Make sure 1) the product has already been released to the public and 2) the hardware isn't stolen. Rig up a small power supply and find a way to light it up.

Being able to drop that in front of an interviewer and explain the entire system front-to-back is a massive advantage over people that have listed random "projects" in their resume but don't have much more to say about it. Be honest about your contributions, don't give away anything proprietary, but be proud of the project and show some enthusiasm when you talk about it.

That alone will get you 80% of the way to the job.

I also keep a binder with a single page for every project I've done. Just a photograph and maybe 3-4 lines of text. Keep that off to the side. When an interviewer asks about a technology or idea that matches even a little you whip that book out and point to the page. Now you're showing and telling again. Super easy to put together and maintain over your career.

Unfortunately doesn’t sound like a scalable application strategy

Basically no one I've ever met was able to show me work from the giant corporation they worked for.

But it's not because of NDAs. Indeed because of the nature of my business, those companies are my customers, we already all work together, I've signed NDAs, they are actually permitted to show me stuff.

It's because they didn't do anything. NDA = Not Doing Anything.

> That alone will get you 80% of the way to the job.

Large corporations (500+) employ like half of Americans, and probably way more than 50% of tech workers. So many of their management systems boil down to having 2-10 people redundantly doing the same work. So many do no work. I mean I'm sure they aspire to do work, but there isn't any to do.

As long as this remains the norm, your interviewers will, statistically speaking, have done similarly little as you, and that will be okay, and leetcode will prevail.

No, it's because it's my employers code, not mine.

God knows what trying to exfiltrate it opens me up to criminally or civilly.

You're going to have a hard time expressing what exactly is the violation when everyone has signed the same NDAs and CIIAs! Like if you work for Google, and I work for Google, you can fathom, well I can look at code you've written for Google.

Okay, now if I only "work" for Google, which like 200,000 people do, and they've signed the same exact agreements as you... It's your prerogative!

> criminally or civilly

It's your prerogative! You can leetcode instead!

I am not saying this is you. But there are many developers, arguably the majority, who complain tirelessly about the status quo of interviewing. And given one opportunity after another to change that status quo - doing the stuff Simon says, doing the stuff I am saying - they make no effort! They vamp about how it's impossible.

They think their social local mobile trip planning startup website code is sensitive. They think their 15 layers of Dagger dependency injections is sensitive. It's not. If you want to change the status quo from leetcoding, you're going to have to screen share a "diff" here or there, and show people concretely what the hell you've been doing for a year at BigCo or UnicornCo. I cannot predict the future and I cannot generalize, but in my experience, the likelihood of criminal, civil or even the far more realistic reputational and cultural repurcussion is extremely small.

All I am saying is, the reason this hasn't happened yet is because most people spend a year at BigCo and UnicornCo doing nothing of any substance. I mean maybe that's going to change. But it's really tough, nobody is being honest with how truly tremendously mismanaged and ZIRP-fueled large employers are. It hasn't been this way forever, but it has for at least 10 years, and it means some crazy things have happened in the job market that made no sense.

Copying work code to a non-work device to show during an interview is exfiltrating code. Well staffed security orgs at large companies have insider threat teams that look for this type of thing, in addition to monitoring for exfiltration of company documents and other materials to personal devices.

wait how does that work in the context of an interview though? You're by definition interviewing somewhere where you don't currently work

> you're going to have to screen share a "diff" here or there, and show people concretely what the hell you've been doing for a year at BigCo or UnicornCo. I cannot predict the future and I cannot generalize, but in my experience, the likelihood of criminal, civil or even the far more realistic reputational and cultural repurcussion is extremely small

Ah, nvm

No thanks, I'm not gonna do that

I do hiring at my company. If a candidate showed me non-public code during an interview, they're an immediate no hire. Interview is immediately over. This isn't my personal preference or anything either. It's specifically in our interview training.

It demonstrates a clear inability to protect company IP. That's a big deal. Especially if you're a publicly traded company.

I've been meaning for years to put together a proper "projects" portfolio for my own site. I really like what Tom MacWright has for that https://macwright.com/projects/

Are we sure the author is not showing some unconscious bias by looking in others for traits he has (public creativity)?

There is no particular reason why public creativity is linked to good engineers. It's one way to show good engineering, sure. But far from the only way. I could see some other hiring managers arguing the opposite: if you have time to write lightweight tech posts on your blogs, maybe you are not a great engineer who will solve my company's most difficult problems.

That being said, especially for new grads, I strongly recommend showing something, anything beyond "I graduated from this university and here are the classes I took".

Blogging takes time away from work. Some people like myself do not want to make their thoughts public because I value privacy. I also don't feel like I have anything much interesting to say. I just like getting "shit" done.

I feel I'm capable of learning anything required to complete a task/job. Yet, I wouldn't fit his idea of someone who stands out. Then, again I don't really like working with people who show such extreme bias and are not open minded.

That being said, I see no reason this advice wouldn’t work on hiring managers with less experience blogging.

He never claimed it means you're a good engineer. It's advice for standing out among other applicants when you're looking for a job.

Some of them are live, have screenshots, proper documentation and such.

Some of them gets stars or people reach out for support on these projects.

Some of them I've advertised on Reddit etc and reached 100K+ views and a lot of upvotes in their respective Communities.

