4 ms·

Writing a blog relatively regularly got me job offers from FAANG companies and book offers from publishers (some of the latter I accepted). It's also a good exe

Writing a blog relatively regularly got me job offers from FAANG companies and book offers from publishers (some of the latter I accepted). It's also a good exercise to get better at your job because communicating effectively is just as important a skill for programmers as writing code is.

scarface_74 2y ago
Are you saying that anyone in your interview loop took time to read your blog posts? And it wasn’t just you passing the standard interview process like everyone else has to do.
- samrus 2y ago
  I read it as them being approached by faang recruiters or hiring managers because they happened to stumble upon their blog and thought they might be a good fit. Although idk if that sort of thing happens anymore
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    FAANG recruiters are dumb and not selective. They definitely don’t look at blog posts. - a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE 3 (L6) position when I had nothing on my LinkedIn profile aside from a bunch of CRUD jobs on my profile. I - After talking to the recruiter, they suggested I apply for a remote role at AWS Professional Services which I did get. Funny enough, I had two recruiters reach out to me from Amazon on LinkedIn while I was - working at Amazon and it was on my profile. - I had a recruiter from Google reach out to me while I was at Amazon for an Engineering Manager position. The problem is, my current position wasn’t even a software developer on my profile and I had no management experience. - a recruiter from Meta hounded me for months about a senior position as a developer specializing in AI. Did I mention that my most recent role at the time wasn’t as a software developer and I had no AI experience? - Even before working at Amazon, recruiters from Netflix reached out to me. No I wouldn’t have had any chance passing the interview Recruiters - even at BigTech reach out to anyone with a pulse. I still get recruiters from BigTech reaching out to me about software development positions even though for the past five years my profile clearly shows a pivot to cloud consulting and customer engagement.
    - janalsncm 2y ago
      > Recruiters - even at BigTech reach out to anyone with a pulse. The purpose of the tech blog isn’t to impress recruiters because as you say they are impressed if you mention drinking a cup of java once or have a pet python. The primary purpose is for your own understanding. The secondary purpose is to impress someone familiar with your field.
  - InsideOutSanta 2y ago
    People inside the company (not recruiters) read my blog and started the recruiting process.
- harvey9 2y ago
  I've had interviewers talk to me about my personal site, but it's on my resume so it's not like they had to search.
  - JustExAWS 2y ago
    They said at BigTech companies where the interview process is very regimented and the interviewer at most has an hour and comes in with a known set of questions.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      strange to think there are more than just BigCo out there, huh?
      - scarface_74 2y ago
        Yes but the parent commenter said. > Writing a blog relatively regularly got me job offers from FAANG companies.
        johnnyanmac 2y ago
        okay. And BigCo wasn't always bigco, right? It shouldn't be a surpise many in this community may have experiences going back 15,20,30+ years in a completely different tech landscape. I envy that, but what can you do?
        scarface_74 2y ago
        I’m still not following you. The commenter said that they got an offer at a FAANG because of a blog. That’s just not how things work at FAANG. There is a regimented process with multiple interviews and then after the interviews, all of the interviewers enter their notes and discuss. I can’t imagine anyone in the loop saying “I read their blog post and they should be hired”. Hiring is completely about some combination of how the candidate did on coding, system design and behavioral interviews. In 2010 (15 years ago), all of the current FAANG companies were already large except Meta and it was growing rapidly. In 2005 (20 years ago), how many people were blogging? 20 years ago, the interview process was even more esoteric than it is today at least at Google. I haven’t heard stories about any of the others Yes I was around back then.
- InsideOutSanta 2y ago
  Someone at the company read my blog, asked me if I was interested in a job on their team, and initiated the hiring process if I said yes.
rs186 2y ago
Are you comfortable with sharing the URL of your blog? I find the idea interesting, but also puzzling -- If you work at a commercial company on proprietary software, like most of software engineers, there is very limited amount of things you can talk about work and not leak proprietary/internal information. Otherwise, you need to work enough outside work to have things you can talk about freely. I don't want to have a blog where it's all opinion and no concrete details, like my meaningless comments on HN. How do you manage to post "useful" things on a personal blog?
- wonger_ 2y ago
  I'm also curious about what kinds of posts were good enough to get job offers. In my experience it's hard to consistently produce thorough, accurate, and useful technical posts. It takes so much time. If you have the time, though, open-source is a good way to work on non-proprietary, useful things.
- InsideOutSanta 2y ago
  You can discuss things unrelated to genuinely proprietary information. But this depends on the company—I worked for several companies whose secret sauce was more related to proprietary business information rather than proprietary tech, so they gave close to zero shits if I publicly wrote about it and, at times, republished my posts on their own company blog to make themselves more attractive to devs. I also have a bunch of personal projects about which I can talk. Topics like "what we learned load-balancing a tomcat cluster" contain genuinely useful information, but the company I worked for at the time didn't consider them proprietary because the proprietary stuff was what they ran on the cluster. I'll acknowledge that this won't be the case for everybody. I've been pretty lucky that none of the companies I worked for prevented me from writing about these topics; some were happy to use what I wrote for their own promotional material. (I don't want to dox myself, so I'd rather not share a link to my blog, and "what we learned load-balancing a tomcat cluster" isn't the literal title of a blog post I wrote.)
- jamietanna 2y ago
  I'd recommend having a read of my blog (https://www.jvt.me/archives/ https://www.jvt.me/archives/), as I've been in a similar position, and heavily blogging my career For instance between 2016-2021 where I was working in a large financial institution (Capital One), but still blogging about the work I was doing and problems I was solving, without leaking proprietary information A lot of them didn't have the "context" for what problem was being solved or why, or I'd need to create a minimal example to help explain what needs to be fixed, which is also a very good skill to be more practiced in You can also see how over the years of my career (https://hire.jvt.me/ https://hire.jvt.me/), some organisations have led to me blogging more openly about /what/ I'm doing

scarface_74 2y ago

Are you saying that anyone in your interview loop took time to read your blog posts? And it wasn’t just you passing the standard interview process like everyone else has to do.

