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Comment by snide | Hacker News Reader

Have been hiring designers and developers for nearly 15 years. The easiest way around this is to just make a website that shows your work. Put up a small project on Github (even if it's a small hobby). A resume tells me nearly nothing and the logos on it only get you past the recruiter. It is absolutely mind boggling to me that people looking for Internet-related jobs do not own the story of their own career on a website of their making.

If I need to have a conversation with you to figure out if you know what you're doing, I'm wasting your and my time. I'd rather have a conversation about whether you're a good fit.

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A lot of people don’t look at your portfolio, or even with considerable verifiable open source work still ask you to do a test.

I interviewed at one place that used my work and ran my code in production. Still had to do a take home test.

Which is fine, I quite enjoy them.

I've experienced the exact same thing. People would go, "After seeing your resume and noticing you made X software by yourself, I immediately installed it and it worked great. I just wanted to say thanks!"

Proceeds to ask me to solve random leetcode questions anyway.

What would you expect if it the person interviewing was a mobile developer, or backend developer? What should they put on the website? A mobile developer perhaps some screenshots of app screens? What about backend logic?

I'll give my two cents as someone who's in the same position.

I look for code style, commit messages (both proxies of quality of work), following standards, good code orga and tests. Show me that you understand why clean code is important basically

I suppose a backend engineer could produce screenshots of parts of the front-end that they helped enable, charts that visualize any improvements to metrics they made, and maybe systems diagrams to show services they built or maintained. Each one would need some accompanying text to give context

If you want to know if I know what I'm doing, go browse my GitHub. I'm not going to do the extra work of building a website lol

This is what has landed me 3 of my 4 programming jobs.

1. Having a web portfolio which has system designs, images, or gif videos of my apps, and points to my github code which interviewers can view.

2. Then walking interviewers through a project during the interview.

Whereas 3 months ago, I had a call w/ a "Director" of Engineering for a small startup (5-10 engineers, about 10-20 other staff). He wanted me to do a take home project. "it's just a 2 hour project: a CLI tool to lookup data via REST API, based on arguments passed in. And expose a gRPC endpoint, writte in Go or your favorite language, but we want to see it ready for production with tests". Everything except the REST API part was new to me: a CLI framework, gRPC, protobuf typing stuff.

Three hours in, I realized I crossed my self-imposed timebox and that the project would really take about 8 hours (or perhaps 16 if I wanted to polish it and have a higher rate of getting hired). However, I was on my vacation and the purpose was to spend time away from technology.

The whole thing felt a bit silly. Learned a new framework though so that was cool (yargs -- https://www.npmjs.com/package/yargs ).

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