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Unlike another top poster, this doesn't ring true for me. I have a blog with 170-ish posts. About half are technical. Three or four have gone viral on HN. The

• robbywashere_ 3y ago
  At what point in the job finding/interviewing process are you having trouble with? If you don’t mind me asking?
  • gavinhoward 3y ago
    It can be any part. Usually, the problem is that companies find out that I'm not good as a cog in a machine. That can happen at any time, but once they do, they're not interested.
    • Hermitian909 3y ago
      > Usually, the problem is that companies find out that I'm not good as a cog in a machine IMO this is the real problem - and it comes through in your blog posts. It's very risky to hire someone who can't be a cog, you need a lot of social proof that they're worth the risk.
      • hef19898 3y ago
        There is being a mindless cog, and honestly, at the extremes, nobody eants that except for the most mindless, easiest manual jobs. And there is being a professional who does his job as part of a team, follows some basic rules and still speaks his mind, but also knows when it just doesn't do any good. Try being the second, because at the other extreme of the mindless drone (which people are forcedbto be and hardly are by choice) is being a contrarian know-all who is just impossible to work with. Edit: From what others wrote about about your blogs, I think your ascertion that your personal views shouldn't pose a proboem are wrong. By that I don't mean having them is wrong, but being as outspoken about, lets put it mildly, potentionally controversial opinions in a borderline aggressive way is the problem. It would be an equal problem if we talked veganism as another, potentionally bad, example. Nobody wants to be called out by their co-worker during lunch for having a steak everytime. And nobody wants to talk about why a co-worker feels insulted for not being ablento bring a gun to the workplace. Edit 2: Paul Graham has one of his earlier articles that seems relevant: the one about keeping a low public profile. Is more relevant than ever, the more said profile deviates from the mainstream the more it can become a problem. GP is great example for this.
        • gavinhoward 3y ago
          I went shooting with previous colleagues. They carried guns to the workplace too.
          • hef19898 3y ago
            Something is deeply wrong with the USA, like truely and deeply wrong.
            • loeg 3y ago
              Eh, this guy doesn't speak for us.
    • leovander 3y ago
      Sorry for not looking at your credentials, do you have enough experience to potential land staff+ roles? Would still be a cog but maybe a bit more breathing room depending on the type of role you apply for. https://staffeng.com/book https://staffeng.com/book has a list of different types of staff+ roles that could maybe fit.
      • gavinhoward 3y ago
        I don't think I have enough work experience. But thank you for the link.
    • raincole 3y ago
      But to get a job, at least for most positions, is exactly to be a cog in a machine.
    • emptysongglass 3y ago
      What does that actually mean? The fact you're using language like, "cog in the machine" is already telling me a lot about why companies don't want to hire you. If you told us exactly where the process breaks down for you and why with illustrative examples, we might be able to help you identify where it's going wrong for you. But tip 1, companies hire people who are positive about how they can contribute and work within an org. 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?
      • teaearlgraycold 3y ago
        Literally came here for the same thing. Went to their blog and saw that a programming language is "dead to [them]" because the organization behind the language doesn't like guns. WUT > "Why can't I get a job?" > - man with 30ft pole behind them with a red flag hoisted on it
        • gavinhoward 3y ago
          I never asked why I can't get a job. I merely said that I can't. I know I'm not a good fit in sterile workplaces.
      • gavinhoward 3y ago
        There might be people outside of the conference targeting attendees.
        • emptysongglass 3y ago
          Let me be completely clear with you: you are the danger to others when you bring a concealed firearm to a conference. There might be people outside of the conference targeting attendees? That is the talk of someone who walks around life haunted by fear.
    • umvi 3y ago
      So you can't get a job that you want, but you could get a job that you don't want (software dev cog)
    • thejosh 3y ago
      Yeah, this is usually a killer in interviews. You can be super smart, know what you're taking about... but if you're not willing to "play the game" you're going to go nowhere. I'm Australian based, probably similar elsewhere.
    • midasz 3y ago
      You seem like a super intelligent guy in regards to your profession, though (and perhaps it is my own bias) also super contrarian. I'd genuinely always pick the person who is easy to work with than someone who might cause conflict - even if the latter was way smarter. Collaboration is key in teams.
