This rings true for me anecdotally. The last time I was looking for a job I struggled to land even a phone screening. But then I posted about a small project on my blog and LinkedIn and I had a hiring manager call me the next day with a gig that worked well for both of us.
GitHub can be faked by taking work of others. When screening there’s no time to investigate each artifact. It’s nice if someone has a github repo, but it’s by no means the deciding factor.
Just happened to come across a coworkers GitHub today and really only looked at it for like 5 minutes. My take always were: “wow they have a LOT of recent activity”, “all the history of this repo is 8 years old”, and “didn’t know they coded with next|node|ruby”
But it gave positive impressions
I'd say that's what the README page is for that you can create and gets shown at the top of your profile.
I summarized my most important projects, the languages I know and some other simple facts about me. Mainly because i have a lot of "trash" on my gitlab which is just for personal use (I am always unsure if i should keep that public anyways)
Yeah. I often look at a candidate’s GitHub profile before an interview to get a sense of what they’re interested in - but mostly so I can ask interesting interview questions. “So, I saw on your GitHub you’ve made a few projects building terminal based UIs. What got you into that?” / “What are the big challenges in making modern terminal UIs? Why don’t more people do it?”
Yeah, I have a fairly prolific GitHub portfolio so the first 5 minutes of most interviews are flipping to a random GitHub repo and asking me what is going on there. Makes me think they're trying to have me prove that I'm the author of it.
I’ve had an in person interview where we talked about them actually reading through my website. It was awkward to be honest but also cool they read it - was also strange to talk about “extracurriculars” during a technical interview.
Always had a really really difficult time with how to present “myself” on a personal website - too many sides (code, personal preferences, opinions, etc) in one place. But whatever just send it and own it I guess - am still content selective though.
I always linked my gitlab profile in all my applications. If I had any code on it which might be relevant to the position I also mentioned it in my cover letter. Barely anyone ever mentioned my gitlab projects or ask things about it. Just this one guy, he was confused that my master thesis was stating I handed it in in 2021 and asked why i didn't have a job yet. Thanks to this man I found out there is a typo on the cover of my thesis, because i handed it in 2022.
It was kinda embarrassing, but I also felt joy that there are actually people out there who look at my stuff. The job didn't fit, but it was still a good experience.
So yeah: Investing a few minutes in writing up a personal readme which gets shown on my gitlab was worth it. I can recommend!
You need to distinguish between filtering and interviewing.
Most interviewers will not discuss your public work because they want to be unbiased and have the same discussion with multiple candidates without any other factors other than your performance in the interview itself influencing their assessment. They are doing the right thing.
Where a portfolio can help you is in getting you from application to being invited to interview, which can be a challenge when there are many applications for a role.
In some cases it might also influence a hiring manager's or hiring committee's decision as a tie-breaker between you and another candidate who did just as well as you did in interview, but I believe that's less common.
Anecdotal, but I've changed jobs 3 times in the last 6 years (oof) and in two of the interview processes they dug deep enough into my github (linked from the CV) to be able to ask tricky questions and have discussions.
Heck, as part of the most recent interview process I was asked to provide a code walkthrough of a part of a personal project of mine for two developers from the company I was interviewing for. It was fun actually.
Your blog, open source contributions, or conference talks are often the thing that gets you to the interview, but I’ve never been asked about them directly during an interview.
I can only speak from interviewing candidates at a big corp, but generally HR shortlists a bunch of candidates, schedules interviews then send me the resume about 16hr before the actual interview.
I’ve never come across a candidate where anyone has dug into someone’s online presence prior to an interview.
And to be honest, I’d rather speak to the person that read something they wrote.
But again, that’s big corp so obviously other companies might do it differently.
I really just don't know what to look for. Occasionally when looking at resumes I'll see a github link, and I never get any useful information from looking at it, so I mostly don't bother.
IME in Aus, it's mostly recruiters, the kind who ask if I have experience with 'Jasons', who do the initial screening. I'm not sure I'd have much more luck getting past them with a substantial online presence behind me. On the other hand, I was recently referred by a friend for a role with the state gov. The HR person said my lack of experience with X hurt my chances. I passed this on to my friend and said thanks anyway. They later said their line manager scoffed at the HR person's comments. I'd be interested to hear if other Aus/NZ folk have similar experiences. Maybe the online presence works better in the US.
Also worked in Aus - Melbourne and Sydney, as well as London. I have zero blogs, and I don't contribute towards open source. My github has random bits of code, a few coding exercises from other companies.
What I do have though is a decent CV.
When people say you need this or that, what they're actually saying is you need to show somehow that you're technically capable.
There are other ways of doing that than just having a blog.
Agree. Also in Aus. HR doesn't give a shit about creativity. They need to see the TLA's on the CV that the tech nerds said they needed for the role.
Also, is it me, or is this ridiculous? Accountants don't need to do any open-source accounting to prove their bona fides. Lawyers don't need to side-hustle some public defense cases to get respect. Civil Engineers don't build some free bridges to get hired.
The employer working out if I have the technical skills I say I have is literally not my problem. They need to have a technical test or whatever they feel ticks that box for them. I'm happy to jump through whatever hoops they put in front of me (except a "take-home project" that will actually take more than an hour), but they have to put the hoops out.
I'm not against open source, but I don't see that as a qualification either. It's a different thing from writing commercial code, with different skills and conditions. Plus, 90% of "projects" that I see on people's Git*b repos are forks or non-working code. I'm all for having my mistakes in public, but if I was to judge the average coder by their Git*b content I'd never hire any of them.
Same for blogging - the ability to write a coherent, meaningful blog is great, and possibly a useful indication that the author can actually string a sentence together, but it's a different skill from what's required to write commercial code.
I do have private code that I'm working on in my freetime that is not public and most likely never will be.
Most of it is an incomplete mess, intentionally over/under engineered or created to learn a new tech / development philosophy. It served it's purpose and is not going to get "finished".
Other projects are personal and are tailored to my specific needs making liberal use of hardcoded assumptions.
None of it is a good representation of my professional work 99% of which is not open sourced.
> The HR person said my lack of experience with X hurt my chances.
The HR person probably also wrote the job spec with "at least 10 years experience with programming language that is 1 year old" or "minimum 5 years managing a team of more than 20 people and revenue over $100mil - entry level starting salary $30,000"
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 demonstrates high proficiency with C. It demonstrates careful work with every function documented in Doxygen comments and a development manual entirely designed to raise the bus factor to infinity. It also shows I've got fuzzing chops.
I have other code. It's not complete, but I've got hundreds or thousands of hours in it, and it's to the same quality.
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.
There is being a mindless cog, and honestly, at the extremes, nobody eants that except for the most mindless, easiest manual jobs. And there is being a professional who does his job as part of a team, follows some basic rules and still speaks his mind, but also knows when it just doesn't do any good. Try being the second, because at the other extreme of the mindless drone (which people are forcedbto be and hardly are by choice) is being a contrarian know-all who is just impossible to work with.
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.
Sorry for not looking at your credentials, do you have enough experience to potential land staff+ roles? Would still be a cog but maybe a bit more breathing room depending on the type of role you apply for.
What does that actually mean? The fact you're using language like, "cog in the machine" is already telling me a lot about why companies don't want to hire you. If you told us exactly where the process breaks down for you and why with illustrative examples, we might be able to help you identify where it's going wrong for you. But tip 1, companies hire people who are positive about how they can contribute and work within an org.
EDIT: Took a quick look at your blog to see if there were any obvious red flags and found this, in the context of the Rust Foundation's prohibition of firearms at Rust events
> I have a concealed carry permit. I have firearms and other weapons. I know how to use them, and I will use them in defense of my wife and myself.
> And you can bet I carry them into places I consider dangerous if it is legal to.
If I was hiring, this would be a huge red flag to me. Why do you need to even consider bringing a firearm into a conference?
Literally came here for the same thing. Went to their blog and saw that a programming language is "dead to [them]" because the organization behind the language doesn't like guns. WUT
> "Why can't I get a job?"
> - man with 30ft pole behind them with a red flag hoisted on it
Yeah, this is usually a killer in interviews. You can be super smart, know what you're taking about... but if you're not willing to "play the game" you're going to go nowhere.
You seem like a super intelligent guy in regards to your profession, though (and perhaps it is my own bias) also super contrarian. I'd genuinely always pick the person who is easy to work with than someone who might cause conflict - even if the latter was way smarter. Collaboration is key in teams.
This is 100% true in basically any case of bigger than startup orgs - you don't desperately need that superstar 10x or 100x coder if he is pain to work with, creates code full of abstractions that are then hard to maintain for rest of the team or even worse, like potential security problem (looking into OP for 2 mins I already know he is rather hardcore christian, maybe a bit gun nut, antivaxxer/anti-mask, has long history of anxiety and other health issues). All sums up into 'probably difficult to work with'.
This would be a problem for me when hiring too (to be frank - hard pass due to above, and no amount of git code beauty would change that).
Collaboration, communication, team work are much more important long term in bigger teams. Willingness to help team/project even though sometimes bureaucracy might be Kafka-esque. Yes we are all cogs in big machine, so what? It takes 2 seconds to realize that for each of us. We still do the work, its work for christ sake, we pay the bills, vacations and go back to our families just like everybody else.
Looking at your blog, I think you're such a specialist that it's going to be hard to find a good fit. (For example, only being willing to write code in C.) Most people are more flexible.
You can get a job. You've made it clear that you know what you need to do to get a job (be more flexible with the language you'll work in, remove all non-technical opinions from your blog, and for the love of god stop carrying a fucking gun with you everywhere)
If you don't want to do the things that would qualify you for the available jobs, that's not because your technical posts wculdn't make you stand out, positively, it's because you're choosing not to!
I'm already infamous for my personal opinions in the tech world. Will removing he personal posts and putting them on a separate blog really work? (I do already have a domain.)
I'm not so sure it would work. By the time I thought about it, I had already gone viral on HN and the personal attacks had started.
Yes, absolutely, it will work fine. People on the Internet don't have that long of a memory and many people will not have seen your articles on HN. No one is going to look your site up on the wayback machine.
You can also ask dang to delete some of your posts on HN if it helps disassociate your name from discussions like these (though I doubt most people would think to look you up on HN based on a name)
It's funny, because posting that list of businesses is... also pretty petty. As is refusing to wear a mask during a global pandemic. I bet this guy also gets pissed off at the "no shoes, no shirt, no service" signs some businesses have.
I know if I was hiring for something and found that post, that'd be an instant no-hire from me.
> It's funny, because posting that list of businesses is... also pretty petty.
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?
Absolutely agree boycotting is a great way to tell a business you're not happy with something they do.
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.
While I disagree with the stance and tone of that repo, I appreciate that someone stops being a corporate lackey even on their personal websites; we've all become sterile, pleasant representations of the ideal worker just hoping for someone to have the decency to pay us for our programming ability and talent.
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.
I thought about it but no. I am OK with who I am, and I don't have any hate speech to share that I need to hide my identity. I just want to show the Internet world a side of me that is not only the stereotypical software engineer, because I'm not. No one is, is the point I'm making.
We all have our quirks, and we should celebrate them. I know your blog, I can't say I understand where you're coming from or that I relate very much with your persona, but I appreciate that you're able to stand out as your own, and I'm able to recognise you among the masses.
