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> At the end of my senior year, I received an e-mail from a Software QA Manager at Apple (who followed my comments at the bottom of TechCrunch articles) invitin

> At the end of my senior year, I received an e-mail from a Software QA Manager at Apple (who followed my comments at the bottom of TechCrunch articles) inviting me for an on-site interview. Can anyone tell me how common is it in the Bay Area to get opportunities based on your online presence? In India, I have seen that being well connected on LinkedIn is the most significant factor in getting contacted by technical recruiters. Although, blogs and projects are nice to have, but doesn't necessarily mean you'll have more offers on hand.

snewk 9y ago
not in the bay area, but a US startup where i once worked found quite a few candidates by scouring stackoverflow and contacting people who consistently gave valuable responses.
eropple 9y ago
Not in the Bay, because I like being able to afford living, but in Boston--and probably a solid 10-15% of my business as a consultant comes from Hacker News posts. Not just devops stuff, either; not too long ago I consulted on something much more general software-dev after being noticed with a one-off post about something or other.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Not in the Bay, because I like being able to afford living Nice. There are times, when things are in one of their gross phases here, that that is literally the only reason I stick around. Nice. Arg, I was going to engage, but just... whatever. Ok yeah, it's impossible to live in the bay, HN is gross and only valuable for money, the world sucks. Sorry, it's not even you. It's just this running joke of dissing on HN in passing (not even a solid critique or actionable complaint) that's getting a bit old. It seems like a common sentiment, but I know this is just randomness/selection bias doing its thing. But it's slightly frustrating when the disses are sandwiched around the substance, so there's no way to even respond to them without by definition being off-topic. So you end up getting a free, cheap shot. Anecdotally, the mods work their butts off, so if there's something specific that you're hoping will change, they're more than willing to listen. Especially if the community starts collectively nodding in agreement. Though usually it's better to express this in a tangentially-related topic.
  - eropple 9y ago
    Yes, I avoid living in the Bay Area because I literally couldn't afford to live there without having my rent payments or the commute suck my life away. I've run the numbers. I couldn't. I don't feel bad about not being able to for all sorts of reasons, but whether I felt bad or not doesn't change that the math doesn't work. As for the latter, I edited it before your reply because I didn't really feel like getting into it because it's late--but I will be straight with you, if there's a "running joke" out there I certainly wasn't participating in its spread. Those critiques--and I'm happy to shoot the shit about them, my email is in my profile and you're welcome to say hey--don't belong in this thread.
geppeto 9y ago
An engineer with all those things will get the same salary as a new grad or someone else with a few years of experience (or even a coding school grad), in the bay area. Many people do those things simply to get a phone call or email back, and have no leverage at all in the actual technical interview process. And there is no shortage of technical interviews in programming, very common for a job seeker to do 12 - 15 interviews at different companies during their interview cycle. So again, standing out to recruiters is not really worthwhile. Although recruiters that do look for those things will swear by finding candidates with public github contributions, but thats how they avoid living in tents, but its not an objective reality.
askafriend 9y ago
This guy was prolific on TechCrunch though. He was probably in the top 1% of commenters if not the top. If you went to TechCrunch at all, you were bound to run into his name. The quality of his content, I can't attest to, but he certainly put himself out there and someone was bound to notice - especially with TC's viewership.
sparky_ 9y ago
Anecdotal: though I'm far from a top contributor, the CTO at my first job out of school eventually confessed that it was my Stack Overflow profile that convinced him to make the call.

snewk 9y ago

not in the bay area, but a US startup where i once worked found quite a few candidates by scouring stackoverflow and contacting people who consistently gave valuable responses.

eropple 9y ago

Not in the Bay, because I like being able to afford living, but in Boston--and probably a solid 10-15% of my business as a consultant comes from Hacker News posts. Not just devops stuff, either; not too long ago I consulted on something much more general software-dev after being noticed with a one-off post about something or other.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
Not in the Bay, because I like being able to afford living Nice. There are times, when things are in one of their gross phases here, that that is literally the only reason I stick around. Nice. Arg, I was going to engage, but just... whatever. Ok yeah, it's impossible to live in the bay, HN is gross and only valuable for money, the world sucks. Sorry, it's not even you. It's just this running joke of dissing on HN in passing (not even a solid critique or actionable complaint) that's getting a bit old. It seems like a common sentiment, but I know this is just randomness/selection bias doing its thing. But it's slightly frustrating when the disses are sandwiched around the substance, so there's no way to even respond to them without by definition being off-topic. So you end up getting a free, cheap shot. Anecdotally, the mods work their butts off, so if there's something specific that you're hoping will change, they're more than willing to listen. Especially if the community starts collectively nodding in agreement. Though usually it's better to express this in a tangentially-related topic.
- eropple 9y ago
  Yes, I avoid living in the Bay Area because I literally couldn't afford to live there without having my rent payments or the commute suck my life away. I've run the numbers. I couldn't. I don't feel bad about not being able to for all sorts of reasons, but whether I felt bad or not doesn't change that the math doesn't work. As for the latter, I edited it before your reply because I didn't really feel like getting into it because it's late--but I will be straight with you, if there's a "running joke" out there I certainly wasn't participating in its spread. Those critiques--and I'm happy to shoot the shit about them, my email is in my profile and you're welcome to say hey--don't belong in this thread.

geppeto 9y ago

An engineer with all those things will get the same salary as a new grad or someone else with a few years of experience (or even a coding school grad), in the bay area. Many people do those things simply to get a phone call or email back, and have no leverage at all in the actual technical interview process. And there is no shortage of technical interviews in programming, very common for a job seeker to do 12 - 15 interviews at different companies during their interview cycle. So again, standing out to recruiters is not really worthwhile. Although recruiters that do look for those things will swear by finding candidates with public github contributions, but thats how they avoid living in tents, but its not an objective reality.

askafriend 9y ago

This guy was prolific on TechCrunch though. He was probably in the top 1% of commenters if not the top. If you went to TechCrunch at all, you were bound to run into his name. The quality of his content, I can't attest to, but he certainly put himself out there and someone was bound to notice - especially with TC's viewership.

sparky_ 9y ago

Anecdotal: though I'm far from a top contributor, the CTO at my first job out of school eventually confessed that it was my Stack Overflow profile that convinced him to make the call.