On Friday, 13 May 2016 at 21:10:09 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Friday, May 13, 2016 19:53:18 bitwise via Digitalmars-d
wrote:
May be worth mentioning archiving sites like gmane that seem
to love making your stupid questions/statements your #1 google
search result. Excellent way to make an impression on future
employers... ;)
Actually, the fact that I had fairly high reputation on
stackoverflow helped me get my current job, and I've had other
companies looked favoribly on the fact that I have activity on
github. I'm even amazingly searchable given how common all of
my names are thanks primarily to this newsgroup. You'll
probably find me fairly quickly if you search for
Jonathan M Davis programming
and this in spite of the fact that Jonathan and Davis are both
_very_ common (and my middle name, Michael, is just as bad). I
definitely think that having a visible presence on sites like
stackoverflow and github is good, and if they have your real
name (or something close to it) with your real photo, it's a
lot easier to show that it's really you.
Sure, some folks may want to stay more anonymous, and that's
there prerogative, but in my experience, having a visible
presence online with regards to programming is definitely an
aid in getting employment. Potential employers can actually see
that you know something and that other programmers think that
you know something, whereas they can't if you do everything
online under a pseudonym and/or never contribute to projects
online or make any of your own code available online.
As to Walter's original point of recognizing folks, it's
definitely nicer when contributors use the same names in the
newsgroup and on github (be they their real names or not).
Otherwise, it _can_ be a pain to figure out that they're the
same person. For frequent contributors, you tend to figure it
out and remember it, but even then, it's more work than when
the names match - and if the contributor is not a frequent
contributor, then it's unlikely that any connection is going to
be made, and it's going to seem like they came out of nowhere
when they might actually be someone who posts in the newsgroup
semi-frequently.
- Jonathan M Davis
I agree there is value to having a strong online presence, but I
personally don't approach my online interactions as if every bit
of it was part of a portfolio. That is something I believe you
have to plan for from the start, but for many, that ship has
sailed ;)
The biggest problem though, is that you can't control what every
random internet crawler decides is a popular bit of conversation.
For example, if you try to answer enough questions on
stackoverflow, eventually, you're going to get one wrong.
Sometimes, moronically so. So if some random search engine
decides that that particular question is a popular one, you could
easily have that [i]proud[/i] moment coming up as your #1 google
search result.
I'm certain that even in a year's time, I'll look back at some of
my questions/statements on dlang.org, and frown. Except the one
about conditional version statements, of course ;)
Bit