I also have a substack which has reached top of HackerNews once.

All this has netted me exactly ZERO opportunities till now.

Thankfully, I'm doing Github and Substack as a hobby/learning so no expectations = no disappointment.

But the author is deluded to think these things help. You might win the lottery and the right person might see your content at the right time. But it's better to just use this time to cram Leetcode and get a job.

After reading your post, I reviewed your GitHub profile. You're certainly on the right track, but there's room for improvement. Here are my personal observations and opinions:

- You have numerous small projects, but they lack detailed descriptions and the README files don't tell me much about their purpose. Why are you building these? How can they be run? What functionality do they offer?

- Many projects have minimal activity, suggesting they might be incomplete or abandoned.

- There are several boilerplate projects like "calculator", "todo", and "tutorial".

- Your commit messages in most repos are quite short, often just one or two words. This practice might not be accepted in a professional team setting. I've been guilty of this with my personal projects at times too.

- Your project https://github.com/prakhar897/workaround-gpt shows promise in terms of community interest and the start of what could be a well-constructed README. Perhaps you should consider continuing with this project or developing a similar, well-structured project. Just a thought.

If that's going to be seen as a red flag, then I'm not going to share any of that.

I've some GH repos whose quality I'm ashamed of today. But it's clear they were developed by a person with 12 years less experience than me today. It's clear it was just a hobby-project or clear that it wasn't ever meant to be continued this long. A line like "The code in X is a mess and needs a refactoring" is enough.

It is to me, when I researched candidates. When a ticket, todo or note shows that the author is clearly aware of the problems, and shows she/he can weigh off why (not) to fix that today, it tells -me- they are good in what they do.

A dev who shows to make decisions about quality, effort, workflows, based on experience and reasoning, to me, is worth a hundred devs that blindly follow The Sacrosanct Rule Of The Latest Cargo Cult Religion™. A dev who shows she/he grew over time, by showing "terrible" code in the past, to me, is worth a hundred devs that have been doing the exact same rituals for years or decades.

So, yes: by all means, show your worst stuff. But be sure it's clear that you know its "bad" and why.

At least in the companies I've worked for in the UK and the US it should help you make it past the first filter - the "I have a stack of candidates, which of these are worth setting up an initial phone interview with" phase.

Here's my Resume for reference: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u9F8_2m2W1mcKIoFs3hwUEn5Kgf...

I'm quite Junior so I don't know if this applies to more senior positions, but in my experience when applying to jobs my Github page was always a point of discussion when I got an interview.

That said, not sure you can easily quantify projects as having no impact. Back when I was a seeker my resume had a handful of non-trivial public projects buried in a footnote and one would come up in about 75% of interviews. Despite bias I doubt this is too unique assuming the projs themselves are interesting.

Remember: your entire resume is adtech for your skills to a future employer. I'm of the belief that if human eyes ever skim it: project: Java CLI fizz buzz will never outperform project: RISC-V microkernel in Rust.

Due to competition, very few measures are competed upon very fiercely.

Whatever applies in west doesn't apply here.

I have had friends like you who did incredible projects and contributed to open source.

The best of my friends have ended up in relatively good startups due to open source and projects, after lot of struggle.

But on the other hand, I have seen absolutely incompetent morons who did Leetcode (or even cheated at it) and got a high life job.

Scale ruins things I guess. This market is pathetically fucked.

Unless you highly curate your online presence for the hiring people (e.g. your blog only contains articles of interest to the interviewers in one place), I think nobody cares. The exception being is if your code/articles are in the top 5% of read articles, then I'd guess that speaks for itself without gaming the presentation.

On mine I list three attributes that make me a great, and unique, worker for the jobs I'm looking for. Go ahead and be grandiose here -- the point is to start a conversation!

https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an...

Maybe part of the problem is that I'm grossly under-estimating the amount of work involved in "post an interesting technical article to it once or twice a year" for people who don't already spend a lot of their time writing.

Here are the struggles I've had with this over my career:

* Public vs private persona. I'm a pretty open person and happy to share with people I know or where it feels "safe" (eg, Facebook where I more explicitly control the audience) but I'm deeply uncomfortable with publicly announcing things under my name on the internet to go god-knows-where. This is one reason I've been tremendously uncomfortable with Twitter. I absolutely despise the public-broadcast model, and I'm somewhat suspicious of people who want to make such a show of themselves (to build an "audience"). I've toyed with various forms of pseudonymity but that brings its own problems; I think it encourages antisocial behaviors and then at some people you have to 'expose' yourself (eg, when you have to tell your prospective employer, yes, NSAhacker31337 is my github, take a look!)

* Along with the above, blogging/demonstrating things always has a bit of a show-off feel. "Look at this great thing I know how to do, I bet you don't know how to do it!" Or, worse, you're demonstrating something "everybody knows" and you look like a naive fool.

* Consistency. I've made various "I should start a blog" efforts over the years, and inevitably get bored of the tools and want it somewhere else, or I don't like the tone I used to use, or I forget which site I used, or whatever. It's sort of like how "just go to the gym 3 days a week" shouldn't be that hard, but for 99% of people is.

Again, these are just my personal struggles, to maybe help you understand why people don't. It's nothing against your advice, which I think is fantastic.

That's one of the reasons I'm so keen on the TIL format - it gives you permission to write about tiny little things (things you just learned) without feeling like you need to be original or explain something groundbreaking and new.

I just published a tiny one about figuring out typing.Protocol in Python for example: https://til.simonwillison.net/python/protocols

I wrote more about that here: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/

I know I'm coming at this from the idealistic position of someone who's lucky enough to have a job, but isn't it kind of a good thing if you find out early that you're applying to a company where doing things is a red flag?

We hem and haw and tweak and fret about every little thing in this process, but ultimately all roads lead to "Thank you for your interest in SomeCorp. Unfortunately, we have decided not to proceed with your candidacy at this time, but we appreciate the time and effort you dedicated to the application process. We will keep you in mind for future openings and we encourage you to keep current on new opportunities on our careers site."

Generally it's been easy for me to get interviews, and hard to get offers (something like a 95% onsite rejection rate). I have enough experience and the resume items that gets recruiters excited about their next bonus. But it seems folks walk away saying "Yeah he's technical, but <xyz nitpick or undermining statement about my contributions>" ...

Oh well, I've also given up on caring.

I've had a surprising number of interesting interactions just because someone saw my email and went to my website. Some yielded job leads and eventual referrals to jobs through old-school networking.

Oh, but the explanation is simple. They resent being told to eat their vegetables. They know you're right, but don't want to or can't do it, and attack you for reminding them of that.

> I'm grossly under-estimating the amount of work

Probably a big part of it - if you write a lot, it is very easy to forget how intimidating it can feel to those who don't. And related hang ups can be amplifiers - if you don't write much and have insecurities (sorry, "imposter syndrome"), being told this should be an easy thing can be triggering. And this is employment we're talking about - it is definitionally high-stakes, whatever the stakes are.

I think that's largely it. I've thought of things that would be interesting to write as a short blog post. What's stopping me?

* I don't already have a blog where it'd be easy to post things. I'd have to research what to sign up for. Free sites would spam my readers with ads that I don't agree with, and try to track them. Paid sites cost money, obviously, and may be predatory. The platform could be acquired and/or killed, and I could lose my content or have to transfer it somewhere else. I anticipate 50% of my total blogging effort would be spent just on dealing with all this bullshit. That's time I could be spending with my kids. "Just self-host!" okay now 90% of my total blogging effort, plus server costs.

* I'd want proper code formatting, examples, good visuals; you know, something publishable. I'd simply never get it good enough to post. Perfect would absolutely be the enemy of good. And ideas are constantly evolving and changing. I don't agree now with everything I wrote a year ago; that's what progress and learning is supposed to do. So the temptation to constantly go back and nitpick it, edit it, would be there, all day, every day.

* Nobody would ever read it anyway. It wouldn't hold a candle to the blazing light of SEO spam. Even in the unlikely event someone did read it, they wouldn't care. Even in the unlikely event they did care, it would be different from the way they're already doing things, and therefore they'd become extremely hostile and write hateful comments about some minor point they misunderstood. Which I'd read, despite myself, and then I'd have shower arguments with them instead of focusing on actual work.

So why am I doing all this work? Who am I blogging for? A potential future employer for the one time I'm looking for a job in the next decade, who probably won't even bother to look at it? "You write for yourself, to organize your own thoughts" -- okay, I already do that, I just don't publish it, for all these reasons.

For both #1 and #2, there are dozens of static site generators that handle all of this for you automatically. Not all of them are as complicated as the big ones. You can get started with a theme in Zola in a couple hours and that can be your blog forever, with support for code syntax.

For number 3, the idea is not that people will organically stumble on your blog in a search, but that you'd share it to different communities relevant to your blog post. If you're writing about F#, post it on the F# reddit. SEO spam can't really mess with you there. In fact, I feel like SEO spam is only pushed by Google, and communities tend to not engage with that content.

I feel you on the extremely hostile responses, though. Without fail, any article that makes it to the top of HN has lots of people insinuating it was somehow written maliciously, even if it's just about something minor like Sum Types vs Union Types. Unfortunately the answer is to shut off your brain to the hostility but take in their counterpoints. These people likely think about nothing but code for most of the day, so even if they're well-rounded and nice in real life, their brain has temporarily narrowed the scope of their world view, and they make mountains out of mole hills

My recommendation these days is to start with GitHub Pages.

1. It's free

2. The default address - yourname.github.io - looks good enough. You can assign a custom ___domain to it easily for free too if you want to: https://til.simonwillison.net/github/custom-subdomain-github...

3. GitHub have a REALLY GOOD track record of not breaking things like this. I trust them more than most other companies with respect to my stuff there staying online for a long time into the future.

My trick for formatting syntax highlighting is to write my posts in Markdown (with the ```python tags for code) and then run it through this little tool to turn it into HTML: https://til.simonwillison.net/tools/render-markdown - then I publish the resulting HTML.

I actually think that we'd have a much better job market without any of this.

I'm also among the people that see too much pointless content being published simply for hidden advertising, including by companies.

I think there's a small correlation between "having a tiny bit of evidence online that you're capable of solving problems" and "getting invited to an in-person interview" - at least given my own experience at the companies that I've worked at (and hired for).

