Job interview and helping in a conference organisation

You did a job a interview for a software developer position and some questions were like:

• Do you have a blog?
• Are you a contributor of any open source project?
• Do you have a pet project?
• What’s your twitter account? who do you follow on twitter?

You might agree or disagree if this is a good way to select a software developer or not and probably you’d have answered no to at least one or to all these questions, what it is pretty normal for many IT professionals. How many of your colleagues would say yes to all these questions?

All these question are about how you get involved in the software community in general, so why not be part of your local community?

I'm a software developer just like you and I found very nice way to improve my career and myself helping in the organisation of JBCNConf (www.jbcnconf.com).

Although this is not the same as having a tech blog or being a committer in a open source project, it helped me to “open some doors” in my career. In every interview with a recruiter or with a tech lead this was seen as a plus. Of course this isn’t a free pass to a new job, but I never got reject by a recruiter, but helping in a conference organisation is not only to show off to recruiters that you're engaged in a community. It's about networking and soft skills as well. I can give you 4 examples to follow:

1. Engage with others communities to promote the conference help with communication skills (networking)
2. Analyse papers from speakers help to guide what is the most important and relevant for the community (tech skill)
3. Organising speakers' accommodation and expenses help to get one out of the comfort zone doing administrative tasks (soft skill)
4. And I don’t even need to mention all the advantages you get of being in a conference ;-)

I hope this has helped you to discover one more way to engage in the software community and improve your chances in the interviews for the next time.

Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash