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I would actually not apply to this company. All of the advice sounds great, but not at all practical for some of the best engineers in I’ve met. >Regular cont

I would actually not apply to this company. All of the advice sounds great, but not at all practical for some of the best engineers in I’ve met. >Regular contibutions to personal GitHub for a year, well too bad I work 15 hours a day in this tech company that has private git repos > open source contributions, or stackoverflow answers Well too bad that I don’t want to work opensource or use stack overflow (I don’t for work because we have our own internal one for years) > show measurable impact Well too bad, whatever impact I have in the corner of a 50000 employee company is probably not going to be enough for you. How about just checking I know what I put on the resume and being done with it, instead of expecting me to cure cancer for a job position that has me change colors of a button every few days? Edit: to be clear, I do agree with some of the things said like “look for a reason to say yes”. This is generally good advice outside of hiring. It brings new opportunities and when it goes wrong, lessons.

irrational 4y ago
> well too bad I work 15 hours a day in this tech company that has private git repos Same. I've been in the industry for nearly 25 years and have written hundreds of thousands of lines of code and tens of thousands of sql queries, but I can't share any of it.
- bastardoperator 4y ago
  If you want to play the game: https://github.com/artiebits/fake-git-history https://github.com/artiebits/fake-git-history
  - kube-system 4y ago
    If I am considering a candidate enough to look at their GitHub, I will actually look at the content. If someone was actually trying to pass this off as relevant work, I’d disqualify them for being dishonest. They’d be 1000x better off by having no GitHub history.
    - bastardoperator 4y ago
      Not if it's in a private repo... you won't be looking at anything. Are you going to outright reject a candidate because you can't see contributions to their current employers private org/repo? I believe this is the point the poster is trying to drive home. You can't see their contributions because they're private.
      - kube-system 4y ago
        If you commit only to private repos then you shouldn’t be linking to your GitHub, as this article also says. Resumes are for communication. Communicate! Tell the reader what you do, and demonstrate it as much as you can. Everyone knows that private repos are a thing, that’s okay. This can be articulated.
        CBarkleyU 4y ago
        I've never linked to my GitHub, yet it sometimes still comes up in interviews.
        bastardoperator 4y ago
        The article says verbatim "Don’t include a link to your GitHub link if it’s empty." yet you're giving 1000x (your words) credence to an empty profile versus someone working privately. Private contributions show up on the graph, you just can't see the content of the commit. So it's not empty and to your point it can be articulated. Sounds like you just want to see some examples of work, just ask for that, but that's not a resume.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        kube-system 4y ago
        “A commit graph and nothing else” is approximately equivalent to empty as far as I am concerned. If I clicked such a link on a resume, I’d say “wtf am I supposed to be looking at here?” If your repos are private, just tell me they’re private. It is well known that many engineers can’t share their work. It isn’t a requirement. But if you do share your GitHub, make sure it adds value to your resume and doesn’t detract from it.
johncessna 4y ago
And that's fine. I think there's confusion that every SWE can work at every company. Every place has bias in their hiring. It's literally the point of screening candidates. This place chooses to bias against folks who just want to code at work and want to use a traditional resume. Makes sense when every hire can make or break your company and you don't have the resources to put someone through a multi-month boot camp before letting them touch the code base.
- darth_avocado 4y ago
  When every hire can make or break your company, then you are looking at this from a very wrong perspective. In that case you should be hiring in network, candidates you know, or are vetted by people you trust. Or hire people on contract and convert them to full time. Or work with trusted vendors in the field who can source great candidates. Not every SWE can work at every company, that is pretty much true. But creating arbitrary “signals” to figure out who will be a great fit will doom your company with a very specific type of people, which is not what you want when every candidate can make or break your company.
cosentiyes 4y ago
To be fair, they explicitly say that github/so/etc is optional: We understand that not everyone has time to contribute to public discourse, so #2 is optional.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  Making something optional on an application is a waste of everyone's time. If it is optional, and it doesn't have bearing on the application process, then don't ask me to include it. If it is optional, but it does have bearing on the application process, then I assume that I'm not a good fit for you. If it is optional, and it officially doesn't have bearing, your screeners and interviewers may still have an internal bias that favors applications which "go the extra step" to do the optional work. Even if they don't, I'm going to assume that they do and that we're all wasting everyone's time in asking me to apply.
  - darth_avocado 4y ago
    This. Companies just like to make candidates go that extra mile to finally not even look at their resume. Job listings where they already are interviewing candidates or have hired one are still up. Imagine how much time is wasted with frivolous optional questions.
  - brookst 4y ago
