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I completely agree with you in principle, yet I still find myself working on a personal website with stuff to show off how I think and work. In any industry, y

I completely agree with you in principle, yet I still find myself working on a personal website with stuff to show off how I think and work. In any industry, you need to capture people's attention one way or another. You can craft your personal brand through a website, and your projects and your articles -- Or you can craft your personal brand in person, by schmoozing and networking and making sure people know who you are and what you can do. I'm not the best people person, but I am a truly excellent software engineer and businessman. I haven't had much success maintaining a loyal network of people who will connect me with opportunities, but I do have an excellent track record of building great software. The problem is, how do I convince people of that? Most of my code is proprietary and cannot be shared with prospective clients or companies.

majormajor 9y ago
I believe that insisting on seeing code is a trap. Code is notoriously tricky to evaluate without actually running it for a while, anyway - look at all the bugs that make it through code reviews - so it works well for "ok they're not completely full of shit" but rarely a lot beyond that. If there's truly interesting and clever architectural stuff going on, that can be explained in words in an interview (in person or not). That puts some burden back on people skills, but... if you're creating clever solutions you can't explain to other technical people, I'm going to be worried about your ability to work on a team anyway. If I'm hiring someone with more than 5 years of experience I'm hoping they can tell me some interesting war stories or have some interesting design ideas when asked about a potential business problem.