4 ms·

I don't understand why "public creativity" would be something you'd screen for in an engineering role.

by maxk42 5y ago

im_down_w_otp 5y ago
I'm not sure. There does seem to be a pretty significant increase in selection criteria for a lot of things, from hiring to investing, that biases heavily toward rewarding "influencer" and/or "celebrity" traits.
tibbetts 5y ago
The amount of information available on candidates to hiring managers is extremely limited. Evidence of outside creativity is a pretty good sign that someone is not a bozo.
- maxk42 5y ago
  Again - I fail to see how the second part is derived from the first. If I'm already engaging in a screening process, wouldn't it be better to ask the candidate to solve a problem that relates to their role than to ask them if they've done any blogging on the topic of tech?
  - azinman2 5y ago
    Because it gives you a more rounded sense of the individual. Other passions. Other ideas. Areas they’ve worked in unrelated to your problem. Job/coding interviews are very difficult to do well, and many people such as myself tend to perform poorly due to the stress of the interview (so much that I’d rather stay in a mediocre position than go through the agony of interviewing — I hate it with every fiber of by being, and it correlates 0% to my in-job performance). It’s just more data, which is especially useful if you’re on the fence with someone. You can also see creativity which isn’t something you can test well for in an interview — especially technical interviews.
    - EvilEy3 5y ago
      > it correlates 0% to my in-job performance False. It correlates directly to your job performance, unless you're YAML developer.
      - azinman2 5y ago
        My ability to solve an artificial problem on a whiteboard time limited with a gun to my head correlates directly to my job performance? Not only does it not in my case, I don’t know how you could even make such a claim without knowing me, my work, and how I perform in such interviews… and that’s just me. Much has been written on this subject with similar anecdotes as well as quantitative research done by Google’s HR department. Clearly 0% is an exaggeration at large, but it’s well documented to be a poor correlate.
  - simonw 5y ago
    Being able to write and communicate clearly is an important skill for software engineers, especially in senior roles - and it's something that's difficult to evaluate in an interview setting. Interviews don't tend to include writing - and strong communicators who get nervous during interviewers may end up at a disadvantage.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    I think you're missing the "stand out" part of this. I've done a lot of tech interviews lately, which is where I get at ability to do the work. But when a hiring team is trying to pick among the people who do approximately as well on that, then other factors can help. At that stage, I definitely like to see things that indicate people are excited about something enough to just make a thing (a library, a small project, a blog post). If that's related to our domain or tech stack, even better. But even without that it's a plus in that it's a sign I can just give them a user problem or a technical issue and trust they'll go off and do something good with it.
  - wyager 5y ago
    By the time you've gotten someone in an interview you've already committed a huge amount of effort towards them. Seeing a cool project someone made is a very strong signal that interviewing them won't be a waste of time.
- dheera 5y ago
  Why is this such a hard problem to solve? When I was a founder it was incredibly hard to find people who are "available" and skilled because they feared listing themselves as available on LinkedIn. When I'm not a founder and skilled it's incredibly hard to get to hiring managers. Usually I get warm intros from people within companies I'm interested in, it works way better, and usually often results in jumping straight to the on-site interview step. Why isn't there a central website where you can just post your name-redacted-resume, accomplishments, and (optionally) target location and salary range anonymously, and if someone wants to reach out, then you can reveal your real name and e-mail? Or better yet a Tinder-like interface where companies swipe candidates and candidates swipe companies, albeit with no photos, just a name-redacted resume?
  - a_t48 5y ago
    You just know someone would ruin it by finding a way to cross reference it with LinkedIn data.
  - lodovic 5y ago
    This may not provide you with the desired results - you usually want to hire people for their technical skills, not how good they are building an online presence and marketing themselves.
    - dheera 5y ago
      They don't need to build an online presence, they just need to join the app and upload a resume.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
simonw 5y ago
It's not something you screen for - as I said in the article, "you don’t want to miss out on a great engineer just because they spent all of their energy making great products for prior employers rather than blogging, speaking and coding in public" But if someone has it, you're likely to take it into account. So as a candidate it's useful.
- maxk42 5y ago
  In the article you state "you don’t have to put very much work at all into public creativity in order to stand out as a job candidate". This implies that when I am acting as a hiring manager I would be screening for "public creativity." I'm trying to understand why I would want to do that. I've been a hiring manager for well over a decade and it's never been something I thought I should screen for. Indeed, in my career the majority of the best coworkers I've had have had little to no public presence online and I can think of at least one counterexample of a person who was extremely prolific with blogging and giving talks at conferences who happened to be absolutely garbage at their role. There is some underlying assumption in this article that I'm not grokking.
  - simonw 5y ago
    I tried really hard to make it clear in this post that as a hiring manager it is your job to find great candidates who don't do this. So you shouldn't "screen" for this, in terms of filtering candidates based on whether or not they have evidence of public creativity. But... of course I look beyond the resume that the candidate has sent me. Which means that, as a candidate, a relatively easy way to stand out is to have a small amount of public creativity on display for hiring managers to spot. Sometimes a candidate might interview poorly because they get nervous... but there's clear evidence out there of their skills and experience which can help guide a second round of interviews that help avoid missing out on great talent.
    - maxk42 5y ago
      So the advantage in doing this is for candidates that don't interview well? That doesn't jive with the statement in the article that "you can give yourself a big advantage in terms of standing out from the crowd with a relatively small amount of work", which seems to imply that a hiring manager would prefer candidates with blogs or a twitter audience. When I'm reviewing resumes and someone lists their blog or twitter handle on their resume, I'm going to assume it's because they don't have concrete accomplishments to point to. It's not going to rescue a candidate who has a weak resume from being passed-over and it's not going to compensate for a candidate who made it to the technical interview but then couldn't solve the assigned problem. It's nice to see when someone posts a really great piece of code in their github, but I have no way of knowing whether they were even the person who wrote the code or not, so the technical interview is their chance to show me they have at least a basic grasp of coding. If they fail that, there's nothing short of a ten thousand star project in github that might make me reconsider a poor performance in the interview and that's never happened to me before. So I still don't understand the premise that candidates with a public presence should stand out more nor the premise that if I'm a candidate a small public presence would help me. I could be wrong - it could be that most managers like to see this sort of thing, but it's never been something I've screened for and I've yet to be convinced I should start.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