But in many cases, outside the fight for gender identity freedom, this is not possible in the world of modern social media, where you're always one step from being lynched by a mob because you dared go against the grain. The Twitterverse is the reason we're all sterile clones of each other, dividing everybody into a us vs them culture battle. That's too much nonsense for me.
Yes but really, having a pseudonym that is wholly unrelated to you and letting you get things out on that side blog that way can be invaluable. I have at least two such side blogs. Statistically you've probably read one of those side blog articles without knowing.
Yes you might be right. Also the hacker culture has always been centered around pseudonyms and fake identities. My quest might be a bit quixotic in this day and age.
> 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.
If it's important to you then you should. There are places that allow/encourage people to be individuals.
>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.
That said be careful what you write and how you phrase it because it's one thing to have an opinion, and another to make a statement like that.
> That said be careful what you write and how you phrase it because it's one thing to have an opinion, and another to make a statement like that.
That's the bloody point. Fuck having to walk on eggshells, especially when I made it quite clear I have no issues with that. I had to be quite careful with the wording, and I know exactly this opens me to be attacked and pointed out as a bigot because I equated gender identity struggles with identity in general. How dare I.
We're all walking on eggshells and get quickly silenced if we even dare question it. I do not wish the Internet to operate under mob rule.
No, what you are railing against is that your actions have consequences. But it is your choice wether you are willing to bear them and act or not and do not act. That's a basic anarchist tenet reaching back to the Cynics of ancient Greece.
The things you say in public could be heard by someone and those someones have the gall to form an opinion of you you don't like -- some may even confront you about it.
Disagreement, unemployability, hostility, these are among the prices we pay for saying things in public places such as the internet. You can decide to pay the price and maybe turn it into a fruitful discussion (granted, unlikely on the internet) or you can shut up and seethe with anger for "being silenced".
You made a conscious decision to introduce gender identity into the discussion when nobody else was talking about it. It's not walking on eggshells for getting pulled up on you bringing up your beliefs when nobody asked.
> especially when I made it quite clear I have no issues with that.
No, you didn't. You pretty much said "just saying" as though that absolves you of what you actually said [0].
> People increasingly don't even read the posts before the go off on ideological rants and false accusations.
Eh? The comment I replied to said `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.`
I should be able to mention it en passant without having to dive deep into my opinions of the matter which are wholly unrelated and just a way to entrap me.
The discussion is around identity, and mentioning that these days only gender identity is a corporate-acceptable struggle. I claim that identity in general should be celebrated. I shan't be afraid to say, on my blog I'm an anarchist, or, for argument's sake, I'm a satanist, I am trans, I vote Trump, Google is a shitty company, or Star Wars is a terrible franchise.
> I should be able to mention it en passant without having to dive deep into my opinions of the matter which are wholly unrelated
No, you don't get to do that on any topic. If you write a blog post on a programming language feature, and in the middle of your post decide to slip in a note about your feelings on the middle east conflict, web3/crypto or your political opinions, expect people to talk about that. You decided it was important enough to mention in your post, so it's up for discussion.
> and just a way to entrap me.
Nah, you don't get "woe is me" card if you shoehorn in a dog whistle and get called out on it.
> I shan't be afraid to say, on my blog I'm an anarchist, or, for argument's sake, I'm a satanist, I am trans, I vote Trump, Google is a shitty company, or Star Wars is a terrible franchise.
Do that. But don't be surprised if people treat your words equally.
If you can't keep your message on-point, that's a you problem, not an everyone else problem.
This is why social media is shit today. It's full of people unable to sustain intelligent discussion, so they try to find hidden meaning behind someone else's words.
You see a dog whistle, I see a person that gets off doing online witch hunts, instead of simply knowing how to disagree. If you have to resort to the personal attack, it's quite obvious there is no intelligent argument to be had here.
This. I got a very mixed feeling after reading his blog. On one hand it looks like he lacks self-awareness to the point that he didn't realize the blog makes him quite unemployable. On the other hand, I don't want to live in a society where a blog can make you unemployable, and I kinda admire his audacity to keep it on.
You're allowed to discriminate based on personality by law, but socially, if you do it with anyone you don't agree with completely:
1. You probably don't have many friends or
2. Your friends are not very diverse
Outside, in the real world, I can sit and have a very pleasant conversation on TV shows or Lisp interpreters with someone with terrible ideas or belief which are inconsequential to the matter at hand and are not part of the conversation. I can sit for a beer with childhood acquaintances that I know are racist, bigots or generally idiots, because we're talking about something else than the things I know we don't see eye to eye. And that's fine.
It is frightening that we're forgetting how real people outside the Internet are, behave and can get along in all their complexity.
> if you do it with anyone you don't agree with completely
Where did I say that?
> Outside, in the real world, I can sit and have a very pleasant conversation on TV shows or Lisp interpreters with someone with terrible ideas or belief which are inconsequential to the matter at hand and are not part of the conversation. I can sit for a beer with childhood acquaintances that I know are racist, bigots or generally idiots, because we're talking about something else than the things I know we don't see eye to eye. And that's fine.
Good for you. We're multinational company with thousands of employees, I personally been witness to situations where incompatibility in views caused issues during work.
In my free time, with my childhood acquaintances I can talk about anything, during work with my colleagues I want to have productive workday - not arguing about current flavor of racism or whoever-knows-what's opinions about anarchy.
Yeah, but it's a bit like to refuse to work with someone who follows a different religion than you, or someone who is into astrology a bit too much.
Again I know it's not black and white and everyone has different red lines. If someone treats killing baby mammals as their favorite form of entertainment I probably can't work with them.
My original post was refuting claims that a blog and public code could get you hired.
I know that companies will see me as not a good fit. That's a good thing for both of us because I've come to realize that I'm not a good fit for a sterile office environment.
I don't care how good of a C whiz this person is, if I see that crap associated with an applicant their application is going straight to the incinerator. Even if I had no problem hiring bad, asshole human beings, this guy is a legal liability.
If people can't read your posts then you need to write them more clearly. You're the author of them. Don't shift that personal responsibility onto the readers.
You're the one that isn't getting hired. Whether you recognize your error or not, the people looking to hire do. There's content in your posts that if they were in a company slack message would be a major liability. Most companies don't believe in breaking the law.
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 discriminatory statements.
Beyond being an ethically bad and bigoted person, this guy would bring state and federal liability to the company from the first day on the job. I don't care if he disagrees, this isn't a matter up for discussion, I will not break the law for you.
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.
While he does feel that he "live[s] in a place where people generally share the same values" some of those values are probably a bit public for a "boring mainstream" company.
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.
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" the code (and sometimes, the contributor is hired as a contractor for a couple months).
Weeeell.. I mean, look, anything's possible, but if the CV looks kinda meh but the candidate has a good blog, would that get them an invite? I'm not so sure.
> (...) 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.
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.
It was a bundle of declarations that included duplicate definitions on each source file. The candidate then expected stuff to remain consistent by updating all declarations.
There are exceptionally talented, successful, high-profile software developers with incomplete & unpolished exploratory projects on their GitHub. It's surprising that you would take pride in using this as a basis to disqualify.
> There are exceptionally talented, successful, high-profile software developers with incomplete & unpolished exploratory projects on their GitHub.
If you intentionally put up your GitHub page in your resume and all you have is "incomplete and unpolished exploratory projects", that's how you're choosing to present yourself.
Also, the degree of "unpolished ness" actually attests to the skillet you bring to the table. If the "exploratory projects" you choose to showcase as your portfolio are ungodly messes, you should not be surprised they reflect poorly on you.
> It's surprising that you would take pride in using this as a basis to disqualify.
I know for a fact that public GitHub repositories explicitly presented by candidates as their technical portfolio is an accurate reflection of their skillet. I am certain of this fact because I never used personal source code repos to exclude candidates but to guide the interview, and each and every single candidate I interviewed that published crap in their portfolio was lacking absolute basic competencies in the domain they showcased.
Do you have any data to refute this?
I really don't understand how anyone in this day and age is surprised that the way you present yourself in a CV or even online, specially in professional venues, has an impact on your hireability.
They may not care about it much, but for me it's at least been helpful in having prospective employers waive coding tests on several occasions. How they interact with it (e.g. whether they ask me any questions that suggests they've at least taken a look) also acts as a strong signal to me about whether or not it's somewhere I'm likely to be happy. So it may be worth putting it on your CV anyway.
> Got another programming job. Got fired for "performance." I think the reason wasn’t good, but I also have a hard time building a theory of mind, which means I can’t read code written by others.
If you can't read code written by others, that's going to be a big concern for companies that require you to read and modify other people's code.
Perhaps you need to be a contractor, not an employee.
Even then, your job as a developer is reading and comprehending other people's code and your manager's intents; writing your own code should be a detail.
> Perhaps you need to be a contractor, not an employee.
Unfortunately, I'd say a key skill for a contractor is probably reading code written by others because - at least in my experience - you're 90% of the time coming in to clean up or maintain an old mess someone else has made.
> 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 by case basis, but at a minimum, would expect events and conferences using the Marks to…prohibit the carrying of firearms…
> I have a concealed carry permit. I have firearms and other weapons. I know how to use them, and I will use them in defense of my wife and myself.
> And you can bet I carry them into places I consider dangerous if it is legal to.
I doubt that even a C-only programmer at a Rust conference would be in such danger that it would require firearms to mitigate. But that is my European perspective anyway, perhaps Rust programmers in the USA are significantly more vicious.
Not much. Having lived many years abroad, my theory is that America appears to be such a wild and crazy place because we value everyone having a voice. People in America like to let others know of their opinion as freedom of speech is so celebrated here. You don't see shirts and stickers exposing lifestyles and opinions as often abroad, like "I'm the proud parent of an accelerated learner" or "I love God and Guns".
I bet there are people out there outside the US who think that you should protect your safety in a boring computer conference, but you won't ever hear about it. This notion is too fringe and people won't dare say it.
> I bet there are people out there outside the US who think that you should protect your safety in a boring computer conference,
I think you missed my previous point. Angry men with guns being allowed into a boring computer conference (or anywhere else for that matter) is the reason people think they need to protect their own safety in the first place.
Especially bringing up defending his wife. Do people bring their wives to Rust conferences? Or maybe the reason people don't is because it's too dangerous.
LOL.
I know Rust programmers can be passionate. But this juxtaposition of Gun Violence and Programming strikes a funny chord.
Can just imagine a Rust conference, and an argument breaks out over memory management, one guy starts yelling about 'borrowing', starts shooting, someone else yells "you can take my pointers out of my dead cold hands", starts shooting.
Pandemonium.
Fascinating how they place more importance on how “unwelcome” they would feel if not allowed to carry a gun, versus how physically unsafe others might feel if they were.
It's good PR CYA. They ensure that there will be a much lower chance of an article headlined "mass shooting at rust conference" being written.
I am personal'y of the opinion that brands play it too safe in general and people aren't stupid and know that just because a brand happened to be near something bad doesn't mean the brand is responsible and therefore bad, but apparently brands don't agree and they're the ones calling the shots on where they're displayed.
> They ensure that there will be a much lower chance of an article headlined "mass shooting at rust conference" being written.
I don't think this follows. Historically speaking, most mass shootings have occurred at locations that specifically disallow firearms, making them "soft targets" where the cowardly attacker will not have anyone fight back. It doesn't seem logically consistent to assume that this policy item has the effect you are stating.
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, and should we switch to Rust, would it be a problem?
Frankly, I think if people won't hire because of a post like this, then the interviewers are the one contributing to the problem.
