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by 1autodev 1442 days ago
Do you have the following?

- A github / gitlab profile with small to medium size open source projects

- A linkedin profile with 500+ connections

- A web portfolio featuring descriptions & visuals of at least 3 past projects, as well as a summary of your skills, professional experience, academic background, and personal hobbies

that is to ask: are you marketing yourself?

3 comments

Why would a product manager need open source git contributions?

I dont do any of the self marketing things you ask for and yet I'm able to find jobs.

Op, its possible you need to have someone look over your resume to make it more appealing. Alternatively, it could be the job positions you are applying for.

Those things can help, but for engineering, I've found them to have very little value. For someone in business development, I have no idea how those would help.

In my experience, no one gives a shit what's on your GitHub. You could have original code that's been starred that's also relevant to what you'll be working with on the job, but it's unlikely to have any impact. After all, how do we know you didn't just copy that code from somewhere else?

> A linkedin profile with 500+ connections

I've never heard of that as a qualification. Maybe it's considered weird if someone doesn't have a LinkedIn (which is also BS), but 500+ connections? Who actually has that many connections and not have them be mostly recruiters and randos?

After my 9+ years of experience, I have 165 connections on LinkedIn, and they are all people I've either worked with, went to school with, or met in person in a professional context. I guess I should up my game and just make a bunch of worthless connections?

> A web portfolio featuring descriptions & visuals of at least 3 past projects

Would be one thing for a designer, but this isn't really fair for those with an engineering background. Some of us work on projects where we can't disclose that we worked on them, myself included. Even if I could, it's the same problem with GitHub. Most people just don't care that you can say that you worked on something. I've worked on things that have millions of active users, and no one in charge of hiring gives a shit (not that I expect them to).

This isn't to say any of those things are bad, but the return on investment for open source projects and portfolios is staggering, IMO.

An alternative, again for (more) senior people, is to be able to point to commercial packages xxx and yyy as "things I made a direct contribution to, specifically aaa, bbb and ccc".

Those who have worked in commercial code, particularly for a longer time, predate open-source or have been essentially forbidden to participate (ie, companies own my ideas). I have no particular desire to be litigated :-).