I don't understand why "public creativity" would be something you'd screen for in an engineering role.

by maxk42 5y ago

I don't understand why "public creativity" would be something you'd screen for in an engineering role.

I'm not sure. There does seem to be a pretty significant increase in selection criteria for a lot of things, from hiring to investing, that biases heavily toward rewarding "influencer" and/or "celebrity" traits.

tibbetts 5y ago

The amount of information available on candidates to hiring managers is extremely limited. Evidence of outside creativity is a pretty good sign that someone is not a bozo.

maxk42 5y ago
Again - I fail to see how the second part is derived from the first. If I'm already engaging in a screening process, wouldn't it be better to ask the candidate to solve a problem that relates to their role than to ask them if they've done any blogging on the topic of tech?
- azinman2 5y ago
  Because it gives you a more rounded sense of the individual. Other passions. Other ideas. Areas they’ve worked in unrelated to your problem. Job/coding interviews are very difficult to do well, and many people such as myself tend to perform poorly due to the stress of the interview (so much that I’d rather stay in a mediocre position than go through the agony of interviewing — I hate it with every fiber of by being, and it correlates 0% to my in-job performance). It’s just more data, which is especially useful if you’re on the fence with someone. You can also see creativity which isn’t something you can test well for in an interview — especially technical interviews.
  - EvilEy3 5y ago
    > it correlates 0% to my in-job performance False. It correlates directly to your job performance, unless you're YAML developer.
    - azinman2 5y ago
      My ability to solve an artificial problem on a whiteboard time limited with a gun to my head correlates directly to my job performance? Not only does it not in my case, I don’t know how you could even make such a claim without knowing me, my work, and how I perform in such interviews… and that’s just me. Much has been written on this subject with similar anecdotes as well as quantitative research done by Google’s HR department. Clearly 0% is an exaggeration at large, but it’s well documented to be a poor correlate.
- simonw 5y ago
  Being able to write and communicate clearly is an important skill for software engineers, especially in senior roles - and it's something that's difficult to evaluate in an interview setting. Interviews don't tend to include writing - and strong communicators who get nervous during interviewers may end up at a disadvantage.
- wpietri 5y ago
  I think you're missing the "stand out" part of this. I've done a lot of tech interviews lately, which is where I get at ability to do the work. But when a hiring team is trying to pick among the people who do approximately as well on that, then other factors can help. At that stage, I definitely like to see things that indicate people are excited about something enough to just make a thing (a library, a small project, a blog post). If that's related to our domain or tech stack, even better. But even without that it's a plus in that it's a sign I can just give them a user problem or a technical issue and trust they'll go off and do something good with it.
- wyager 5y ago
  By the time you've gotten someone in an interview you've already committed a huge amount of effort towards them. Seeing a cool project someone made is a very strong signal that interviewing them won't be a waste of time.
dheera 5y ago
Why is this such a hard problem to solve? When I was a founder it was incredibly hard to find people who are "available" and skilled because they feared listing themselves as available on LinkedIn. When I'm not a founder and skilled it's incredibly hard to get to hiring managers. Usually I get warm intros from people within companies I'm interested in, it works way better, and usually often results in jumping straight to the on-site interview step. Why isn't there a central website where you can just post your name-redacted-resume, accomplishments, and (optionally) target location and salary range anonymously, and if someone wants to reach out, then you can reveal your real name and e-mail? Or better yet a Tinder-like interface where companies swipe candidates and candidates swipe companies, albeit with no photos, just a name-redacted resume?
