Productizing Yourself As A Software Developer
developers, hiring, productize
I recently wrote a post about one of Naval Ravikant's tweets:
In the post, I describe "Productizing Yourself" as the process of transforming interests into scalable forms (e.g. blogging about something you recently built.)
Productizing yourself is important as a software developer because of how difficult it is to hire software developers. Software and humans are both quite complex. This makes hiring decisions difficult. But, productizing yourself makes hiring decisions easier.
From my personal experience and as the president of an on-campus developers club, I noticed that hiring managers seek to answer two essential questions during the interview process:
- Can this person do the job?
- Can I stand to work with this person for 8 hours/day?
When you talk or write about the things you're learning and building online, it's easy to see what your skills are and how you might be a good fit. When you talk or write about the things you're interested in, others are (usually) left with a positive and supportive view (even if they don't share the same interest.)
Another reason to productize yourself is that the hiring process for software engineers can be nonsensical, even in the best of times. Many software developers feel this way. A study that analyzed software developer sentiment on the hiring process came to this conclusion:
"... our findings suggest that candidates perceive these practices as subjective, arbitrary, unnecessarily stressful, non-inclusive — and at times — demeaning to their sense of self-worth and self-efficacy...""
Overloading the hiring manager with data that allows them to confidently answer the two essential questions takes the edge off of the interview.
Everyone involved in the interview has a better idea of who you are as a candidated. Its pretty simple, more data is better than less data.
They don't have to stress about squeezing you for details about something you've built because they have the link to a write-up about it, or a demo, or the source code.
They don't have to push to see if you understand every edge case of a coding problem because they've seen some of the difficult problems you've already solved online.
I could keep going with examples, but I think you get the point.
If you're a software developer (or trying to become one), productize yourself and you'll have an easier time getting hired as a software developer.
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