Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

From the hiring side, I always spend time reading people's blogs, Github, or social media if they make an effort to include it on their resume.

9 out of 10 times, blogs are extremely stale content from 5+ years back. A lot of people start blogging at the beginning of their careers and then just stop. This creates a weird frozen-in-time effect where what's shown on their blog doesn't match their current skillset at all.

I've read enough personal blogs that I know to look for timestamps and put it in context. If I see a "Ruby on Rails TODO app MVP" blog post or Github repo dated 8 years ago, I'm not going to use that for consideration in hiring them.

However, not every resume reader is going to be that considerate. If your blog isn't up to date, you may want to omit it from applications to avoid giving someone the wrong impression that you're still a beginner.

View on HN

The trend to remove dates from blog posts is problematic for just this reason (as well as being reader-hostile).

I feel like words have lost all meaning when we're calling removing a date from a blog article "hostile." It's only so for non-evergreen content, anyway. There's plenty of technical content that is just as relevant today even though it was written 2, 5, 10 years ago.

Edit for clarification: By no means am I saying that it's bad to have dates, or that we shouldn't have them. They make sense a lot of times, it's just kind of silly to call it hostile to the reader.

It's hostile because it removes context that can help understand the content better, and because it's typically done as an engagement trick to aid the author and their "brand".

Feel free to disagree, but I don't think I'm destroying language here.

Why would dates be removed from articles? (and why is this only a thing for 'news' articles and advertisements? I've never seen a personal blog without dates)

The only reason I can think of is to misrepresent the content as being more up-to-date and relevant than it actually is. Useful content that doesn't go out of date would never be harmed by including one.

> up-to-date and relevant

These don't have to be synonyms.

Of course not, I wouldn't have used both if they were synonymous, that would be redundant.

Not to mention you'd be repeating yourself!

That is so last decade. What is hot now is to make the date recent.

Ugh, get off my lawn!

But yeah I've seen this too, this is where it turns from hostile to truly evil.

That trend started the moment people started discarding content because of the date alone.

I usually put the date at the footer of the post so that people keep reading the damn post

The number of interviewers who even read resume, let alone a blog is very minimal. Even if they read it , i doubt people would be asked the same questions as one who has no blog.

So in my opinion the return of investment in terms of hiring is close to zero. However it can be a great tool to document your journey or learning and how much one has evolved.

This doesn't match my experience. If a candidate advances far enough that 3-4 of us are going to spend a couple hours of our day interviewing and deliberating, we each will at least scan resume linked blogs.

Of the companies that gave me offers in the last few months, none of them even knew I had github projects until I brought it up with them during the interview process. I mention these github projects on my resume in a separate section - its not even a throwaway line.

Personally, if someone has a blog or a Github and I'm conducting an onsite interview with them, I definitely spend an hour or so going over everything.

This is very generous of you and I would appreciate it as a candidate. In my experience, almost nobody does that. I even came across companies that never looked at the portfolios that they had requested in their job ads. One of these companies even hired me! Fun times.

Interestingly, at my company it's specifically _discouraged_ to look at people's resumes before the interview to avoid any potential bias.

The ones who you want it to matter to and to work with will read it though. Think of them mentioning it as a filter in your process.

Guilty! Well, not quite 5 years but my writing has slowed down a lot. As I get older, I have less time to write and spend a lot more time on other hobbies and obligations.

If you believe that your personal obligations take precedence over spending your free time on software relation extracurricular activities, are you really worthy of a job in this sector?

There are 2 reactions I have to your comment:

1. I agree with you. I like seeing people's blogs. It's great to see the way that they contribute back to the community.

2. I feel that your judgement is a little misaligned. I personally have had a blog (it's still there and I can still blog) However, to be able to get an audience who reads it, you can react to other blogs, and they can contribute to yours just isn't there. It feels like you have to be an influencer to get any kind of traction. I just want to have it so I can get feedback etc.

Also: I have a draft of a blog article about seperating out your content from the display and syndication. It's the tim berners lee before he published the solid web manifesto,however that draft has been unpublished for probably more than 10 years now.

Additionally.. I have discovered with the industry is that it's better not to over stress yourself out with side projects and hustle attempts. You just aren't awarded better jobs because you blog or invest yourself like this. You tend to signal yourself better to managers who see "oh he codes after work.. that means he'll love to code my project for free after work".

Your comment just motivated me to write another blog article about something recent I've learned. Thanks ^_^ My last post had already been more than a year old :O

I feel like you're personally attacking me haha.

I don't really need it for getting jobs but I definitely moved on to other topics and just never kept up with the blogging.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com