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Comment by trhoad | Hacker News Reader

You'll miss out on a whole range of engineers that have a life outside of work (which also brings some balance and maturity to the job), and therefore have no time (or inclination) to groom a public presence on the internet. Raising a family, going cycling, volunteering, reading books - these are all more valuable insights into a candidate for me, more so than your retweets.

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Folk post this on every thread as if denying the effect somehow makes it go away. As both a candidate and hiring manager, the effect is very real and it is folly to ignore it. As a candidate, I landed a FANG job early in my career almost exclusively on the basis of my (poor quality) tech blog attracting the attention of a recruiter. As a hiring manager, I've dumped all resumes for a position and practically begged an extremely young (barely legal) candidate to interview and work for me on any terms just based on the strength of the passion found in their resume and web site.

Simon's article is expressly about how little work is required to exploit this effect. You can still have a life outside of work while presenting the appearance of being passionate about what you do during work, it's really not hard.

> while presenting the appearance of being passionate about what you do during work

Why would anyone want this? It's fake. Let's try to keep the IT world free of as much BS as we can please. Don't follow this nonsense trends.

Why? You don't need to be passionate about your work to be a great employee.

Many days I don't feel like working and I'm not motivated. But I still do (I think) a great job and try my best.

Passion is bullshit. Passion is useful in some cases, but it's not requirement to do a great job.

I think the parent comment was more about the "fake" than about the "passion" - as in, don't fake something for the sake of getting a job, whatever that something is.

>Passion is bullshit. Passion is useful in some cases, but it's not requirement to do a great job.

I strongly disagree. Maybe for other professions, sure. But to write great software requires passion. Showing up and doing the bare minimum leads to the garbage software that proliferates the world today. Not that that really matters to the individual; if you're doing what's asked of you and nothing more, then more power to you for finding a good work life balance. But you simply cannot produce top quality software without being passionate about it.

Sucking at what you do != not being passionate.

Passionate people can also suck at their jobs. I did some terrible things when I was inexperienced.

There's nothing special about software. It's like asking the builder of your house how passionate they are about building houses. What I care about is how professional and experienced they are, not their passion.

What's fake about showing initiative? I was under no illusion the young lad would be an ideal hire, but I'd have been even more impressed to discover post-hire that he'd hoodwinked me. You can't advertise for or buy that kind of intelligence

> Folk post this on every thread as if denying the effect somehow makes it go away. As both a candidate and hiring manager, the effect is very real and it is folly to ignore it.

Overwhelming majority of employed developers has literally no public presence.

Then you'll have a leg up on the overwhelming majority of employed developers. Just because lots of people don't have public presence, doesn't mean that you having public presence doesn't make you stand out. Quite literally the opposite: it will make you stand out.

Thanks - that's exactly the point I was trying to make in the article.

> As a candidate, I landed a FANG job early in my career almost exclusively on the basis of my (poor quality) tech blog attracting the attention of a recruiter.

I would be careful attributing this to your blog or thinking that wouldn't have contacted you if you hadn't had a blog. I've never had a blog, live in the midwest, haven't contributed to my Github repos in years, and I don't even work as an engineer anymore (I've switched into product management), and yet I still get the occasional recruiter email from Amazon, Facebook, and even Google. Recruiters cast a VERY wide net because most people don't respond to their emails. I'm not saying I would necessary be qualified for any of these jobs, but merely haven't a recruiter reach out to you doesn't mean much.

From my article:

> The vast majority of candidates have little to no evidence of creativity in public at all. The same is true for many of the best engineers I have worked with.

> As a hiring manager, this means you have to learn how to source candidates and interview effectively: 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.

People on Reddit were making the same complaints, even when I expressly wrote "It’s not a must have, but if you do have it, it’s a leg up." I think people are just rationalizing why they don't need to do anything, so they don't actually read the text of the articles/comments and just project what they want it to mean.

"Why would you make a good candidate for this position?" "I actually wrote a popular open-source app that-" "Shh... do you ride a bicycle? And do you raise children?"

I think this is a bit of an obtuse take. Doing non-coding things can give one skills that are useful in a software engineering role. Soft-skills like writing or public speaking, organisational skills, etc.

Having an outlet that's not related to your job helps keep your mind sharp and fresh when it comes to work, too. Less chance of burnout if programming isn't 100% of what you do within and outwith work.

If you deal with end-users, having a social life that involves non-technical people is a bonus too. Helps one to maintain an open-mind.

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