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by fitandfunction 4702 days ago
Technical skills aside, the best piece of advice in the article is "show them that you want it."

I've conducted countless interviews / hires where it basically went: candidates P & Q are the best on paper and in person, but candidate P said x, y, z or did a, b, c, and seems to really want this job and work in our company

x, y, z was sometimes as simple as enthusiasm, and other times was in describing what he/she did in their spare time. a, b, c was usually a project for work, school or fun that was highly relevant.

Intellectually, I think I know that "enthusiasm" is a poor / weak predictor of success. But, emotionally, it's a go-to tie-breaker.

1 comments

Should I start putting every substantial R/Python script I write, even if they are based on some tutorials, on the Github/Personal-Website? Is that how I "show"? I missed the Github bus for all my previous projects.
What do you mean you "missed" the github bus? If you still have the code saved somewhere, you can just create a new repo and put it up there.
No need to point to projects that are based on tutorials. Lots of githubs are nothing more than that at this point.

If you're going to go the coding route, put up a working page, publish a blog entry about it, publish a working app, etc.

The key is to show effort (I spent time on this) and relevancy (I'm solving a problem that you might care about).