Bartram: Companies only look at side projects during initial resume screening
Ammon Bartram · Hiring Engineers with Ammon Bartram · Y Combinator · May 17, 2017 · at 23:30
Ammon Bartram, co-founder of technical hiring platform Triplebyte, discusses whether personal coding portfolios matter during software engineering job interviews.
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“So companies, Don't actually pay very much attention to side projects. Except for at the screening stage. So resume screen, you know, candidate applies to company, the company decides if they're going to interview the person at all. And there's some adverse selection bias in who applies to companies, and there's this big stream of candidates. And so, you know, at any company, there's this huge stream coming in, and they have to decide somehow. And so they do that based on resume screens, and it comes down to pretty dumb credential stuff, right? If you've worked at a top company, you've gone to a top school or in some cases if you have a project that catches right, that's impressive. And so side projects can help a lot there. But they are very rarely given away in the actual interview.”
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