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Comment by aristofun | Hacker News Reader

Sorry to disappoint but unless you possess some rare and unique skill in the grand scheme of things you are a commodity.

Business is not your mommy nor a nobel prize committee, it doesn’t care if you are smart or not. It only cares if you can execute your function good enough to justify your salary and get the project out of the door on time.

If 2 candidates are good enough - the cheapest wins.

Therefore there is no point in marketing yourself. Just learn to play by the rules (i.e. how to pass interviews, make up resumes etc) or get unique and extraordinary in your niche.

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I think you are wrong.

It cares if your smart. Hence leetcode etc. You need to be practiced for that.

It also helps to be connected to get your CV top of the pile.

Yes most of us are commodities. But in some ways we are not. Two engineers, same creds, one knows someone who works at the company for a warm positive intro. This is not fungible.

> It cares if your smart. Hence leetcode etc. You need to be practiced for that.

It’s not to detect how smart you are. Leetcode screening is passed via memorizing patterns and masturbating for hours on sample tasks. It has nothing to do with smartness nor with real work.

Your assumption is wrong.

Leetcode is to filter in more disciplined and agreeable folks, who are ready to struggle through whatever meaningless bullshit company come up with. Its a loyalty filter mainly.

Originally it was intended to detect geniuses, but this is not relevant for 20 years now.

We are commodities. It doesn’t mean personal contacts don’t matter. Same way as you will likely buy a barrel of oil from someone you know rather than not. But there is no point in systemic markting efforts to promote your specific oil vs others of the same grade.

Yes, but leetcode shows some level of smarts. It is not something most people can do.

Like I guess 5% of the population could actually do well at it given the time, practice and motivation. Might be 75% for programmers, granted. But companies dont want people who are unskilled.

Anyway yes the oil analogy is close but it is more like too many people are selling fools oil, and your oil is real and so you vouch for it. So oil is not fungible and the vouch means alot. But vouched and proven oil as a class is fungible. Almost everyone is fungible, you can find another Steve Jobs (they did, Apple is doing well after all) or PoTUS. Maybe entertainment is the exception e.g. Taylor but even then if the job is to sell music she is fairly fungible. Other singers do that too.

Your generalizing about the fungibility of labor yields nothing. Every successful hire is a unique mix of right place, right time, right man. You control what you can.

> Every successful hire is a unique mix of right place, right time, right man

This perspective even though technically true yields nothing useful.

Most hires could have (and often do) been replaced by few alternatives in pipeline, and everyone of them would also be unique mix of same things.

Everyone is unique, but business doesn’t care about uniqueness, it cares about getting the job done in a predictable and profitable way.

You control your experience, resume and skills. But not “marketing” that was original point of this discussion.

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