Simon Willison's Weblog: recruiting

It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

2021-07-17T18:47:24+00:00

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 job 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.

Start a blog. Post an interesting technical article to it once or twice a year - something you've learned, or a bug you've fixed, or a problem you've solved. After a few years stop bothering entirely, but leave the blog online somewhere.

Build a small personal project and put the code on GitHub. Accompany it with a README with a detailed description of the project and screenshots of it in action - almost no-one does this, it only takes a few hours extra and it massively increases the impact your project will have on hiring managers who are checking you out.

That's it. One or two blog posts. Maybe a GitHub repository. Believe it or not, if you are up against a bunch of other candidates (especially earlier on in your career) they likely won't have anything like that. You will jump straight to the top of the hiring manager's mental list, maybe without them even noticing.

There's plenty more you can do if you want to put the effort in: build an audience on Twitter, start a newsletter, make videos, give talks (ideally that get recorded and published online), release open source packages, publish TILs - but honestly if your goal is to get through the interview process more easily you will very quickly hit the law of diminishing returns.

If you're going to do that stuff do it because you want to develop those skills and share with and learn from the world - don't just do it because you think it's a critical path to being hired.

This post started out as a Twitter thread:

If you want to stand out from other candidates, having even one piece of writing or published piece of code that shows something you've built is a great way to do that https://t.co/QfYEWxfIet
- Simon Willison (@simonw) July 17, 2021

Tags: blogging, recruiting, careers

Why we use homework to recruit engineers

2020-05-27T18:04:04+00:00

Why we use homework to recruit engineers

Ad Hoc run a remote-first team, and use detailed homework assignments as part of their interview process in place of in-person technical interview. The homework assignments are really interesting to browse through—“Containerize” for example involves building a Docker container to run a Python app with nginx a and a modern cipher suite. I’m nervous about the extra burden this places on candidates, but Ad Hoc address that: “We recognize that we’re asking folks to invest time into our process, but we feel like our homework compares favorably to extensive on-site interviews or other evaluation techniques, especially for candidates who have responsibilities outside of their work life.”

Tags: recruiting

Does Facebook fly you to London when you apply for this office or are the interviews done remotely?

2013-11-24T13:06:00+00:00

My answer to Does Facebook fly you to London when you apply for this office or are the interviews done remotely? on Quora

If they are anything like Google (which I expect they are) they will do the initial interviews remotely and then fly promising candidates to the London office (or even to California) for in-person interviews.

Tags: facebook, london, recruiting, quora

What are the top five items to pique interest in developers to join a startup?

2012-09-22T12:35:00+00:00

My answer to What are the top five items to pique interest in developers to join a startup? on Quora

It's all about shipping.

In larger organisations, it's very easy to end up with a bunch of steps between you and actually shipping code. There are the people who decide what's going to be built, the people they need buy-in from, the people who sign off on the budget for the work, the people who write the requirements, the people who review the requirements, the people who schedule the work, the people who decide which tools will be used for the work, the people who change their mind about how the thing should work half way through the work, the people who test the work and the people who actually get to deploy the work.

Some of those roles are shared, but it's still a very complex environment to Get Stuff Done in.

Then there are the people who step in after 6 months and decide to cancel the entire project before it sees the light of day!

At a small startup, there's hardly anything in between you having an idea, writing the code and shipping it to customers. Our startup has a "everyone ships on the first day" policy which ensures that new hires have the capability to ship to production within a few hours of us handing them their computer. For people who have previously worked in more bureaucratic organisations, this is a huge breath of fresh air.

Tags: recruiting, startups, quora

Why are front end developers so high in demand at startups if front end development is relatively easier than other fields of engineering?

2012-02-13T16:32:00+00:00

My answer to Why are front end developers so high in demand at startups if front end development is relatively easier than other fields of engineering? on Quora

You're starting with an invalid assumption. Front end development is absolutely not "easier" than other forms of engineering.

When you're writing server-side code, you're writing for one language on one operating system with (usually) one database implementation. Write the code, test that it works, go home.

Front end developers have to write code that works in dozens of different environments. It's not just different browsers (IE/Firefox/Safari/Chrome/Opera) - it's also the different versions of those browsers. IE 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 all have their own bugs and limitations. Mobile is even worse - hundreds of different browser/OS/device variations, and even Android has bugs and even feature regressions on different browser versions.

To make things worse, they have to do most of their work in HTML and CSS, which provide extremely limited tools for working around bugs (hence the past decade's obsession with CSS hacks). JavaScript helps a lot here because at least you can use feature detection (though that in itself is controversial due to the performance overhead) - but now you're handling even more code branches and potential areas for bugs to creep in.

Not to mention that a good frontend engineer will need an understanding of web performance - which incorporates everything from DNS lookup times to HTTP caching behaviour to minification build scripts to CSS layout engine implementation details.

Oh, and they're on the frontline of web application security, so they need to understand CSRF, XSS, Click Jacking, DNS pinning (that was a fun one), UTF-7 character encoding attacks...

And these days there's responsive design, media queries, HTML5 AppCache, WebGL, CSS transforms, SVG, Canvas, localStorage, WebSockets and so on to worry about as well - each one introducing exciting new capabilities, and each one introducing brand new browser support challenges to figure out.

Seriously. Server-side developers have it easy.

Tags: programming, recruiting, web-development, quora, frontend

Where can I find great Java/Scala developers in London?

2012-01-22T10:36:00+00:00

My answer to Where can I find great Java/Scala developers in London? on Quora

There are quite a few Scala events in London - here are the ones we know about at the moment: http://lanyrd.com/topics/scala/i...

The Scala Days conference at the Barbican in April looks like a particularly good place to find Scala developers. Since it's still a relatively niche language I imagine there are a bunch of Java developers who would like the opportunity to work with it full time.

Tags: java, london, recruiting, scala, quora

What specific skills are most important in a front-end web developer and in a back-end web developer?

2011-12-08T12:47:00+00:00

My answer to What specific skills are most important in a front-end web developer and in a back-end web developer? on Quora

Understanding of web app security. If they don't know what XSS, CSRF and clickjacking are I'd be worried.

Tags: recruiting, webapps, web-development, quora, frontend

Algorithmic recruitment with GitHub

2010-02-12T13:17:44+00:00

Algorithmic recruitment with GitHub

Matt Biddulph crawls GitHub’s social graph using JUNG (the Java Universal Network/Graph Framework), JRuby and Yahoo! BOSS to find good leads on interesting developers in specific geographic locations.

Tags: github, matt-biddulph, recruiting, social-graph