[lesser23]

The post is somewhat strange but I think the point of it is clear. Projects aren’t what land jobs. This is contrary to age-old advice of “build a portfolio to show off” which has been repeated for as long as I remember. At least since 2010 or so.

Instead the writer discovered what we all inevitably do. Companies don’t really care about what you’re capable of. They care strictly if you’ll bend over backwards, give up everything, and grind leetcode to make it through their arbitrary and demeaning hiring process. At least you can somewhat justify it at FAANG given you need an “efficient” way to weed out 80% of the 30,000 applicants you get a year. But this rot goes all the way down to the mom and pop e-commerce startup anymore.

It’s no surprise. I suppose if the writer was a major contributor to a larger project their experience might be different (as you could probably fool ATS and HR using them as experience on a resume). But indeed, no one cares about your toy implementation of a linter.

It’ll only get worse in the age of AI slop, AI slop brained company leadership, and leetcode supremacy.

[forgetfreeman]

"This is contrary to age-old advice of “build a portfolio to show off” which has been repeated for as long as I remember. At least since 2010 or so."

The thing is this not only used to work, it was The Way. You could short circuit the entire technical interview process by sending a link to your commit histories on various open source projects or hell even your GitHub account if you had decent amounts of public activity on there. Even better, a company's unwillingness to accept these in lieu of infantile "coding tests" was a great way to weed out bullshit organizations you wouldn't want to work for in any case. Now that none of that is the case I haven't the faintest idea how one would go about getting a job writing code these days short of leveraging your network to score a nepo hire?

[lesser23]

I have spoken to a few people in the "recruiting industry". In particular, one CEO of one. Both were rather frank discussions. Both told me that it is a complete waste of time to submit resumes and do follow up calls. Rather shocking. Indeed, they both suggested that networking and/or being nepo-hired is basically the only way you'll get in somewhere. That isn't a "big company with big goals" somewhere. This is a trend in almost every sector of software. If you're like a lot of people and need remote work due to not living in one of the 3-4 major tech hubs it's even harder.

I do remember a time when projects mattered. I believe my open source work 12 years ago was what got me the job even after I failed their coding test miserably.

It probably won't get better for a long time. I've been casually looking around for a new gig and even with over a decade of experience in software across the backend stack (bare metal and up) I don't fit a lot of the requirements. They want junior engineer grind, mid level pay, and staff+ level knowledge. As expected, it's a employer market now, and we're probably gonna be waiting for the glut of new CS grads, bootcampers, etc to give up and move on to other things.

[bee_rider]

Although, FAANG is kind of an old acronym. Those companies (other than maybe Apple because they’ve always been weird) are more like Microsoft was, when the phrase was coined. In the sense that they are matured companies that aren’t striking out and building new things in new markets.

It wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve lost the “look at interesting portfolios” muscle and gained the “look at metrics” one.

Most people didn’t work at FAANG back then, right? You worked at FAANG because you were better than people who took the conventional approach, and the really competent growing companies could figure that out.

Not sure who the up-and-comers are now, though.

[lesser23]

What I find interesting is that despite, as you said, FAANG doesn't really have the "genius appeal" it used to have they still demand it. You would sort of expect a company that is in the glacial stages of movement to have more capital and more leeway. If anything, the competition for these positions has gotten even worse despite the work not being anything close to revolutionary or novel at all.