      • The_Colonel 3y ago
        This is what it boils down to. The combination of competent and contrarian often becomes extremely toxic for the workplace.
      • saiya-jin 3y ago
        This is 100% true in basically any case of bigger than startup orgs - you don't desperately need that superstar 10x or 100x coder if he is pain to work with, creates code full of abstractions that are then hard to maintain for rest of the team or even worse, like potential security problem (looking into OP for 2 mins I already know he is rather hardcore christian, maybe a bit gun nut, antivaxxer/anti-mask, has long history of anxiety and other health issues). All sums up into 'probably difficult to work with'. This would be a problem for me when hiring too (to be frank - hard pass due to above, and no amount of git code beauty would change that). Collaboration, communication, team work are much more important long term in bigger teams. Willingness to help team/project even though sometimes bureaucracy might be Kafka-esque. Yes we are all cogs in big machine, so what? It takes 2 seconds to realize that for each of us. We still do the work, its work for christ sake, we pay the bills, vacations and go back to our families just like everybody else.
      • gavinhoward 3y ago
        I never said that companies weren't right to not hire me. I personally think I'm just not a good fit anywhere.
    • skybrian 3y ago
      Looking at your blog, I think you're such a specialist that it's going to be hard to find a good fit. (For example, only being willing to write code in C.) Most people are more flexible.
      • gavinhoward 3y ago
        Oh, I know. I never wondered why. I merely said that I can't get a job to refute the article.
        • pcthrowaway 3y ago
          You can get a job. You've made it clear that you know what you need to do to get a job (be more flexible with the language you'll work in, remove all non-technical opinions from your blog, and for the love of god stop carrying a fucking gun with you everywhere) If you don't want to do the things that would qualify you for the available jobs, that's not because your technical posts wculdn't make you stand out, positively, it's because you're choosing not to!
          • gavinhoward 3y ago
            I'm already infamous for my personal opinions in the tech world. Will removing he personal posts and putting them on a separate blog really work? (I do already have a domain.) I'm not so sure it would work. By the time I thought about it, I had already gone viral on HN and the personal attacks had started.
            • pcthrowaway 3y ago
              Yes, absolutely, it will work fine. People on the Internet don't have that long of a memory and many people will not have seen your articles on HN. No one is going to look your site up on the wayback machine. You can also ask dang to delete some of your posts on HN if it helps disassociate your name from discussions like these (though I doubt most people would think to look you up on HN based on a name)
  • ahartmetz 3y ago
    It could be when they see that https://git.gavinhoward.com/gavin/petty-tyrant-businesses https://git.gavinhoward.com/gavin/petty-tyrant-businesses
    • wiseowise 3y ago
      Jesus Christ.
    • kelnos 3y ago
      It's funny, because posting that list of businesses is... also pretty petty. As is refusing to wear a mask during a global pandemic. I bet this guy also gets pissed off at the "no shoes, no shirt, no service" signs some businesses have. I know if I was hiring for something and found that post, that'd be an instant no-hire from me.
      • dvt 3y ago
        > It's funny, because posting that list of businesses is... also pretty petty. 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?
        • kelnos 3y ago
          Absolutely agree boycotting is a great way to tell a business you're not happy with something they do. 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.
• lordCarbonFiber 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • kelnos 3y ago
    His bio just says "Christian", and doesn't say anything about being a Mormon. Also pretty sure most of the people working on bare metal are not LGBT or furries. Certainly some are, but... what a weird thing to assert.
    • ycombinete 3y ago
      They mean his blog bio: https://gavinhoward.com/about/ https://gavinhoward.com/about/
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • kelnos 3y ago
        Ah, didn't catch that. The references to living in Utah in some places on his website should have tipped me off, too.
• WinLychee 3y ago
  IME, most companies generally don't care about Github or your blog, but _some_ companies that are heavily involved in on FOSS or OSS, do care and hire contributors.
  • BossingAround 3y ago
    Even for companies like Red Hat, Canonical, SUSE, Mongo, ..., my experience is that a good blog or a good Github doesn't account to anything more than a few pleasant sentences at the beginning of the interview. 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).
    • CapricornNoble 3y ago
      >a good blog or a good Github doesn't account to anything more than a few pleasant sentences at the beginning of the interview But it may contribute to you getting an interview in the first place, no?
