Comment by intellectronica | Hacker News Reader

Comment by intellectronica | Hacker News Reader

intellectronica

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.

This may be the uncommon opinion, but hell no.

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.

> do not doubt that what you are saying is true

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_in_the_United_Sta...

There's similar stuff in the UK though the thresholds may be different - can't speak for other countries.

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.

Writing this out, stressed me out :)

> 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.

How do you filter for these companies in the job search process?

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

> How do you filter for these companies in the job search process?

As sister comment said, look at Fortune 500 companies. In the top 10, only 3 are tech companies.

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).

It’s not about groveling. It’s about demonstrating that you have the skills and experience they are looking for.

You are selling something, why should anyone buy it? Convince them.

(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.

Didn't say that it's a hiring signal but rather that it's a filtering (get from application to being invited to interview) signal.

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?

What credible, impressive, publically available work did you do to become a hiring manager?

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.

Are you aware that this heavily biases your hiring process against parents and other people with little free time?

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