> Frankly, I think if people won't hire because of a post like this, then the interviewers are the one contributing to the problem.
Totally disagree. For the vast majority of software dev jobs (like 98% of them), you just want someone who shows up and does the work without making much of a fuss. People who openly demonstrate that they are difficult to work with are freely signaling "do not hire me, I will make your life much harder"
Why would you hire someone like that? You'd much rather have someone who is 50% as skilled but gets along with everyone and doesn't make other's lives harder because of their personality
Same. Finding out the politics and personal views of some of the people I've worked with would curl most people's toes! But they show and and work without making much of a fuss. In fact they have been some of my favorite people to work with.
> 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.
GP carries concealed, so by definition you wouldn't know. If you did know, then it's no longer concealed and that's a different issue.
But (depending on where you live) you'd also be surprised how many coworkers carry guns with them. At one company I was shocked. HR put a policy prohibiting concealed carry, and damn near 80% of my team took serious issue with it. It felt like I had accidentally walked into an NRA meeting or something. There were never any issues, and we tended to get into some heated arguments at that place. Turns out most gun carriers recognize and respect the gun and don't just pull it out and start shooting people every time they get offended.
I've never had anything to do with guns and I admit I find it weird to want to bring one to a rust conference, ridiculous actually. I do see the point though that whoever came up with these rules is intentionally provoking people. Why would a software project have firearms policy other than as a sort of discrimination or put differently a way of showing the kind of people who are welcome and those who are not. Laws are what they are, and if someone is complying with the law completely unrelated to the software, I don't think my software should have an opinion about that. It's a loud dog whistle and a provocation, not a useful policy.
> Perhaps you need to be a contractor, not an employee.
If you can't read code by written by others, being a (software) contractor is probably the worst job you could have. Now you need to read new code at every new client you start at.
And most times it's code that you really don't enjoy reading because it was dragged up from the slurry pits in Beelzebub's own septic tank and mangled over the years into a horrific totem, a paean to insanity, screeching out its perverted agonies the only way it knows how - through JIRA and Kanban boards containing decade-old bugs that you are asked, nay expected, to fix in your first week.
I worked with a contractor who implements an abstraction layer for a communication protocol: goes into a company, provides an integration for the protocol, then leaves.
Similarly I've worked for someone who sets up a continuos integration systems.
There are contracting jobs that don't require you to read the code of others.
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.
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.
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 pandemic.
* You're petty enough about the above to post a list of businesses you won't patronize because they require masking.
* You are boycotting Rust because they don't want people bringing guns to their conferences.
* You complain about being banned from lobste.rs for posting transphobic comments. (And yes, despite your protestations, they are indeed transphobic.) And also for claiming that gender dysphoria is essentially a mental illness to be cured.
You clearly think these are all reasonable positions to hold, but the fact of the matter is that these sorts of things will be considered red flags by many recruiters and hiring managers at many tech companies. You may believe that these things should have no bearing on whether or not you get a job, but what matters is the reality, not what you believe.
On the technical side:
* You don't want to work in any language but C.
* You claim that you can't read/understand code written by others, citing a dubious "theory of mind" excuse.
Most tech companies don't use C these days. Certainly there are some, but most that write internet-facing programs don't use it. Even a company that does have C positions might be concerned about your unwillingness to write anything else. And reading, understanding, maintaining, and adding features to other people's code is a huge part of nearly any software development job.
I have no doubt that some of your technical achievements are impressive, but companies consider much more than that when making hiring decisions.
All this is just from a few minutes perusing your website.
> I live in a place where people generally share the same values, so those other posts shouldn't be a problem.
I'm assuming you live in Utah based on some of the things I read on your website; I don't expect there are a ton of tech-company employers there. And of those that are there, I suspect many people who work at them don't share as many of your values as you think they do.
Yeah, even if I were to agree with the standpoints, they all say "I do not work well with other people and I am an angry person", which is a disqualifier for most jobs.
Dude's getting eviscerated for his opinions, but you're right, it's the attitude that's the red flag. I'd avoid hiring his political polar opposite too, if they were this petty/angry about it.
I wonder if he's going to listen to the advice and present as more milquetoast when using his real name, or double down.
Even discounting finding his opinions objectionable (which, in my opinion, any reasonable person would), I'd pass on someone who posts this kind of content purely because they're a ticking time bomb. I don't want them to piss off a big client or explode because of a work disagreement while they're packing heat. I wouldn't want to hire them knowing that I might have to fear for my life even a little if I need to fire them one day.
I mean I have some pretty fringe beliefs too (mainly on the strongly anti-capitalist, progressive side of things). I'm not stupid enough to post those ideas publicly because they're far more likely to hurt my chances of employment than to help them.
> which, in my opinion, any reasonable person would
Well, yeah, but I'm European, which means I'm practically a Communist ;) I was trying to give the benefit of the doubt, because "dude, tone it down a bit, you're spookin' the horses" is easier to swallow than "everything you believe is wrong".
The original post is titled "it doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate"
Not that I necessarily agree with that, but how are you refuting it?
The posts that make you stand out the most don't really demonstrate creativity, nor do they make you stand out in a positive way (to most employers; perhaps not to any employers, since you're so publicly opinionated on a variety of things that are largely unrelated and yet also largely unaligned with the majority of tech workers)
I'm not refuting that you have technical writing that could make you stand out in a positive way, but it's overshadowed by all the other stuff.
It's like if someone posted "You only have to write one operating system from scratch to stand out as a candidate", and then Terry Davis (author of TempleOS) comes in and says "not true, I wrote an operating system and no one will hire me"
Well sure, but if you look at the comments in the source code for that or any of his writing or videos, they're riddled with racial slurs.
Obviously the OS itself is impressive, but no one wants to hire a liability
The article didn't expressly say that in the title because it was clear from the context.
The author is clearly talking about blogging to demonstrate expertise and creativity in the technical domain, in order to stand out positively.
The author did not make the claim that ranting about your fringe opinions online will make you stand out positively. In fact, they didn't mention the impact that would have at all.
You are fighting a straw man.
> When you're like me, it's not
It has nothing to do with being like you. You're not standing out positively because you're choosing to post things that make you stand out negatively, and the author made no claim about how that would impact you as a candidate.
The article talks about how you can start building a relatively small online presence that can give you a leg up in job interviews. It doesn't say that any kind of online presence will do that.
To offer an extreme example, if someone were to put up a website that advocates for child cannibalism, and then didn't get a tech job as a result, I don't think it'd be credible for them to say that their website refutes this article's point.
As an aside, your comment that any work environment that might object to your views must be "sterile" is yet another piece of supporting evidence for why you might have trouble finding a job.
The post you reply to sounds quite angry as well. Many "social justice" people are extremely angry, form mobs and defame anyone standing in their way.
All while striving for positions of power that they keep and deny to those whom they pretend to represent.
They do not work well with other people, they dictate, intimidate and eschew real work.
Yet they are hired. The irony is that I agree with several of their positions, but make no mistake. They are horrible people who would march under any flag if expedient.
I assure you that I wrote that without anger. I started off with some feelings of sadness and disappointment, which gradually morphed into some incomplete level of detachment. I was hoping the post would come off as at least somewhat neutral, as in "I don't have a dog in this race, but here's why I think -- hopefully factually -- your website turns off potential employers".
I know I didn't achieve that; certainly some amount of judgment came through, but ultimately I'm fine with that. Life goes on, etc.
For the record, your post comes off as a bit angry too! But I'll try to read it as if you were writing it with feelings of weary disappointment.
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.
Perhaps it wasn't clear, but here I mean they think people with gender dysphoria should be "cured" in the sense of "go through some therapy" or "change your outlook on life" and it'll go away.
Certainly transitioning is one way (and a seemingly very successful one) at dealing with gender dysphoria. Whether or not accepted psychological practice would call that situation "a cure for a mental illness" is something I don't know.
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.
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 read a couple of the posts; I can't comment on the demographics or beliefs of the people recruiting in the location you are looking, but I suspect they are not as uniform as you imply - and even those who share them may not share also your penchant for mixing the professional with cultural evangelism - especially if they have responsibility for team cohesion and company reputation.
Is it possible that employers could think that your political aspirations may outweigh your commitment to working consistently for them into the future? Links from your site:
An employer cannot retaliate if you're running for office or have whatever political beliefs you may have. This is from the California Labor Code, but if I remember correctly, every State has this protection in place:
> Labor Code section 1101 prohibits an employer from preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or preventing employees from becoming candidates for public office.
I can't comment on other jurisdictions, but the United States has a section of legislation called the Civil Rights Act Title VII[1] codifying that discrimination on the basis of a variety of factors (age included) is actually not (legally) right.
I think this is hard to enforce in practice, but just to be clear -- it's not (technically) "right" to be ageist in one's hiring practices in the US.
We have similar anti-discriminatory rules in the various parts of eu.
The answer is always: 'prove the discrimination'.
Candidates can rarely afford to even consider bringing a case.
Of course. But I bet many are quietly influenced by something like this, especially smaller employers who don't want to lose an employee and have to rehire.
I can appreciate that plans and motivations change, but I read that page about intent and the update at the bottom was about getting a letter from Romney. FYI, I'd found the campaign content from the Gab link, which didn't have the campaign-termination announcement.
"If I lose, I will run for Senate of the United States against Mitt Romney in 2024. I will not go away."
"And if I lose, I will then run for President of the United States in 2028 since that is the first year I will be eligible. I will not go away."
This might reflect poorly on you in the eyes of an employer wondering if you were distracted by political priorities, and/or not seeing it through? Could explain the job fortunes.
Let's just say that there was an external reason why I lost motivation that I could tell a potential employer, and they would understand. I won't repeat it on HN though.
In reality, I know why I'm not getting a job. I'll not a good fit for sterile office work. And that's okay for both me and companies; their are right to avoid hiring me.
As long as you're not surprised by the dampening on your job prospects. I feel like there's a difference between not being a good fit, and not getting the opportunity to prove you're not a good fit. Some of your filter, as many are suggesting, is well before the interview process.
I'm mid-40s and have worked for myself since my late teens. I recently realised that I'm likely unemployable in a traditional office sense, and so will need to make everything work off my own back until retirement. Things are good now, but prospects and perceptions change quickly with age, depending on your field.
I don't see a contradiction. The article only talks about standing out from the crowd. You probably do. But in your case it probably causes people to not want to hire you.
Yeah you're 100% right. There's absolutely no contradiction. This guy's online presence does make him stand out. Unfortunately, in his own words, he isn't too great with following logical constructions (like code) written by others.
> It demonstrates careful work with every function documented in Doxygen comments and a development manual entirely designed to raise the bus factor to infinity.
In my experience, not a single employer cares about documentation.
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 your code/articles are in the top 5% of read articles, then I'd guess that speaks for itself without gaming the presentation.
Actually, I think the opposite can also happen. I've heard point-blank during a programming interview: "why do you want to work here...you're too creative."
I would only ask if its directly relevant. If you have a fork of a few repos and a crud app, I don't really care. If you have something you want to draw attention to, do it in your resume with a link to the github profile.
I strongly recommend creating a GitHub Profile README and spending some time on it, and get others to review it. Imagine the interviewer will skim it for 10 seconds before your interview -- your personal README matters! They are unusual so you'll stand out.
On mine I list three attributes that make me a great, and unique, worker for the jobs I'm looking for. Go ahead and be grandiose here -- the point is to start a conversation!