      • BossingAround 3y ago
        Weeeell.. I mean, look, anything's possible, but if the CV looks kinda meh but the candidate has a good blog, would that get them an invite? I'm not so sure.
    • rewmie 3y ago
      > (...) my experience is that a good blog or a good Github doesn't account to anything more than a few pleasant sentences at the beginning of the interview. 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.
• deleted 3y ago
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• okeuro49 3y ago
  Your blog post: > 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.
  • Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    Even then, your job as a developer is reading and comprehending other people's code and your manager's intents; writing your own code should be a detail.
  • zimpenfish 3y ago
    > Perhaps you need to be a contractor, not an employee. 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.
  • pcthrowaway 3y ago
    Yikes! https://gavinhoward.com/2023/04/rust-is-dead-to-me/ 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.
    • WJW 3y ago
      America is such a wild place lol. How dangerous can a Rust conference really be?
• davidgatti 3y ago
  I have a similar situation lots of online presence showcasing what needs to be showcased and I find nobody cares to take the time to check it.
• berkle4455 3y ago
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  • LilBytes 3y ago
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    • deleted 3y ago
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    • dang 3y ago
      Please don't bring in extraneous information to attack someone on HN, no matter how wrong they are or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=online%20shaming%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22personal%20details%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • dang 3y ago
    Whoa - you can't attack another user like this here, no matter how wrong they are or you feel they are. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
• wiseowise 3y ago
  Standing out doesn't mean you'll get a job. 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.
  • gavinhoward 3y ago
    It's not enough to get a job, no. I am not a good fit for companies, and I know it. I was just refuting the article.
    • loeg 3y ago
      This isn't what "refute" means! Your situation does not contradict the article's claim. It's orthogonal.
      • gavinhoward 3y ago
        Well, not exactly. The article had an implicit bent that standing out is a good thing. That's what I'm refuting.
        • loeg 3y ago
          Pretty clearly, the article means standing out through creativity and work product is a good thing. Not by being angry and whiny.
• kelnos 3y ago
  I'm sure you'll get pissed at this, but assuming hiring managers see your blog and Gitea instance, here are some of my guesses as to why they don't want to hire you: * 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.
  • Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    Yeah, even if I were to agree with the standpoints, they all say "I do not work well with other people and I am an angry person", which is a disqualifier for most jobs.
• mellosouls 3y ago
  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 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.
  • gavinhoward 3y ago
    Oh I know. My post was never wondering why I don't fit. I know. I was just refuting the article.
• prawn 3y ago
  Is it possible that employers could think that your political aspirations may outweigh your commitment to working consistently for them into the future? Links from your site: https://gavinhoward.com/2020/06/i-am-running-for-office/ https://gavinhoward.com/2020/06/i-am-running-for-office/ https://gab.com/gavinhoward https://gab.com/gavinhoward
  • dvt 3y ago
    An employer cannot retaliate if you're running for office or have whatever political beliefs you may have. This is from the California Labor Code, but if I remember correctly, every State has this protection in place: > 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.
    • prawn 3y ago
      Of course. But I bet many are quietly influenced by something like this, especially smaller employers who don't want to lose an employee and have to rehire.
    • jedberg 3y ago
      Sure but if you never hire them then you don't have to worry about it.
      • dvt 3y ago
        Yes of course, this is also how people get around ageism (you're simply "not a good fit"). All in all, it still doesn't make it right.
        • wiseowise 3y ago
          > All in all, it still doesn't make it right. 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.
• globular-toast 3y ago
  I don't see a contradiction. The article only talks about standing out from the crowd. You probably do. But in your case it probably causes people to not want to hire you.
  • gavinhoward 3y ago
    I know. I merely refuted the article. I know why I can't get a job.
  • malcolmgreaves 3y ago
    Yeah you're 100% right. There's absolutely no contradiction. This guy's online presence does make him stand out. Unfortunately, in his own words, he isn't too great with following logical constructions (like code) written by others.
• BeetleB 3y ago
  > It demonstrates careful work with every function documented in Doxygen comments and a development manual entirely designed to raise the bus factor to infinity. In my experience, not a single employer cares about documentation.
  • gavinhoward 3y ago
    And that's probably one of the many reasons I can't get a job: I'm too careful.