That said, I do think there's a strong correlation between being good at written communication and being a great senior / staff-level engineer.

I do intend (as in, have been particularly intending recently) to do it, because I think then I would find it lower effort, I would do it, and that I would like that. We'll see, the list of things I've intended to do is long!

I particularly like the style of (others') blog where you dive semi-deep on something semi-obscure to fix or do something, perhaps it's not your usual area, and then write up a nice explainer for the next searcher, or a note to self for the future. Explain it to someone who's never understood it before, while you still remember that perspective.

I'd suggest a regular repo, but GitHub block search engine crawlers from indexing anything other than the README.md file - so Gists are weirdly better for publishing content.

Edit to add: I feel like this came off as harsh, but it really wasn't intended to at all. We all have this kind of bias. I have a bit of the opposite bias as you, for what it's worth, because the best people I've worked with have been essentially silent in public, and I tend to see people with robust public profiles as having spent time on marketing themselves that could have been better spent on other things. This kind of bias that we all build throughout our life experience is why hiring is extremely fraught.

I have about five ideas I really want to write about, that I know would be really great future PR for myself in the niche I'm interested in right now. They wouldn't need to be long, but they would still be hard for me to write and edit to a point that I feel good about having them out in public attached to my name. So they don't get written. (But maybe they will someday.)

But making your voice heard and stand out from the crowd is no simple feat: we don't all have the luxury of Twitter following, a much subscribed RSS feed, a prominent ___domain name to spread the fruits of our hard work.

The network effects that benefit early influencers are difficult to pierce, I find.

You just need something you can link to from your resume, so the hiring manager can click through and see a tiny bit of evidence that you can talk about code or build a project.

Asking for the proverbial friend.

Whether that's through a blog, through their socials, LinkedIn posts, through their YouTube, through their GitHub - I review all of it; anything I can find. I want to see how they communicate, how they think, how they comment their code (or don't), their view points on various touchy subjects in software engineering and system design.

It's basic background research. Why suffer through a relationship that isn't going to work out for either party if some basic digging can short circuit that problem? It also provides great context for an interview and points of discussion that help connect with the other party.

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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...

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.

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...

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.

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

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

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!).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

However it didn't help much in the interview process. I've never been in an interview where the interviewer looked at my profiles on various code hosting platforms, reviewed some of my pull requests before hand, and came into the room with a good idea of what I do and how I work. They will still ask the same pre-canned questions they are forced to ask and we're back to reversing linked lists and memoizing tree walking algorithms.

It's good for getting to know folks which can help in finding places to apply to where you might already know some people.

But I doubt it's going to make you stand out in the interview process itself.

Update: That being said, I've been on the other side of the table and when I was the one setting up the interview process I made sure candidates knew that they could send over recent PRs they've made for us to review in order to bypass any coding exercises. I find it much easier to discuss the problem they were working on and seeing their solution is really helpful.

I guess one thing Simon didn't consider is that as long as the vast majority of developers (let alone people) express no creativity, your interviewers won't either.

> ...they could send over recent PRs

As long as the cultural norm is NDA - better known as Not Doing Anything - it won't happen.

I have a blog with 170-ish posts. About half are technical. Three or four have gone viral on HN.

The other half are personal, but I live in a place where people generally share the same values, so those other posts shouldn't be a problem.

I've got a personal project. It's used in production and ships as part of the base install with FreeBSD and Mac OSX.

It demonstrates high proficiency with C. It demonstrates careful work with every function documented in Doxygen comments and a development manual entirely designed to raise the bus factor to infinity. It also shows I've got fuzzing chops.

I have other code. It's not complete, but I've got hundreds or thousands of hours in it, and it's to the same quality.

And I can't get a job.

> Got another programming job. Got fired for "performance." I think the reason wasn’t good, but I also have a hard time building a theory of mind, which means I can’t read code written by others.

If you can't read code written by others, that's going to be a big concern for companies that require you to read and modify other people's code.

Perhaps you need to be a contractor, not an employee.

https://gavinhoward.com/2023/04/rust-is-dead-to-me/

> Rust the language is dead to me.

> why?

> Because, quite literally, the Rust Foundation wants to make people like me unwelcome in any Rust event, not just official ones.

> Don’t believe me?

> Look at the draft Rust Trademark Policy that the Rust Foundation is asking for comments on and go to page 12:

> > We will consider requests to use the Marks on a case by case basis, but at a minimum, would expect events and conferences using the Marks to…prohibit the carrying of firearms…

> I have a concealed carry permit. I have firearms and other weapons. I know how to use them, and I will use them in defense of my wife and myself.

> And you can bet I carry them into places I consider dangerous if it is legal to.

I bet there are people out there outside the US who think that you should protect your safety in a boring computer conference, but you won't ever hear about it. This notion is too fringe and people won't dare say it.

I think you missed my previous point. Angry men with guns being allowed into a boring computer conference (or anywhere else for that matter) is the reason people think they need to protect their own safety in the first place.

Can just imagine a Rust conference, and an argument breaks out over memory management, one guy starts yelling about 'borrowing', starts shooting, someone else yells "you can take my pointers out of my dead cold hands", starts shooting. Pandemonium.

