You could have a Github portfolio that has one or two personal projects that demonstrates a proficiency in the language/framework needed at the company you're applying?

I've interviewed plenty of people in SF - candidates from top tier universities like MIT. And have passed on them. They simply lacked a proficiency in doing the basics (Rails in this case).

There's so many opportunity to be had by just showing very specific proficiencies with a personal project.

Skip all of the hoops you've outlined above, because they never matter anyway. A majority of candidates never have a portfolio, it's the biggest opportunity that is missed by most.

OP specifically talked about bigger companies:

> I feel like most big names in tech won't even look at your resume.

Do you think your suggestions work for Facebook or Google (which i assume OP means by "big names", among others)?

I did mean FAANG companies, yeah. At the same time I feel what s/he's saying is also right; in fact I am slowly building up repos on github while I work on my masters and hopefully I'll start contributing to librabries I use so that I can show all of that off to potential employers. I also feel like having a website in your name works wonders, but I am not too sure companies are really interested in that.

I can't speak for the "big names" but as someone who has done tech hiring for multiple SMBs, having a website that shows off your abilities absolutely makes a difference. I don't care if you hand coded the website or it's a bunch of articles on Medium. Showing that you know what you're talking about and can explain it well in English (or the company's language of choice), puts you at the top of my list of people I want to bring in to talk to. It's also likely to make me skip the stupid first steps that most companies take to filter out candidates that have no business applying like fizzbuzz tests when I'm talking to you.

Thanks for your input, I definitely want to set it up asap so that I can start blogging about stuff I'm interested in or ramblings I want to go on about after tackling some of the bigger assignments.

As a follow up to this I wanted to give some additional thoughts on how to make your site more valuable for getting hired as a software dev at the kind of SMBs that I've worked for.

1) Keep your personal items separate from your technical. If I'm looking to hire you to do something technical I really don't care about your kids t-ball game, the latest recipe you made, or pretty much anything that doesn't have to do with technology. Non-software related tech is fine as long as it's not most of the content. 2) There needs to be more than just code in your software related posts. If the post is 90% code I have no way to know if you actually know what it does or if you wrote it. 3) Provide links to working demos of the concepts if possible. Public repos with instructions for setting up and running it are almost as good. 4) Please no videocasts. Text is so much easier to consume and scan through. I'm not going to watch a bunch of 30min videos of you explaining a concept. I will read an in-depth article from beginning to end. 5) If you have side projects you work on in your spare time, please make it a prominent part of your site. Even more than in-depth articles, this is what shows me you can build working software which is the single most important thing I care about when hiring to fill software positions.

Just a few items that might help you out depending on what sort of company you're looking to land a job with.

You don't hire top grads from MIT to do grunt programming work sorry.

Then they shouldn't apply for "grunt programming" positions.

I'm an Australian with no degree who got poor marks in high school, and I got a job at Microsoft (software engineer doing C++ dev and some light reverse-engineering) after about 5 years of freelance work, with zero qualifications.

IIRC my education history came up once in the interview process (I was interviewed by 6 different people that day and only one brought it up), and that part of the conversation basically consisted of:

Interviewer: "You don't have a degree?"

Me: "No, I'm self-taught."

Interviewer: "Oh okay, that's cool."

Literally nobody that I work with talks or cares about where you went to school or what your grades were. YMMV I guess.

I feel like the problem lies in getting your feet through the front door, after that how you got your education really doesn't matter anymore. You were lucky enough to get an interview with Microsoft thanks to your past work experience, but other people (especially the ones who try academia before going into the private sector) don't have that chance and most of the time won't even be invited to an interview, that's the problem.

I am confident that if big companies actually interviewed people coming from different universities they would find that most top-uni grads are worse that people coming from different institutions who always feel like they have to perform 110% just to level the playing field.

Actually my work experience had almost nothing to do with it, as pretty much all of it was done under NDA. What really helped me was having a set of public personal projects which demonstrated competency in relevant areas (I know because I had a discussion about it with my hiring manager after I'd been working there for a couple of months - I was curious about how much the lack of a degree mattered when they were filtering candidates).

The GP was talking about going to grad school after finishing an undergrad in a different country; you're discussing getting a job without a degree.

All either of these anecdotes illustrate is it really depends on the circumstances.

I was responding directly to: "You could've gone to the best university in your country, but if it's not a top institution in the US or a handful of others [...] I feel like most big names in tech won't even look at your resume."

Definitely agree that it's very circumstantial.

Education is not the same as work. Plus the point is that in most top uni there are a lot of competion some some criterias are always "unfair" because u need to lower the pool size quickly