Everytime I talk about 'digital presence' on Twitter, I get a whole lot of pushback from people saying 'no one will read it', 'do I need a lot of followers' and so on. In this post I will clarify the why and what of maintaining a professional digital presence.
Let's, like Simon Sinek, start with why. Why maintain a digital presence? The answer is simple - your website is a way for hiring managers to get to know you. That's it. But it goes deeper than that. The more hiring managers interact with your persona, the more they come to trust you. If you think about an interview, the hiring manager actually has very little opportunity to get to know you. They have to form their opinion of you as you struggle to come up with an answer to some random question that you may or may not know the answer to. Why do this? Why not have them get to know you at a time and place of your choosing, as you explore topics of your choosing.
This automatically also gives them ample fodder for the interview, fodder that you provided :-) Here are some examples of a good digital presence
https://injuly.in/blog/
https://medium.com/@kuldeep27396
Maintaining a good digital presence gives off the vibes of someone who has their life together enough to just bang out an essay or two every month, consistently. Someone who cares enough about learning to distill their learnings into a post, and someone who has the urge to help others (how many times has your life been saved by a random blog post?). These are all good things. Hiring managers are looking for people who get meaning from their work, and a blog is the easiest way to prove that.
What it is not
Your digital presence is not the place to push forward the state of the art. No one is expecting that from you. So if you're using the excuse that you have nothing new to say that hasn't already been said before, you can stop using that as an excuse. Same for your github. Those saying they don't have time to 'do OSS contributions' would do well to answer the question - how come in your entire life as a programmer you have never come across some software that needs to exist? My github is full of tiny libraries that no one else except me is using. Who cares? It shows that I know how to decompose a problem into a general solution. Also, sometimes I see little tools that the author built just for themselves. This is the way. You don't need to get commits into some huge project to 'do OSS'. You can just write useful software, useful just to you, and publish it.
Adverse selection
One of the objections I got was that 'just because someone doesn't have a digital presence doesn't mean they're a bad programmer'. Agreed. But if someone gave you a method whereby you could (ethically) hypnotise your hiring manager into giving you the job you want, would you not want to use it? That's what your digital presence is for.
Use it to be found, to be recognised, to be known even before you step into the interview room.
And now on to the jobs.
Let's, like Simon Sinek, start with why. Why maintain a digital presence? The answer is simple - your website is a way for hiring managers to get to know you. That's it. But it goes deeper than that. The more hiring managers interact with your persona, the more they come to trust you. If you think about an interview, the hiring manager actually has very little opportunity to get to know you. They have to form their opinion of you as you struggle to come up with an answer to some random question that you may or may not know the answer to. Why do this? Why not have them get to know you at a time and place of your choosing, as you explore topics of your choosing.
This automatically also gives them ample fodder for the interview, fodder that you provided :-) Here are some examples of a good digital presence
https://injuly.in/blog/
https://medium.com/@kuldeep27396
Maintaining a good digital presence gives off the vibes of someone who has their life together enough to just bang out an essay or two every month, consistently. Someone who cares enough about learning to distill their learnings into a post, and someone who has the urge to help others (how many times has your life been saved by a random blog post?). These are all good things. Hiring managers are looking for people who get meaning from their work, and a blog is the easiest way to prove that.
What it is not
Your digital presence is not the place to push forward the state of the art. No one is expecting that from you. So if you're using the excuse that you have nothing new to say that hasn't already been said before, you can stop using that as an excuse. Same for your github. Those saying they don't have time to 'do OSS contributions' would do well to answer the question - how come in your entire life as a programmer you have never come across some software that needs to exist? My github is full of tiny libraries that no one else except me is using. Who cares? It shows that I know how to decompose a problem into a general solution. Also, sometimes I see little tools that the author built just for themselves. This is the way. You don't need to get commits into some huge project to 'do OSS'. You can just write useful software, useful just to you, and publish it.
Adverse selection
One of the objections I got was that 'just because someone doesn't have a digital presence doesn't mean they're a bad programmer'. Agreed. But if someone gave you a method whereby you could (ethically) hypnotise your hiring manager into giving you the job you want, would you not want to use it? That's what your digital presence is for.
Use it to be found, to be recognised, to be known even before you step into the interview room.
And now on to the jobs.