I am personal'y of the opinion that brands play it too safe in general and people aren't stupid and know that just because a brand happened to be near something bad doesn't mean the brand is responsible and therefore bad, but apparently brands don't agree and they're the ones calling the shots on where they're displayed.

I don't think this follows. Historically speaking, most mass shootings have occurred at locations that specifically disallow firearms, making them "soft targets" where the cowardly attacker will not have anyone fight back. It doesn't seem logically consistent to assume that this policy item has the effect you are stating.

Most places with large crowds disallow firearms, and most mass shootings occur at places with crowds. You're confusing correlation with causation.

HN never change please.

Frankly, I think if people won't hire because of a post like this, then the interviewers are the one contributing to the problem.

Totally disagree. For the vast majority of software dev jobs (like 98% of them), you just want someone who shows up and does the work without making much of a fuss. People who openly demonstrate that they are difficult to work with are freely signaling "do not hire me, I will make your life much harder"

Why would you hire someone like that? You'd much rather have someone who is 50% as skilled but gets along with everyone and doesn't make other's lives harder because of their personality

For the vast majority of people who post stuff like that on their blog, they show up and do the work without making much of a fuss.

I know because I've worked with several of them.

And you'd have no problem with your coworkers always keeping a gun on them? This seems like a recipe for a workplace incident

But (depending on where you live) you'd also be surprised how many coworkers carry guns with them. At one company I was shocked. HR put a policy prohibiting concealed carry, and damn near 80% of my team took serious issue with it. It felt like I had accidentally walked into an NRA meeting or something. There were never any issues, and we tended to get into some heated arguments at that place. Turns out most gun carriers recognize and respect the gun and don't just pull it out and start shooting people every time they get offended.

But sure, the workplace will usually have a policy about guns, and that's more an HR problem than a problem for me as an interviewer. And I'd put the burden on him to enquire about that aspect.

Unfortunately, I'd say a key skill for a contractor is probably reading code written by others because - at least in my experience - you're 90% of the time coming in to clean up or maintain an old mess someone else has made.

If you can't read code by written by others, being a (software) contractor is probably the worst job you could have. Now you need to read new code at every new client you start at.

And most times it's code that you really don't enjoy reading because it was dragged up from the slurry pits in Beelzebub's own septic tank and mangled over the years into a horrific totem, a paean to insanity, screeching out its perverted agonies the only way it knows how - through JIRA and Kanban boards containing decade-old bugs that you are asked, nay expected, to fix in your first week.

Similarly I've worked for someone who sets up a continuos integration systems.

There are contracting jobs that don't require you to read the code of others.

I read a couple of the posts; I can't comment on the demographics or beliefs of the people recruiting in the ___location you are looking, but I suspect they are not as uniform as you imply - and even those who share them may not share also your penchant for mixing the professional with cultural evangelism - especially if they have responsibility for team cohesion and company reputation.

I was just refuting the article.

https://gavinhoward.com/2020/06/i-am-running-for-office/

https://gab.com/gavinhoward

> Labor Code section 1101 prohibits an employer from preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or preventing employees from becoming candidates for public office.

Sure it does. It may suck from a perspective of a candidate, but it’s a fair business position to value cohesion in a team.

I can't comment on other jurisdictions, but the United States has a section of legislation called the Civil Rights Act Title VII[1] codifying that discrimination on the basis of a variety of factors (age included) is actually not (legally) right.

I think this is hard to enforce in practice, but just to be clear -- it's not (technically) "right" to be ageist in one's hiring practices in the US.

[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/oasam/centers-offices/civil-rig...

I lost the motivation to continue.

"If I lose, I will run for Senate of the United States against Mitt Romney in 2024. I will not go away."

"And if I lose, I will then run for President of the United States in 2028 since that is the first year I will be eligible. I will not go away."

This might reflect poorly on you in the eyes of an employer wondering if you were distracted by political priorities, and/or not seeing it through? Could explain the job fortunes.

Let's just say that there was an external reason why I lost motivation that I could tell a potential employer, and they would understand. I won't repeat it on HN though.

In reality, I know why I'm not getting a job. I'll not a good fit for sterile office work. And that's okay for both me and companies; their are right to avoid hiring me.

I'm mid-40s and have worked for myself since my late teens. I recently realised that I'm likely unemployable in a traditional office sense, and so will need to make everything work off my own back until retirement. Things are good now, but prospects and perceptions change quickly with age, depending on your field.

Of course, it might happen that they'd hire contributors, as you say. I'd say this is incredibly rare (but does happen). Usually, from my experience, this happens when the company wants to essentially "acquire" the code (and sometimes, the contributor is hired as a contractor for a couple months).

But it may contribute to you getting an interview in the first place, no?

A few years ago I was offered a job explicitly because I had a github account where I hosted a public project that used a framework.

Later, I was the recruiter in a few hiring rounds, and public source code repos was my primary source of data to assess q candidate. If a candidate had shit code in their repos, they'd be rejected. By "shit code" I mean a candidate for a senior software engineer for a C++ project showed up his GitHub project as his C++ portfolio, and all he had for show was a project that didn't even used include guards.

If you intentionally put up your GitHub page in your resume and all you have is "incomplete and unpolished exploratory projects", that's how you're choosing to present yourself.

