*"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](https://til.simonwillison.net/)—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."*

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36843484>

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

Hi I'm Jeremy. I'm building this site because I'm not satisfied with other online community type websites and their lack of innovation (see the /about page). The goal is to make a superior, more open, and more decentralized online community.

The site is still in early stages in active development (see the dev masterthread here: https://zsync.xyz/p/zsync-dev-update-masterthread)

Join us if this sounds interesting! Feel free to send me any feedback or reach out directly!

99% of dev work has already been done before. That's why most modern dev is "Search Google" -&gt; StackOverflow or random blog post -&gt; copy & paste + tweak code

LLMs and AI code completion tools (eg. GitHub Copilot) drastically simplify this even further. In a few years, you'll simply write a prompt and the code will be written for you, infrastructure set up for you, and APIs glued together for you.

The takeaway is that basic app development will be completely commoditized within a few years, and ultimately all dev work will be. Once something has been done once and is understood by AI, then that work is now commoditized.

Developers are the "translator" between someone who wants to build something and the machine. Just like AI will automate human language translators, AI will do the same for machine translators. Of course there will still be humans verifying the AI's output and handling edge cases, but there will be significantly less demand for humans.

For developers to remain employable, they'll need to offer more than commoditized dev services. This means working at the bleeding edge of what hasn't already been done before (eg. building the AI), and/or coupling dev with other skills (eg. product, marketing, management).

Ultimately though it's an arms race where every worker is competing against their irrelevance due to automation, and it's only going to get more and more competitive as AI improves exponentially.

The tech job market sucks now, but I personally don't think it's going to get better. If/when we get back to low interest rates and another market bubble we might see another boom cycle, but long-term things are only going to get more competitive, and the longevity and time relevance of your knowledge will only decrease as tech advances exponentially.

Of course this needn't be a bad thing if our economic system was designed to accommodate automation such as via a Universal Basic Income (UBI) that ensured that job automation doesn't equate to billions of people becoming destitute, but unfortunately such obvious simple policies are beyond the cognitive capacity of politicians, and everyone else is too focused on the arms race of trying to remain economically relevant in the face of AI automation to pay attention to the bigger picture. Or even if most people see the writing on the wall and have identified the solution, actually implementing the solution is a prisoner's dilemma that requires mass collaboration and individually doesn't help you due to the time/energy opportunity cost (your skills are getting outdated as you read this) and it going against the elite's interests as poorer masses = more elite power (eg. imagine how many less OnlyFans girls there'd be if college tuition wasn't so expensive and we had a UBI).

Basically UBI would be the easiest solution to countering the massive job losses that will result from automation, while redesigning our system to have automation work FOR us rather than AGAINST us (since automation then shifts from "oh no I might lose my job" to "cool I don't need to do this menial work anymore thanks to technology"). But supporting UBI means you're lazy and want to be a useless parasite who just collects a paycheck and plays videogames right?

Speaking of which, I need to get back to work before I lose my economic relevance.

<https://twitter.com/jeremybernier/status/1686573852770664449>

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

We're Competing With Each Other Against Our Own Economic Irrelevance