    Disagree. There can be multiple optional things, where nobody is expected to have all of them, but everybody should have some of them. It’s a way to expand the pool. Startups especially need a lot of diversity of skills, so rather than specifying the one ideal set of skills/experiences, it’s better to be open to a wider range and then use what you’ve gained from this hire to inform what you need in the next. Rigid checkbox criteria makes sense in dinosaur companies, but not small ones.
  - cosentiyes 4y ago
    They're literally flagging one "sanctioned" way to provide signal as an example in a resume advice post--how is that a waste of time? This lets people infer what other types of "optional" content might provide signal: publications, blog posts, etc. Transparency in the application process is fantastic and it's wild to me that people are upset about a company posting some ways that applicants can make themselves stand out. This is order of magnitudes better than VC, finance, etc.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kube-system 4y ago
> Well too bad that I don’t want to work opensource or use stack overflow (I don’t for work because we have our own internal one for years) Then communicate that. The point in the article is just to demonstrate that you deliver consistently. If you have meaningful contributions to an internal system, tell me about it. > whatever impact I have in the corner of a 50000 employee company is probably not going to be enough for you. Working at a large company is definitely different than working at a small company. The breadth and depth of the job responsibilities will be different. That’s okay. Not every job is for everyone. > How about just checking I know what I put on the resume and being done with it What do you mean by “check”? Resumes are a place for the candidate to tell me about themselves, they’re not some sort of background investigation. I presume they are honest unless the candidate gives me a reason otherwise. And if the candidate gives me a reason to believe they’re not honest, I’m not wasting any time sleuthing about their background — they’re disqualified.
azangru 4y ago
> How about just checking I know what I put on the resume and being done with it Which would bring us to another favorite Hacker News topic, i.e. venting about how tech interviews are terrible, and why don't interviewers just look at the candidate's resume and projects instead :-)
throwaway55780 4y ago
It's also worth noting that many companies have policies against open-source contributions, the use of public forums (like stackoverflow), and so forth. This is obviously more common in big tech as opposed to startups. I know employees in those corps that love coding and do that stuff in their spare time - but because of the policies they do it under a screen name and certainly don't mention it in their resumes, etc. In some of those corps there actually is a "dont ask dont tell" kind of policy around personal projects/blog posts/oss contributions/etc. as the company forbids them unless you have special approval. However on the flip side managers know that the people with those projects and experiences often have a stronger drive than those simply treating coding as a 9-5 job. I also know of cases where the interviewers were very impressed by the candidate's Github repo/oss contributions but stated that the candidate would have to stop working on that stuff after being hired. I know people who upon graduation seperated their projects for this purpose, continuing some under a screen name and having other less important ones for resume purpose knowing that they may not be able to continue working on them under that name in the future.
- __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  Worth noting, yes. But it's also not unreasonable to prefer candidates that avoid such environments.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  I actually did not know that was a thing, and I’ve been working in startups for over a decade now. I’ve never worked in big tech though, so maybe it’s common there. If a company told me I couldn’t work on side projects without approval, I’d tell them to fuck off.
  - phkahler 4y ago
    >> I’d tell them to fuck off. I just tell them "this is something I do" and if that's a problem "I'm not giving that up". Leave it to them to end the interview, no need to get an attitude.
    - 4y ago
geodel 4y ago
Totally agree. This all sounds like a impressive sounding bullshit.
Existenceblinks 4y ago
Sometimes I wonder sales people trying to sell vs applicants chasing interview, whose job is more soul-crushing.
brookst 4y ago
I don’t think they were suggesting you have to do all of those things, but rather that those things are examples of resume content that demonstrates what they’re looking for.
agumonkey 4y ago
Also, I've heard a lot of people asking for github, so I made one. Recruiters all say "oh very nice" and no one reads a line. ever.
Patrol8394 4y ago
Well said. Also, for professionals who have a life besides coding and work, they might prefer spending their time with family, kids etc. I spend my entire day at work in front of a screen coding, writing documents, meetings etc … the last thing I wanna do in my non existent spare time is to spend more time indoor in front of screen working on side/open-source projects and stack overflow. You might use that as metric for junior/fresh out of college, but definitely not for experienced professionals. It would not work for me and I have built tons of staff.
- mypalmike 4y ago
  They're not looking for experienced professionals. They're looking for cheap, young, enthusiastic laborers with no lives.
hiccuphippo 4y ago
I would love to work on a company that allows time to contribute to opensource or answering questions on SO. 15 hours a day sounds like modern slavery.
version_five 4y ago
