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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3410 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 12, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Have any of my fellow early career programmers and programming adjacent professionals like Data Scientists gotten any success in the job search after making a personal website? Or a fancy personal website?

I HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE writing HTML and CSS, like hate it with the burning passion of a thousand suns. Nonetheless, I sucked it up and finally created a personal website because some programmers swear by it so much, going as far as to say the website was the deciding factor of them getting hired or not because they claim that the hiring manager remarked "not everyone is putting in this much effort".

I'm assuming this is only an early career thing? How fancy does the website need to be really?

It's mostly irrelevant IMO. I've been on hiring committees at multiple companies and nobody has ever commented on whether a candidate had a website at all, much less the quality of it. It might help if you made a site that did something cool or interesting and were prepared to talk about it at an interview. Most interviewers and decision makers will realistically spend 15min max checking out your resume and any websites before the actual interview. Do at least make sure any sites you list aren't horrifically ugly or broken though.

I would also say that while I don't have a ton of love for doing graphic design, it's probably worth knowing at least enough HTML and CSS to make any project site you build at least not too ugly. Some of the newer CSS stuff isn't too painful to work with.

I also do a moderate amount of hiring, mostly for finsec stuff. We do have a team that does a general "internet sweep" for the online footprint, if any, of the applicant. Nothing we find will help the applicant, only hurt them. Our idea candidate has a Linkedn and maybe a boring Facebook page. No FB is as good as a normal, boring one. People who are extremely on-line under their real identity are generally a pass unless they have high levels of talent or the majority of their on-line activity is directly related to their field of expertise. Crusaders can be ok if their goals are our goals too. Twitter warriors are a hard pass.

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