Nor your LinkedIn profile does. That’s why I struggle to prove my worth. I still haven’t figured out how to convey my true value to those who don’t know me yet. I find it particularly difficult in two completely different countries: Italy and the United States. Let’s try to understand together why (and how to deal with it).
You Are Worth More Than Your Salary
This sentence was said to me years ago, just before leaving me at home, so it’s a bit meaningless. I read what @sylwia-lask said last week about the GitHub contribution graph and I want to share my experience. I agree with her: it doesn’t mean anything. And that’s not the only thing that, despite everything, is useless.
First, although GitHub discourages from doing so, you may have separate accounts for personal and professional use just like me. You can merge them, but you will lose permissions for what you delete. In any case, the repositories in my company account are all private and therefore would not show anything to employers.
Before my last job, I worked for a startup that uses GitLab, so if I had kept it active, I would have had an account that had been unused for six years. Does that mean I did nothing during all that time? What if I had worked in consulting, using on-premise servers? These parameters cannot be objectified.
The Italian Job: A World Apart
I’m Italian and I work in Italy. Compared to the rest of the world (or at least what I read from my foreign colleagues), the job market is completely different. Forget about your LinkedIn profile, Stack Overflow, etc.: they will ask you for them all, and no one will look at them. You must have connections within the company.
Don’t dare to have a resume in English. Everyone here has a degree, and no one really speaks it. Since my resume is only in English, no one has called me back: of course, I may have included information that was not interesting, but it’s strange that until the day before I had numerous proposals.
Another thing I did was to exclude age, marital status, and photograph. Abroad, it is illegal to include them, but in Italy, they ask everyone for them. And if, unfortunately, you’re a woman of childbearing age, it’s a problem. Well, actually, it’s a problem even if you’re just a woman. I’m not, but I’m old.
LeetCode and the United States of America
Who else hates LeetCode? I have a very clear (and very negative) idea of US education. What they study at university there, we study here in elementary school: what is completely different is the method. LeetCode, like the US education system, seeks to objectify the subject.
Let me explain. I have ADHD and an above-average IQ: this means, on the one hand, that I have greater potential than other candidates and, on the other, that I have special needs. If you give me a time limit to solve a problem that has nothing to do with reality, I will end up losing interest in solving it. That’s it.
For me, it makes no sense to solve an abstract problem with a specific tool within a time limit. They would never ask me to do the same at work: I’m the one who chooses the most suitable tool for the specific request. And it’s not about calculating the distance from Earth to the Moon in light years.
It’s All a Matter of Trust
Don’t get me wrong, I understand perfectly well that it’s difficult to understand the potential of the person in front of you. You can get degrees without studying, and you can copy homework. You can be very talented and hate being watched while you work, or you can be mediocre but know how to keep your cool.
But if I have a j*rk in front of me, I can tell right away. When I realize that you are not, then I have to figure out if you have the right motivation. I can learn another programming language, another framework, but I can’t work for someone who doesn’t trust me. And, below a certain IQ level, I struggle.
There are patterns that help me recognize a bad job advertisement. I suppose there are also patterns that help identify bad applicants. Measuring abilities based on code written in a specific time frame is as stupid as judging university grades. And I say this as someone who graduated with honors… in a totally different field.
If you’d like, follow me on Bluesky and/or GitHub for more contents. I enjoy networking.
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