samrus 2y ago
I read it as them being approached by faang recruiters or hiring managers because they happened to stumble upon their blog and thought they might be a good fit. Although idk if that sort of thing happens anymore
- scarface_74 2y ago
  FAANG recruiters are dumb and not selective. They definitely don’t look at blog posts. - a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE 3 (L6) position when I had nothing on my LinkedIn profile aside from a bunch of CRUD jobs on my profile. I - After talking to the recruiter, they suggested I apply for a remote role at AWS Professional Services which I did get. Funny enough, I had two recruiters reach out to me from Amazon on LinkedIn while I was - working at Amazon and it was on my profile. - I had a recruiter from Google reach out to me while I was at Amazon for an Engineering Manager position. The problem is, my current position wasn’t even a software developer on my profile and I had no management experience. - a recruiter from Meta hounded me for months about a senior position as a developer specializing in AI. Did I mention that my most recent role at the time wasn’t as a software developer and I had no AI experience? - Even before working at Amazon, recruiters from Netflix reached out to me. No I wouldn’t have had any chance passing the interview Recruiters - even at BigTech reach out to anyone with a pulse. I still get recruiters from BigTech reaching out to me about software development positions even though for the past five years my profile clearly shows a pivot to cloud consulting and customer engagement.
  - janalsncm 2y ago
    > Recruiters - even at BigTech reach out to anyone with a pulse. The purpose of the tech blog isn’t to impress recruiters because as you say they are impressed if you mention drinking a cup of java once or have a pet python. The primary purpose is for your own understanding. The secondary purpose is to impress someone familiar with your field.
- InsideOutSanta 2y ago
  People inside the company (not recruiters) read my blog and started the recruiting process.
harvey9 2y ago
I've had interviewers talk to me about my personal site, but it's on my resume so it's not like they had to search.
- JustExAWS 2y ago
  They said at BigTech companies where the interview process is very regimented and the interviewer at most has an hour and comes in with a known set of questions.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    strange to think there are more than just BigCo out there, huh?
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      Yes but the parent commenter said. > Writing a blog relatively regularly got me job offers from FAANG companies.
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        okay. And BigCo wasn't always bigco, right? It shouldn't be a surpise many in this community may have experiences going back 15,20,30+ years in a completely different tech landscape. I envy that, but what can you do?
        scarface_74 2y ago
        I’m still not following you. The commenter said that they got an offer at a FAANG because of a blog. That’s just not how things work at FAANG. There is a regimented process with multiple interviews and then after the interviews, all of the interviewers enter their notes and discuss. I can’t imagine anyone in the loop saying “I read their blog post and they should be hired”. Hiring is completely about some combination of how the candidate did on coding, system design and behavioral interviews. In 2010 (15 years ago), all of the current FAANG companies were already large except Meta and it was growing rapidly. In 2005 (20 years ago), how many people were blogging? 20 years ago, the interview process was even more esoteric than it is today at least at Google. I haven’t heard stories about any of the others Yes I was around back then.
InsideOutSanta 2y ago
Someone at the company read my blog, asked me if I was interested in a job on their team, and initiated the hiring process if I said yes.

rs186 2y ago

Are you comfortable with sharing the URL of your blog? I find the idea interesting, but also puzzling -- If you work at a commercial company on proprietary software, like most of software engineers, there is very limited amount of things you can talk about work and not leak proprietary/internal information. Otherwise, you need to work enough outside work to have things you can talk about freely. I don't want to have a blog where it's all opinion and no concrete details, like my meaningless comments on HN. How do you manage to post "useful" things on a personal blog?

wonger_ 2y ago
I'm also curious about what kinds of posts were good enough to get job offers. In my experience it's hard to consistently produce thorough, accurate, and useful technical posts. It takes so much time. If you have the time, though, open-source is a good way to work on non-proprietary, useful things.
InsideOutSanta 2y ago
You can discuss things unrelated to genuinely proprietary information. But this depends on the company—I worked for several companies whose secret sauce was more related to proprietary business information rather than proprietary tech, so they gave close to zero shits if I publicly wrote about it and, at times, republished my posts on their own company blog to make themselves more attractive to devs. I also have a bunch of personal projects about which I can talk. Topics like "what we learned load-balancing a tomcat cluster" contain genuinely useful information, but the company I worked for at the time didn't consider them proprietary because the proprietary stuff was what they ran on the cluster. I'll acknowledge that this won't be the case for everybody. I've been pretty lucky that none of the companies I worked for prevented me from writing about these topics; some were happy to use what I wrote for their own promotional material. (I don't want to dox myself, so I'd rather not share a link to my blog, and "what we learned load-balancing a tomcat cluster" isn't the literal title of a blog post I wrote.)
jamietanna 2y ago
I'd recommend having a read of my blog (https://www.jvt.me/archives/ https://www.jvt.me/archives/), as I've been in a similar position, and heavily blogging my career For instance between 2016-2021 where I was working in a large financial institution (Capital One), but still blogging about the work I was doing and problems I was solving, without leaking proprietary information A lot of them didn't have the "context" for what problem was being solved or why, or I'd need to create a minimal example to help explain what needs to be fixed, which is also a very good skill to be more practiced in You can also see how over the years of my career (https://hire.jvt.me/ https://hire.jvt.me/), some organisations have led to me blogging more openly about /what/ I'm doing