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

I'd suggest separate technical/non-technical blogs and only referring people to the first. I'm mostly thinking of all the blog posts that explicitly point to the disclaimer..

You don't have to hide the personal blog but this is probably a bit much for sites you point employers at.

People boycott things all the time for all kinds of reasons. Some people boycott Israeli businesses due to the Israel/Palestine conflict, other people boycott MyPillow, and others boycott Chik-Fil-A, or more recently Budweiser. The outrage here on HN is a bit annoying, considering this used to be a fairly balanced platform.

As a consumer, boycotting a business is basically the only recourse for whatever grievance (justified or not) you may have which happens to be outside the purview of the law. Or is boycotting not petty only when your tribe does it?

But if many people think you are being petty/bonkers/anti-something-they-care-about based on why you are boycotting particular businesses, that might cause you some trouble.

> Or is boycotting not petty only when your tribe does it?

There are certainly some boycotts I don't participate in, but respect the decision of those who do.

Boycotting is petty when people think it's petty (pettiness is an opinion, not an intrinsic property of something). If you want to talk about "tribes", sure, maybe a particular "tribe" thinks some particular boycott is petty. That's life.

First, let me say that I don't disagree, pragmatically, with the truth of what you're saying, in terms of increasing your odds on the whole as a candidate.

But that said, as another hiring manager, let me respectfully disagree with this as a strong hiring signal. I say this, to boot, as an engineer with an, in my experience, above average OSS contribution, research, and patent portfolio, although these things are a bit power-law-esque so obviously I'm nothing next to many.

When I interview, I want to know you have a track record of high quality delivery, and are good for the skills you attest to. I can understand some folks looking at the public displays as a proxy to that, but I'd argue, at that point, indexing on the "public" part is orthogonal to what we're looking for it to display, and carries both false positives and negatives.

To some degree we may be agreeing loudly here, where you'd say "well that's what them putting it in public is" but I'd worry that by caring about the public component vs. a more generalized examination of professionalism and accomplishment, we preclude folks who have no time or interest in curating that sort of profile.

If I put myself into the absolute edge case of two candidates all things being equal but one seems to have also made a more visible portfolio of work, MAYBE, MAYBE that would move the needle in terms of establishing a degree of external validation, but I think I'd be looking _hard_ for other aspects to differentiate that would seem to have more direct applicability to our day-to-day needs, and am hard pressed to think of a time in the last few hundred interviews I've had to make such a choice without a stronger differentiator for any candidate above a very junior level.