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Comment by ipnon | Hacker News Reader

I would not recommend the standard resume -> job portal -> application pipeline to anyone seriously looking for gainful employment. The signal:noise ratio is not in your favor. The current meta for tech jobs is an OSS portfolio, sponsored competitions, self-produced apps, and technical blogposts, roughly in that order. You will get much farther by solving real problems with public visibility.

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Some people just want a job, not to package themselves like a sales pitch. It’s about putting bread on the table, not performing personal branding theater — yet the job market has become wildly disproportionate to the reality of the work.

The reality of any matching market is based around first impressions and theater. Dating, college apps, hiring, real estate transactions, etc.

Some people just want to buy or sell a house. FSBO with some cheap cellphone pictures will sell far slower than a staged house with professional photos, MLS listing, and a launch party for local agents.

Do many high schoolers care about volunteer work, taking a second language, etc? No. Is it expected to be a part of their application and essay for a good school? Yes.

> Do many high schoolers care about volunteer work, taking a second language, etc? No. Is it expected to be a part of their application and essay for a good school? Yes.

Note that this is only true in countries where the first priority of the "good school" is to obscure their admission goals.

But no employer has ever said "I just want an employee". So only someone naive in the extreme would imagine with the power dynamic in play the sales pitch isn't necessary. That a job is even advertised means the hardest part of the sell has already been done for you internally, but also probably has less favourable terms. If all you ever think is "I just want a job" you will almost always undersell yourself and have the worst jobs. The best ones aren't even advertised and are created purely on your own salesmanship.

People keep parroting this point, but I don't think it actually applies, it's just one of those things that gets reposted a lot on the internet. When we're hiring a candidate, I generally don't go through their Github repos or blogs. I talk to them about what they've worked on and what they've done. Hobby projects can be a good starting point to talk about that, as can be blogs, but really you could start with anything. Most people start with their current day job and that's perfectly fine. You don't have to be coding both inside and outside of working hours do be a good applicant.

I'd go as far as saying it's counter-productive. I have a hobby-level project with actual users earning me some money on the side while requiring very little day-to-day involvement (roughly 2h per week) and there's no quicker way to get my door shut doing interviews than by mentioning it.

There's simply no way to package that which doesn't make the other side think that I'm gonna steal company's time at best and that I'm only looking for like a temporary gig until it takes off at worst.

You assume hiring managers are looking at OSS?

In my experience, they don’t. They might click to see the GitHub profile but rarely open any repo to check the code.

I've never had a potential job reference a single thing on my github, and I've been a user since 2007. Usually I had to point out, when trying to get a job using e.g. Rails, that I had contributed significant code that they were using in production.

happy to display that I'm clued-out, but what does 'meta' mean in this context? Clearly not the company, nor the general 'meta' modifier to something to describe qualifying criteria about it, like meta data for phone calls. it sounds closer to the term 'alpha' that investors use to describe competitive advantage (and even that term I wonder about).

Very popular term in gaming

https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/what-does-meta-mean-in-...

Thank you! (Starts down fresh rabbit-hole...)

Meta is short for metagame. In videogames, and even in some sports, there are decisions made above/outside of the typical strategy of the game which players call metagame. For example, drafting players in football is metagaming. Or choosing what pickleball paddle to use is metagame.

An expanded view of that is that there's usually a "current" meta strategy that people tend to adhere to, kind of like a convention. And if you stray from that, you lose, even if your strategy would succeed in a vacuum.

For example, if the current meta is for employers to mainly use referrals/networking to hire, it would be a bad strategy to apply to postings.

Thank you! Very helpful clarity, indeed sounds like an incredibly useful term!

If someone does that, how do they then convert it into a job?

Also, be under 40.

Huh? Im over 40 its only getting easier to get hired... Not sure where the ageism meme came from other than perhaps older generations who learned compsci pre the internet got left behind a little bit in the made takeoff of software. I am over 40 without a family or partner though, so I suspect the bias is far more about how much of your life is work energy.

What type of companies though? Because startups definitely seem to discriminate. I think partly because it's easier to convince a 20-something that working 6 days a week for mythical equity is a good deal.

  > its only getting easier to get hired

How could one know? How many times have you been hired in the last couple of years?

Agree the standard resume -> application etc. is tough. It has always been tough even at the best of times.

Most jobs are through friends/network etc. If you really think you're a great fit but lack the network try figuring out who the right person is and reach out directly.

If you're a new grad then internships etc.

> If you're a new grad then internships etc.

If you're a new grad, haven't you lost the status of "current student" that most-to-all internships require?

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