I've mostly always believed this to be true and had some early confirmation in my past, greatest spike being around 2007.
But for the past 5 years I've been consistently publishing original work and getting absolutely zero feedback and little engagement. My former personal network doesn't respond to my emails anymore, etc.. Might have to do with some defamation that happened in 2016 by an employer, but that shouldn't be surfacing until the reference check after I get an offer--unless I'm on black lists that are decently circulated. Another possibility is my reach is just limited when I post content with depth, as opposed to things that will get more engagement. People used to read my blog directly, which has been shut down for years.
I'm open to the possibility that my presentation is just terrible, that my SEO needs work, stuff like that. Keeping all my web properties up and producing content up to modern standards has been pretty out of reach given my life circumstances... not complaining, just saying.
My temp bosses are always happy with how good I wash dishes, anyway. I'll never stop publishing my tech work online, but I know it takes more than just publishing what I'm doing to stand out as a job candidate. I'd love to get an objective view about what else I'm lacking or penalized on almost as much as I'd like some good old fashioned Agape love, to help me want to check my email and notifications that I'm programmed to dread checking by now (usually due to non-responses to everything I send, if not trolls).
Sorry that this may come off as negative. I've really had some success standing out and just publishing for most of my career, it's been really hard to figure out how to get out of the crater that it has become. I don't even talk like this that much, to anyone who wants to say my negativity pushes everyone away... I get that, too. Hard conversations are different than negativity; negativity is more like being a parasite, whereas I'm genuinely trying to find the issues which actually exist and fix them.
Things I know I can fix:
* Maintain properties and populate search engine/open graph fields for SEO
* Produce thumbnails and editorialize headers
* Increase my engagement in ways that are selected for
It's rare that I look at projects when interviewing, but I'd rather see a complete, published open-source project than a dev sandbox. It's a signal that you can stick with something complex and drive it to completion. Alternatively, meaningful PRs to projects can be good because it shows you can work in someone else's codebase and build consensus.
You're selling a notepad app for $30 with the disclaimer "This is the initial release and may contain bugs that lead to data loss, and so frequent backup and careful usage are suggested."
I did a quick Google search for you on LinkedIn but didn't find anything.
Everywhere you say you can take consulting gigs, but I'm not sure why I'd want you as a consultant. What expertise do you bring to the table?
As a person involved in hiring in my company, one of my goals is to remove biases for things that are not really related to the thing I'm evaluating, which is the ability to do a given job. There are valid reasons not to have an interest in publishing your coding or writing work, there are lots of great developers that don't do that, so I don't feel like this should make a difference.
The shouldn't in an ideal world, but on the other hand, it's obvious that it can. If you're looking for someone to perform a specific task, and you stumble on a blog post from him, or a project that showcases his passion and skill, it would be (IMO) pretty stupid to "remove the bias" and ignore this. At this point it's not even bias, it's just proof in front of your eyes that this guy has some knowledge and might be a good fit ( or whatever proof it is)
It's because information exposed in blog posts can be used to bias or discriminate, either intentionally or unintentionally. Consider a hiring manager finding a blog post from a month ago about the candidate having a newborn child; now the hiring manager has been exposed to information that can be used to justify discrimination.
There are valid reasons not to post code or blog. True for some.
Posted code or a blog may demonstrate knowledge and capability in the subject area for the potential hire. Also true for some.
Demonstrating professional skills shouldn't be discounted just because someone else doesn't.
It absolutely should make a difference if it's relevant even other people have reasons for not doing the same.
Hiring is selecting the right person and not selecting the wrong person. It is not about sorting all people 100% correctly into hire/no-hire groups.
A blog with code can tell a lot about a person. Do they understand the material? Can they write coherently about it? Can they target an appropriate level of audience with that? Maybe these can't be answered just by reading the blog, but it gives a lot to discuss in the interview process.
Some people want to have the exact same interview process between all people. People are different, though. Locking the interview down to a single process doesn't allow for the variety of skills out there to shine individually. If that avenue is through a portfolio or blog, it's fair game.
I completely agree that here are lots of great developers without a public figure.
However, having one gives the interviewer some additional insights about you. While no candidate should be discarded for not having public code, I don't think dismissing it completely without even looking at it is correct, because you are discarding a great source of information about a candidate.
Note that the insight could even be negative (such as a candidate applying to a senior position with sub-par public code recently written)
Worked for me at the start of my programming career. I had a few Stack Overflow answers (few hundred karma) and a fairly barebones GitHub profile.
I applied to a large local IT corporation. The person interviewing me (who was a team lead) simply assumed I have the skills necessary for an entry position and we pretty much skipped the technical part of the interview. (I ended up in a fairly fantastic team full of great engineers and coworkers. Turns out the guy who interviewed me was awesome at hiring.)
Other comments here mention there's no real time to look through actual code or a GH repo. I agree, however that's why I think it's better to focus on the other markers here - blog, community involvement, and so on. It doesn't have to be grandiose; just list it on your CV!
You cover a few things this way. You show that you think beyond the terms of warming a seat, and can highlight particular ways you may fit a specific job.
I've had several jobs/contracts that told me they think I'm a fit because of me listing my involvement with meetup hosting and how I've tailored my CV to highlight specific kinds of work that I'm interested to do more of (e.g. payment integrations).
Like with dating or sales, it's kind of the same idea: you want to look specific instead of generic, in order to filter out jobs that would be a lukewarm-to-negative fit for you.
If you have nothing to differentiate yourself, then start something and highlight it. For kicks and giggles I even have "Certified Log Home Builder" in my CV after taking a course on it.
100%. Especially in a tough, competitive job market like today's, having a credible portfolio of work, published content, and external validation makes a huge difference. It can take a good candidate to the top of the list, and when that list is a few dozen great applications, that's critical.
As a hiring manager I weigh a candidate's public presence at 10~15% of my initial decision, even more if it's exceptionally impressive. And I hear from other hiring managers that they view this similarly.
If you have good academic qualifications and a great record of past work experience ... guess what, there are several other candidates with great academic qualifications and an impressive work experience. Having a strong portfolio of public work can be what distinguishes you and gets you the opportunity to be invited to interview.
One important note: just having publicly available content isn't enough. It also has to be credible and impressive. Original articles that demonstrate deep expertise and are valuable to others. Serious codebase you wrote yourself or made significant contributions to. Real achievements on things like Kaggle competitions. I sometimes see people including a link to a "business card" type website with their photo and links to their social media or a blurb about themselves. That doesn't impress and won't make a difference.
(Obvious disclaimer all views are my own and not my employer's)
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.
Companies already want us working an amount of hours well beyond what our salaries should cover, being on-call, and often working well into the night for deadlines, and sometimes the entire night into the next work day when incidents arise.
Then, when we need a job, we need to custom write a compelling “cover letter” that sucks the dick of some corporate entity in order to “tell us why you’d love to work for us” in a unique way that gets someone’s eyeballs in the 5 seconds of time your resume has to get attention or shredded.
Why do I want to work for your company? Because I need to eat to survive and you’re hiring. That’s why. There may be more about your company I like, but at the end of the day I wouldn’t apply to work there if I didn’t need to in order to survive.
Now, we need to be spending all of our time off, which if you work for a startup isn’t as much as you’d think, developing a blog with highly technical and relevant posts in an industry where all tech is a moving target with fads that move fast, Maintain open source projects that should not be “simple” in nature, speak at conferences, etc. That’s in addition to the never ending time commitment to continued learning we already have to do in order to stay somewhat relevant, while also trying to focus on specific tech enough to become a senior level expert or industry leader.
No. Enough. Corporate America gets enough of our lives. The interview process from applying to offer is already a shit show circus of having to market yourself hoping you get picked to not become homeless, all while dealing with multiple rounds of lengthy calls with people on power trips who can often actually be threatened by an impressive portfolio and not recommend you for hire in order to secure their own role and status.
If I work on open source it will be for me and not for a potential job (that won’t look at it or care anyway unless they can use you for it).
You know what gets people offer letters? Word of mouth referrals coming from highly revered coworkers. If you have solid connections out there that are badass engineers who can vouch to their eng managers that you too are a badass engineer, the interview is essentially a formality.
Tbh I don't think that is the uncommon opinion at all. In fact I agree with it myself. But it seems obvious that the more people share this opinion, the easier it will be to stand out if you do just a little bit extra.
> Why do I want to work for your company? Because I need to eat to survive and you’re hiring.
This is embodied in the contractor lifestyle: no corporate bullshit, no politics, and the "you give me money, I give you a limited slice of my time and skills" equation is crystal clear, without any BS like "we are a family", and such like.
> You know what gets people offer letters? Word of mouth referrals by highly revered coworkers.
Equally relevant as a contractor. And the bonus is that interviews are usually done quicker than for permies, actually, the last time I had a single 45 minute interview, with a minimal amount of technical questions asked (YMMV!).
I hear something like that from other Americans as well and do not doubt that what you are saying is true, but why is it like that? Isn't the unemployment rate in the US low (around 3.5%) right now?
I live in a country where the unemployment rate is pretty low (2.5%) and the situation is kind of the reverse of what you are describing. Companies are trying to entice potential employees, not the other way around. Give me 6 weeks of paid vacations and do not even think about over-times; you look at me funny and I am gone... there are 10 other companies where I can start tomorrow.
I am now trying to relocate to Spain and it is not like that there - but I get why; because their unemployment rate is really high so employers have the power over employees. But in the US? I am sorry if that is a naive question - I've not been to the US since 2002. A lot has changed, apparently.
Unemployment being low in the US is not so directly correlated with how workers are treated because there are so few labor protections in place and those that do exist are rarely enforced.
For a tech industry example, what Elon Musk did with layoffs and worker treatment at Twitter in his relentless efforts to demonstrate his incompetence would be illegal in most of Europe and quickly face the ire of unions and regulators. In the US, by contrast, his behavior was seen as aspirational by a number of other tech CEOs, who quickly followed suit to demonstrate that they were just as “smart” and “tough” as Musk.
You should doubt it, because it’s wildly exaggerated. The overwhelming majority of software engineers in America are not speaking at conferences, blogging, or maintaining open-source software beyond possibly toy projects.
> Isn't the unemployment rate in the US low (around 3.5%) right now?
Remember that the "unemployment rate" in the US is very particular. If you haven't searched for a job within the past 4 weeks then you're not unemployed.
Its very easy to fire people in the US, so there is likely considerable more stress involved in the US workers day to day as they don't know if they are going to be randomly let go tomorrow. US companies will often lay off hundreds of people to make the bottom line look better. We generally make good $ but it could all end tomorrow so we are always thinking of the next position. In addition, we get used to the money so while we could probably easily get a lower paying job if we have to, many of us [not al] also are not that great at financial planning in the US so the stress is maximized. On top of that our health insurance for our family is provided by our jobs.
So in the US its a perfect storm of stress and reliance on our jobs that can be taken away at any moment.
> our health insurance for our family is provided by our jobs
I was not sure how this worked. I knew that the US does not have universal health care (not having it is one of those famous American things) but I assumed that it works on a private basis - you chose an insurance company if you want (and can afford) to be insured, you pay them $X per year and you are covered. Having this tied to your employment gives your employer terrible leverage over you. That would certainly stressed me out.
Generally your employer provides you a fixed set of say 1 - 3 options, each better but more expensive than the prior. Our insurance policies generally also include a deductible, an amount you have to pay out of pocket before coverage kicks in. For example $3,000 per year. The higher the monthly premium, the lower the deductible. The employer pays ~50% - 70% of the premium and the employee pays the rest with pre tax money. The cost increases as you add children and spouse to your policy. Spouse is generally a higher premium bump than kids.
