Recently, when I start to look for a new job as an engineer, before the interview I was asked to share my Github repo or contribution evidence on OSS
Unfortunately, all my focus was on building products for my clients and I couldn’t show the source code except resume and the product I contributed to, I felt I became less able to show what I can really do. This made me re-think what an engineer should do to find clients.
The goal of the clients is to hire people who can provide value, and our goal is to find clients who would like to exchange their value. It’s an exchange of value for both sides.
It’s the clients’ responsibility to know what is the value they want and how to evaluate candidates to be qualified to provide that value, Also, it’s the candidates’ responsibility to know how to show their value.
As an engineer, I questioned myself what is value for clients? what’s my value? how should do to show my value?
In the business world, the value we should have is what values the clients want, as a business the clients usually have their own customers or users they provide value to if we can help on that we are valuable for them. The more helpful we are the more valuable we are than our competitors and that’s why our clients choose us instead of others.
Like engineers don’t learn techniques for no reason, techniques are created to resolve problems.
When there are new practices, new concepts, new programming languages, new tools, they are all born to provide value, the world is value-driven. so we should be also value-driven and learn what can resolve problems.
The more valuable is the problem is the more value we provide by resolving that.
Engineers can write clean code, can design clean architecture, can work with TDD, can use Agile, can use DevOps, etc. There are all values behind them. They are all meant to help.
But all those things are hard to show to the clients in the interview which is not long enough to show all our values, especially to show ideas in our mind, because knowledge and thinking are invisible, but interviews can’t take forever, because time is the coat for both sides.
To lower the cost, as engineers we should build our visible value system all time intentionally instead of just before the interviews, and this benefits both sides, we become more confident to show ourselves, we don’t take a long time to think what they might ask, on the other hand, the clients also are more clear about our value in a short time, they don’t need to ask lots of questions to determine what you can do for them.
Building a visible value system means we need to identify what is values, write it down, and after that, all our focus is to improve on each of the values and make it as visible as we can to the public.
Say we share solutions to the challenge in our work to show how we resolve problems, we make a contribution to OSS to show how we work, we write articles to share how we think about goal system, task management, resource management which are all values.
At the same time we grow as we do this, this not just for the purpose to lower cost in interviews, this also makes us be more valuable people. And we enjoy being thought of as valuable.