- a_t48 5y ago
  You just know someone would ruin it by finding a way to cross reference it with LinkedIn data.
- lodovic 5y ago
  This may not provide you with the desired results - you usually want to hire people for their technical skills, not how good they are building an online presence and marketing themselves.
  - dheera 5y ago
    They don't need to build an online presence, they just need to join the app and upload a resume.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

simonw 5y ago

It's not something you screen for - as I said in the article, "you don’t want to miss out on a great engineer just because they spent all of their energy making great products for prior employers rather than blogging, speaking and coding in public" But if someone has it, you're likely to take it into account. So as a candidate it's useful.

maxk42 5y ago
In the article you state "you don’t have to put very much work at all into public creativity in order to stand out as a job candidate". This implies that when I am acting as a hiring manager I would be screening for "public creativity." I'm trying to understand why I would want to do that. I've been a hiring manager for well over a decade and it's never been something I thought I should screen for. Indeed, in my career the majority of the best coworkers I've had have had little to no public presence online and I can think of at least one counterexample of a person who was extremely prolific with blogging and giving talks at conferences who happened to be absolutely garbage at their role. There is some underlying assumption in this article that I'm not grokking.
- simonw 5y ago
  I tried really hard to make it clear in this post that as a hiring manager it is your job to find great candidates who don't do this. So you shouldn't "screen" for this, in terms of filtering candidates based on whether or not they have evidence of public creativity. But... of course I look beyond the resume that the candidate has sent me. Which means that, as a candidate, a relatively easy way to stand out is to have a small amount of public creativity on display for hiring managers to spot. Sometimes a candidate might interview poorly because they get nervous... but there's clear evidence out there of their skills and experience which can help guide a second round of interviews that help avoid missing out on great talent.
  - maxk42 5y ago
    So the advantage in doing this is for candidates that don't interview well? That doesn't jive with the statement in the article that "you can give yourself a big advantage in terms of standing out from the crowd with a relatively small amount of work", which seems to imply that a hiring manager would prefer candidates with blogs or a twitter audience. When I'm reviewing resumes and someone lists their blog or twitter handle on their resume, I'm going to assume it's because they don't have concrete accomplishments to point to. It's not going to rescue a candidate who has a weak resume from being passed-over and it's not going to compensate for a candidate who made it to the technical interview but then couldn't solve the assigned problem. It's nice to see when someone posts a really great piece of code in their github, but I have no way of knowing whether they were even the person who wrote the code or not, so the technical interview is their chance to show me they have at least a basic grasp of coding. If they fail that, there's nothing short of a ten thousand star project in github that might make me reconsider a poor performance in the interview and that's never happened to me before. So I still don't understand the premise that candidates with a public presence should stand out more nor the premise that if I'm a candidate a small public presence would help me. I could be wrong - it could be that most managers like to see this sort of thing, but it's never been something I've screened for and I've yet to be convinced I should start.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]