If you happen to find a job which has a small open source component, the for-pay public work you do for job n can help you land job n+1.
I agree that hundreds of hours of non-paid work is not a reasonable thing to expect of IT workers. But TFA's message has worked for me for landing several jobs.
I thought the same. But now I'm looking for a job, and I regret that I don't have a polished project on GitHub that I could show. You don't have to code for another three hours after work, but doing one or two projects on GitHub doesn't hurt. It's relatively easy and adds many points when looking for a job.
Tip: Work for an established company - preferably a non-Internet oriented one. Perhaps a traditional engineering company (you know, the type that actually manufactures something physical). Definitely not a startup. Or one that is not in tech (e.g. bank, hospital, etc).
They typically will not work you that hard, and no one checks your blog or Github.
Of course, there are downsides to this approach as well...
This is a good idea. I have found that since I started working for an old established fortune 500 [non tech] company, my work life balance is much better. Benefits are very good and no one bothers me when I take vacation. Get out of startup and tech specific companies unless you love development work.
Personally I don't like software development, I have just put on the golden handcuffs that software engineering provides. I cant switch careers and take a massive paycut to do something i like.
An old big company is a good place to work for those of us that just want to work our 40 - 45 hours a week, get a solid paycheck and live our lives. Plus you can do solid work and feel good about it without the local 10x developer coming in to tell you its wrong.
Been on a lot of hiring teams over the years. Hiring managers are especially wary of self promoters. If it's a genuine contribution, side project, or meaningful community involvement, that's great and it counts a lot. But the idea that this status doesn't take much to achieve can backfire if you try to game it.
> Now, we need to be spending all of our time off, which if you work for a startup isn’t as much as you’d think, developing a blog
If you read my post, you'll see that I'm not advocating for that. I'm suggesting the bare minimum: "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."
The point of my piece is that you don't need to dedicate huge amounts of effort to doing this kind of work. Do a little bit, stick it online somewhere and it will still give you a huge benefit compared to other candidates who don't have any public evidence of their work.
I think what can be confusing to people who receive this advice at a time when they are already searching for a job, is that this is potentially a bit too late. If you publish something once or twice a year (like you suggest in the post) it all adds up and in a few years you have a body of work to present. If you're applying for a job next week there's not much you can do in this one week (although I've seen some exceptions to that too, where people did something cool and heroic in a few days to draw attention to what they have to offer before or while going for a job).
Not necessarily disagreeing with this approach - but an interesting other side to this that should be considered: what about candidates who look great on their public profiles - real achievements and credible expertise - because they focus more on their public profile than their main job?
Completely anecdotal and probably another extreme of the coin - but I'm curious if folks have some experience with this and how to spot this case.
> what about candidates who look great on their public profiles (...) because they focus more on their public profile than their main job?
Not OP, but I'd want to chime in and state the following fact: if you're looking for a job, your goal is to sell yourself as the best choice that your potential employer can make. If you cannot make that case for your employer, why do you think any third party would make it for you?
There are indeed a lot of paper tigers out there. I worked with a couple of them. They can interview better than most. If hiring managers have a limited amount of time to make that call, are you helping them find you by failing to present your case?
Plenty. I have an unusual background with no education beyond high school and all-over-the-place career history, and everything I got in my career was on the strength of my work. It's amazing how many times my publicly available work was crucial for being able to get an opportunity.
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 those, the ability to put in honest work is the biggest limitation of most people. I like to compare honest work to Allies fighting World War II -- doing whatever is necessary to win, wherever it leads you. No plan is stupid if it works, there is nothing shameful about trying and failing. There will be setbacks because life is not fair and on short time scales the rewards are never assured. But what makes winners different from losers is what they do in response. If they can persevere, through their setbacks, experience, hard work, the focus they put in they will gain the knowledge that lets them win on the long time scale. You lose only if you lose faith in yourself and quit.
True, and you don't even need to get to the top 1%. For many jobs, being in the top 20% for the relevant reference group (global, local, specialised, general) will make you the best candidate with a wide margin.
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.
"Easy" means it is just your decision whether you want to get it or not (well... most of the time... to get to 1% in most fields).
I know if I can spend enough effort I can learn to reasonably play Irish flute, the only question is am I willing to put in the effort?
Once I decided I really want to get something, the rest is relatively easy -- yes, that means resolve and the right attitude and some amount of consistent effort -- I have not said "easy" means "free".
I have been in the top (say top 3-10) of a number of online games and had a lot of discussions with people who were at the top about what makes them different from all those other people who never reach the top.
Most of the time the difference is people get stuck and they don't know how to unstuck themselves. They are not listening to advice. They are not honestly trying to understand what keeps them stuck, etc. That's a problem of attitude.
I think training your resolve and the attitude is separate problem from achieving your goals, this is something many people would gain a lot from if they focused on it for a bit.
Your definition of "easy" is certainly unconventional.
> Once I decided I really want to get something, the rest is relatively easy
I hate this phrase, but I think it fits here - check your privilege. It's quite possible that you ignore your starting position and don't consider it doesn't have to apply to everybody else - especially when you're forming very general statements.
by this logic its "easy" to become a champion bodybuilder, an accomplished mathmetician, top of pretty much any sport, and many other things. After all, it just needs sustained focus and effort over a peroid of years, as well as the humility to learn.
Turns out that the ability, support network & lack of distractions to do this is very rare.
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.
There's a classic blog covering this that has done the rounds here a few times. I recommend giving it a read if you don't think becoming a top achiever is possible through non-heroic amounts of sustained practice.
You google my real name, and there’s a mountain of content I created. I’m an independent contractor and it’s been getting me short and long term work… all over the world as a web developer. I think it’s been the best thing I ever did.
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 some public email addresses of their recruiters but nothing, I got a generic rejection message.
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.
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.
I really should work on polishing up my public appearance, but right now my job and personal life take up any creative energy I might have outside of work. I have a blog (multiple?), but posts are few and far between and I frequently regret publishing things. I barely go back to previous comments I leave on the internet / HN, afraid of what others might think. Maybe I should talk to someone about that <_<.
I could be shadowbanned for all I know, come to think of it.
First they need to look at your application / resume.
Then they need to have questions, which triggers curiosity that has them looking for more.
Only then does having a piece of content help you.
Yes it helps, but it doesn't help as much as having a resume that suggests you're a potentially good match without oversharing why you're not a good match. A good resume raises questions that leads to a conversation.
The resume matters more... but if all else is equal and candidates you're competing against also have great resumes, then content matters. You'd be very surprised at the lack of great resumes though.
When you make stuff the order is usually the other way around - someone finds your work, then gets interested in the person behind it.
If you make it easy for someone doing so to get in contact about job opportunities and make it clear you’re open to them, you’ll often start to get some.
Completely agree with this. Personal projects, blogs, etc are tools which can help pass barriers in the interview process. Normally these barriers are later in the process.
One thing I haven't seen anyone touch on here is that I think this is more relevant early on in someone's career when there is less visible history on candidates.
I started doing talks this year to get better at speaking. Posted photos on LinkedIn and got an offer from an old acquaintance who saw it, for something related. Other than that, makes the day job mor fun and I became the 'expert' on the topic at eork
It shouldn't take any. This hiring attitude discriminates against (not an exclusive list) parents, people with caring responsibilities, and those that find "public creativity" difficult due to personality traits or medical issues. It cements the "tech bro" culture. It stifles diversity. Just hire people that can do the job you're paying them for. I don't ask my plumber to show me their blog posts.
> I don't ask my plumber to show me their blog posts.
Yes, but you probably read his reviews online, compared his quotes with competitors in the space to pick one with a good reputation, and otherwise sought signals of competence. Blog posts are the very same thing, quickly verifiable, albeit potentially wrong, signals of skill and competence.
> Just hire people that can do the job you're paying them for
Speaking bluntly, this is what hiring people that can do the job looks like. Attacking those that take the effort to show they have that experience because others wouldn’t is tall poppy syndrome, and it neither improves the quality of the field nor actually helps those struggling that need more support so they can operate at the same level as others.
Free quotes and inspections prior to work commencing, time potentially spent waiting for jobs to come in in which customer support and taking calls are essentially a pure unpaid cost center for the business, taking the time to answer customer questions wholly unrelated to the job potentially even after the job completed, a desire by customers to hear you say things like
> hey, I saw your valve on blah was loose when it shouldn’t be, since I was there and it was an easy fix, tightened it for you as part of the job, no charge.
And there are likely more, I’m not a plumber.
If you are looking for it, you’ll find many cases of “free work is used as a tool to distinguish oneself, delight, and lubricate business”, and plumbing is no exception.
Nobody asks you to put any blog posts online, but complaining that someone gets more recognition for extra work they do to promote themselves is kind of obtuse.
Do you also complain about fit people having bigger chances to find a partner than people who don’t work out because of their situation?
anyone can plagiarise a github or a blog. you still need to speak to the person. you're just adding even more steps to what is already an insufferably bad experience.
but adding more steps is something we love to do. every solution creating 10 new problems.
Just a note for anyone who needs to hear it: you don’t even necessarily have to be a maintainer and have complete open source repos to show off. If your entire GitHub is you just forking libraries, fixing a bug or adding a feature, and then creating a somewhat tasteful PR then I find that extremely reassuring. It means you’re doing real work, experiencing pain, diagnosing the issue and fixing it. I do not need to see seventeen green badges at the top of a readme to be impressed.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] threadAlways had a really really difficult time with how to present “myself” on a personal website - too many sides (code, personal preferences, opinions, etc) in one place. But whatever just send it and own it I guess - am still content selective though.
It was kinda embarrassing, but I also felt joy that there are actually people out there who look at my stuff. The job didn't fit, but it was still a good experience.
So yeah: Investing a few minutes in writing up a personal readme which gets shown on my gitlab was worth it. I can recommend!
Most interviewers will not discuss your public work because they want to be unbiased and have the same discussion with multiple candidates without any other factors other than your performance in the interview itself influencing their assessment. They are doing the right thing.
Where a portfolio can help you is in getting you from application to being invited to interview, which can be a challenge when there are many applications for a role.
In some cases it might also influence a hiring manager's or hiring committee's decision as a tie-breaker between you and another candidate who did just as well as you did in interview, but I believe that's less common.
Heck, as part of the most recent interview process I was asked to provide a code walkthrough of a part of a personal project of mine for two developers from the company I was interviewing for. It was fun actually.
I’ve never come across a candidate where anyone has dug into someone’s online presence prior to an interview.
And to be honest, I’d rather speak to the person that read something they wrote.
But again, that’s big corp so obviously other companies might do it differently.
What I do have though is a decent CV.
When people say you need this or that, what they're actually saying is you need to show somehow that you're technically capable.
There are other ways of doing that than just having a blog.
Also, is it me, or is this ridiculous? Accountants don't need to do any open-source accounting to prove their bona fides. Lawyers don't need to side-hustle some public defense cases to get respect. Civil Engineers don't build some free bridges to get hired.
The employer working out if I have the technical skills I say I have is literally not my problem. They need to have a technical test or whatever they feel ticks that box for them. I'm happy to jump through whatever hoops they put in front of me (except a "take-home project" that will actually take more than an hour), but they have to put the hoops out.