Also, the degree of "unpolished ness" actually attests to the skillet you bring to the table. If the "exploratory projects" you choose to showcase as your portfolio are ungodly messes, you should not be surprised they reflect poorly on you.

> It's surprising that you would take pride in using this as a basis to disqualify.

I know for a fact that public GitHub repositories explicitly presented by candidates as their technical portfolio is an accurate reflection of their skillet. I am certain of this fact because I never used personal source code repos to exclude candidates but to guide the interview, and each and every single candidate I interviewed that published crap in their portfolio was lacking absolute basic competencies in the ___domain they showcased.

Do you have any data to refute this?

I really don't understand how anyone in this day and age is surprised that the way you present yourself in a CV or even online, specially in professional venues, has an impact on your hireability.

It was a bundle of declarations that included duplicate definitions on each source file. The candidate then expected stuff to remain consistent by updating all declarations.

Judging by your description and comment you certainly stand out, but is that enough to get a job? I can't tell unless I have an interview with you.

I am not a good fit for companies, and I know it.

I was just refuting the article.

* You call BLM a "terrorist organization".

* You explicitly object to the idea that the phenomenon of police killings of black people is rooted in white supremacy.

* You give off serious antivaxxer vibes, and refuse to wear a mask during a global pandemic.

* You're petty enough about the above to post a list of businesses you won't patronize because they require masking.

* You are boycotting Rust because they don't want people bringing guns to their conferences.

* You complain about being banned from lobste.rs for posting transphobic comments. (And yes, despite your protestations, they are indeed transphobic.) And also for claiming that gender dysphoria is essentially a mental illness to be cured.

You clearly think these are all reasonable positions to hold, but the fact of the matter is that these sorts of things will be considered red flags by many recruiters and hiring managers at many tech companies. You may believe that these things should have no bearing on whether or not you get a job, but what matters is the reality, not what you believe.

On the technical side:

* You don't want to work in any language but C.

* You claim that you can't read/understand code written by others, citing a dubious "theory of mind" excuse.

Most tech companies don't use C these days. Certainly there are some, but most that write internet-facing programs don't use it. Even a company that does have C positions might be concerned about your unwillingness to write anything else. And reading, understanding, maintaining, and adding features to other people's code is a huge part of nearly any software development job.

I have no doubt that some of your technical achievements are impressive, but companies consider much more than that when making hiring decisions.

All this is just from a few minutes perusing your website.

> I live in a place where people generally share the same values, so those other posts shouldn't be a problem.

I'm assuming you live in Utah based on some of the things I read on your website; I don't expect there are a ton of tech-company employers there. And of those that are there, I suspect many people who work at them don't share as many of your values as you think they do.

I wonder if he's going to listen to the advice and present as more milquetoast when using his real name, or double down.

I mean I have some pretty fringe beliefs too (mainly on the strongly anti-capitalist, progressive side of things). I'm not stupid enough to post those ideas publicly because they're far more likely to hurt my chances of employment than to help them.

But it's a good thing that companies find this out because I'm not a good fit for a sterile work environment.

My original post was not asking why; it was refuting the article that said it was a good thing in its face.

Not that I necessarily agree with that, but how are you refuting it?

The posts that make you stand out the most don't really demonstrate creativity, nor do they make you stand out in a positive way (to most employers; perhaps not to any employers, since you're so publicly opinionated on a variety of things that are largely unrelated and yet also largely unaligned with the majority of tech workers)

I'm not refuting that you have technical writing that could make you stand out in a positive way, but it's overshadowed by all the other stuff.

It's like if someone posted "You only have to write one operating system from scratch to stand out as a candidate", and then Terry Davis (author of TempleOS) comes in and says "not true, I wrote an operating system and no one will hire me"

Well sure, but if you look at the comments in the source code for that or any of his writing or videos, they're riddled with racial slurs.

Obviously the OS itself is impressive, but no one wants to hire a liability

The article had an implicit bent that standing out was good. When you're like me, it's not. That's what I was refuting.

The author is clearly talking about blogging to demonstrate expertise and creativity in the technical ___domain, in order to stand out positively.

The author did not make the claim that ranting about your fringe opinions online will make you stand out positively. In fact, they didn't mention the impact that would have at all.

You are fighting a straw man.

> When you're like me, it's not

It has nothing to do with being like you. You're not standing out positively because you're choosing to post things that make you stand out negatively, and the author made no claim about how that would impact you as a candidate.

To offer an extreme example, if someone were to put up a website that advocates for child cannibalism, and then didn't get a tech job as a result, I don't think it'd be credible for them to say that their website refutes this article's point.

As an aside, your comment that any work environment that might object to your views must be "sterile" is yet another piece of supporting evidence for why you might have trouble finding a job.

Well, yeah, but I'm European, which means I'm practically a Communist ;) I was trying to give the benefit of the doubt, because "dude, tone it down a bit, you're spookin' the horses" is easier to swallow than "everything you believe is wrong".

All while striving for positions of power that they keep and deny to those whom they pretend to represent.

They do not work well with other people, they dictate, intimidate and eschew real work.

Yet they are hired. The irony is that I agree with several of their positions, but make no mistake. They are horrible people who would march under any flag if expedient.