I can see valuing some clearly passion driven extracurricular activity. Like if someone is a top SO contributor, that's cool. Or if they're part of a big open source project. Or also if they volunteer at a soup kitchen or charity. Stuff like that may be worth including on your cv to show what your interests are. I wouldn't weight it much differently than anything on the hobbies section, but it's still cool. Personally I'd be wary of hiring someone who had done just the right amount of all this stuff, and who appeared to be soulessly gaming metrics instead of actually being interested in stuff. Otoh, there are jobs and work environments that fit well for that kind of person, and screenings that optimize to make sure that's what they get. It's just as important for people that aren't that way to not get accidentally stuck in such an environment. Like a "17 pieces of flare is only the minimum" kind of vibe
time_to_smile 4y ago
Startups tend to be shockingly ignorant of the culture at larger companies (or non-startups in general), and personally I find it a bit of a red flag when it seems like nobody at a startup has worked for a real business before. It's great to have fresh takes, but there should be a few people on the team who also know how normal companies operate. I remember interviewing for a startup that sounded pretty promising. The interview was going well and then I was asked for a presentation. I told them that I was more than happy to present on personal projects (of which I had plenty) but was not comfortable sharing details of work related projects while not explicitly representing that company. They basically said "too bad" and where shocked that I cancelled the rest of the interview. I've worked at plenty of a companies in the past where being willing to share other companies' internal work would be the red flag, and turning down such a request would be seen as a good sign. > I would actually not apply to this company. Sadly that was the same impression I've had, and this is from someone who has been following the author's writing for awhile. Especially in the current economic environment.
- ghaff 4y ago
  A lot of companies are very uptight about external presentations without explicit approval. This is mostly about conferences and the the like but a private presentation to a competitor might well be looked at even less favorably.
chriskanan 4y ago
I think the advice she has is mostly pretty spot-on for recent graduates looking for ML Engineer jobs, and I think her advice is consistent with what I was mostly looking for when I was a hiring manager for non-senior roles. That said, I agree that the advice is much less helpful for anyone who has significant industry experience as an ML engineer.
chipsgithub 4y ago
>Regular contibutions to personal GitHub for a year, But what you quoted is not what she wrote. What she wrote was Some signals of persistence that I’ve seen: * Daily contribution to GitHub for one whole year. * Being good at anything that requires consistent effort, e.g. a Kaggle master, a chess master, a professional athlete, etc. * Having previously joined another early startup before and stuck around. I get that the idea here is to look for positive signal but for someone talking about daily github contributions her own https://github.com/chiphuyen?tab=repositories https://github.com/chiphuyen?tab=repositories falls a bit short. Not a good look.
quickthrower2 4y ago
No one really knows how to hire so they chuck in random filters that sound good. That said I get the impression overall that the OP preponders each CV and tries to evaluate it on its merits. Small companies can’t afford to turn good people away because of silly reasons like you haven’t produced code on an open license and uploaded it to Azure. Impact is about understanding the impact. Which talks to then getting jobs where you can write a good story about them after. Which you might do. I don’t. I optimise for joy and teamwork so I take the hit in bragging rights. However there is usually a story to tell of how you helped the company be better. All this said I am curious if the “no cv” approach of fly.io will catch on. They have an interesting sounding application process.
Nimitz14 4y ago
Don’t worry, pretty clear from this comment you’d be a terrible match for an early stage startup.
lucb1e 4y ago
I don't think it should all be taken that literally. It's not about literally using GitHub or stackoverflow but about having anything demonstrable, even if it's just words on paper about what you did in your role and not a link to something public. If you can't show anything, you're a tough sell no matter where you apply, and that's not meant meanly but it's the problem literally everyone has when looking to get their first serious job without having done side projects or other demonstrable things in the past. You might be offered an entry level position if they don't simply take your word for it or have tests available to assess claimed skills. (On the other hand, a friend once took a test for a job, like hacking some application for a security consultant position, did very well at it, better apparently than someone who joined a month earlier and gets a principal consultant title and salary, but my friend was given a junior position... YMMV how much they care about tests if you can talk the talk and are of the age to get grey or bald.)
- thinking4real 4y ago
  Oh they literally want code on github. And that’s a hard no for me and should be for most. I don’t play these games. I don’t take tests, I don’t have public repos, and I’m not going to change that. Why? Because these tests are arbitrary, faulty, and highly based in subjectivity. They are costly to me both in time and mental health. Back when I was fresh and did them, I found that I always ended up starting a new job with a bad attitude. Well duh, it’s abusive to make a person stand in front of others and have them evaluate their worth live. It’s abusive to ask someone to work for you for free so that they can see if they like you. It’s a terrible cycle and it shouldn’t be justified or normalized. There are plenty of people out there who want to hire you without coming up with idiotic games for you to have to play. Seek them out.