I'm not against open source, but I don't see that as a qualification either. It's a different thing from writing commercial code, with different skills and conditions. Plus, 90% of "projects" that I see on people's Git*b repos are forks or non-working code. I'm all for having my mistakes in public, but if I was to judge the average coder by their Git*b content I'd never hire any of them.
Same for blogging - the ability to write a coherent, meaningful blog is great, and possibly a useful indication that the author can actually string a sentence together, but it's a different skill from what's required to write commercial code.
Most of it is an incomplete mess, intentionally over/under engineered or created to learn a new tech / development philosophy. It served it's purpose and is not going to get "finished".
Other projects are personal and are tailored to my specific needs making liberal use of hardcoded assumptions.
None of it is a good representation of my professional work 99% of which is not open sourced.
It works out well.
If they actually gave enough of a crap to look deeper and question you on it you're onto a winner.
The HR person probably also wrote the job spec with "at least 10 years experience with programming language that is 1 year old" or "minimum 5 years managing a team of more than 20 people and revenue over $100mil - entry level starting salary $30,000"
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 demonstrates high proficiency with C. It demonstrates careful work with every function documented in Doxygen comments and a development manual entirely designed to raise the bus factor to infinity. It also shows I've got fuzzing chops.
I have other code. It's not complete, but I've got hundreds or thousands of hours in it, and it's to the same quality.
And I can't get a job.
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.
https://staffeng.com/book has a list of different types of staff+ roles that could maybe fit.
EDIT: Took a quick look at your blog to see if there were any obvious red flags and found this, in the context of the Rust Foundation's prohibition of firearms at Rust events
> I have a concealed carry permit. I have firearms and other weapons. I know how to use them, and I will use them in defense of my wife and myself.
> And you can bet I carry them into places I consider dangerous if it is legal to.
If I was hiring, this would be a huge red flag to me. Why do you need to even consider bringing a firearm into a conference?
> "Why can't I get a job?"
> - man with 30ft pole behind them with a red flag hoisted on it
There might be people outside of the conference targeting attendees? That is the talk of someone who walks around life haunted by fear.
I'm Australian based, probably similar elsewhere.
This would be a problem for me when hiring too (to be frank - hard pass due to above, and no amount of git code beauty would change that).
Collaboration, communication, team work are much more important long term in bigger teams. Willingness to help team/project even though sometimes bureaucracy might be Kafka-esque. Yes we are all cogs in big machine, so what? It takes 2 seconds to realize that for each of us. We still do the work, its work for christ sake, we pay the bills, vacations and go back to our families just like everybody else.
I personally think I'm just not a good fit anywhere.
If you don't want to do the things that would qualify you for the available jobs, that's not because your technical posts wculdn't make you stand out, positively, it's because you're choosing not to!
I'm not so sure it would work. By the time I thought about it, I had already gone viral on HN and the personal attacks had started.
You can also ask dang to delete some of your posts on HN if it helps disassociate your name from discussions like these (though I doubt most people would think to look you up on HN based on a name)
But I'm still going to carry when I feel I need to.
I know if I was hiring for something and found that post, that'd be an instant no-hire from me.
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.
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.
We all have our quirks, and we should celebrate them. I know your blog, I can't say I understand where you're coming from or that I relate very much with your persona, but I appreciate that you're able to stand out as your own, and I'm able to recognise you among the masses.
But in many cases, outside the fight for gender identity freedom, this is not possible in the world of modern social media, where you're always one step from being lynched by a mob because you dared go against the grain. The Twitterverse is the reason we're all sterile clones of each other, dividing everybody into a us vs them culture battle. That's too much nonsense for me.
Thanks for the level headed conversation
If it's important to you then you should. There are places that allow/encourage people to be individuals.
>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.
That said be careful what you write and how you phrase it because it's one thing to have an opinion, and another to make a statement like that.
That's the bloody point. Fuck having to walk on eggshells, especially when I made it quite clear I have no issues with that. I had to be quite careful with the wording, and I know exactly this opens me to be attacked and pointed out as a bigot because I equated gender identity struggles with identity in general. How dare I.
We're all walking on eggshells and get quickly silenced if we even dare question it. I do not wish the Internet to operate under mob rule.
The things you say in public could be heard by someone and those someones have the gall to form an opinion of you you don't like -- some may even confront you about it.
Disagreement, unemployability, hostility, these are among the prices we pay for saying things in public places such as the internet. You can decide to pay the price and maybe turn it into a fruitful discussion (granted, unlikely on the internet) or you can shut up and seethe with anger for "being silenced".
> especially when I made it quite clear I have no issues with that.
No, you didn't. You pretty much said "just saying" as though that absolves you of what you actually said [0].
[0] https://www.npr.org/2010/12/18/132160770/its-rude-its-crude-...
People increasingly don't even read the posts before the go off on ideological rants and false accusations.
Eh? The comment I replied to said `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.`
The discussion is around identity, and mentioning that these days only gender identity is a corporate-acceptable struggle. I claim that identity in general should be celebrated. I shan't be afraid to say, on my blog I'm an anarchist, or, for argument's sake, I'm a satanist, I am trans, I vote Trump, Google is a shitty company, or Star Wars is a terrible franchise.
No, you don't get to do that on any topic. If you write a blog post on a programming language feature, and in the middle of your post decide to slip in a note about your feelings on the middle east conflict, web3/crypto or your political opinions, expect people to talk about that. You decided it was important enough to mention in your post, so it's up for discussion.
> and just a way to entrap me.
Nah, you don't get "woe is me" card if you shoehorn in a dog whistle and get called out on it.
> I shan't be afraid to say, on my blog I'm an anarchist, or, for argument's sake, I'm a satanist, I am trans, I vote Trump, Google is a shitty company, or Star Wars is a terrible franchise.
Do that. But don't be surprised if people treat your words equally.
If you can't keep your message on-point, that's a you problem, not an everyone else problem.
This is why social media is shit today. It's full of people unable to sustain intelligent discussion, so they try to find hidden meaning behind someone else's words.
You see a dog whistle, I see a person that gets off doing online witch hunts, instead of simply knowing how to disagree. If you have to resort to the personal attack, it's quite obvious there is no intelligent argument to be had here.
This is not Twitter. Good day.
You don’t want to live in a world where people won’t hire you because they don’t like you? You’re in for a rough ride.
Actually my gender and race are much more "me" than my blog, cause I might change my opinions and my blog no longer reflects my internal "states".
You can’t discriminate based on sex or race, you can based on personality.
1. You probably don't have many friends or
2. Your friends are not very diverse
Outside, in the real world, I can sit and have a very pleasant conversation on TV shows or Lisp interpreters with someone with terrible ideas or belief which are inconsequential to the matter at hand and are not part of the conversation. I can sit for a beer with childhood acquaintances that I know are racist, bigots or generally idiots, because we're talking about something else than the things I know we don't see eye to eye. And that's fine.
It is frightening that we're forgetting how real people outside the Internet are, behave and can get along in all their complexity.
Where did I say that?
> Outside, in the real world, I can sit and have a very pleasant conversation on TV shows or Lisp interpreters with someone with terrible ideas or belief which are inconsequential to the matter at hand and are not part of the conversation. I can sit for a beer with childhood acquaintances that I know are racist, bigots or generally idiots, because we're talking about something else than the things I know we don't see eye to eye. And that's fine.
Good for you. We're multinational company with thousands of employees, I personally been witness to situations where incompatibility in views caused issues during work. In my free time, with my childhood acquaintances I can talk about anything, during work with my colleagues I want to have productive workday - not arguing about current flavor of racism or whoever-knows-what's opinions about anarchy.
Again I know it's not black and white and everyone has different red lines. If someone treats killing baby mammals as their favorite form of entertainment I probably can't work with them.
My original post was refuting claims that a blog and public code could get you hired.
I know that companies will see me as not a good fit. That's a good thing for both of us because I've come to realize that I'm not a good fit for a sterile office environment.
A blog can get you hired.
Your blog will not.
I don't care how good of a C whiz this person is, if I see that crap associated with an applicant their application is going straight to the incinerator. Even if I had no problem hiring bad, asshole human beings, this guy is a legal liability.
People really don't read my blog posts very well.
You're the one that isn't getting hired. Whether you recognize your error or not, the people looking to hire do. There's content in your posts that if they were in a company slack message would be a major liability. Most companies don't believe in breaking the law.
The moderation of lobste.rs is nowhere near as even-handed as HN, as his example (and many others) demonstrates.
Beyond being an ethically bad and bigoted person, this guy would bring state and federal liability to the company from the first day on the job. I don't care if he disagrees, this isn't a matter up for discussion, I will not break the law for you.
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.
I've come to expect it.
Notice that I never wondered why companies don't hire me. I merely said they don't. I know I'm not a good fit in a sterile work environment.
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.
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" the code (and sometimes, the contributor is hired as a contractor for a couple months).
But it may contribute to you getting an interview in the first place, no?
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.
It was a bundle of declarations that included duplicate definitions on each source file. The candidate then expected stuff to remain consistent by updating all declarations.
If you intentionally put up your GitHub page in your resume and all you have is "incomplete and unpolished exploratory projects", that's how you're choosing to present yourself.
Also, the degree of "unpolished ness" actually attests to the skillet you bring to the table. If the "exploratory projects" you choose to showcase as your portfolio are ungodly messes, you should not be surprised they reflect poorly on you.
> It's surprising that you would take pride in using this as a basis to disqualify.
I know for a fact that public GitHub repositories explicitly presented by candidates as their technical portfolio is an accurate reflection of their skillet. I am certain of this fact because I never used personal source code repos to exclude candidates but to guide the interview, and each and every single candidate I interviewed that published crap in their portfolio was lacking absolute basic competencies in the domain they showcased.
Do you have any data to refute this?
I really don't understand how anyone in this day and age is surprised that the way you present yourself in a CV or even online, specially in professional venues, has an impact on your hireability.
> Got another programming job. Got fired for "performance." I think the reason wasn’t good, but I also have a hard time building a theory of mind, which means I can’t read code written by others.
If you can't read code written by others, that's going to be a big concern for companies that require you to read and modify other people's code.
Perhaps you need to be a contractor, not an employee.
Unfortunately, I'd say a key skill for a contractor is probably reading code written by others because - at least in my experience - you're 90% of the time coming in to clean up or maintain an old mess someone else has made.
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 by case basis, but at a minimum, would expect events and conferences using the Marks to…prohibit the carrying of firearms…
> I have a concealed carry permit. I have firearms and other weapons. I know how to use them, and I will use them in defense of my wife and myself.
> And you can bet I carry them into places I consider dangerous if it is legal to.
I bet there are people out there outside the US who think that you should protect your safety in a boring computer conference, but you won't ever hear about it. This notion is too fringe and people won't dare say it.
I think you missed my previous point. Angry men with guns being allowed into a boring computer conference (or anywhere else for that matter) is the reason people think they need to protect their own safety in the first place.
Can just imagine a Rust conference, and an argument breaks out over memory management, one guy starts yelling about 'borrowing', starts shooting, someone else yells "you can take my pointers out of my dead cold hands", starts shooting. Pandemonium.
I am personal'y of the opinion that brands play it too safe in general and people aren't stupid and know that just because a brand happened to be near something bad doesn't mean the brand is responsible and therefore bad, but apparently brands don't agree and they're the ones calling the shots on where they're displayed.
