There is some dirty secret i learned in my time as a eng. manager: Working in open source / Being the maintainer of a popular library / Blogging about software: All this things won't give you necessarily a competitive edge but can work against you. It's counterintuitive but sometimes teams are looking for a more low-profile hire.
In my experience, maintaining a very popular software library, supporting open source, and blogging have absolutely all contributed to my success, and, additionally, as someone who is now a founder seeking like-minded, highly skilled engineers, those are key signals for an attractive hire.
I can understand though, perhaps in a work environment where management is unlikely to be able to retain high skilled talent, you may want 'low-profile' workers that aren't going to have as many competitors chasing after them...
How so? Care to elaborate? I get that bloggers/educators can sometimes be not the best fit for IC roles but doing open source seems like a huge advantage.
Some companies want subservient, homogenous employees that come in, do work, and can be let go if they do not perform. That's a simple equation.
If you get in somebody who is a star, however minor, that changes the equation, changes the dynamic. Now that person can have more confidence, can have more sway in the decision making. If the company wants to let them go, then they might post a message to their followers, riling them up, creating bad PR for the company. It's no longer a simple equation.
So it all comes down to the insecurities of the company.
I was part of the selection committee for a position once, where we selected the more junior engineer.
The probably most simple explaination would be that for some roles you like to have someone that can be easier "shaped" into a certain role. Someone who is already successful may bring their own system of doing things. This is great if it is a good fit, but can produce frictions if it isn't.
The next thing is that if you apply to a mediocre position with overly amazing credentials, it can raise suspicions. Something must be wrong with you, maybe you got amazing credentials, but you are complicated to work with. Maybe you're looking for the mediocre job just because you think it will be a walk in the park, etc. There are legit reasons for this (e.g. "my partner moved to $TOWN for her career and I am looking for something to do here, and you seem like the best fit. I know I am technically overqualified, but I wanted to go back to coding for years now and this offers me a geeat chance to give it a go").
Of all the senior canidates we have rejected the most common issue was that they didn't offer a convincing explanation to why they chose that specific position. The worst one was talking about how it would be a relaxing position for them.
Yes, sure, in theory. But the position we were filling was one with very little supervision and oversight, for room reasons. So basically one person in a room in a different building who has to maintain a bunch of stuff in addition to build up a organizational structure from scratch.
Filling it with someone who you might have to check after not for seemed like a risky bet. Call it a gut feeling. I worked together with a guy like that, which lead to me having to save the day every other week because he forgot to organize for an event he knew about months in advance.
When parent poster says things like “low profile” it should be interpreted as cheap and doesn’t know their worth. Assume all hiring managers want the least qualified and cheapest possible employee that can still get the job done.
Not always true, but true enough to be useful and more true than hiring managers admit to themselves. I’ve been a senior involved with hiring for years because while I full don’t want to manage, I also never trust my manager to hire well. They have multiple mutually exclusive narratives they tell themselves about how they hire/manage. Not all of them are true, and sometimes not any are.
It dependents on the size of the organization a lot. However in general it's likely that the new hire is the most competent of them all, which would be an immediate risk for some of the managers (e.g being displaced)
It does not even have to be successful. After getting repeated feedback about my strengths as an entrepreneur and how it is not a good fit for that position, I am now toning that down a lot. YC advertises that funding a company is always good career choice because even if you fail it will be good in your CV. But my experience so far is that many companies see it as a red flag.
This is kinda fair, though. People who have run their own business make for really, really, awkward employees. It takes a really skilled manager to deal with them properly
IF you have a side gig it is easy to think you won’t be 100% invested in company success. If you monetize you most likely will jump ship.
There are other risks like burn out as you may read a lot of OSS contributors have — so when someone is hit by burn out it will be across the board not that they somehow will perform at their peak at job while burned out by coding on side.
That's often works and is a good idea, in my personal experience. It would be so much better, however, if we had a functional and affordable health care system for independent consultants. Consultants working from outside the US may actually have an advantage in this regard, depending on where they are exactly.
This is cope and propaganda to discourage people from developing their own brand. Better for the corporation if the workers have no support structure or reputation that might lead them to quit
"Developing your own brand" is not a scalable solution. There's only ever going to be a few thousand developers who are well enough known to be called a brand.
"Personally, I like to publish nothing and collaborate on nothing outside of work, because I like corpobux more than anything else. I'm too stupid and slow to conceivably make anything worth writing about"
