doesn’t necessarily get you the job
The more experienced you get, the harder it is for any one interviewer to really grok your breadth and depth. This is doubly true in youth-biased tech cultures like Silicon Valley, and quadruply true 12 years into a bull market for tech.
At some point the game becomes: read your interviewer and tell them what they want to hear.
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#84I’ve been told in the past by hiring managers my resume (at the time) was too creative. And later by hiring gurus that you need a creative resume to be noticed. Noticed doesn’t necessarily get you the job
There's a different interview strategy for every middle manager under the sun. Engineers want a single algorithm to land them a job. Middle managers want someone they get along with to maximize productivity and minimize trouble, and that's a target that moves with every interview.
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
That discussion was part of my inspiration for writing about this. The point I'm trying to make here is that the idea that you need to invest vast amounts of effort into side projects in order to increase your chances of being hired is misleading. But... putting just a small amount of effort into having e.g. a couple of blog posts and a single public project on GitHub CAN give you most of that value. Hiring managers…
But if that candidate only made the blog posts and put stuff on github to help them get work, and not, say, because they were interested in the subject?... Then that becomes a reason to ignore their blog and github.
Honestly that wouldn't make a difference for me. If it was obvious that they had only put up blog posts to help them get work, but the content of those blog posts was good, they'd still bump themselves up my list of candidates compared to candidates that hadn't done that.
The signal I'm looking for here is proof that the candidate can write, can think and can do some aspect of the work. A resume usually won't prove that to me on its own.
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#86In 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…
Yep. I've had a portfolio of full video games I've coded and released on my own, as the sole programmer, that could be played on the web, had my name credited on the title screen, and you could even see the code on some of them, and I proudly included the link on my resume.
Never brought up during the interview process, I was still expected to take the coding tests, and if I did a little poorly on one question I almost always got passed, even though the games I made had plenty of things going on, and some were even finalists in game contests (one hosted by Microsoft, even).
I don't bother keeping up a portfolio anymore (I am working on a new personal site again, but not to put on my resume).
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#87There 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…
> 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.
It's apocryphal at best. The guy was rejected by Google, but was never asked about inverting binary trees, like he claimed.
(I can believe that he was rejected on some other technical trivia, no clue. But the 'invert a binary tree' thing never happened.)
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#88And still a mere semester at Stanford or year at Facebook still seems to stand out over all. The elite Silicon Valley institutions are extremely efficient at attracting, filtering and acquiring the best of the best. Their simple mention on a resume signals strongly to middle managers the world over that "the right stuff" has fallen into their lap, to the detriment of the rest of us.
If I see a FAANG company on a candidates profile I don't even bother technical interviews. I just try to see if they are someone I can work with easily.
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#89And still a mere semester at Stanford or year at Facebook still seems to stand out over all. The elite Silicon Valley institutions are extremely efficient at attracting, filtering and acquiring the best of the best. Their simple mention on a resume signals strongly to middle managers the world over that "the right stuff" has fallen into their lap, to the detriment of the rest of us.
> The elite Silicon Valley institutions are extremely efficient at attracting, filtering and acquiring the best of the best.
Not sure. Google and Facebook have gotten so large, that they had to drop their bars quite a bit.
I do agree that they are still seen as good signals on your CV. But the attraction to hiring managers might be in the same vein as the venerable 'nobody ever got fired for buying IBM'.
Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> "Practice. Go on interviews even when you don't need a job." I'm ambivalent about this kind of advice. On the surface it seems right, and I've never been more comfortable in interviews than when I was thinking "I don't need this job", at the same time interviews are incredibly stressful time wasters. For a lot of people, interviewing is one of the most stressful situations they are going to be in, barring life or d…
I think it can be good to see what’s out there, and interviews allow you to ask questions to the employer too. I’ve found it can be a good temperature check of how much I like my current job and organization, are my skills competitive, what’s my monetary worth, etc.
I love the feeling of “I don’t need this job” during interviews but I feel a lot of stress when I want the job/need it for some reason. I feel for people who NEED to interview often.