How do you signal that you’re a good engineer?
While I have my own views on the matter, I found an interesting argument at the (outdated) Bnoopy blog that describes what a good engineer is. Criteria I think we can all agree on: good communication, tendency to tinker, and passion for coding.
The author usually asks some questions to see if those criteria are met: does the engineer have a blog? A personal webpage? Contributions to an open source project?
Whoa, what do blogs and personal webpages have to do with anything?
Blog => interested in and dedicated to writing
Personal homepage => build it yourself & experiment with technologies, instead of being content with what generic services can make for you
Open source => you will hack for free if something needs to get done
As soon as I read that I thought: signals! Economic theory spends a lot of time arguing about how candidates with high ability signal their ability to employers. A college education is traditionally considered an effective signal. Maybe blogs, homepages, and open source contributions should be paired with education if you’re trying to communicate to companies that you rock. I know Google and IBM are starting to take more interest in those who’ve hacked OSS. Get to it!
[…] A friend recently introduced to me the dynamic game of signaling. In brief, signaling games involve two players, a sender and receiver. The sender, by nature, has a certain type that is unknown to the receiver. Being aware of his own type, the sender selects a message from a set of possible messages, M = {m1, m2,…,mn-1,mn} to send to the receiver. Unaware of the sender’s type, the receiver observes the messages an chooses from a set of possible actions, A = {a1, a2,…,an-1,an}. Ultimately, the two players will receive a payoff based upon the sender’s type, the mi message sent by the sender, and the ai action chosen by the receiver. […]
Pingback by The Netpreneur » Signaling Games and Startup Recruiting October 25, 2006 at about 11:21 pm
[…] Another very handy project to have under your belt is the “personal project”. The better interviewers will ask you what programming you’ve done on your own, outside of school. It shows that you actually enjoy what you are doing enough to do it when nobody is giving you a grade - that you are driven to improve yourself beyond what you would learn in a classroom. If you’ve developed for an open source project, even better. As one friend of mine put it, it shows that “you will hack for free if something needs to get done”. […]
Pingback by Quinntessential Contemplations » The Art of the Interview November 3, 2006 at about 1:28 pm
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