I’ve spent nearly twenty years blogging, giving talks and releasing open source code. It’s been fantastic for my career, and a huge amount of work

Simon Willison’s Weblog

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2021-07-17 19:00:05

I’ve spent nearly twenty years blogging, giving talks and releasing open source code. It’s been fantastic for my career, and a huge amount of work. But here’s a useful secret: you don’t have to put very much work at all into public creativity in order to stand out as a candidate.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of people, and screened hundreds more resumes—mostly for tech roles in San Francisco, an extremely competitive job market.

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.

But as a candidate, this means you can give yourself a big advantage in terms of standing out from the crowd with a relatively small amount of work.