Clojurians Log v2

this is the chart

Yes - there are two other aspects though: • Recency - if something was a long time ago it should probably fall lower in the CV. • Relevance - If the experience is in the wrong role/programming language/tech stack/industry/etc it my need to receive less emphasis. ◦ e.g. when applying for a programming job - it may be better to emphasise non-professional coding experience over work experience as say a waiter. There is also a minimum threshold: • e.g. My CV doesn't include my exam results when I was 16 years old - they're just so long ago it's not worth mentioning! So yeah, it might be a pyramid - but the pyramid changes based on the specifications of each job you are applying for.

Yes, this comparison has to be within relevant and recent experiences. In my opinion, work experience comes on top, and I don't think that is controversial. I did this post with a very practical purpose in mind. If I'm giving advice to someone that wants to find a Clojure job - so no relevant work experience with the language, how can the candidate make best use of their time to demonstrate competence? Personal project? OS contribution? Training?

It's tricky to jump to a new stack. I was lucky to have an employer investing in my training, but that's not always the case.

depending on the floss contribution, I'd see floss work the same as relevant work experience, and possibly better as I can actually see something rather than just hear a report about it

tho I do keep in mind that not everyone has the time/resources to make floss contributions

I think one approach with the CV is to put some summary bullet points at the top - incase valuable experience is hidden lower down. E.g. > I have significant experience with Clojure outside of a professional setting. I have created multiple hobby projects in Clojure, attended talks, completed multiple tutorials and I feel reasonably fluent in the programming language.

yeah, I put a list of skills (usually grouped by theme) up near the top and then list the skills I used in various projects chronologically further down (I can do this at the top. I did this here, then, further down). I'm pretty happy when I see this in a CV as I want to know if the job I have on offer matches with what someone can/wants to do. I'm a hiring manager though and not a HR person so ymmv

A question I sometimes ask as an interviewer: > Even though you have no professional experience of Clojure - do you feel your skills are equivalent to someone with 1/2/3/etc years of professional experience? If so how many? > What are your strongest programming languages? If you were to have a programming test/challenge today - what would you choose?

n = 1 sample here, but demonstrating personal projects — actual completed projects, not empty folders with a README inside, and having a trackable record of open source contributions (albeit not in clojure) was very helpful in getting some people to listen to me rather than ignore my emails

one thing I learned is that sometimes you just have to be lucky when it comes to getting a job — what makes 1 person respond to you likely makes another hiring manager simply ignore you. e.g. ive ran into people who would inquire on what ive actually written on my resume in order to assess whether id be a good fit for a senior dev position, whereas other hiring mangers simply count years, dont see a magical number greater than 5, and say “sorry we only want seniors”. there’s simply no way to tell what kind of person you’re talking to, so I’d say there’s a lot of luck involved, together with sufficient evidence of being able to work in a team and being able to do things other applicants aren’t doing (that a hiring manager finds valuable)

> open source contributions yeah, short of actual work experience, open source contributions come as a close second

but for that you have to get into the details of specific experiences. If you're just looking at someone's profile and online elements, how can you know that, you don't have access to those details. Although they're super important and some candidates might highlight them ... Creator of OS is a different category imo and I didn't include it. My reasoning being, If you don't need introductions, and you're the creator of a project with a ton of stars, you're probably in a different bag than all the other CVS. Open source contributions were short for - person has done code voluntarily that has been peer-reviewed.

and by the way, these elements for me are all approximations to the real thing, which is to know how it's like to work with someone in a non-trivial task. But you won’t know that until after the fact.

@hiskennyness the stacked boxes pyramid is not a great design, it was just easier to write content inside. There are no dimensions, just ordered by average

Judging someone's competence is complex and depending on how you ask things, you might get different answers. This was the original quiz: "How do you rate these items when judging someone's competence with a given technology. Assume these all happened within the same time frame, and they all count as relevant experience." and then the items in the pyramid with a 1-5 selection

Right. My concern is that the items are orthogonal with what I myself happen to think constitutes relevant experience, although "personal project" and "creater of O/S" are not bad. Before I understood the code camp phenomenon, and not realizing I was surrounded at a work social by camper graduates, I once offered that a good measure of an interviewee would be the code they wrote for fun. Oops.

Since this original post, I asked a few developers in my network for their opinion and the result "came in":

This link has the original question and results https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yebc7gf0KmNe0_l6q-8-7lmqgacbqJxoJtahcohzjgQ/edit?usp=sharing

it's a very small sample of 13 developers in my network, but this made me curious to make a larger study

As a long-time hiring manager, I would probably agree with the top of that pyramid but I've had extremely good experience hiring and working with people who have gone through "bootcamp" courses and I would rank that fourth behind personal projects or perhaps even third behind open source work. I consider professional certificates to be the least valuable on that list, followed by coding challenges. University coursework might be a good indicator in an entry level developer but quickly becomes irrelevant as you gain work experience: in general, for me, once you have 5+ years in industry, your degree is irrelevant -- even whether you have a degree is irrelevant for me at that point (and I wish our industry would stop gating nearly all jobs at every level based on the candidate having a bachelor's degree!).

I'm with @seancorfield on Bootcamp being 4th, partly as it shows grit and that the candidate will probably have some experience doing something beyond coding, which I value when I hire. Bootcamp + personal project/open source/work experience is a really good sign as it shows a lot about how determined a candidate can be, but I understand that not everyone will have the time for that

some ppl even rated OS contributions higher than work experience. I personally thought professional certificates would rank much lower. Also, I've worked with really strong devs in the UK that did apprenticeships, which I think it's a brilliant system.

What I like about the bootcamps (at least, the ones I've had experience with graduates from): they work in teams, they follow an agile workflow, with TDD and/or automated testing, CI, version control, bug tracking, etc -- so the candidates don't question any of that in an employer and will often ask about that sort of stuff in the interview and favor a well-organized employer.

I can imagine apprenticeships working well to build good skills -- as an industry, we're woefully short on proper mentorship.

I found it hard to distinguish between bootcamp graduates prior to interview. They all had the same GitHub profile with the same projects. For me that has devalued personal projects and put more importance on the interview process. Hiring from bootcamps is an effective way to find good, motivated developers in my experience.

Yeah, their resumes can be pretty similar and then you're looking for more subtle clues (and, hopefully, a nicely-tailored cover letter).

Looking at those results, I wonder if there are bootcamps that put an emphasis in OS contributions, rather than just doing projects

Where is "original work"? How about, "(winning) war stories"? "Personal project" sounds promising, but the pyramid seems to me to be designed around the wrong dimensions. ie, In any box other than "personal project" I would be asking for original contributions. So do we need those boxes? 🤔

@hiskennyness what do you mean by "original contributions"? (IIUC it is a bit cross cutting so I probably would ask as a part of it). I'd also consider any thing they could tell me about these projects and how they did it as "war stories", tho I've gone off that term of late in favour of "experience reports".

Yeah, "war stories" can be taken as deprecating real war. But we'll have to do better than "experience reports" if we want those clicks! 🤣 I would just ask about anything they originated, be it a solitaire game written to satisfy a much simpler homework requirement but done just for the fun of it, or a complete rewrite of a failing enterprise project. It could also be a brutal refactoring of a legacy system, required to extend it. I just need to get them talking about sth specific, I do not work well with abstract. The inverse is what happened when I saw sth neat on a resume and asked about its implementation. On about the third Q they got upset and pretty much said, "Don't ask me, I did not design it!". Oops.