irrational 4y ago

> well too bad I work 15 hours a day in this tech company that has private git repos Same. I've been in the industry for nearly 25 years and have written hundreds of thousands of lines of code and tens of thousands of sql queries, but I can't share any of it.

bastardoperator 4y ago
If you want to play the game: https://github.com/artiebits/fake-git-history https://github.com/artiebits/fake-git-history
- kube-system 4y ago
  If I am considering a candidate enough to look at their GitHub, I will actually look at the content. If someone was actually trying to pass this off as relevant work, I’d disqualify them for being dishonest. They’d be 1000x better off by having no GitHub history.
  - bastardoperator 4y ago
    Not if it's in a private repo... you won't be looking at anything. Are you going to outright reject a candidate because you can't see contributions to their current employers private org/repo? I believe this is the point the poster is trying to drive home. You can't see their contributions because they're private.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      If you commit only to private repos then you shouldn’t be linking to your GitHub, as this article also says. Resumes are for communication. Communicate! Tell the reader what you do, and demonstrate it as much as you can. Everyone knows that private repos are a thing, that’s okay. This can be articulated.
      - CBarkleyU 4y ago
        I've never linked to my GitHub, yet it sometimes still comes up in interviews.
      - bastardoperator 4y ago
        The article says verbatim "Don’t include a link to your GitHub link if it’s empty." yet you're giving 1000x (your words) credence to an empty profile versus someone working privately. Private contributions show up on the graph, you just can't see the content of the commit. So it's not empty and to your point it can be articulated. Sounds like you just want to see some examples of work, just ask for that, but that's not a resume.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        kube-system 4y ago
        “A commit graph and nothing else” is approximately equivalent to empty as far as I am concerned. If I clicked such a link on a resume, I’d say “wtf am I supposed to be looking at here?” If your repos are private, just tell me they’re private. It is well known that many engineers can’t share their work. It isn’t a requirement. But if you do share your GitHub, make sure it adds value to your resume and doesn’t detract from it.

johncessna 4y ago

And that's fine. I think there's confusion that every SWE can work at every company. Every place has bias in their hiring. It's literally the point of screening candidates. This place chooses to bias against folks who just want to code at work and want to use a traditional resume. Makes sense when every hire can make or break your company and you don't have the resources to put someone through a multi-month boot camp before letting them touch the code base.

darth_avocado 4y ago
When every hire can make or break your company, then you are looking at this from a very wrong perspective. In that case you should be hiring in network, candidates you know, or are vetted by people you trust. Or hire people on contract and convert them to full time. Or work with trusted vendors in the field who can source great candidates. Not every SWE can work at every company, that is pretty much true. But creating arbitrary “signals” to figure out who will be a great fit will doom your company with a very specific type of people, which is not what you want when every candidate can make or break your company.

cosentiyes 4y ago

To be fair, they explicitly say that github/so/etc is optional: We understand that not everyone has time to contribute to public discourse, so #2 is optional.

zdragnar 4y ago
Making something optional on an application is a waste of everyone's time. If it is optional, and it doesn't have bearing on the application process, then don't ask me to include it. If it is optional, but it does have bearing on the application process, then I assume that I'm not a good fit for you. If it is optional, and it officially doesn't have bearing, your screeners and interviewers may still have an internal bias that favors applications which "go the extra step" to do the optional work. Even if they don't, I'm going to assume that they do and that we're all wasting everyone's time in asking me to apply.
- darth_avocado 4y ago
  This. Companies just like to make candidates go that extra mile to finally not even look at their resume. Job listings where they already are interviewing candidates or have hired one are still up. Imagine how much time is wasted with frivolous optional questions.
- brookst 4y ago
  Disagree. There can be multiple optional things, where nobody is expected to have all of them, but everybody should have some of them. It’s a way to expand the pool. Startups especially need a lot of diversity of skills, so rather than specifying the one ideal set of skills/experiences, it’s better to be open to a wider range and then use what you’ve gained from this hire to inform what you need in the next. Rigid checkbox criteria makes sense in dinosaur companies, but not small ones.
- cosentiyes 4y ago
  They're literally flagging one "sanctioned" way to provide signal as an example in a resume advice post--how is that a waste of time? This lets people infer what other types of "optional" content might provide signal: publications, blog posts, etc. Transparency in the application process is fantastic and it's wild to me that people are upset about a company posting some ways that applicants can make themselves stand out. This is order of magnitudes better than VC, finance, etc.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kube-system 4y ago

