Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't hire someone presenting themselves like this. My immediate energy is "disagreeable and difficult" and it fails the vibes test.

I know that's stupid but it's also real.

Use something simple like linktree and go way deeper on your blogposts if you want to use that. When I'm in a hiring manager role, I'm looking for works that express depth and competency.

Really, if I can find say, 100 or so lines of competently written code, I'm interested. As far as what that means, take https://js1k.com/ and click on any of them and go to the demo details. I just picked a random one: https://js1k.com/2019-x/details/4167 ... I see that code and I think "well this person seems to know what they're doing, it's worth a phone call".

Or let's take https://allrgb.com/ ... any one of them take pretty decent understanding and coding to do (here's a random one: https://allrgb.com/random-triangles) Make one, do a writeup on it, release the code and present that.

Another tactic: Any large software project. Let's take Libreoffice. Bugs from the last 7 days: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/buglist.cgi?chfield=%5BB... ... or the 1000 open tickets on wireshark: https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/issues start fixing them. There's plenty of work to do.

If your work is good, the jobs will actually come to you. Most companies are desperate for good, motivated, easy to work with engineers.

Disagreeable and difficult? If you look into OP's reply history on HN he seems perfectly agreeable, cheerful and helpful even.

The rest of your comment I don't have a problem with.

Have you looked at their website? https://calebjosue.gigalixirapp.com

No offense intended, and of course I don't know OP at all and this is all 100% based on an initial gut feeling, but this is not the website of someone who seems like they would be pleasant to work with. I wouldn't be surprised if hiring managers got the same feeling and just moved on.

The garish green on black, the large prominent picture of their face, the odd English ("Hello there all", "and I do like to share the following with you"). Also, the odd domain.

Normally I wouldn't even mention any of this since everyone is free to have their own style, but if OP is looking to get hired it might help if their website looked a little more "professional". Or just don't plug the website.

Some professionals don't do web design, and pictures are common in some countries. The website looks ok, but could obviously be cooler (though, that should not matter too much). It is a strange domain indeed. There should be something more straightforward name that can be used. I think all that appeals more to programmers than HR types but idk.

It's interesting how impressions can vary so much. This is exactly the kind of site that would be a strong positive signal to me. To me it appears old school, friendly, straight-forward.

i don't know how you and GP can read so much into this.

sure, the website may look kind of ugly, but it is also very simple (and in fact green on black are old terminal colors. maybe just get an old terminal font and suddenly the website would look cool?), so i find it easy to look past that, but all that tells me is that this guy is not a designer. and the odd phrasing tells me that this is not a native english speaker. that's all.

if you are reading any more into this then that tells me more about your character than about the creator of the website.

Like I said, I think it's fine and people should have their own style. But if someone says they haven't been hired in 2 years and is asking for help I might as well be hypercritical.

And this is not about me. This is about all those hiring managers that may have seen this and been like "ick", closed the tab and moved on.

fair enough, but i think that can be worded less direct and more like a possible explanation. the way you worded it in the second paragraph makes it sound like you don't actually think it's fine for yourself. only the third paragraph contradicts that. that's how i read it anyways.

I mean I don't like it hence the observation, but usually that's completely irrelevant and I wouldn't bring it up or pay that much attention to it. You're right it could've been worded a bit more sympathetically.

Unfortunately most hiring managers aren't old school programmers.

The non native phrasing isn't terrible, but at least spell Bachelor's correctly.

The very same part of my brain that allows me to implement a disjoint-set forest tells me bright yellow text on a bright pink background is good design.

Yes, that was weird to say the least. The CV page is shockingly bare--there's no actual experience listed except a link (on the PDF to another PDF) to "More experience" in the Miscellaneous category which is the actual resume.

The main failure is to present oneself in the manner expected (and effective) to those hiring. Not many will spend time wading through such bespoke oddness, when the experience appears relatively standard.

I loved the green on black, it was very nice to read and didn't seem too ugly to me. But I am an engineer, not an HR person.

I'm sure he's a pleasant person and great.

If you've been unlucky enough to sort through hundreds of resumes and make hasty decisions on who to spend time on, as a constraint of time and the volume of candidates, you have to make ridiculously judgmental and often wrong decisions because you need to say no to over 95% of them.

A site like this would be ok if the domain was say blahblah.(mit|stanford|caltech|something-fancy).edu/blahblah and linked to their scholar page but outside of that, probably not.

If you want a personal page and you're not a designer, just use a template from a site like https://html5up.net/ and replace the images and copy. If the site was say https://html5up.net/astral ... not only do all my objections flutter away but now there's a small checkmark in the "interested" column.

Know what the people on the other end are tasked with and feed them what they're looking for.

>Most companies are desperate for good, motivated, easy to work with engineers.

Is there currently a shortage of good, motivated, easy to work with engineers in this job market? It was my understanding that we are in an employer's market right now. Have things turned around?

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