I know I didn't achieve that; certainly some amount of judgment came through, but ultimately I'm fine with that. Life goes on, etc.

For the record, your post comes off as a bit angry too! But I'll try to read it as if you were writing it with feelings of weary disappointment.

I thought this was the progressive opinion? Gender dysphoria is a mental illness and transitioning is the treatment. What’s the accepted view now?

Certainly transitioning is one way (and a seemingly very successful one) at dealing with gender dysphoria. Whether or not accepted psychological practice would call that situation "a cure for a mental illness" is something I don't know.

My post was not wondering why I wasn't getting hired; it was a refutation of the article saying that blogs were all good.

Sometimes you can stand out in a bad way (in other people's minds).

I'm okay with this because I'm not a good fit for sterile office work.

> 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.

That's all it says about starting a blog. It doesn't say blogging about any topic is good. It very much doesn't say posting about social and political issues is good. It just says that posting a couple times a year about technical topics is good.

I work for an established (perhaps legacy) tech company. While people with such views aren't the norm, we have quite a few of them, and we all get along quite well. The only thing that would give pause in the list above are the transphobic comments.

But I do believe that, even for an employer who might by sympathetic to some of this person's views, many will not want to take a chance dealing with someone who might be a liability in the workplace in various ways due to those views. Certainly writings on one's blog aren't a perfect indication, but I think most hiring managers would prefer people who keep their more extreme views under their hat. Whether or not this is fair is besides the point; I do believe this is the reality.

For the record, I think many companies would have the same reaction to someone who posts angry-sounding leftist rhetoric on their website. But I do expect many are more tolerant of that than angry-sounding right-wing rhetoric.

Beyond that, even without all the social and political views, I think things like "I'll only work in C" and "I'm bad at understanding other people's code" alone would disqualify a candidate for most jobs.

In my experience, not a single employer cares about documentation.

Maybe be a little careful with the conspiracy theories, but I am quite done with the corporate-friendly personas we are pushing in our tech world.

I wanted to write a couple posts about anarchism on my personal blog, nothing crazy, and kept being concerned it might drive off a potential recruiter. Who the hell cares, a company where I cannot have a touch of personality is not a place I want to work at either.

Must be because I learned this job in the early 2000s, when sysadmins were wearing black shirts and listening to death metal, and the CEO stayed well away from that office, not the shirt-wearing, well-trimmed DevOps you see at conferences these days.

The only potentially "controversial" idea (as in, corp might not like it but will have to deal with it) that is still accepted in tech is being trans or a furry. I have no issue with either, mind you, just pointing out that anything else is a no-no.

If it's important to you then you should. There are places that allow/encourage people to be individuals.

>The only potentially "controversial" idea (as in, corp might not like it but will have to deal with it) that is still accepted in tech is being trans or a furry. I have no issue with either, mind you, just pointing out that anything else is a no-no.

That said be careful what you write and how you phrase it because it's one thing to have an opinion, and another to make a statement like that.

That's the bloody point. Fuck having to walk on eggshells, especially when I made it quite clear I have no issues with that. I had to be quite careful with the wording, and I know exactly this opens me to be attacked and pointed out as a bigot because I equated gender identity struggles with identity in general. How dare I.

We're all walking on eggshells and get quickly silenced if we even dare question it. I do not wish the Internet to operate under mob rule.

The things you say in public could be heard by someone and those someones have the gall to form an opinion of you you don't like -- some may even confront you about it.

Disagreement, unemployability, hostility, these are among the prices we pay for saying things in public places such as the internet. You can decide to pay the price and maybe turn it into a fruitful discussion (granted, unlikely on the internet) or you can shut up and seethe with anger for "being silenced".

> especially when I made it quite clear I have no issues with that.

No, you didn't. You pretty much said "just saying" as though that absolves you of what you actually said [0].

[0] https://www.npr.org/2010/12/18/132160770/its-rude-its-crude-...

People increasingly don't even read the posts before the go off on ideological rants and false accusations.

Eh? The comment I replied to said `The only potentially "controversial" idea (as in, corp might not like it but will have to deal with it) that is still accepted in tech is being trans or a furry. I have no issue with either, mind you, just pointing out that anything else is a no-no.`

The discussion is around identity, and mentioning that these days only gender identity is a corporate-acceptable struggle. I claim that identity in general should be celebrated. I shan't be afraid to say, on my blog I'm an anarchist, or, for argument's sake, I'm a satanist, I am trans, I vote Trump, Google is a shitty company, or Star Wars is a terrible franchise.

No, you don't get to do that on any topic. If you write a blog post on a programming language feature, and in the middle of your post decide to slip in a note about your feelings on the middle east conflict, web3/crypto or your political opinions, expect people to talk about that. You decided it was important enough to mention in your post, so it's up for discussion.

> and just a way to entrap me.

Nah, you don't get "woe is me" card if you shoehorn in a dog whistle and get called out on it.

> I shan't be afraid to say, on my blog I'm an anarchist, or, for argument's sake, I'm a satanist, I am trans, I vote Trump, Google is a shitty company, or Star Wars is a terrible franchise.

Do that. But don't be surprised if people treat your words equally.

If you can't keep your message on-point, that's a you problem, not an everyone else problem.

