No, I do not have third-party projects to show you
I know exactly the moment when I lost my chances to get an interview at a shopping application development company in the center of Austin. They wanted to see examples of my code. Of course, they understood that I could not show them the code of my current or past employers. But this should not be a problem. After all, they are allowed to show the code of one of my many third-party projects, which I no doubt have.
But I do not have third-party projects. I do not have an account on GitHub. I do not have open-source projects that I stricter in the evenings. I have exactly zero pull requests in any of the latest fashion projects involving all the cool coders. I do not mess with exercises in Haskel. And I hate hackathons.
And when I said that I could not show them third-party projects, it sounded to them that I was not the best. I am not a keen developer. I don’t spend enough time to keep up my education and skills. Programming is “just work”.
And to some extent this is true. I am not the best. I have met some of the best, and these are fundamentally different creatures. If you allow a comparison from my past long-distance running, then I could finish among the first 5-10%, but the distance between me and the elite was equal to the distance between me and the last 1%. Yes, I was fascinated by running, ran 80+ kilometers a week. Squeezed everything out to achieve perfection. Perfection, which is possible within the boundaries of time and the life balance that I have established for myself. To achieve elite status, I would have to make life sacrifices that I did not want to do. This meant running at the expense of all other activities.
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There is a small group of people who hear the code talking. They are not looking for work, they hear the call. The code is an art, and they are artists. For each of these guys, there are thousands of excellent, reliable developers who are much better than 90% of the rest of the IT graduates. But they are "not the best."
When a company says that it is looking for “enthusiastic developers” who program in their spare time, when they say that they are looking for “the best”, I start to get nervous. This is a myopic approach to team building. This is a cunning way to find robots.
I made it a rule to add things to my resumes and online profiles that I enjoy. That ridiculous art project that opened in Austin. My business is related to dogs. Running, drawing, writing. For me it is important that these qualities are valued in the workplace. If they value such things in me, they will appreciate them in other people, and that says a lot about corporate culture.
The world is gradually moving towards this reality. San Francisco, Seattle, New York - these may be hot, modern cities for the location of your startup or a giant conglomerate, but you severely limit the choice of potential candidates to only a tiny handful of people who can afford to live in these cities. I have four children. I have a whole separate business for the care and entertainment of dogs (playcare business) with my wife. I am an active member of the local art community. I could never live in any of these cities. And although some companies understand that there are a lot of people like me - Facebook, Google, Amazon, all of them are present in Austin, in particular, because in other places the talents are over - many others are still confident that the “best” live for the sake of programming. What “best” you can bring to your company, because you have a room to take a nap, you can work 80 hours a week and play table tennis. That on Friday evening the "best" get drunk in the insole and they have absolutely no plans for the evening or the weekend. Never.
I did not get a job at a shopping application development firm in downtown Austin. I have no third-party projects to show you. In the evenings on Thursday, I go to the studio and together with other artists for three hours I make sketches of our model in various poses. Most often in the evenings, having made dinner and spending time with my wife and children, I sit down and write 2,000 words for my fifth novel (like the four previous abominations, he will remain in my Shame Corner and will never be seen by any living creature). On weekends I go hiking. Deeply immersed in art. I am a keen developer because I am a keen person. But the code here, I can not show you.
But I do not have third-party projects. I do not have an account on GitHub. I do not have open-source projects that I stricter in the evenings. I have exactly zero pull requests in any of the latest fashion projects involving all the cool coders. I do not mess with exercises in Haskel. And I hate hackathons.
And when I said that I could not show them third-party projects, it sounded to them that I was not the best. I am not a keen developer. I don’t spend enough time to keep up my education and skills. Programming is “just work”.
And to some extent this is true. I am not the best. I have met some of the best, and these are fundamentally different creatures. If you allow a comparison from my past long-distance running, then I could finish among the first 5-10%, but the distance between me and the elite was equal to the distance between me and the last 1%. Yes, I was fascinated by running, ran 80+ kilometers a week. Squeezed everything out to achieve perfection. Perfection, which is possible within the boundaries of time and the life balance that I have established for myself. To achieve elite status, I would have to make life sacrifices that I did not want to do. This meant running at the expense of all other activities.
')
There is a small group of people who hear the code talking. They are not looking for work, they hear the call. The code is an art, and they are artists. For each of these guys, there are thousands of excellent, reliable developers who are much better than 90% of the rest of the IT graduates. But they are "not the best."
When a company says that it is looking for “enthusiastic developers” who program in their spare time, when they say that they are looking for “the best”, I start to get nervous. This is a myopic approach to team building. This is a cunning way to find robots.
I made it a rule to add things to my resumes and online profiles that I enjoy. That ridiculous art project that opened in Austin. My business is related to dogs. Running, drawing, writing. For me it is important that these qualities are valued in the workplace. If they value such things in me, they will appreciate them in other people, and that says a lot about corporate culture.
The world is gradually moving towards this reality. San Francisco, Seattle, New York - these may be hot, modern cities for the location of your startup or a giant conglomerate, but you severely limit the choice of potential candidates to only a tiny handful of people who can afford to live in these cities. I have four children. I have a whole separate business for the care and entertainment of dogs (playcare business) with my wife. I am an active member of the local art community. I could never live in any of these cities. And although some companies understand that there are a lot of people like me - Facebook, Google, Amazon, all of them are present in Austin, in particular, because in other places the talents are over - many others are still confident that the “best” live for the sake of programming. What “best” you can bring to your company, because you have a room to take a nap, you can work 80 hours a week and play table tennis. That on Friday evening the "best" get drunk in the insole and they have absolutely no plans for the evening or the weekend. Never.
I did not get a job at a shopping application development firm in downtown Austin. I have no third-party projects to show you. In the evenings on Thursday, I go to the studio and together with other artists for three hours I make sketches of our model in various poses. Most often in the evenings, having made dinner and spending time with my wife and children, I sit down and write 2,000 words for my fifth novel (like the four previous abominations, he will remain in my Shame Corner and will never be seen by any living creature). On weekends I go hiking. Deeply immersed in art. I am a keen developer because I am a keen person. But the code here, I can not show you.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/341676/
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