> Well too bad that I don’t want to work opensource or use stack overflow (I don’t for work because we have our own internal one for years) Then communicate that. The point in the article is just to demonstrate that you deliver consistently. If you have meaningful contributions to an internal system, tell me about it. > whatever impact I have in the corner of a 50000 employee company is probably not going to be enough for you. Working at a large company is definitely different than working at a small company. The breadth and depth of the job responsibilities will be different. That’s okay. Not every job is for everyone. > How about just checking I know what I put on the resume and being done with it What do you mean by “check”? Resumes are a place for the candidate to tell me about themselves, they’re not some sort of background investigation. I presume they are honest unless the candidate gives me a reason otherwise. And if the candidate gives me a reason to believe they’re not honest, I’m not wasting any time sleuthing about their background — they’re disqualified.

azangru 4y ago

> How about just checking I know what I put on the resume and being done with it Which would bring us to another favorite Hacker News topic, i.e. venting about how tech interviews are terrible, and why don't interviewers just look at the candidate's resume and projects instead :-)

throwaway55780 4y ago

It's also worth noting that many companies have policies against open-source contributions, the use of public forums (like stackoverflow), and so forth. This is obviously more common in big tech as opposed to startups. I know employees in those corps that love coding and do that stuff in their spare time - but because of the policies they do it under a screen name and certainly don't mention it in their resumes, etc. In some of those corps there actually is a "dont ask dont tell" kind of policy around personal projects/blog posts/oss contributions/etc. as the company forbids them unless you have special approval. However on the flip side managers know that the people with those projects and experiences often have a stronger drive than those simply treating coding as a 9-5 job. I also know of cases where the interviewers were very impressed by the candidate's Github repo/oss contributions but stated that the candidate would have to stop working on that stuff after being hired. I know people who upon graduation seperated their projects for this purpose, continuing some under a screen name and having other less important ones for resume purpose knowing that they may not be able to continue working on them under that name in the future.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
Worth noting, yes. But it's also not unreasonable to prefer candidates that avoid such environments.
danielvaughn 4y ago
I actually did not know that was a thing, and I’ve been working in startups for over a decade now. I’ve never worked in big tech though, so maybe it’s common there. If a company told me I couldn’t work on side projects without approval, I’d tell them to fuck off.
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> I’d tell them to fuck off. I just tell them "this is something I do" and if that's a problem "I'm not giving that up". Leave it to them to end the interview, no need to get an attitude.
  - 4y ago

geodel 4y ago

Totally agree. This all sounds like a impressive sounding bullshit.

Existenceblinks 4y ago

Sometimes I wonder sales people trying to sell vs applicants chasing interview, whose job is more soul-crushing.

brookst 4y ago

I don’t think they were suggesting you have to do all of those things, but rather that those things are examples of resume content that demonstrates what they’re looking for.

agumonkey 4y ago

Also, I've heard a lot of people asking for github, so I made one. Recruiters all say "oh very nice" and no one reads a line. ever.

Patrol8394 4y ago

Well said. Also, for professionals who have a life besides coding and work, they might prefer spending their time with family, kids etc. I spend my entire day at work in front of a screen coding, writing documents, meetings etc … the last thing I wanna do in my non existent spare time is to spend more time indoor in front of screen working on side/open-source projects and stack overflow. You might use that as metric for junior/fresh out of college, but definitely not for experienced professionals. It would not work for me and I have built tons of staff.

mypalmike 4y ago
They're not looking for experienced professionals. They're looking for cheap, young, enthusiastic laborers with no lives.

hiccuphippo 4y ago

I would love to work on a company that allows time to contribute to opensource or answering questions on SO. 15 hours a day sounds like modern slavery.