This is why social media is shit today. It's full of people unable to sustain intelligent discussion, so they try to find hidden meaning behind someone else's words.

You see a dog whistle, I see a person that gets off doing online witch hunts, instead of simply knowing how to disagree. If you have to resort to the personal attack, it's quite obvious there is no intelligent argument to be had here.

This is not Twitter. Good day.

You don’t want to live in a world where people won’t hire you because they don’t like you? You’re in for a rough ride.

Actually my gender and race are much more "me" than my blog, cause I might change my opinions and my blog no longer reflects my internal "states".

You can’t discriminate based on sex or race, you can based on personality.

1. You probably don't have many friends or

2. Your friends are not very diverse

Outside, in the real world, I can sit and have a very pleasant conversation on TV shows or Lisp interpreters with someone with terrible ideas or belief which are inconsequential to the matter at hand and are not part of the conversation. I can sit for a beer with childhood acquaintances that I know are racist, bigots or generally idiots, because we're talking about something else than the things I know we don't see eye to eye. And that's fine.

It is frightening that we're forgetting how real people outside the Internet are, behave and can get along in all their complexity.

Where did I say that?

> Outside, in the real world, I can sit and have a very pleasant conversation on TV shows or Lisp interpreters with someone with terrible ideas or belief which are inconsequential to the matter at hand and are not part of the conversation. I can sit for a beer with childhood acquaintances that I know are racist, bigots or generally idiots, because we're talking about something else than the things I know we don't see eye to eye. And that's fine.

Good for you. We're multinational company with thousands of employees, I personally been witness to situations where incompatibility in views caused issues during work. In my free time, with my childhood acquaintances I can talk about anything, during work with my colleagues I want to have productive workday - not arguing about current flavor of racism or whoever-knows-what's opinions about anarchy.

Again I know it's not black and white and everyone has different red lines. If someone treats killing baby mammals as their favorite form of entertainment I probably can't work with them.

My original post was refuting claims that a blog and public code could get you hired.

I know that companies will see me as not a good fit. That's a good thing for both of us because I've come to realize that I'm not a good fit for a sterile office environment.

A blog can get you hired.

Your blog will not.

We all have our quirks, and we should celebrate them. I know your blog, I can't say I understand where you're coming from or that I relate very much with your persona, but I appreciate that you're able to stand out as your own, and I'm able to recognise you among the masses.

But in many cases, outside the fight for gender identity freedom, this is not possible in the world of modern social media, where you're always one step from being lynched by a mob because you dared go against the grain. The Twitterverse is the reason we're all sterile clones of each other, dividing everybody into a us vs them culture battle. That's too much nonsense for me.

Thanks for the level headed conversation

I know if I was hiring for something and found that post, that'd be an instant no-hire from me.

People boycott things all the time for all kinds of reasons. Some people boycott Israeli businesses due to the Israel/Palestine conflict, other people boycott MyPillow, and others boycott Chik-Fil-A, or more recently Budweiser. The outrage here on HN is a bit annoying, considering this used to be a fairly balanced platform.

As a consumer, boycotting a business is basically the only recourse for whatever grievance (justified or not) you may have which happens to be outside the purview of the law. Or is boycotting not petty only when your tribe does it?

But if many people think you are being petty/bonkers/anti-something-they-care-about based on why you are boycotting particular businesses, that might cause you some trouble.

> Or is boycotting not petty only when your tribe does it?

There are certainly some boycotts I don't participate in, but respect the decision of those who do.

Boycotting is petty when people think it's petty (pettiness is an opinion, not an intrinsic property of something). If you want to talk about "tribes", sure, maybe a particular "tribe" thinks some particular boycott is petty. That's life.

I don't care how good of a C whiz this person is, if I see that crap associated with an applicant their application is going straight to the incinerator. Even if I had no problem hiring bad, asshole human beings, this guy is a legal liability.

People really don't read my blog posts very well.

You're the one that isn't getting hired. Whether you recognize your error or not, the people looking to hire do. There's content in your posts that if they were in a company slack message would be a major liability. Most companies don't believe in breaking the law.

The moderation of lobste.rs is nowhere near as even-handed as HN, as his example (and many others) demonstrates.

Beyond being an ethically bad and bigoted person, this guy would bring state and federal liability to the company from the first day on the job. I don't care if he disagrees, this isn't a matter up for discussion, I will not break the law for you.

I'd suggest separate technical/non-technical blogs and only referring people to the first. I'm mostly thinking of all the blog posts that explicitly point to the disclaimer..

You don't have to hide the personal blog but this is probably a bit much for sites you point employers at.

I've come to expect it.

Notice that I never wondered why companies don't hire me. I merely said they don't. I know I'm not a good fit in a sterile work environment.

EDIT: Took a quick look at your blog to see if there were any obvious red flags and found this, in the context of the Rust Foundation's prohibition of firearms at Rust events

> I have a concealed carry permit. I have firearms and other weapons. I know how to use them, and I will use them in defense of my wife and myself.

> And you can bet I carry them into places I consider dangerous if it is legal to.

If I was hiring, this would be a huge red flag to me. Why do you need to even consider bringing a firearm into a conference?

> "Why can't I get a job?"

> - man with 30ft pole behind them with a red flag hoisted on it