[throwaway27448]

> Given several presentations at conferences discussing anything from your project as a library author, maintainer or at a company showcasing your engineering expertise.

What sort of positive signal is this supposed to be? Why would presenting point towards a productive employee?

[systima]

I agree.

In my experience, this correlates more with soft skills and “one man band” founder/maker companies that tend to sell training products or (if they do exist in a company environment at all) invariably work in DevRel and aren’t pushing code.

[rvz]

The whole point is to reinforce the track record of someone applying to said founding engineering role which you can look up what they have presented and see how well they answer questions from the audience which are soft skills applicable in founding engineer / CTO / senior roles which goes beyond AI-generated CVs or cover letters.

This can be found all the time, from many tech talks or conferences large or small and 99% of the time, the person presenting already covers most of the requirements and makes the selection process easier, not harder.

One part I did miss in my post was to require at least 2 out of 3 of them so, I added that in. But I'd rather optimize for hiring candidates who are builders and know what they are talking and what to build even with AI and can easily answer deep technical questions (because they have experience and have done it), than those studying for the interview and need constant hand-holding and are over-reliant on AI.

Remember, this is for recruiting founding engineers and the bar has to be high way above the noise.