Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Is an Online Identity Important When Searching For Technical Jobs?
First time accepted submitter quintessentialk writes "I'm looking for a new engineering job. I'm in my early 30s, and have a degree and some experience. I don't have an online presence. Does it matter? Is a record of tweets, blog posts, articles, etc. expected for prospective employees these days? What if one is completely un-googleable (i.e., nothing comes up, good or bad)? Though I haven't been 'trying' to hide, I only rarely use my full name online and don't even have a consistent pseudonym. I don't have a website, and haven't blogged or tweeted. I'm currently in a field which does not publish. Should I start now, or is an first-time tweeter/blogger in 2013 worse than someone with no presence at all?"
What do you do do?
If you're in IT especially and you're invisible you're suspicious. Lots of job applicants. What makes you stand out?
If you're a programmer looking for your next gig, having a slew of projects you've developed or worked on show up in Google can definitely help. Having lots of red party cup drunken pictures with your friends on a blog somewhere, however, will definitely hurt you.
If your technical job requires a TS or above clearance, it is best ot have very little presence. Party life or drug refrences in your posts will work against you in your background investigation for the clearance.
The truth shall set you free!
Frankly, any company that expects any given hire to have an extensive record of blog posts and tweets is not one I would really want to work for.
Not just because of the privacy implications, but because, in my view, that's expecting me to have a particular kind of personality: one that feels compelled to share everything, or at least a frequent chunk of what I do and think.
Unfortunately, this is just another manifestation of extroverts running most organizations and not even truly comprehending what it might be not to be an extrovert. So much of the hiring process and expectations in the workplace are centered around things that give extroverts a charge, but drain introverts' energy badly.
Just one of my big pet peeves X-P
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
I think your social media silence says quite a lot about what kind of person you are. If I were looking for someone to keep the company's secrets, it'd be you.
There are two choices for online presence that makes sense to me:
- avoid it completely
or
- use it only as a self-marketing tool. Only blog/tweet about technical stuff, no politics, current affairs, funny pictures. Only use social networks that bring value to you. I use LinkedIn, but it might be not useful for everyone. Always assume that whatever you put there is public, even if it says "private". Ignore trolls. Praise other projects freely, but be reluctant to post negative opinions. In general, be constructive.
I have never been asked about imaginary friends in job interviews. Am I missing something?
Honestly, you're better off without an online presence. Unless the company is looking to hire a full time blogger, if they do an internet search at all, it will only be to find out if there's any reason why they shouldn't hire you.
Nobody's going to even look. All we care about is can you do the job. The only exception is if the job is in marketing, then they may care about your use of social media.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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An exception would be if the applicant links to his professional online presence in the CV. Then I would use that as I would any other information on the CV. However the presence on the web does not make the information different than having the same information on the CV.
If I were hiring for a sensitive position where a background check is warranted, then I would do a real background check.
But if no background check is required, why go poking around in someone's private life.
Having just sifted through about 100 CVs to find 5 of 6 potential candidates for a senior programmer opening let me fill you with some tips:
* First and foremost: do not pad your CV with things you barely know just to qualify. It's one thing if you used both MS SQL Server and MySQL interchangeably in your past employment but if you used exclusively SQL Server for the past 3 jobs and the requirement is "experience with MySQL" do not apply. Including "experience with MySQL" to trigger the keywords will be an indicator of desperation and lack of professionalism
* About the original question (online presence): it is detrimental unless you are world renowed in your field. Bruce Schneier can point to his online body of work but if yours consists only in presence in Facebook groups, an occasional post on some majordomo list for your pet language or, heavens forbid, a Linkedin account just ommit it. It won't get read and if it does, more likely than not it will show a side of you that would be better hidden.
* The only valuable online presence is a portfolio. Websites you were part of the development team if you area applying for a web developer position, website for the product or service you helped to create, anything that can prove the quality of your work and your qualifications.
* Last but not least important: hiring in this field is mostly about word of mouth and references. The first thing many companies do when trying to find someone qualified is to ask the current employees "do you know someone you can vouch for this position?" That is the surest way to get to the shortlist, to have someone to vouch for you by name.
Last, a little rant. Lucky for us Slashdot got bought by Dice so most of the "infomercials" are in form of people getting and giving advice about employment. Imagine if they had been bought by Sony or Microsoft, it would be a lot like when "jumptheshark.com" got bought by TV Guide only to be dismantled and destroyed.
I find myself in a similar situation. I am looking for a new job. I have never had time for an online presence, but an heavily foul-mouthed person, who shares my uncommon name, does. Worse, we're about the same age. Without looking like a nut job, how do I put on my resume that I am NOT that guy?
Not a single police force has tried to hire me since I started using medical marijuana. Just try to get a pilot's license! Oddly, if you drink, they'll trust you not to fly drunk but if you use medical marijuana they won't trust you at all.
I work for a well-known technical company with tons of both open-source contributions and projects we've open-sourced ourselves; we have a techblog, and a presence in many conferences.
When we look at someone technical, we see if they have a presence online. That doesn't mean Twitter or Facebook -- we really don't care about them unless they're public and inappropriate -- but contributions to OSS, technical blog posts, talks, etc. If it's there, it may make us somewhat more interested.
That said, I have a few engineers working for me who are similarly Google-invisible, and who have no interest in creating OSS, speaking at conferences, or writing blog posts. That's not a problem. They weren't penalized when we interviewed them, and they're not penalized now.
I suspect that a company, given the choice between a famous engineer and a non-famous engineer who are equally qualified, may be biased to hire the famous engineer (in my company, we'd just hire both), so I suspect it's an informal edge, not an explicit expectation (most of the time).
If you're in it purely for the money you're in it for purely the wrong reason.
If I was in it purely for the money, I would have gotten my securities license or gone to law school to become a certified professional asshole instead of a software developer. I do enjoy doing the work but I don't go around gushing emotional about how great my fucking job is. What I cannot stand is all of the patronizing bullshit from management as they try to turn work into a game and offer "non monetary" rewards for overtime spent working on their projects. We aren't children we're adults and it would be better for everyone involved if the relationship was kept businesslike and adult. When I'm working for hire I work hard and put in my best effort, as a point of professional pride, but don't think that I care more about your projects than my family or my personal obligations. And besides that, why should you care how I "feel" about it as long as the work gets done on time, it's up to standard and passes spec? If at any time either one of us isn't satisfied with the arrangement we can part ways and move on, it's not personal it's just business. That to me is the mark of a true professional, not faked passion and bullshit emotional games, so spare me your management theories on why I need to be passionate because the software business, or at least the development side, is not a service business. We aren't being paid for emotional labor but for finished product. If you want "passion" in addition to the finished product, that costs extra, but hey if you've got the money honey I've got the time.
First of all, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I don't work in IT or software so some of the specifics don't directly apply, but the generalities do. The biggest clarification I need to make though is by 'online presence' (with my examples of webpages, blogs, and tweets) I didn't mean social chit chat or tools like facebook. I meant 'having a history of making topical posts that are well received by an audience'. If a twitter feed, it would be a journalistic twitter feed, not a 'what I ate for breakfast' twitter feed. The argument (as it has been made to me) is that regularly generating content, and maintaining an audience, shows that you are an active member of your field, and that your ideas have some influence. Especially given that my current work is bound by NDA (no portfolio, no publications, vague resume) having something outside of that would be useful -- but I can't create a reputation ex nihlo. And, since I'm an engineer and not a journalist, it might not matter that much anyway.