Hiring

In the bygone era, we had résumés—and today, many of us still maintain these professional summaries (or curriculum vitae, for the academically inclined). But now we also curate digital identities through social profiles that serve as our new first impressions in an increasingly online world. For the professionally ambitious, these digital personas have become the initial point of contact, the gateway through which career opportunities flow. In the context of employment, these digital breadcrumbs form a constellation that hiring managers use to make judgments about your candidacy long before any interview. Best hope those recruiters don’t unearth your anonymous Reddit alter ego.

In the Linux kernel project, Linus Torvalds has made over 70,000 commits since 19911. That’s an average of over 2,000 commits per year, or about 6 commits per day, every day, for 30 years. Meanwhile, the average contributor makes fewer than 10 commits total. This isn’t an anomaly—it’s a pattern we see across the entire software industry.

We often must judge others, such as when hiring, choosing who to work with, or selecting friends and partners. I find that there are two attributes most desirable in people I associate with: authenticity and intelligence. There are two simple heuristics for detecting inauthentic people and genuinely smart ones, which I’ll outline below.

I had the recent pleasure of speaking with someone from a big tech company about their interview process. They wanted to put me through the funnel to run the gauntlet and see if I “had what it takes” to make it to the offer stage. I declined, but (against better judgement) I gave them 30 minutes to pitch their company to me anyway.

You’ve probably heard about the “labour shortage” everywhere. But what’s really happening in the job market? There are many theories floating around—early retirements, COVID deaths, government stimulus making people flush with cash—but the data tells a more nuanced story than these simple explanations suggest. Let’s explore what the numbers actually show about the current state of the labour market.

Software engineers are likely familiar with the CAP theorem, coined by Eric Brewer. In essence, the CAP theorem states that distributed databases can have at most 2 of 3 attributes: consistency, availability, or partition tolerance (fault tolerance). In other words, you can have a database that is consistent and highly available, but not fault tolerant. Or, you can have one that’s fault tolerant and highly available, but isn’t always consistent (especially during network failures).