I don't think this follows. Historically speaking, most mass shootings have occurred at locations that specifically disallow firearms, making them "soft targets" where the cowardly attacker will not have anyone fight back. It doesn't seem logically consistent to assume that this policy item has the effect you are stating.
Most places with large crowds disallow firearms, and most mass shootings occur at places with crowds. You're confusing correlation with causation.
HN never change please.
Frankly, I think if people won't hire because of a post like this, then the interviewers are the one contributing to the problem.
Totally disagree. For the vast majority of software dev jobs (like 98% of them), you just want someone who shows up and does the work without making much of a fuss. People who openly demonstrate that they are difficult to work with are freely signaling "do not hire me, I will make your life much harder"
Why would you hire someone like that? You'd much rather have someone who is 50% as skilled but gets along with everyone and doesn't make other's lives harder because of their personality
For the vast majority of people who post stuff like that on their blog, they show up and do the work without making much of a fuss.
I know because I've worked with several of them.
And you'd have no problem with your coworkers always keeping a gun on them? This seems like a recipe for a workplace incident
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.
But (depending on where you live) you'd also be surprised how many coworkers carry guns with them. At one company I was shocked. HR put a policy prohibiting concealed carry, and damn near 80% of my team took serious issue with it. It felt like I had accidentally walked into an NRA meeting or something. There were never any issues, and we tended to get into some heated arguments at that place. Turns out most gun carriers recognize and respect the gun and don't just pull it out and start shooting people every time they get offended.
If you can't read code by written by others, being a (software) contractor is probably the worst job you could have. Now you need to read new code at every new client you start at.
And most times it's code that you really don't enjoy reading because it was dragged up from the slurry pits in Beelzebub's own septic tank and mangled over the years into a horrific totem, a paean to insanity, screeching out its perverted agonies the only way it knows how - through JIRA and Kanban boards containing decade-old bugs that you are asked, nay expected, to fix in your first week.
Similarly I've worked for someone who sets up a continuos integration systems.
There are contracting jobs that don't require you to read the code of others.
https://git.gavinhoward.com/gavin/petty-tyrant-businesses
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
Judging by your description and comment you certainly stand out, but is that enough to get a job? I can't tell unless I have an interview with you.
I am not a good fit for companies, and I know it.
I was just refuting the article.
* 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 pandemic.
* You're petty enough about the above to post a list of businesses you won't patronize because they require masking.
* You are boycotting Rust because they don't want people bringing guns to their conferences.
* You complain about being banned from lobste.rs for posting transphobic comments. (And yes, despite your protestations, they are indeed transphobic.) And also for claiming that gender dysphoria is essentially a mental illness to be cured.
You clearly think these are all reasonable positions to hold, but the fact of the matter is that these sorts of things will be considered red flags by many recruiters and hiring managers at many tech companies. You may believe that these things should have no bearing on whether or not you get a job, but what matters is the reality, not what you believe.
On the technical side:
* You don't want to work in any language but C.
* You claim that you can't read/understand code written by others, citing a dubious "theory of mind" excuse.
Most tech companies don't use C these days. Certainly there are some, but most that write internet-facing programs don't use it. Even a company that does have C positions might be concerned about your unwillingness to write anything else. And reading, understanding, maintaining, and adding features to other people's code is a huge part of nearly any software development job.
I have no doubt that some of your technical achievements are impressive, but companies consider much more than that when making hiring decisions.
All this is just from a few minutes perusing your website.
> I live in a place where people generally share the same values, so those other posts shouldn't be a problem.
I'm assuming you live in Utah based on some of the things I read on your website; I don't expect there are a ton of tech-company employers there. And of those that are there, I suspect many people who work at them don't share as many of your values as you think they do.
I wonder if he's going to listen to the advice and present as more milquetoast when using his real name, or double down.
I mean I have some pretty fringe beliefs too (mainly on the strongly anti-capitalist, progressive side of things). I'm not stupid enough to post those ideas publicly because they're far more likely to hurt my chances of employment than to help them.
Well, yeah, but I'm European, which means I'm practically a Communist ;) I was trying to give the benefit of the doubt, because "dude, tone it down a bit, you're spookin' the horses" is easier to swallow than "everything you believe is wrong".
But it's a good thing that companies find this out because I'm not a good fit for a sterile work environment.
My original post was not asking why; it was refuting the article that said it was a good thing in its face.
Not that I necessarily agree with that, but how are you refuting it?
The posts that make you stand out the most don't really demonstrate creativity, nor do they make you stand out in a positive way (to most employers; perhaps not to any employers, since you're so publicly opinionated on a variety of things that are largely unrelated and yet also largely unaligned with the majority of tech workers)
I'm not refuting that you have technical writing that could make you stand out in a positive way, but it's overshadowed by all the other stuff.
It's like if someone posted "You only have to write one operating system from scratch to stand out as a candidate", and then Terry Davis (author of TempleOS) comes in and says "not true, I wrote an operating system and no one will hire me"
Well sure, but if you look at the comments in the source code for that or any of his writing or videos, they're riddled with racial slurs.
Obviously the OS itself is impressive, but no one wants to hire a liability
The article had an implicit bent that standing out was good. When you're like me, it's not. That's what I was refuting.
The author is clearly talking about blogging to demonstrate expertise and creativity in the technical domain, in order to stand out positively.
The author did not make the claim that ranting about your fringe opinions online will make you stand out positively. In fact, they didn't mention the impact that would have at all.
You are fighting a straw man.
> When you're like me, it's not
It has nothing to do with being like you. You're not standing out positively because you're choosing to post things that make you stand out negatively, and the author made no claim about how that would impact you as a candidate.
To offer an extreme example, if someone were to put up a website that advocates for child cannibalism, and then didn't get a tech job as a result, I don't think it'd be credible for them to say that their website refutes this article's point.
As an aside, your comment that any work environment that might object to your views must be "sterile" is yet another piece of supporting evidence for why you might have trouble finding a job.
All while striving for positions of power that they keep and deny to those whom they pretend to represent.
They do not work well with other people, they dictate, intimidate and eschew real work.
Yet they are hired. The irony is that I agree with several of their positions, but make no mistake. They are horrible people who would march under any flag if expedient.
I know I didn't achieve that; certainly some amount of judgment came through, but ultimately I'm fine with that. Life goes on, etc.
For the record, your post comes off as a bit angry too! But I'll try to read it as if you were writing it with feelings of weary disappointment.
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.
> 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.
I thought this was the progressive opinion? Gender dysphoria is a mental illness and transitioning is the treatment. What’s the accepted view now?
Certainly transitioning is one way (and a seemingly very successful one) at dealing with gender dysphoria. Whether or not accepted psychological practice would call that situation "a cure for a mental illness" is something I don't know.
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.
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.
I read a couple of the posts; I can't comment on the demographics or beliefs of the people recruiting in the location you are looking, but I suspect they are not as uniform as you imply - and even those who share them may not share also your penchant for mixing the professional with cultural evangelism - especially if they have responsibility for team cohesion and company reputation.
I was just refuting the article.
https://gavinhoward.com/2020/06/i-am-running-for-office/
https://gab.com/gavinhoward
> Labor Code section 1101 prohibits an employer from preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or preventing employees from becoming candidates for public office.
Sure it does. It may suck from a perspective of a candidate, but it’s a fair business position to value cohesion in a team.
I can't comment on other jurisdictions, but the United States has a section of legislation called the Civil Rights Act Title VII[1] codifying that discrimination on the basis of a variety of factors (age included) is actually not (legally) right.
I think this is hard to enforce in practice, but just to be clear -- it's not (technically) "right" to be ageist in one's hiring practices in the US.
[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/oasam/centers-offices/civil-rig...
I lost the motivation to continue.
"If I lose, I will run for Senate of the United States against Mitt Romney in 2024. I will not go away."
"And if I lose, I will then run for President of the United States in 2028 since that is the first year I will be eligible. I will not go away."
This might reflect poorly on you in the eyes of an employer wondering if you were distracted by political priorities, and/or not seeing it through? Could explain the job fortunes.
Let's just say that there was an external reason why I lost motivation that I could tell a potential employer, and they would understand. I won't repeat it on HN though.
In reality, I know why I'm not getting a job. I'll not a good fit for sterile office work. And that's okay for both me and companies; their are right to avoid hiring me.
I'm mid-40s and have worked for myself since my late teens. I recently realised that I'm likely unemployable in a traditional office sense, and so will need to make everything work off my own back until retirement. Things are good now, but prospects and perceptions change quickly with age, depending on your field.
In my experience, not a single employer cares about documentation.
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 your code/articles are in the top 5% of read articles, then I'd guess that speaks for itself without gaming the presentation.
On mine I list three attributes that make me a great, and unique, worker for the jobs I'm looking for. Go ahead and be grandiose here -- the point is to start a conversation!
https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an...
But for the past 5 years I've been consistently publishing original work and getting absolutely zero feedback and little engagement. My former personal network doesn't respond to my emails anymore, etc.. Might have to do with some defamation that happened in 2016 by an employer, but that shouldn't be surfacing until the reference check after I get an offer--unless I'm on black lists that are decently circulated. Another possibility is my reach is just limited when I post content with depth, as opposed to things that will get more engagement. People used to read my blog directly, which has been shut down for years.
I'm open to the possibility that my presentation is just terrible, that my SEO needs work, stuff like that. Keeping all my web properties up and producing content up to modern standards has been pretty out of reach given my life circumstances... not complaining, just saying.
My temp bosses are always happy with how good I wash dishes, anyway. I'll never stop publishing my tech work online, but I know it takes more than just publishing what I'm doing to stand out as a job candidate. I'd love to get an objective view about what else I'm lacking or penalized on almost as much as I'd like some good old fashioned Agape love, to help me want to check my email and notifications that I'm programmed to dread checking by now (usually due to non-responses to everything I send, if not trolls).
Sorry that this may come off as negative. I've really had some success standing out and just publishing for most of my career, it's been really hard to figure out how to get out of the crater that it has become. I don't even talk like this that much, to anyone who wants to say my negativity pushes everyone away... I get that, too. Hard conversations are different than negativity; negativity is more like being a parasite, whereas I'm genuinely trying to find the issues which actually exist and fix them.
Things I know I can fix:
* Maintain properties and populate search engine/open graph fields for SEO * Produce thumbnails and editorialize headers * Increase my engagement in ways that are selected for
It's rare that I look at projects when interviewing, but I'd rather see a complete, published open-source project than a dev sandbox. It's a signal that you can stick with something complex and drive it to completion. Alternatively, meaningful PRs to projects can be good because it shows you can work in someone else's codebase and build consensus.
You're selling a notepad app for $30 with the disclaimer "This is the initial release and may contain bugs that lead to data loss, and so frequent backup and careful usage are suggested."
I did a quick Google search for you on LinkedIn but didn't find anything.
Everywhere you say you can take consulting gigs, but I'm not sure why I'd want you as a consultant. What expertise do you bring to the table?
It's not bias to hire non-one-dimensionally. People are not cogs.
Demonstrating professional skills shouldn't be discounted just because someone else doesn't.
It absolutely should make a difference if it's relevant even other people have reasons for not doing the same.
Hiring is selecting the right person and not selecting the wrong person. It is not about sorting all people 100% correctly into hire/no-hire groups.
A blog with code can tell a lot about a person. Do they understand the material? Can they write coherently about it? Can they target an appropriate level of audience with that? Maybe these can't be answered just by reading the blog, but it gives a lot to discuss in the interview process.
