Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

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The hiring manager will base about 95% of the decision on the answer to one question: What have you built?

I think this is approximately as true as "Customers make purchasing decisions approximately 95% based on product quality and 5% on those trivial details like marketing."

By all means, build stuff. But after having achieved some level of building stuff, the returns are far greater in attractively marketing the stuff you have build versus continuing to build more stuff, on a ROI per-hour-invested basis.

I mean, clearly she can build stuff, right? There's a portfolio. It has stuff in it. Achievement Unlocked: Stuff Got Built. That portfolio could have one extra 100x100 thumbnail that no decisionmaker is going to click on anyway, or, this site could exist. Do you think the thumbnail will matter more than this site existing? That strongly does not match my experience with how people approach decisions in the real world.

P.S. Takeaway for all engineers in the room: if you have three projects on Github and don't have one of these sites built yet, you will have far better returns on time building a site like this than you will doing another OSS project, and you will have still better returns doing actual networking rather than hoping someone on the Internet will stumble across your hidden potential and give you a shot.

You might want to re-read my comment. Nowhere did I say that marketing doesn't matter. Nowhere did I say that you should just build more stuff and not write a resume to market yourself.

On the contrary, my comment began "To write an effective resume..." Translation: the rest of the comment is going to be advice to my fellow HNers about how to market themselves. I'm not sure how you interpreted "showcase your actual work well and present it in the most impressive possible light" as "just create another project on github".

My point is that this particular resume answers all the wrong questions. All the questions I don't really care about when I'm making a hiring decision. Only at the end does she say "So... What're ya waiting for!?" and link to her portfolio. And her portfolio isn't nearly as well done as all the fluff sections ("I'm vehement about creating kick-ass interactions" and "I never wear high heels"). This is a mistake. The most prominent and polished part of her resume should showcase her actual work. She should answer the question "What have you built?" right away and in impressive fashion. Note that the question isn't "Have you built stuff?"; it's "What have you built?" So, the fact that Stuff Got Built, as you say, isn't very important. I don't care that "clearly, she can build stuff." I care to see what she's built. So, show it to me. In other words "showcase your actual work well and present it in the most impressive possible light."

"...and you will have still better returns doing actual networking rather than hoping someone on the Internet will stumble across your hidden potential and give you a shot."

This is such a retarded market inefficiency. Someone here should do something about it.

Open programming contests for job seekers? Open Source awards for job seekers?

I don't know enough about how the hiring process works, de facto.

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