Hacker News Reader

I think if you give the article a second chance, you'll see that it does not advocate for the self-promotional behavior you dislike.

The article doesn't tell us to "listing out insignificant contributions to FOSS they have made, especially when not asked." Rather the article tells us to research about how we can add value to our prospective employers beforehand.

Stated in that way, the article's message is quite "boring", but also true.

View on HN

The challenge here is that it's incredibly hard to know how to add value, from the outside. Especially for not-very-senior positions, adopting this tactic can backfire big time. I interviewed a guy who attempted to tell us how he'd design our systems, and only showed a severe lack of understanding of the domain () (which is really not surprising, it takes most people at least a few months to start to grasp it).

() It also smacked of arrogance - it's as if he thought he knew better than people working on it "how it should really be done".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com