version_five 4y ago

I can see valuing some clearly passion driven extracurricular activity. Like if someone is a top SO contributor, that's cool. Or if they're part of a big open source project. Or also if they volunteer at a soup kitchen or charity. Stuff like that may be worth including on your cv to show what your interests are. I wouldn't weight it much differently than anything on the hobbies section, but it's still cool. Personally I'd be wary of hiring someone who had done just the right amount of all this stuff, and who appeared to be soulessly gaming metrics instead of actually being interested in stuff. Otoh, there are jobs and work environments that fit well for that kind of person, and screenings that optimize to make sure that's what they get. It's just as important for people that aren't that way to not get accidentally stuck in such an environment. Like a "17 pieces of flare is only the minimum" kind of vibe

time_to_smile 4y ago

Startups tend to be shockingly ignorant of the culture at larger companies (or non-startups in general), and personally I find it a bit of a red flag when it seems like nobody at a startup has worked for a real business before. It's great to have fresh takes, but there should be a few people on the team who also know how normal companies operate. I remember interviewing for a startup that sounded pretty promising. The interview was going well and then I was asked for a presentation. I told them that I was more than happy to present on personal projects (of which I had plenty) but was not comfortable sharing details of work related projects while not explicitly representing that company. They basically said "too bad" and where shocked that I cancelled the rest of the interview. I've worked at plenty of a companies in the past where being willing to share other companies' internal work would be the red flag, and turning down such a request would be seen as a good sign. > I would actually not apply to this company. Sadly that was the same impression I've had, and this is from someone who has been following the author's writing for awhile. Especially in the current economic environment.

ghaff 4y ago
A lot of companies are very uptight about external presentations without explicit approval. This is mostly about conferences and the the like but a private presentation to a competitor might well be looked at even less favorably.

chriskanan 4y ago

I think the advice she has is mostly pretty spot-on for recent graduates looking for ML Engineer jobs, and I think her advice is consistent with what I was mostly looking for when I was a hiring manager for non-senior roles. That said, I agree that the advice is much less helpful for anyone who has significant industry experience as an ML engineer.

chipsgithub 4y ago

>Regular contibutions to personal GitHub for a year, But what you quoted is not what she wrote. What she wrote was Some signals of persistence that I’ve seen: * Daily contribution to GitHub for one whole year. * Being good at anything that requires consistent effort, e.g. a Kaggle master, a chess master, a professional athlete, etc. * Having previously joined another early startup before and stuck around. I get that the idea here is to look for positive signal but for someone talking about daily github contributions her own https://github.com/chiphuyen?tab=repositories https://github.com/chiphuyen?tab=repositories falls a bit short. Not a good look.

quickthrower2 4y ago

No one really knows how to hire so they chuck in random filters that sound good. That said I get the impression overall that the OP preponders each CV and tries to evaluate it on its merits. Small companies can’t afford to turn good people away because of silly reasons like you haven’t produced code on an open license and uploaded it to Azure. Impact is about understanding the impact. Which talks to then getting jobs where you can write a good story about them after. Which you might do. I don’t. I optimise for joy and teamwork so I take the hit in bragging rights. However there is usually a story to tell of how you helped the company be better. All this said I am curious if the “no cv” approach of fly.io will catch on. They have an interesting sounding application process.

Nimitz14 4y ago

Don’t worry, pretty clear from this comment you’d be a terrible match for an early stage startup.

lucb1e 4y ago

I don't think it should all be taken that literally. It's not about literally using GitHub or stackoverflow but about having anything demonstrable, even if it's just words on paper about what you did in your role and not a link to something public. If you can't show anything, you're a tough sell no matter where you apply, and that's not meant meanly but it's the problem literally everyone has when looking to get their first serious job without having done side projects or other demonstrable things in the past. You might be offered an entry level position if they don't simply take your word for it or have tests available to assess claimed skills. (On the other hand, a friend once took a test for a job, like hacking some application for a security consultant position, did very well at it, better apparently than someone who joined a month earlier and gets a principal consultant title and salary, but my friend was given a junior position... YMMV how much they care about tests if you can talk the talk and are of the age to get grey or bald.)

thinking4real 4y ago
Oh they literally want code on github. And that’s a hard no for me and should be for most. I don’t play these games. I don’t take tests, I don’t have public repos, and I’m not going to change that. Why? Because these tests are arbitrary, faulty, and highly based in subjectivity. They are costly to me both in time and mental health. Back when I was fresh and did them, I found that I always ended up starting a new job with a bad attitude. Well duh, it’s abusive to make a person stand in front of others and have them evaluate their worth live. It’s abusive to ask someone to work for you for free so that they can see if they like you. It’s a terrible cycle and it shouldn’t be justified or normalized. There are plenty of people out there who want to hire you without coming up with idiotic games for you to have to play. Seek them out.