Some people want to have the exact same interview process between all people. People are different, though. Locking the interview down to a single process doesn't allow for the variety of skills out there to shine individually. If that avenue is through a portfolio or blog, it's fair game.
However, having one gives the interviewer some additional insights about you. While no candidate should be discarded for not having public code, I don't think dismissing it completely without even looking at it is correct, because you are discarding a great source of information about a candidate.
Note that the insight could even be negative (such as a candidate applying to a senior position with sub-par public code recently written)
I applied to a large local IT corporation. The person interviewing me (who was a team lead) simply assumed I have the skills necessary for an entry position and we pretty much skipped the technical part of the interview. (I ended up in a fairly fantastic team full of great engineers and coworkers. Turns out the guy who interviewed me was awesome at hiring.)
You cover a few things this way. You show that you think beyond the terms of warming a seat, and can highlight particular ways you may fit a specific job.
I've had several jobs/contracts that told me they think I'm a fit because of me listing my involvement with meetup hosting and how I've tailored my CV to highlight specific kinds of work that I'm interested to do more of (e.g. payment integrations).
Like with dating or sales, it's kind of the same idea: you want to look specific instead of generic, in order to filter out jobs that would be a lukewarm-to-negative fit for you.
If you have nothing to differentiate yourself, then start something and highlight it. For kicks and giggles I even have "Certified Log Home Builder" in my CV after taking a course on it.
- Proficient in the use of log aggregation tools
- Experience ensuring systems can stand up under heavy load
- Skilled at operating within strict architectural constraints
As a hiring manager I weigh a candidate's public presence at 10~15% of my initial decision, even more if it's exceptionally impressive. And I hear from other hiring managers that they view this similarly.
If you have good academic qualifications and a great record of past work experience ... guess what, there are several other candidates with great academic qualifications and an impressive work experience. Having a strong portfolio of public work can be what distinguishes you and gets you the opportunity to be invited to interview.
One important note: just having publicly available content isn't enough. It also has to be credible and impressive. Original articles that demonstrate deep expertise and are valuable to others. Serious codebase you wrote yourself or made significant contributions to. Real achievements on things like Kaggle competitions. I sometimes see people including a link to a "business card" type website with their photo and links to their social media or a blurb about themselves. That doesn't impress and won't make a difference.
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.
Companies already want us working an amount of hours well beyond what our salaries should cover, being on-call, and often working well into the night for deadlines, and sometimes the entire night into the next work day when incidents arise.
Then, when we need a job, we need to custom write a compelling “cover letter” that sucks the dick of some corporate entity in order to “tell us why you’d love to work for us” in a unique way that gets someone’s eyeballs in the 5 seconds of time your resume has to get attention or shredded.
Why do I want to work for your company? Because I need to eat to survive and you’re hiring. That’s why. There may be more about your company I like, but at the end of the day I wouldn’t apply to work there if I didn’t need to in order to survive.
Now, we need to be spending all of our time off, which if you work for a startup isn’t as much as you’d think, developing a blog with highly technical and relevant posts in an industry where all tech is a moving target with fads that move fast, Maintain open source projects that should not be “simple” in nature, speak at conferences, etc. That’s in addition to the never ending time commitment to continued learning we already have to do in order to stay somewhat relevant, while also trying to focus on specific tech enough to become a senior level expert or industry leader.
No. Enough. Corporate America gets enough of our lives. The interview process from applying to offer is already a shit show circus of having to market yourself hoping you get picked to not become homeless, all while dealing with multiple rounds of lengthy calls with people on power trips who can often actually be threatened by an impressive portfolio and not recommend you for hire in order to secure their own role and status.
If I work on open source it will be for me and not for a potential job (that won’t look at it or care anyway unless they can use you for it).
You know what gets people offer letters? Word of mouth referrals coming from highly revered coworkers. If you have solid connections out there that are badass engineers who can vouch to their eng managers that you too are a badass engineer, the interview is essentially a formality.
This is embodied in the contractor lifestyle: no corporate bullshit, no politics, and the "you give me money, I give you a limited slice of my time and skills" equation is crystal clear, without any BS like "we are a family", and such like.
> You know what gets people offer letters? Word of mouth referrals by highly revered coworkers.
Equally relevant as a contractor. And the bonus is that interviews are usually done quicker than for permies, actually, the last time I had a single 45 minute interview, with a minimal amount of technical questions asked (YMMV!).
I live in a country where the unemployment rate is pretty low (2.5%) and the situation is kind of the reverse of what you are describing. Companies are trying to entice potential employees, not the other way around. Give me 6 weeks of paid vacations and do not even think about over-times; you look at me funny and I am gone... there are 10 other companies where I can start tomorrow.
I am now trying to relocate to Spain and it is not like that there - but I get why; because their unemployment rate is really high so employers have the power over employees. But in the US? I am sorry if that is a naive question - I've not been to the US since 2002. A lot has changed, apparently.
For a tech industry example, what Elon Musk did with layoffs and worker treatment at Twitter in his relentless efforts to demonstrate his incompetence would be illegal in most of Europe and quickly face the ire of unions and regulators. In the US, by contrast, his behavior was seen as aspirational by a number of other tech CEOs, who quickly followed suit to demonstrate that they were just as “smart” and “tough” as Musk.
You should doubt it, because it’s wildly exaggerated. The overwhelming majority of software engineers in America are not speaking at conferences, blogging, or maintaining open-source software beyond possibly toy projects.
Remember that the "unemployment rate" in the US is very particular. If you haven't searched for a job within the past 4 weeks then you're not unemployed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_in_the_United_Sta...
So in the US its a perfect storm of stress and reliance on our jobs that can be taken away at any moment.
Writing this out, stressed me out :)
I was not sure how this worked. I knew that the US does not have universal health care (not having it is one of those famous American things) but I assumed that it works on a private basis - you chose an insurance company if you want (and can afford) to be insured, you pay them $X per year and you are covered. Having this tied to your employment gives your employer terrible leverage over you. That would certainly stressed me out.
I agree that hundreds of hours of non-paid work is not a reasonable thing to expect of IT workers. But TFA's message has worked for me for landing several jobs.
They typically will not work you that hard, and no one checks your blog or Github.
Of course, there are downsides to this approach as well...
Personally I don't like software development, I have just put on the golden handcuffs that software engineering provides. I cant switch careers and take a massive paycut to do something i like.
An old big company is a good place to work for those of us that just want to work our 40 - 45 hours a week, get a solid paycheck and live our lives. Plus you can do solid work and feel good about it without the local 10x developer coming in to tell you its wrong.
I saw one and they copied Amazon to a T ( doesn’t help the exec team was lifted from there) with attrition quotas, heavy on calls tight deadlines etc
As sister comment said, look at Fortune 500 companies. In the top 10, only 3 are tech companies.
If you read my post, you'll see that I'm not advocating for that. I'm suggesting the bare minimum: "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."
The point of my piece is that you don't need to dedicate huge amounts of effort to doing this kind of work. Do a little bit, stick it online somewhere and it will still give you a huge benefit compared to other candidates who don't have any public evidence of their work.
You are selling something, why should anyone buy it? Convince them.
Completely anecdotal and probably another extreme of the coin - but I'm curious if folks have some experience with this and how to spot this case.
Not OP, but I'd want to chime in and state the following fact: if you're looking for a job, your goal is to sell yourself as the best choice that your potential employer can make. If you cannot make that case for your employer, why do you think any third party would make it for you?
There are indeed a lot of paper tigers out there. I worked with a couple of them. They can interview better than most. If hiring managers have a limited amount of time to make that call, are you helping them find you by failing to present your case?
And even if you are less intelligent you still can get there, you will just have to put in more work.
I think of those, the ability to put in honest work is the biggest limitation of most people. I like to compare honest work to Allies fighting World War II -- doing whatever is necessary to win, wherever it leads you. No plan is stupid if it works, there is nothing shameful about trying and failing. There will be setbacks because life is not fair and on short time scales the rewards are never assured. But what makes winners different from losers is what they do in response. If they can persevere, through their setbacks, experience, hard work, the focus they put in they will gain the knowledge that lets them win on the long time scale. You lose only if you lose faith in yourself and quit.
I know if I can spend enough effort I can learn to reasonably play Irish flute, the only question is am I willing to put in the effort?
Once I decided I really want to get something, the rest is relatively easy -- yes, that means resolve and the right attitude and some amount of consistent effort -- I have not said "easy" means "free".
I have been in the top (say top 3-10) of a number of online games and had a lot of discussions with people who were at the top about what makes them different from all those other people who never reach the top.
Most of the time the difference is people get stuck and they don't know how to unstuck themselves. They are not listening to advice. They are not honestly trying to understand what keeps them stuck, etc. That's a problem of attitude.
I think training your resolve and the attitude is separate problem from achieving your goals, this is something many people would gain a lot from if they focused on it for a bit.
> Once I decided I really want to get something, the rest is relatively easy
I hate this phrase, but I think it fits here - check your privilege. It's quite possible that you ignore your starting position and don't consider it doesn't have to apply to everybody else - especially when you're forming very general statements.
Turns out that the ability, support network & lack of distractions to do this is very rare.
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.
https://danluu.com/p95-skill/
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.
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.
Still its a cool demo.
I could be shadowbanned for all I know, come to think of it.
Then they need to have questions, which triggers curiosity that has them looking for more.
Only then does having a piece of content help you.
Yes it helps, but it doesn't help as much as having a resume that suggests you're a potentially good match without oversharing why you're not a good match. A good resume raises questions that leads to a conversation.
The resume matters more... but if all else is equal and candidates you're competing against also have great resumes, then content matters. You'd be very surprised at the lack of great resumes though.
2. 100k devs view it
3. One of them thinks “we are hiring and fed up if interviewing turkeys, how about this person who had demonstrated knowledge”
4. Internal email to hiring manager “i recommend calling this one, here is the CV…”
If you make it easy for someone doing so to get in contact about job opportunities and make it clear you’re open to them, you’ll often start to get some.
One thing I haven't seen anyone touch on here is that I think this is more relevant early on in someone's career when there is less visible history on candidates.
Yes, but you probably read his reviews online, compared his quotes with competitors in the space to pick one with a good reputation, and otherwise sought signals of competence. Blog posts are the very same thing, quickly verifiable, albeit potentially wrong, signals of skill and competence.
> Just hire people that can do the job you're paying them for
Speaking bluntly, this is what hiring people that can do the job looks like. Attacking those that take the effort to show they have that experience because others wouldn’t is tall poppy syndrome, and it neither improves the quality of the field nor actually helps those struggling that need more support so they can operate at the same level as others.
Free quotes and inspections prior to work commencing, time potentially spent waiting for jobs to come in in which customer support and taking calls are essentially a pure unpaid cost center for the business, taking the time to answer customer questions wholly unrelated to the job potentially even after the job completed, a desire by customers to hear you say things like
> hey, I saw your valve on blah was loose when it shouldn’t be, since I was there and it was an easy fix, tightened it for you as part of the job, no charge.
And there are likely more, I’m not a plumber.
If you are looking for it, you’ll find many cases of “free work is used as a tool to distinguish oneself, delight, and lubricate business”, and plumbing is no exception.
Do you also complain about fit people having bigger chances to find a partner than people who don’t work out because of their situation?
anyone can plagiarise a github or a blog. you still need to speak to the person. you're just adding even more steps to what is already an insufferably bad experience.
but adding more steps is something we love to do. every solution creating 10 new problems.
That aged well.