We need some startups in the proof of skill space as vast amounts of time and energy are used by developers providing public proof of their skills rather than actually doing work or improving their own skills.
Sure, talks and blogs can be useful, but in the same way that companies are harmed by resume driven development, there are community downsides to resume driven blogging if just that things trend towards whatever is new at the time rather than a diverse range of topics. It also is not helpful if a lot of them are geared towards impressing recruiters rather than informing.
We want tutorials by people who actually enjoy creating good tutorials.
I say this as someone who spent a couple weeks on Stack Overflow answering trivial questions after graduating so that I had more of a public profile. I would answer anything and everything easy as I wanted to get over 200 rep points (so I could say I was "ranked"). Anything challenging was skipped simply because if it took more than half an hour to answer, I might not get 200 points that day.
I knew nobody would see me as an expert due to inexperience (so nobody would really read by Stack Overflow answers), so I was trying to generate proof of enthusiasm.
That isn't desirable for the programming community as a whole as it meant that niche questions I had the answer to never got answered as I had points to earn.
EDIT: Leetcode is for passing the interview. Resumes. blogs, and tutorial writing are about getting the interview. Leetcode doesn't attempt to solve this problem.
Back in my teens (mid 20s now), I was very (very) interested in Photoshop to the point where I would consume dozens of tutorials a day and just work on projects for things like forum signatures or post headers and graphics. My "graphic design" career never took off, but to this day I still have muscle memory of certain tasks and actions I've created and still set up my workspace in the same way.
Now that I'm a programmer I rarely find the itch to dive into things like this again. Every now and then, I'll want to create some silly website with a game or something and again I'd find myself spending late nights just working on it. I've realized that the fact that I "know something" isn't what drives me, it's that I'm interested in what I want so much that I'll learn anything just to get to do it.
Lately, I've been starting to feel the itch for doing something related to baseball (again, something I love), like data analytics or amateur scouting or something. I have no idea how to get started, but I just know I want to. I hope I find tutorials from people who are just as excited to share information as I am to absorb it.
There is not nearly enough content regarding the Korean/Japanese/Taiwanese leagues that are filling the baseball void right now.
I know next to nothing about the players and my typical sources are not putting much out except "the broadcasts are pretty watchable, great circle change." Would love to see more scouting reports on the players who have been very much overlooked in all this.
> We need some startups in the proof of skill space as vast amounts of time and energy are used by developers providing public proof of their skills rather than actually doing work or improving their own skills.
That completely dismisses the fact that the majority of businesses don't want good coders. They want adequate coders who aren't assholes. You can't create an online test that judges whether someone is enthusiastic, kind, honest, cooperative, and reliable. Nobody wants to work with a "10x developer" who passed coding challenges with flying colors but is unpleasant to work with. I'd much prefer to be judged based on my personality and my willingness to learn.
What you're suggesting would not solve any problems, and at worst could harm people's ability to have a job if employers buy into such poppycock.
I agree, I think we need to get away from proof of skill things like leetcode.
In its best light, its discriminatory. How is someone with a life, such as children or other things going on, supposed to take huge amounts of time away from their personal life to practice skills that are unrelated to the thing they actually want to do?
one of my biggest regrets when doing my masters degree was spending my extra time learning things a data scientist would do. Like learning how to go through huge amounts of data, pull NFL data to see which yard lines on the field have the most injuries (1 and 2 yard line because of % of runs), learning NLP techniques like LDA, etc. Only none of this mattered, the guardian at the gate was asking me how to build and balance binary trees, etc.
The fact that I regret spending my time learning how to do the things the job requires is a travesty of the system. It exposes how asinine the whole system is.
There are so many things I want to learn and do - both technical and non technical. Including many things that will make me a better engineer for employers current and future.
But all of that is put on hold so that I can grind leetcode on my way into a better job first. Because nothing else matters.
I want proof of skill, but I want it to mean I rarely have to prove my skill again (or at least only at years-long intervals like 5-10 year refreshers).
Everyone's afraid of that rogue false-positive developer though.
The problem I am seeking to solve is people spending time and energy making less than passionate tutorials or open source contributions for the sake of resume development.
What does that have to do with screening out assholes?
I have enjoyed all of those and the Stockfighter attempt in this space as well. They all seem to have hit a hard obstacle in convincing the general, non-FAANG hiring market that they can provide "better" candidates that any old staffing agency. I have definitely had hiring managers in non-software companies tell me that they will just pick from three resumes from a staffing agency of a standard enterprise developer job without much actual consideration of the candidate's resume or portfolio of previous work.
I do suspect there exists a category of higher-end headhunter agencies with a stable of high-quality, proofed candidates that those agencies can more successfully place than other attempts. Just an anecdote, but I have seen in my area some things that look more like a "small team" placements where that team has some history of helping companies radically improve their software quickly. I am specifically thinking about an actual team that gets hired as a group but into fulltime roles at a company as a unit. This seems to be a prequel to an acquisition of the company that hired them being the end goal. Then that entire team seems to repeat the process elsewhere . . .
I know about those, but those are about passing the algorithmic interview/conducting the tech interview.
I am thinking more about how one might demonstrate expertise in the kinds of things one shows off in blogs, such as expertise in Spring with respect to financial systems.
No ideas presently, just something I would like to see.
I do; write your CV, provide references. Build a portfolio website and/or blog and just write about things you have and are working on, issues you ran into, etc.
I think most developers find their jobs interesting and have a lot to talk about, even if simultaneously they don't believe what they do is much to talk about.
Note to self: Do some writing again. i started a portfolio site on Github years ago and started to just word vomit about my earlier projects and jobs (internships, school projects). It adds up over time.
But do companies care about that stuff? Nowadays, it seems everyone is just interested in your ability to solve leetcode problems on a whiteboard, plus some system design. After that, just make sure you're not an asshole, and voila, you're in.
I've long been in finance tech (i-banks, hedge funds) and still am in the industry (though trying desperately to get out). At the start of my career, I made some effort to learn the business domain. After a while, it became apparent that very few people (including hiring managers) cared, and that it was a total waste of time as far as furthering my career - even if I wanted to stay in finance tech. Better to just study leetcode.
Do they work sufficiently well for the purposes we need it to, though? As another commented mentioned, the bulk of jobs require adequate coding skills with good soft skills. If you have the license, does that mean we can skip the whiteboard coding bunk?
Sure, talks and blogs can be useful, but in the same way that companies are harmed by resume driven development, there are community downsides to resume driven blogging if just that things trend towards whatever is new at the time rather than a diverse range of topics. It also is not helpful if a lot of them are geared towards impressing recruiters rather than informing.
We want tutorials by people who actually enjoy creating good tutorials.
I say this as someone who spent a couple weeks on Stack Overflow answering trivial questions after graduating so that I had more of a public profile. I would answer anything and everything easy as I wanted to get over 200 rep points (so I could say I was "ranked"). Anything challenging was skipped simply because if it took more than half an hour to answer, I might not get 200 points that day.
I knew nobody would see me as an expert due to inexperience (so nobody would really read by Stack Overflow answers), so I was trying to generate proof of enthusiasm.
That isn't desirable for the programming community as a whole as it meant that niche questions I had the answer to never got answered as I had points to earn.
EDIT: Leetcode is for passing the interview. Resumes. blogs, and tutorial writing are about getting the interview. Leetcode doesn't attempt to solve this problem.